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What caused the scientific revolution? How did science advance from the relatively static medieval philosophies of nature to the dynamic technologies of modern science? Secular historians have argued that the church opposed this progress at every turn. But in fact a set of new theological ideas ushered in the scientific innovations of men like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.

First, Christian thinkers applied God's sovereignty to the natural realm in a new way, asserting that nature was governed by God-designed mathematical laws. Then, concerned to protect that sovereignty against Aristotle's notion that natural entities possessed intrinsic drives, Christians began to strip nature of her divinity, positing instead mechanical processes.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid
    in night
God said: "Let Newton be!"
    and all was light.

Alexander Pope's famous couplet gives the impression that Newton's genius lay in his discovery of previously hidden laws of nature. This disguises what was both a novel feature of the science of the seventeenth century and its enduring legacy—the idea that there existed "laws of nature" to be discovered in the first place.

What are laws of nature? For the Middle Ages, natural laws had been universal moral rules established by God. The injunction against murder, recognized by all cultures, was a typical example of a natural law. The concept of a physical law of nature was completely absent. That came only as Christian thinkers extended God's legislative power to the natural world. As philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596-1650) expressed it, "God alone is the author of all the motions in the world."

For its time, this was a radical claim. Following Aristotle, medieval scientists had imputed immanent tendencies to physical entities, saying for example that objects went into motion because they were seeking their own natural resting place. Nature had thus enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy.

In the new science, however, natural objects had no inherent properties, and it was God who directly controlled their interactions. In much the same way that the Deity had instituted moral rules, he was now seen to have enacted laws that governed the natural world.

"Nature," observed Robert Boyle, "is nothing else but God acting according to certain laws he himself fix'd."

The fact that God was the author of these laws meant that they shared something of his nature. Descartes, for example, argued that because of their source, natural laws must be eternal and unchanging. He went on to justify his law of the conservation of motion by appealing to God's immutability. Nature was constant because God was immutable.

This provided a crucial foundation for experimental science. In the words of Newton's predecessor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, experimentalists "do not suspect that Nature is inconstant, and the great Author of the universe unlike himself." Only because they assume that God's decrees are unchanging do they expect the consistent results of a number of experiments to hold true ever after.

The idea of eternal and immutable laws of nature, vital to modern science, found a close ally in mathematics. A distinguishing feature of science, as many hapless students have discovered to their regret, is its mathematical character. But this had not always been so. This change, too, emerged from theology.

To medieval thinkers, the marriage of mathematics and natural science would have been an illicit and barren union. Following Aristotle, they held mathematics to be a product of the human mind. For this reason mathematics was not thought to provide true descriptions of reality: useful descriptions—yes—but not true descriptions.

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