One tradition among historians of science and philosophy holds that in the early-modern period the unraveling of Christianity from pagan philosophy, two forces that had been entangled since the Christ event, established a theory of nature that created the conditions for modern science. This argument implies that science did not make Christianity obsolete, as the popular secularization model has it, but rather that science is the triumph of Christianity. The revival of Greek thinking during the Renaissance triggered a powerful countervailing theological reaction within western Christendom that sought to exorcise from religion and philosophy patterns of thought deemed in error, or even demonic, culminating in the Reformation.
Michael Beresford Foster (1903–1959), Oxford tutor of A.J. Ayer, is among the most known for this view. The reason Greeks had no science, Foster argued, is because their philosophical traditions assumed an uncreated world. Unlike the Christian and Jewish God, who created nature ex nihilo, Plato’s Demiurge assembled the world out of a preexisting and eternal cosmos. God is analogous to a worker who makes things for a purpose—a chair for sitting, a pen for writing—and it is this purpose, or telos, that makes the object intelligible to the human mind. For the Greeks, natural objects were defined through reason alone, which can apprehend the true essence of things simply by contemplating the form given to them by their artificer. Matter, on the other hand, was irrelevant to knowing for the Greeks. It contributes nothing positive to an object’s being, obviating the need for science, based as it is on knowing through the empirical investigation of matter. The pagan theory of God presupposed here meant that God was not independent of the world and therefore has no omnipotent power over it. Nature in Greek thought, which tends toward panentheism, depends on God for its activity but never for its existence.
The God of Christianity is of another order. He is radically separated from Creation, which He creates out of whole cloth by establishing the conditions of possibility for all things. But through this arbitrary act of divine will, known in Christian theology as voluntarism, the purpose of the things He creates ex nihilo (and therefore the means by which humans can know them) is known only to God and remains forever obscure to His creatures. The Christian God who created the world from nothing is like an artist who paints on a whim. We do not know the purpose of the things in the world and—unlike with an artist who might, if she chose to, tell us her reasons—we cannot interview the Creator.
The Greek mode of thought is therefore incompatible with Christian cosmology in that it assumes one can know the mind of God through the things He made. For Christians, as for scientists, knowing is the humble endeavor of forever grasping at our mysterious reality. Only God really knows, and the best we can do is rise a little from our fallen state to know slightly more than nothing. Ecclesiastes 1:13 captures the idea: “I set my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind!”