The Fall of Man and the Rise of Science

Two Interesting reviews of a book by an Oxford guy. here and here.

The book is “The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science” and the Oxford guy is Peter Harrison.

I'm intrigued by the book, and will likely buy it, but I have to say I find this thesis vaguely familiar. Francis Schaeffer outlined a similar viewpoint decades ago.

There are a few distinctly Christian presuppositions about the universe that many argue were necessary for science as we know it to come into existence. The first is often cited and understood by Christians in the ID and Creationist camps. It is simply the idea that the universe is orderly and that our brains can apprehend that order.

There's a lot in that statement. Christian scientists in the 17th century clearly believed the world was intelligible - but they believed the world was intelligible because they were theists who accepted in some sense the biblical creation account and the first line of the Nicene Creed. The belief in a Creator was the key idea that implied orderliness in creation, and that such order could be studied and understood because we were made for this reality. Without a creator, there is no reason for order.

The thesis of this book adds a whole new layer going in a deeper direction, the idea that belief in the fall of man was also a primary factor that drove the 17th century pioneers of science forward.

A Christian worldview would insist that human faculties for understanding are finite. But as Schaeffer argued and Harrison apparently documents, in the minds of 17^th century Christian pioneers in science, the fall of man changed not only the moral character of man, but the intellectual character of man. This had tremendous implications for the quest for knowledge. One of Schaeffer’s most central and controversial ideas was that Thomas Aquinas had an incomplete view of the fall in which the will of man was fallen but the intellect was essentially intact. So Aquinas thought that “right reason” could arrive at truth about the cosmos, man, philosophy and theology apart from the influence of divine grace and revelation. Aquinas’ notion of “right reason” allowed reason to operate independently of revelation according to Schaeffer and this laid the foundation for the autonomous rationalism and naturalism that would eventually drive a wedge between science from faith.

The Reformers, following Augustine’s understanding of original sin, rejected Aquinas’ optimistic view of human reason. Fallen human beings, in the Augustinian/Reformation view, are prone to error in a way that would not have been the case had man not fallen. In fact, men are intellectually in rebellion against truth, consistent with Paul’s statements in Romans 1 and Peter’s statements in 2 Peter 3.

The apparent thesis of Harrsion’s book is that 17^th century predecessors to modern science felt that these human weaknesses – being finite, capable of error due to the fall and the effects of the fall on the mind and even on the cosmos - could be counteracted, but only with a healthy dose of skepticism about human thought and only by the Grace of God. True knowledge, even about things not directly revealed in scripture, could be restored if rigorous methods, tests and controlled experimentation were applied to counteract the effects of the fall on the intellect. But such knowledge would always be incomplete and imperfect.

So the thesis is that it was the very potential for and expectation of human error that gave birth to careful scientific research and reasoning. Without a belief in the fallen nature of man, modern scientific methods of inquiry might not have come into being.

Reviews of the book note the high level of scholarship and extensive documentation. Given that this is a serious work from someone with credentials from Oxford, it should be hard to ignore. This is a thesis that runs completely counter to the notion that the influence of faith and Christian doctrine are anti-science. It asserts instead that science owes its existence to the very doctrine that is today most in question in theistic evolution circles – the fall of man. Harrison’s book could bolster the protest of many who find the current definition of science as a purely naturalistic enterprise to be false and unfair. And it could undermine the unwarranted confidence in the scientific consensus that many seem to hold as an article of faith.

From my own perspective, if this thesis has validity, then there is a cogent answer to the oft-repeated argument of theistic evolutionists who insist that the current scientific consensus must trump all alternative viewpoints from either ID or various Creationist camps. If the human intellect is fallen, then some knowledge about the distant past may simply be out of reach of human reason, and more importantly, the current naturalistic consensus in the Christian academy can be challenged on the basis that the human intellect is not only prone to error but also in rebellion. Though common grace can enlighten even the unbeliever, the effects of the fall taint human thought as well as desire and action. What is taken as empirical knowledge may be quite prone to error and self-deception apart from the corrective presuppositions of a supernatural universe, a fallen race and the need for grace and revelation. For the Christian who stands in the stream of the Reformation, revelation is a necessary starting point to true knowledge. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom”.

And given the intense interest in how Darwinian views seem difficult to reconcile with the historicity of Adam and the fall, it should be an interesting point of discussion to suggest that without the fall, there would possibly have been no science to begin with.

Perhaps the words of Peter can perhaps be heard once again, “...they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.”