Christianity Is Not the Bedrock of Science, and the Argument for It Falls Apart on the Word Law

There is a claim that Christian apologists make often and that almost nobody bothers to challenge: that Christianity is the bedrock of science. The idea of a lawgiver, the story goes, is what sent the early scientists looking for laws in nature. No Christian God, no Newton.

This is false, and it is false in an instructive way, because the whole argument rests on one word carrying two meanings at once.

Two Meanings of Law

A law in the first sense is a rule made by people, or attributed to a god, for moral and social purposes. Do not steal. Keep the sabbath. Its defining feature is that it can be broken, and is, constantly. According to the story itself, the tablets had not yet reached the bottom of the mountain before the first one was violated.

A law in the second sense is a regularity in nature that is always observed. Bodies attract with a force that falls off with the square of the distance. Its defining feature is that it cannot be broken, ever, by anyone, which is the entire reason it is worth finding.

These are not two flavours of one concept. They are opposites on the axis that matters. One is a rule that is routinely disobeyed; the other is a description that admits no exceptions. The apologist's argument requires that the first meaning inspired the search for the second, and stated plainly the inspiration makes no sense. Why would a rule that everyone breaks make you go looking for a rule that nothing can break?

If the word had been different, and in the languages of the time it often was, the argument could not have been made at all. It survives only on the pun.

Where Are the Verses

If the scientific meaning of law were embedded in Christian doctrine, one would expect to find it somewhere in the texts. A verse describing nature as running on fixed, discoverable, exceptionless regularities that God does not suspend.

There is none. The scriptures are full of the opposite: seas parting, the sun standing still, water into wine, the dead rising. The God of the texts is precisely a being for whom natural regularities are suggestions. A book whose central events are suspensions of natural law is a strange candidate for the source of the idea that natural law cannot be suspended.

The Sixteen-Hundred-Year Delay

Christianity had control of Europe's intellectual life from roughly the fourth century. Modern science begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth. If the scientific worldview were latent in the doctrine, waiting to be drawn out, it took over a millennium to appear.

What else happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The printing press. The recovery of Greek and Arabic texts. The rise of trade and the instruments it needed. The loosening of Church authority in the Reformation. These are the events that coincide with the birth of science, and none of them is a doctrine. When an effect appears eleven hundred years after its supposed cause and simultaneously with several other candidates, the supposed cause is not the cause.

The Facts on the Ground

Then there is what the institutions actually did. The Church did not nurture the people looking for laws in nature. It burned some, imprisoned others, banned their books, and forced recantations. Galileo was not pardoned for three and a half centuries. If the scientific spirit were the beating heart of Christianity, the most Christian institution in history spent centuries fighting its own heart.

This leaves two possibilities, and both are bad for the apologist.

The first is that there is no science at the core of the doctrine. That is the view I hold, and the earlier points support it.

The second is more generous: there is some scientific candle in there, but every real Christian institution has been so incompetent at bringing it out that they not only failed but actively worked against it. Consider what that concedes. Communism had a far better documented benevolent idea at its heart, the fair distribution of wealth, stated explicitly and at length by its founders. We reject Communism anyway, not because the idea was absent but because every institution built on it became a dictatorship. A good idea surrounded by institutions that betray it is judged by the institutions. If we hold Communism to that standard, Christianity, whose scientific idea I cannot even find in the text, does not get a gentler one.

Laws Tie God's Hands

There is a final irony. The idea of exceptionless natural law is not merely absent from the tradition; it is hostile to it. If the universe runs on laws that hold always, then God cannot intervene without breaking them, and a God who cannot intervene is not the God of the prayers, the miracles, or the resurrection. This objection, that laws of nature constrain the hands of God, was raised within Christianity against the scientific picture for centuries, and it is a far more authentic expression of the tradition than the supposed lawgiver argument invented after the fact.

Science did not grow from Christianity. It grew in spite of it, in the cracks that opened when the Church's grip loosened, and the apologist's story is what the tradition tells itself now that the outcome is no longer in doubt. Anyone can claim credit for a victory after the war is over. The question is what you did during it.