Where Did Science Come From?

If you study the history of the scientific disciplines, you’ll eventually find a “father of” that particular field. And it’s likely that founder was a creationist!

Most of the pioneers of the various sciences were not just Christians, they were explicitly motivated by their faith to investigate the world they believed God created. Their beliefs about God led them to believe that God created an orderly universe that we can study. Many scientists wanted to bring God glory through studying the world.

We live in a culture shaped by Christian assumptions about nature, but it wasn’t always that way. We know that all over the ancient world, people were brilliant and came up with fantastic inventions. So why didn’t full-blown science develop before Christian Europe? It’s because the practice of science involves the assumption that the world is constant in some ways. If I measure the boiling point of water today and do it tomorrow with the same variables in place, I should get the same answer! But if I believe that Zeus might randomly play around with the laws of physics to trick us, why bother at all?

Science also doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary view. If our brains evolved solely to help us have a maximum chance of survival and that consciousness is just a weird by-product of chemical reactions in our brains, that doesn’t necessarily equate to accurate perception of the world or the ability to think about things scientifically.

However, if God created us to have a relationship with him and to exercise dominion as stewards over his creation as Genesis teaches, it would make sense that he would create us with the mental capacity needed for that function.

Christians founded branches of science out of a desire to glorify God by unlocking the secrets of his creation.

However, today, many people believe that science disproves the Bible. But when you dig down into specific claims, you will find that it is actually a materialistic interpretation of a piece of evidence that people use to attack God’s Word. For instance, some people might take a dinosaur fossil and claim that it is 100 million years old, thus disproving the Bible’s history of 6,000 years. However, a creationist could look at the same fossil and claim that the dinosaur was buried quickly to be preserved so well, and those conditions would have been present at Noah’s flood. We might further crack it open and find soft tissue still preserved inside bearing witness to the fact that it couldn’t possibly be millions of years old!

Christians founded branches of science out of a desire to glorify God by unlocking the secrets of his creation. Today, we need to take back science for God’s glory!