Scientific Foundations: Platonism vs. Christianity

 

Some thoughts from Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton's book:

“One of the most distinctive aspects of modern science is its use of mathematics—the conviction not only that nature is lawful but also that those laws can be stated in precise mathematical formulas. This conviction, too, historians have traced to the Biblical teaching on creation.

 

“The Biblical God created the universe ex nihilo and hence has absolute control over it.  Genesis paints a picture of a Workman completely in charge of His materials. Hence in its essential structure the universe is precisely what God wants it to be.

 

“This idea was alien to the ancient world.  In all other religions, the creation of the world begins with some kind of pre-existing substance with its own inherent nature.  As a result, the creator is not absolute and does not have the freedom to mold the world exactly as he wills.

 

“For example, in Greek philosophy the world consists of eternal matter structured by eternal rational universals called Ideas or Forms.  In Plato’s creation myth, the creator (demiurge) is an inferior deity who did not create from nothing; he merely injected reason (Ideas) into reason-less matter.  And even that he did imperfectly because matter was stubborn stuff, capable of resisting the rational structure imparted by the Ideas.  In short, this is a creator whose hands are tied, as Hooykaas writes, in two respects:

 

‘He had to follow not his own design but the model of the eternal Ideas; and second, he had to put the stamp of the Ideas on a chaotic, recalcitrant matter which he had not created himself.’

 

“As a result, the Greeks expected a level of imprecision in nature, a certain fuzziness at the edges.  If some facts did not fit their theories, well, that was to be expected in an imperfect world.  Individual things were, after all, only rough approximations to the rational Ideas or Forms.  As historian Dudley Shapere explains, in Greek thought the physical world ‘contains an essentially irrational element: nothing in it can be described exactly by reason, and in particular by mathematical concepts and laws.’

 

“By contrast, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo means there is no pre-existing substance with its own independent properties to limit what God can do.  God creates the world exactly as He wills.  For a Platonist, if a line in nature is not quite circular, that is because nature is an only partially successful approximation to geometrical Ideas.  But for a Christian, if God had wanted the line to be circular, He would have made it that way.  If it is not exactly a circle, it must be exactly something else—perhaps an ellipse.  The scientist can be confident that it is exactly something, and not mere capricious variation from the ideal.

 

“A striking example can be found in the work of Kepler, who struggled for years with the slight difference of eight minutes between observation and calculation of the orbit of the planet Mars.  Eventually this slight imprecision drove him to abandon the ideas of circular orbits and to postulate elliptical orbits.  If Kepler had not maintained the conviction that nature must be precise, he would not have agonized over those eight minutes and would not have broken through a traditional belief in circular orbits that had held sway for two thousand years.  Kepler spoke gratefully of those eight minutes as a ‘gift of God.’

 

“Thus the application of geometry and mathematics to the analysis of physical motion rests on the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  The implication is that God is omnipotent; there is no recalcitrant matter to resist His will.  In the words of physicist C. F. von Weizsacker: 

 

‘Matter in the Platonic sense, which must be “prevailed upon” by reason, will not obey mathematical laws exactly: matter which God has created from nothing may well strictly follow the rules which its Creator has laid down for it.  In this sense I call modern science a legacy, I might even have said a child, of Christianity.’

 

“Historian R. G. Collingwood expresses the argument most succinctly.  He writes: ‘The possibility of an applied mathematics is an expression, in terms of natural science, of the Christian belief that nature is the creation of an omnipotent God.’”[1]

      [1]Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1994), 27-29.

* Note: Here is a video I did for class going over this section of text by Pearcey and Thaxton: