Customer Reviews

Religion and the Rise of Modern Science

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This is an excellent and much-needed historical text which really fills a relative void in scholarship regarding this topic. I highly recommend it, especially considering the extraordinary prevalence today of arguments from all sorts of self-proclaimed intellectuals regarding the incompatibility between Christianity and science, most notably by those peddling Darwinism dogma and using the State to crush competing views and conflicting science. Hooykaas inadvertantly makes monkeys of these historical illiterati simply by showing that their argument is completely refuted by all the historical facts on the matter.

The heart of Hooykaas's argument is that in the 16th and 17th century rise of modern science a concomitant (possibly the same) part of the mathematization of nature was the biblical Christianization of nature. Even Hooykaas comments how un-intuitive that "de-deification of nature and natural science on biblical grounds" (p. 17) is. From the back cover (1972 edition), "metaphorically speaking, whereas the bodily ingredients of science may have been Greek, its vitamins and hormones were biblical." This statement is shown to be completely reasonable and developed throughout the book, employing key ideas from leading history of science figures including--amongst others--Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Bacon (Francis mostly...though Roger isn't not mentioned), Descartes, and Newton himself.

The even more surprising upshot of this thesis is that but loads of pagan non-biblically sound, supposedly "scientific" thought, following Hooykaas's thesis, got and gets erroneously passed off either as Christian thinking (when it's actually more Greek pagan in character than biblically theistic) or as science (when it's also actually more Greek pagan in character than biblically non-theistic).

Hence, loads and loads of self-proclaimed "Christians" along with a concomitant number of self-proclaimed "atheists" can both easily be characterized as related sorts of Greek pagans who really aren't so religious in the biblical sense nor so scientific in the facts/mathematics sense.

What church they belong to nor which school they graduated from don't mean a thing. Instead, a good test might be from page 32 of Hooykaas, i.e., Eteinne Tempier's 1277 A.D. "full recognition of the sovereignty and freedom of God." According to Hooykaas, Tempier's condemnation--"at the instigation of Pope John XXI"--of 219 then reigning Scholastic rationalistic theses "in rejecting any limits to [the sovereignty and freedom of God] he unintenitonally took away limitations to scientific theorizing as well." To make a long story short, all the condemned theses were hampering the freedom of science as well as the glory of God. And low and behold, the condemned theses "all of them in the long run turned out to be false." (page 32 of Hooykaas)

(Just to make the sarcastic remark myself before any of my MIT or equivalently intelligent engineering friends do, surely any and all theses--condemned or not--from the year 1277 would turn out to be wrong in the long run. Possibly so, all you smart-Boston-*ss-jerkies out-there (and I mean YOU are really OUT THERE lol), but there's 160 or so other pages to consider in this book that aren't so suspectible to such ya-got-ta-love-it smartiness, even though it is mostly Greek pagan in character [possibly both the rest of this book and all the Boston/equivalent smarties].)

Gheez, don't think I'm off the hook either. I'm just as pagan as Bart Simpson and his sibling's in one of the pilot minis from the Tracy Ulman show.