Question:

How would you respond to people who say “The Greeks (before Christ) also had science. Therefore, there is nothing special about the Bible and its contributions to science.”?

Answer:

The Greeks made some significant advances in the study of the natural world, but one thing that they did NOT do is apply the scientific method to studying the natural world.  They quite notably did not do experiments.  Aristotle published many theories about the natural world, but nearly every theory he described turned out, later, to be absolutely false.  He proposed geocentrism, based on simple observation.  Geocentrism–the idea that the earth is the center of the universe, and the planets, stars, moon and sun circle the earth is flat wrong.  He described the four-element theory–that all substances are composed of the four elements, air, earth, fire and water.  Again, Aristotle is flat wrong.  He also said that “the natural state of motion is at rest.”  Galileo and Newton proved him wrong, not by philosophizing, but by doing experiments, and deriving theories based on experiment.  Aristotle and the Greeks in general applied alchemical theories.  We know how well those worked!   I could go on at length.

The Arabs, similarly, primarily philosophized about the natural world, although they did an extremely limited number of actual experiments.   Here is the bottom line:  The scientific method (to the extent that science has a “method,” which is something that we can discuss if we like), was invented in the thirteenth century by the likes of Roger Bacon.  By the late fifteenth century, people like Copernicus were doing experiments and taking measurements, applying the “method” of Roger Bacon. By the late sixteenth century, especially with the work of Galileo, science became a well-understood method to determine how the laws of nature work.

How did Roger Bacon and others arrive at the basic assumptions of science?  The answer is that they discovered them through applying a basic understanding of the Christian God.  God is universal and unchanging.  Therefore Roger Bacon predicted that the laws of nature should be universal and unchanging.  That one is holding up pretty well. (by the way, the Greeks believed that there were two sets of laws for the earth and for the heavens)  Bacon believed that God reveals himself through nature (general revelation), so he concluded that the laws of nature should be both understandable and obtainable by humans.  That prediction is holding up quite well also.  Bacon also predicted, using his understanding of the beauty and symmetry of God and of nature, that scientific laws ought to be described well by mathematics.  This, too, is holding up fantastically well. Bacon and others deduced what we call science from their understanding of the God of the Bible.

Were any advances made in the understanding and study of nature before the Christian West established what we now call modern science?  Yes, but those advances were very few, and the majority of proposals turned out to be flat out wrong.  The historical fact is that it was the Christian West (Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon) which invented what we now call science, and the source of the basic assumptions of science were Christian natural philosophy.  So, I reject those who make such statements.  Maybe they do not know what science is, or maybe they do not understand the history of science.  One thing I can say with great authority, as a scholar in the history of science, is that the Greeks definitely did not invent or even use science–at least not in the sense of the word science as we use it today.
John Oakes