Science Was Born of Christianity

by Stacy Trasancos

  In Science and Creation Jaki discussed how around 350 B.C., the astronomer Shih Shen drew up a catalogue of around 800 stars and how the manuscripts were stored in the Imperial Library.[99] The ability to catalogue and store documents displayed great sophistication. Technological improvements were made in water works and the extension of the Great Wall, a massive achievement. During the three and a half centuries known as the age of the Warring States (480–220 B.C.), cultural growth continued. The Chinese invented the waterwheel, the wheelbarrow, and other devices that demonstrated continued technological development.[100] Around the middle of the fourth century, Hu Hsi made observations that led him to discover the precession of equinoxes, although the Greek scholar Hipparchus is credited with discovering it centuries earlier.[101]

  The peak periods of Chinese culture spanned the Han, Sung, Thang, Yuan, and Ming periods (collectively 202 B.C.– A.D. 1644) and represented a length of time when scientific endeavor could have “received a decisive spark.”[102] There were technological feats in which the Chinese were the “sole inventors” for a number of centuries. They invented the effective use of horses, the foot-stirrup and breast-strap harness. They discovered magnetic ore. They invented the revolutionary skill of paper-making, which led to the production of printed books. They invented the process of making gunpowder, the production of porcelain, and the development of water-driven mechanical clocks. They used magnets for travel and moveable clay types for printing.[103]

  The Chinese also, Jaki noted, developed algebra at a level compatible with the best in Europe around A.D. 1250. According to Francis Bacon, printing, gunpowder, and magnets were the factors that ushered in the age of science more than anything, but Jaki challenged Bacon’s assertion by noting that even with these developments the Chinese “remained hopelessly removed from the stage of sustained, systematic scientific research.”[104]

  The Chinese had rockets for centuries but did not investigate trajectories or free fall. Their ability to print books did not lead to a “major intellectual ferment.” Magnets were installed on their ships and they were the best navy in the world for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but they never circumnavigated the globe.[105]

  Historians have also noted that the “Industrial Revolution” did not originate in China, and that is of great significance for Jaki’s argument that science was “stillborn” in Chinese culture. Jaki cited a 1922 article in The International Journal of Ethics entitled “Why China Has No Science: An Interpretation of the History and Consequences of Chinese Philosophy.”[106] The author, Yu-Lan Fung, who contributed to Needham’s volumes, noted that the history of Europe and the history of China before the Renaissance are “on the same level,” by which he meant that they both progressed at about the same pace, albeit in different ways. After that time the pace differed: “China is still old while the Western countries are already new.”[107] Fung asked, “What keeps China back?” He answered that it is because “she has no science . . . because according to her own standard of value she does not need any . . . China has not discovered the scientific method, because Chinese thought started from mind, and from one’s own mind.”[108] If truth and knowledge are in the mind, separated from the external world, there is no need for scientific investigation beyond practical skill.

  Fung contrasted the three major powers which competed to conquer the entire empire of China from 570 B.C. to about 275 B.C–Taoism, Moism, and Confucianism.[109] Taoism taught a “return to nature” with nature being the natural state of all things, including the natural tendency of man toward vice. According to Taoism, “every kind of human virtue and social regulation is to them against nature.”[110] Knowledge was considered to be of no use because the Tao is inside man, as the god of the pantheistic philosophy.[111] Taoism did not require any questioning of a beginning and an end, about final purposes and goals, or about the controlling of the forces and patterns in the workings of the Yin and Yang.[112] The cosmological passage from the Chuang Tzu demonstrated this mindset: “Men who study the Tao do not follow on when these operations [properties belonging to things] end, nor try to search out how they began: - with this all discussion of them stops.”[113] The key to success in Taoism was to merge into the rhythm of cosmic cycles.[114]

  The fundamental idea of Moism was “utility,” and virtue was seen as useful.[115] Universal love was taught as a doctrine for the benefit of the country and people, and progress was the ideal of mutual help; anything that was incompatible with the increase of wealth and population was to be fought against.[116] Confucius stood between the two, emphasizing discrimination in different situations.[117] He taught that human nature is essentially good although men are not born perfect.[118] To become perfect, the innate reason must be developed and lower desires “wholly taken away.”[119] His concerns were ethical, not metaphysical. Therefore, Confucius taught that the individual should seek what is in himself and leave external things to their natural destiny.[120]

  In these competing theories of existence, the power that governs the universe is the omnipotent Tao for Taoism, the personified self-god in Moism, and Heavenly Reason according to Confucianism.[121] Moism did have a notion of Heaven as personal and caring for humans, a monotheism of sorts, but its ethics were severed from this idea. As these powers competed over time, to put it far too concisely to do the history enough justice, they actually merged and philosophical investigation of “things” gave rise to two forms of Neo-Confucianism, one school that sought “things” externally and another that sought “things” as phenomena in the mind.[122] In Medieval Europe the same ideas about “things” more or less existed too, but from there on, China and Europe diverged:

  In other words, Medieval Europe under Christianity tried to know God and prayed for His help; Greece tried, and Modern Europe is trying to know nature and to conquer, to control it; but China tried to know what is within ourselves, and to find there perpetual peace.[123]

  So China did not have use for the scientific method because the religions sought what is in the mind separate from the external world. Fung concluded his paper with a call for mankind to become wiser and to find peace and happiness by turning attention to Chinese wisdom so that the “mind energy of the Chinese people of four thousand years will yet not have been spent in vain.”[124] Even if modern science was not born in China, there were other aspects of the culture that were worthy of admiration.

  In concluding this consideration of China’s history, it needs to be noted that other scholars concurred with Fung. In 1995, Justin Yifu Lin of Peking University published an essay titled “The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China.” Lin noted from evidence documented in Needham’s work that “except for the past two or three centuries, China had a considerable lead over the Western world in most of the major areas of science and technology.”[125] From an economic and social perspective, he considers why, despite early advances in science, technology, and institutions, China did not take the next step in the seventeenth century as Western Europe did.[126]

  Ultimately that answer depends on how the Chinese viewed the external world and whether it was created by God or was God itself. In believing that the world was God and was eternal, there was no need to question a beginning and an end or how everything came to be. Even Needham acknowledged that it is a theological orientation of Chinese thought that can be singled out as the decisive factor that blocked the attitude conducive to developing a systematic, scientific investigation.[127] “There, according to Needham’s admission, all the early cultivators of science drew courage for their pioneering efforts from a belief in a personal and rational Creator.”[128]

  For the purposes of Jaki’s argument, the similarity of the Egyptian and Chinese cultures thus considered bears emphasizing. Both were pantheistic, with some degree of monotheism but still a monotheism that held that the world was God, which is basically pantheism. Neither had a loving Creator who “ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight,” who
made man in His image with intellect and free will, or who became Incarnate to redeem mankind.[129] “In a universe without the voice of God there remains no persistent and compelling reason for man to search within nature for distinct voices of law and truth.”[130]

  India

  The decimal system and notation developed in ancient India between the fourth and seventh centuries represents “the most noteworthy single contribution of ancient India to science and its importance cannot be overstated.”[131] Without the decimal system in the Late Middle Ages, the more cumbersome Roman numeral system would have been used and it would have delayed the birth of science in the seventeenth century Christian West.[132] The ancient Indians also built houses out of brick and constructed drainage facilities. There is evidence that they used copper and bronze and made glass.

  Advanced technological skill dating back to the third century B.C. and “still unexplained today” is evidenced in the non-rusting pillars erected by King Ashoka during his reign. They certainly remain a monument to progress in metallurgy, stone-cutting, and transportation engineering.[133] The world-famous monuments of the Iron Pillar of Delhi and Sultanganj and copper colossus of Buddha also provide evidence of advanced metallurgy.[134] There was also a lively interest in industrial arts from the third century B.C. in the writing of Kantilya’s Arthasastra, which articulates the business of government and legislation, the construction of ships, buildings, and roads, and the development of husbandry, agriculture, land surveying, mining, and medicine.[135]

  Jaki noted that “practicality, craftsmanship, and organizational talent do not, however, qualify as science.”[136] There was no theoretical generalization leading to the formulation of physical laws and systems of laws. The claim that science originated in India is also difficult for anyone to make because there are so many doubts about historical sources. This lack of chronology was noted by Needham, a leading historian of not just Chinese, but all Oriental science. He warned that reliable dating of ancient records was necessary for objective analysis of history, and he admitted “the extreme uncertainties in the dating of the most important texts and even of actual objects which have survived” among what is known of Indian history.[137]

  Much debate still wages over Needham’s infamous question regarding “the failure of China and India to give rise to distinctively modern science while being ahead of Europe for fourteen previous centuries.”[138] While acknowledging that the Scientific Revolution was “part of a European miracle,” Indian scholars have offered explanations that perhaps India experienced a “mathematical revolution” called “computational positivism” instead. The Indian approach, according to this theory, showed a “deep and studied distrust of axioms and physical models,” while Europe “achieved unreasonably and unexpectedly spectacular successes in science.”[139]

  Other theories have suggested the ability to grasp logical contradictions and “contempt for mundane reality” as a cause for the lack of science in India, while others suggest the cultural stability of agricultural societies with no new challenges to create new knowledge to solve problems.[140] Yet others have alleged that Indian culture was “otherworldly” and perceived the physical world as an illusion and the liberation of the soul more important than the study of the external world.[141] Still others have claimed that since there was no conflict between religion and science in India, and since atheists were not persecuted, this lack of tension is at fault for complacency about science in India; while others have faulted instead the colonialism of the West, and speculated that the “European miracle” would not have happened if it were not for the mathematical contributions of India.[142]

  Roddam Narasimha, Indian aerospace scientist and Director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies from 1997 to 2004, where he pursued his interests in the history of science and technology and the philosophy underlying Indic rationalism, referred to the Scientific Revolution as part of a “European miracle” triggered by developments in China and India just as Needham also labeled it. He wrote that the “long Dark Ages of Europe were broken with the help of technical and mathematical inventions imported from the East.”[143] This reference was in response to Needham’s question regarding the failure of China and India to give rise to modern science while being ahead of Europe for fourteen centuries prior. He called the “birth of modern science” a European rather than a scientific miracle because technologies from China and India triggered it, allowing Europe to escape the Dark Ages, by which he meant the “period immediately preceding the birth of modern science” during the two centuries 1500–1700.[144]

  So, there has been a lot of speculation about why science was not born in India, but the fact remains, it was not. It is true that European science benefited from the technical and mathematical inventions of the East, but it seems impossible to conclude that these inventions were responsible for the birth of modern science, i.e. the “mathematization of science.”[145] Modern science is the application, as said, of quantities to natural processes. Both the East and the West had access to nature, but one culture applied mathematics and experimentation to seek an understanding of it and the other cultures did not. If mathematical inventions were responsible for a miracle, then why didn’t the culture that invented them experience the so-called miracle first? It seems unsatisfactory to claim that mathematics and technology triggered the birth of modern science in Europe when the real difference in the cultures was a mindset, a psychology, a fundamental way of viewing the universe and existence. Narasimha’s argument actually gives support to Jaki’s, that science was stillborn in other cultures and born from a Christian mindset.

  The Hindus of old also had an animistic view of existence.[146] The doctrine of the Atman represented, and still does represent, a perception of an eternal unity which underlies the phenomenon of nature called the Brahman.[147] Atman is the Indian expression for “first principle,” that the individual self of man is found by laying hold of this ultimate self of the universe, the ultimate essences of all things.[148] The Indians viewed the universe as an organism, an eternal Pantheistic Being, as did the Egyptians and Chinese.[149]

  Indian writings defined the Brahman as a deep sleeper whose vital breath remains dormant, but issues forth on waking, and with his breaths all worlds, gods, and living creatures also awake and are called collectively the Atman.[150] The pranâs (speech, eye, ear, touch) proceeded from the Atman.[151] He was the “Soul of the Universe” which bred himself. His mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears became distinct of his own doing.[152] His skin and hair became the plants and trees, and his heart the moon. His semen became water and his navel exuded corruption.[153] This world-soul is understood as an endless cycle of births and decays with no starting or ending points. Jaki compares it to an eternal “cosmic treadmill.”[154]

  The Kaliyuga from Indian scripture measured four cycles of human history which were taken to be four ages of the demons characterized by ignorance, poverty, and disease.[155] They should have ended around 300 B.C., but when a golden age did not come, the age of the yugas was recalculated to be 360 years so that, as Jaki interpreted it, their “credibility might be saved.”[156] The longer scale meant a never-ending resignation to the age of evil.

  Jaki also noted that, in stark contrast to the ancient skill in metallurgy and construction, it was reported by the World Bank in the year A.D. 2000 that only around forty percent of the 825,000 villages in India possessed paved roads to access essential services.[157] For some reason, technology did not continue even though talent and social stability were not lacking and decimal counting, “possibly the greatest scientific discovery ever made,” was invented in ancient India.[158]

  As Jaki also showed in other cultures, where there was a pervading resignation to the “cosmic treadmill” or the eternal rebirth of the universe, there was no motivation to try to escape from it. Referencing the Hymns of the Rig-Veda, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, and Thirteen Principle Upanishads in Science and Creation and The Savior of Science, Jaki point
s out the prose of the eternal cosmic cycle.[159] The Upanishads form the core of Indian philosophy and spiritual teaching, were composed between 800–500 B.C., and are still in use today.[160] From the Svetasvatara Upanishad in the First Prapathaka, in the last few lines this resignation is evident:

  In such a world as this what have I to do with the enjoyment of desires? Yea, Even if one were fed therewith to the full, he must still return to earth again and again. Wilt thou therefore deign to deliver me? I am here in this world as a frog in a well without water. Oh adorable one, thou art our refuge, thou art our refuge. [161]