Records of the human quest for knowledge have existed for four to five thousand years, revealing that as humans have confronted the vastness of the cosmos, as they have watched and listened and felt the natural environment, their response has been an awe, a wonderment, a sensation of the grandeur of the creation, feelings and sensations and thoughts captured by the word piety. For thousands of years and even today nature has captivated humans as an overwhelming entity of mystery that dwarfs any one of us, generating a pious response, demanding reverence, humility, dedication to protect, faith in its continuation. 

Until only recently in the history of civilization, scientific and religious thought were complementary not contradictory. Scientists prior to the modern age were convinced that their research into nature shed light on the divine. The most valid response to God the Creator was a pious attempt to understand His Creation. Implicit in the piety of thinkers was an awareness of the profundity of existence, of life, and the role of the Creator in making and sustaining life.  Not all of these thinkers had the same view about life, but they all respected and had piety toward life in many, if not all, of its forms. 

Examples are many of great thinkers of the past who brought piety to their scientific inquiries. The ancient Greek thinkers Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were pious philosophers, and since until the Scientific Revolution of the past three to four hundred years philosophers and scientists were one in the same, these thinkers were pious scientists. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle embraced Anaxagoras’ conception of a spiritual, nonmaterial being that creates what is good, what is justice, what is beauty, all that is. Socrates and Plato were more philosophers than scientists, yet they believed that to understand what they called the ideal forms, especially the Good, thinkers must engage in years of what today we would call the liberal arts:  Plato’s student Aristotle embraced these ideas but with a more empirical approach than his teachers. Aristotle utilized experimentation, observation, data collection, analysis, induction, and deduction in books such as Metaphysics and Physics, in which he understood the basis of reality to be an incorporeal transcendent being that, by studying creation in all its forms, the scientist could come to know and understand. Aristotle’s impact on subsequent thinkers was immense: the Hellenistic Age, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Science. During the Hellenistic Age (330-30 BC), Hebrew thinkers were heavily influenced by Greek scientific philosophers. For example, Philo of Alexandria brought his piety to bear in some of the great questions facing students of nature. After the Fall of Rome in the Middle Ages, pious scientists such as the late Roman philosopher Boethius, the Spanish encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, the Carolingian philosopher-scientist John Scotus Eriugena, the English philosopher Anselm of Canterbury, the Franciscan philosopher Bonaventure, the Parisian professor Albert Magnus, the Italian-French scientist-philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and the English Franciscan William of Occam intermixed classical inquiries with Christian faith seeking a pious understanding of God the Creator. One of the founders of the Scientific Revolution in Europe, Nicholas Copernicus, brought his pious understanding of the cosmos to bear in arguing for the heliocentric universe. Michel de Montaigne, the French Catholic aristocrat, and Raymond Sebonde, the Spanish Catholic philosopher/scientist, continued to bring the new thinking of the Renaissance to answer old questions about Elder Scripture, the Creation of the world predating Christian Scripture. As the New Science focusing on the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo began to preoccupy European scientists, even skeptics such as Rene Descartes still dutifully practiced his Catholic faith and Blaise Pascal asked some of the most penetrating questions about life, nature, and God. By the nineteenth century, while many scientists began to abandon their Christian faith, others, such as the French-Mexican scientist Jean Louis Berlandier, embraced piety in all of his scientific inquiries. By the time of the twentieth century, human knowledge, creativity, and technology were eclipsing the millennia-long relationship between piety and science. Even George Lemaître, the astronomer-priest, suggested the idea of the Big Bang, the instantaneous beginning of the universe billions of years earlier, without reference to God’s role as the Creator.

As long as humans felt dependent upon nature, hence upon nature’s Creator, piety reigned in thought, culture, society, and science. But when, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, humans began to discover that they could develop machines that overwhelmed the apparent limits imposed on living things by nature and its Creator, humans began to develop a hubris that limited the once long-held piety. Humans came to understand the way nature works, using this understanding to build machines to control nature, even to destroy it. Human creations, human the creator, overwhelmed God’s creation, God the Creator. Some humans even went so far as to eliminate the creator from all inquiry, to assume that what is, has always been, that it is the result of chance, and that humans, godlike, are the masters of nature rather than its servants and dependents. As Henry Adams succinctly expressed in his autobiography Education, the artificially-divine electric motor, the Dynamo, replaced in the temples of worship the sublime god of nature, which he called, with religious and naturalistic symbolism, the Virgin.

Cultural and social influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a reconsideration of a divine role in the creation of the universe that is revealed by His works, and more of a general anonymous sense of a great mystery in the universe that could or could not be divine. Indeed, there was a slow conversion from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries from a providential to a more deistic God then to a more distant perhaps supernatural force that has some sort of a role in the vastness and complexity of the universe, and finally to pure agnosticism and atheism doubting any kind of supernatural agency at work in the universe.  Piety changes during this time from a clear sense of a personal God–in the West the Christian God–to a more generic sense of a Creator God to a more amorphous mysterious presence to nothingness.

The drivers of this paradigmic change away from piety were inside and outside of science. Those inside were new discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology as well as the development of the professionalization and institutionalization of science with associations/organizations and universities. Those outside were war, industrialization, mechanization, disease, and the modern mentality, the change from a traditional to modern society, as well as the broadening education of the public because of the growth of universities; increasing awareness of human diversity and equality; and forms of communication that spread knowledge and excited speculation. 

Modernity has denied the course of history, in which humans since the beginning of civilization have watched the cosmos and sensed continuity, purpose, thought—the act of Creation. Some thinkers conceived of infinity and eternity in the cosmos; others believed there must be a beginning, imitating life, and like life, there must be an act of creation, a Creator, a being so beyond human conception as to yield astonishment, bewilderment, excitement, and a consequent thirst to know. Ancient thinkers asked: whence does the Cosmos derive? What is the Creator? Can the examination of the Creation reveal the mind and purpose of the Creator?  Throughout time pious scientists such as Aristotle, in his search for knowledge, sought, in Pope Benedict XVI’s words in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, love, agape: “the divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and love– and as the object of love this divinity moves the world.”

Aristotle’s encyclopedic understanding of the Creation inspired thinkers for well over a thousand years. Philosopher/scientists of the later Roman Empire, the Christian and Muslim thinkers of the Middle Ages, those bringing a rebirth to thought and culture during the Renaissance, and subsequent thinkers of the European Scientific Revolution and beyond, were beholden to Aristotle, and before him Plato, Socrates, Anaxagoras, and others of the ancient Milesian School, in their pious attempts to understand the Creation, and through it God.

How in the space of a little more than a century could scientific thinkers go from the natural theology of Edward Hitchcock, author of The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences, to the nihilism of Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker? There has been a revolutionary shift in the understanding of the origins of the universe, hence the origins of life itself, and the origin of the purpose and meaning of life, during the past one hundred and fifty years. The drivers of this paradigm shift from piety to nihilism are both inside and outside of science. But where do our existential and metaphysical questions lead us to today? What are the consequences of our modern way of thinking, which is distinct from every other era of human thought? Through this series on piety and science, we aim to explore the human understanding of God inextricably tied to scientific thought, exhibiting the proper role of piety within our understanding of the universe.

This article first appeared in Catholic Exchange.

For more on piety and science, see my book Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity through the Middle Ages, now in paperback: Amazon.com: Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity through the Middle Ages: 9798216445173: Lawson, Russell M.: Books