Math Circles 8: Incarnation and Science (Part 1)
The Incarnation and Confidence
This is Part 8 of our continuing series based on the Math Circles of math scholar James Duane Nickel.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a math professor named Howard Eves wrote a series of books called In Mathematical Circles. He used the idea of a circle having 360 degrees to write 360 short pieces, each one showing something interesting about math—its beauty, history, people, humor, and real-life uses.
In a similar way, James Nickel has been using that same approach to explore math from a Biblical Christian perspective, aiming to show its depth, meaning, and significance through the lens of faith.
By means of this Substack we are taking a deeper look at each of the entries from his Math Circles with the hope that readers who are as fascinated by the wonder and beauty of mathematics will be enriched. If you’d like to become better acquainted with James Nickel, check out this introduction here.
The Incarnation and Confidence
IN THIS FIRST SECTION Nickel argues that believing in the Incarnation—Christ as fully God and fully man—gave medieval Europe deep confidence that the universe is unified and rational. The same divine Logos who became flesh created and sustains all things, so the same laws govern heaven and earth. This conviction, rooted in a rational personal God, birthed modern science by replacing Greek dualism with harmony.
EN: You make a fascinating connection between the Incarnation and the idea that the universe is coherent and unified. How does believing that Christ is both fully God and fully man actually give scientists confidence that the same laws apply in heaven and on earth? For moderns, this feels like quite a stretch.
James D. Nickel: The significant word in your question is confidence. Next comes unity. What is the relationship between the Incarnation, confidence, and unity? Unfortunately, our modern world has a serious malady regarding vision; it is myopic in that everything is seen from a short-term perspective. No serious consideration is given to why the modern world is the way it is. What were the thought processes that produced our marvelous world of high tech, despite some drawbacks, in all its efficiencies, efficiencies that induced remarkable and multifaceted service to humanity?
Could it be that it was a high-touch vision that generated such high-tech wonders, wonders that only occurred in one culture, a culture infused with that high-touch vision?
The referent essay undergirding these questions looks at the birth of such high-tech wonders by telescoping history back to the birth of a child in Bethlehem two thousand years ago.
What about that birth generated confidence? We let British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) speak about that birth in a lecture that stunned his audience at Harvard University in 1925. We do well to quote an important portion of his talk in from his book Science and the Modern World (1926):
“I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind? When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words. In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There was not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being. I am not arguing that the European trust in the scrutability of nature was logically justified even by its own theology. My only point is to understand how it arose. My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology” (pp. 17-18)
Note that in his book Whitehead, despite having a father who was an Anglican clergyman, speaks of “Jehovah” but never of Jehovah as Creator or the Incarnate Son by whom the Father spoke all things into existence, those all things existing distinct from their Creator. His prevailing pantheism prevented him from acknowledging this Christian dogma. Therefore, he missed recognizing that behind the medieval insistence that the universe was replete with rationality was the dogma of that belief.
In summary, blooming in the European High Middle Ages was a conviction that the universe, the heavens and the earth, were a product of the God of wisdom, of overarching and super-abounding rationality, the God revealed to us through His Word, Word in skin, as Logos (rationality) in a person, the God-man, the Incarnate Son of the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:1-14). It is in this Word that all things were created and by that Word holds all things together, all things in heaven and on earth (John 1:1-5; Colossians 1:15-17). And it is in this Word that every human being lives, moves, and has their existence (Acts 17:28).
It is the revelation of this Word made flesh, of that birth in Bethlehem, that provided the basis of seeing unity in all things, heaven and earth, contra to the heritage given by the Greek philosopher Aristote’s (384-322 BC) radical division between the two realms. [In terms of motion, the heavens governed by circular movement and the earth by rectilinear movement.]
Note carefully the theology grounding how to view the universe articulated by two church fathers, perspectives that were part and parcel of their theological descendants in 14th-century Europe.
Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) (Theophania, Book I, 28): “This sensible world is therefore, not unlike the lyre of many strings, consisting of many dissimilar portions—of acute and grave, lax and intense; and of others between these, all well combined together by the art of the Musician. Such then is also this (universe), collected (as it is) into one compound, consisting of many parts, and many compositions; of cold at once, and warm its opposite; and of matter, wet and dry. It is moreover a mighty vessel, and is the work of the God of all.”
Athanasius (328-373), Against the Heathen:
“(40) … For if the movement of creation were irrational, and the universe were borne along without plan, a man might fairly disbelieve what we say. But if it subsist in reason and wisdom and skill, and is perfectly ordered throughout, it follows that He that is over it and has ordered it is none other than the [reason or] Word of God. But by Word I mean … the living and powerful Word of the good God, the God of the Universe, the very Word which is God, Who while different from things that are made, and from all Creation, is the One own Word of the good Father, Who by His own providence ordered and illumines this Universe. For being the good Word of the Good Father He produced the order of all things, combining one with another things contrary, and reducing them to one harmonious order … all things subsist by the Word and Wisdom of God, nor would any created thing have had a fixed existence had it not been made by reason, and that reason the Word of God ….
(42) The holy Word of the Father, then, almighty and all-perfect, uniting with the universe and having everywhere unfolded His own powers, and having illumined all, both things seen and things invisible, holds them together and binds them to Himself, having left nothing void of His own power, but on the contrary quickening and sustaining all things everywhere, each severally and all collectively; while He mingles in one the principles of all sensible existence, heat namely and cold and wet and dry, and causes them not to conflict, but to make up one concordant harmony.
… as also the Divine says, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made.’ For just as though some musician, having tuned a lyre, and by his art adjusted the high notes to the low, and the intermediate notes to the rest, were to produce a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God, handling the Universe as a lyre, … all things according to their several nature are quickened and organised by Him, and He produces as the result a marvellous and truly divine harmony.”
What the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (325, 381) revealed was a summary of the faith articulated by Church Fathers, specifically Irenaeus of Lyon (125-202), Hippolytus of Rome (165-235), and then Athanasius. They ultimately argued for the homoousion tō Patri clause, that the Son was of one being with the Father. This sui generis Son, the monogenes (only begotten—reread the importance of this word in the referent essay) by the Father, was not only crucified under Pontus Pilate for us and our sins, but was the Word, the Logos, in whom and by whom the Father created all things (te pantōn), visible and invisible. And te pantōn, because they not only came into existence by the Logos of the Father but are also sustained in that existence by the same Logos, formed the grounds of the belief that the cosmos was fully reasonable, i.e., fully logical in union with the Logos, and structured by Divine Wisdom.
It was that belief, grounded in the Incarnation, that, in time (ca. 800-1400), formed the base of a sui generis culture, the Latin West, that expressed the confident conviction that human beings could investigate the ways of motion, both celestial and terrestrial, in a rational, coherent, i.e., unified, manner.
For moderns, we resolve what to them “feels like quite a stretch” by applying the historical ophthalmological correction to their myopic vision.
CONTINUED
Original essay, Math Circles 8: Incarnation and Modern Science.