Philosophy outgrew rationalism, but science clung to it. Today, rationalists strut the scientific stage as if science was their idea. As we shall see, however, modern science was conceived and established entirely by thinkers with a biblical worldview.
The 17th century founding fathers of science believed that every event that takes place in the world could be explained, using reason, to be a consequence of some previous event. This was the so-called law of uniformity of natural causes.
All of them believed that this law operated in a limited or ‘open’ system – with God and man outside the cause-and-effect ‘machine’ of ‘nature’ and able to influence it. God was not part of the machine, but its creator – the original and un-created cause – well able to interfere, supernaturally or otherwise, in the normal processes of cause-and-effect.
With that worldview, they were able to accept the biblical idea that the un-created God formed the universe out of nothing by processes unknown to science.
After Newton (not Newton himself) the rationalists who followed him kept extending the concept of ‘nature’ as a machine until only the machine was left. Even humans were seen as part of that self-governing machine. The machine of ‘nature’ became a closed system unaffected by either God or man.
A rationalist who reacted against being ‘captured’ by the machine of ‘nature’ was Immanuel Kant. He opposed the view of the scientists and argued that mankind had unrestrained freedom. Fundamentally, Kant was crying out for meaning to life.
In resisting ‘capture’ by the ‘machine’, he showed how hard it is to bear the logical consequences of refusing to base our reasoning on the Word of the God in whose image we are created. Kant’s cry also expresses the desire for dominion over creation – a dominion God promises to His “sons.”[1]
Considerable dominion was gradually achieved, but not by rationalism. As we shall see, it began when Reformation thinkers patiently applied biblical truth to build common law justice, then freedom, then science and then the hi-tech prosperity that now beckons all mankind.
Kant’s departure from rationalistic science was ominous. He had opened the way for later philosophers to forsake reason – and therefore rationalism – in their search for meaning.[2]
When philosophers did forsake rationalistic reason, it was because they realized it had no answers to the five big questions. Yet science clung to rationalism and made it their religion, which is why the presuppositions of scientists degenerated from biblical to Godless.
Those new Godless presuppositions began influencing people who idolized science for the improvements it made to their living standards. That led to scientism – the belief that science will eventually solve all problems and discover everything we need to know.
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