The following are chapter synopses and short quotes from the third section of Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity? This third section is entitled: “Christianity and Science”
Chapter 8:
D’Souza argues that Christianity is based on reason–and that Christian theologians throughout the ages have been masters of reasoned defenses of Christian thought.
“My point is that the kind of reasoning about God that we see in Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm is typical of Christianity. There is very little of this in any other religion. And out of such reasoning, remarkably enough, modern science was born.”
Chapter 9:
D’Souza states that a fundamental assumption of the modern scientist is that the world is ordered, logical, rational, and law following. He argues that this belief in an ordered natural universe is directly pirated from Christianity.
“God is sacred and made the universe, and the universe operates lawfully in accordance with divine reason. At the same time Christianity held that the universe itself is not sacred….The Christian universe is ordered and yet disenchanted. Moreover, Christianity…teaches that man was made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God. This means that there is a spark of the divie reason in man, setting him apart from other things and giving him the special power of apprehending them. According to Christianity, human reason is derived from the divine intelligence that created the universe.”
Chapter 10:
D’Souza argues that the story of Galileo being persecuted by the church for his heliocentric theory is just that–a story.
“Galileo was a great scientist who had very little sense. He was right about heliocentrism, but several of his arguments and proofs were wrong. The dispute his ideas brought about was not exclusively between religion and science, but also between the new science and the science of the previous generation. The leading figures of the church were more circumspect about approaching “
Have you heard any of the flap about the discoveries in physics that overturn Einstein’s conclusions about the speed of light being constant? I’ve seen a couple of articles lately — both over my head except for this basic part about how they make a lot of the stability of modern science and the universe unstable…
I have not heard any of this, Janet. I’ll have to start looking around to see if I can find any more info :-)
I do, however, have a few responses to every new scientific discovery that threatens to destabilize everything that we know about the universe:
-First, I am somewhat of a doubting Thomas when it comes to “new scientific discoveries”. One paper does not a century or more of scholarship overturn. Unlike the new media, I prefer to have a number of studies to support a point before I jump on the bandwagon.
-Second, science has undergone a series of convention-breaking, mind-altering shifts in theory. Einsteinian physics was revolutionary, completely different than Newtonian physics (although Newtonian physics still has great validity and explanatory power for objects on earth.) I am not afraid (and no scientist should be afraid) of new discoveries that challenge previous beliefs.
-Third, if there is anything that the shifting field of science has taught me, it is that God is even more glorious than I could ever imagine. Far from disproving God or discrediting His involvement with humanity, new scientific discoveries have only ever caused my view of God to expand. I am sure of one thing: with every new scientific discovery (no matter how difficult it may be initially), we discover even more about the glorious God who created an orderly universe and who loves people very much.