Tuesday, January 24, 2017

The Idea of Science Originated from the Judeo-Christian Tradition

The real history of the Western world, Judeo-Christian tradition, is that it was the rise of Judaism and then Christianity that enabled us to move forward, because these faiths emphasized curiosity, searching for how God's world worked instead of saying this is it; that's it. 

And that curiosity led to what we now call science, which flourished in the West as nowhere else in the world. You know, they all talk about Galileo's trial before the Vatican hundreds of years ago, but if you actually look at what was going on at that time, all of the great discoveries in astronomy and science in those early years came from priests. Came from priests! The man who invented modern physics, at least a precursor of modern physics, Isaac Newton, spent a lot of time studying religion and faith. They didn't see it as polar opposites. They saw it as one in the same-curiosity, finding how God's world worked, and that enabled us to make these great rises. And the truth about the power of knowledge can be seen today, as we know, as the 75th anniversary of the attack on us at Pearl Harbor-changed fundamentally world history and American history. World War II was devastating in Europe and Japan—massive physical destruction, tens of millions of lives lost, and experts thought that after that conflict it would take decades, generations for the world to recover. But the thing is, despite that loss of life, despite that physical destruction, the fact of the matter is knowledge was not destroyed, and within a handful of years after the end of that terrible conflict, thanks to the US Security military umbrella, which allowed security in people to really strive again. Within a few years, Japan and Western Europe exceeded their pre-war levels of production, because knowledge was not destroyed. 

Steve Forbes, Liberty University Convocation, 12/7/16

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