Historic Catholic Influence on Science

The pagan Greeks were the first to try and invent a natural science. They struggled for centuries debating first principles, trying to find a fundamental assumption that would solve the issue of change. In that era, all people believed that everything corrupts, nothing stays the same, that the properties of all things change. None of the pagan philosophers successfully solved the issue of matter changing as it ages. Aristotle, however, insisted that we just assume that something about physical things remains unchanging. He called this attribute of physical things hypokeimenon - the underlying thing. Aristotle's metaphysics is disjointed and difficult to understand. He had no simple word for substance, the essence of what a thing is, so he used many words and categorized material things into ten different groupings. His system fell into disuse - probably because its disjointed ideas about matter are extremely difficult to visualize.

The thirteenth century saw the growth of Catholic universities in the major cities in Europe. All the teachers in the universities were Catholic clergy. The head master was called scolasticus, from which we get our word for them, scholastics. A revival of Aristotle's ideas spread through the universities during that century. The most important scholar who fanned the fires of this revival was Friar Thomas d'Aquino. He was a prodigy, who could dictate to several secretaries at once. He was the prime metaphysician in the West, who argued that Christians should build their knowledge of the world on Aristotle's ideas. He explained Aristotle's disjointed ideas in Latin, the language of scholarship in that age. Hypokeimenon became in Latin subiectum. He used other Lain words substans (substance), essentia (being). Eventually the Latin scholars combined all the disjointed Aristotelean concepts (such as hypokeimenon, ousia, hyle and morphe) into one word from the Latin - substance. Substance, became much more than the Greeks imagined, yet it incorporated the idea of hypokeimenon. Westerners came to hold as a dogma - that the essence of a thing, its substance, its intrinsic properties are fixed, not emerging. The entire structure of scientism was, over the centuries, built on this idea. Almost everything scientific, the measuring units, mathematics, laws, theories, methods and constants depend on the creed that the properties of matter are fixed. Science has an important connection to the Catholic scholastics because they adopted and modified Aristotelian ideas so that empirical science could have a foundation.

What we see in the universe fits Biblical physics, not science. The Bible states that the creation is in bondage to phthora - fundamental change. The Apostle Paul characterizes this as hupotasso, an orderly arrangement. The Bible even predicts that in the last days false teachers will come saying all things remain the same. Biblical physics is confirmed, not with mathematical symbols, but with sight. We can see a biblical cosmic history with optics - we see how galaxies grew, spreading out, the arms of spiral galaxies growing into huge growth spirals in violation of every law and principle of science. This is simple evidence for vast ages in few cycles of the heavens. What we see fits the literal Hebrew words about the fourth creation day. We also confirm biblical physics geologically. We see simple evidence that the primordial earth was a tiny planet - the continents only fit together on a tiny globe and a great expansion seam continually creates new seafloor. Three times the Hebrew Bible states that the Earth spreads out in unbroken continuity.

Look at the heavens. You can see the simple, overwhelming evidence for biblical physics by simply observing the visible history of the cosmos. We can see with sight that the properties of matter are always emerging. Aristotle and the scholastics were dead wrong. How great will be the fall of science - for the great glory of the Creator.