This is a book about the relationship between religion and science—more specifically, about the connection between Christianity and the foundations of European science. Before reading it, my understanding of that relationship was rather shallow. I tended to see religion as a dark barrier in front of scientific progress, with each advance in science representing another breakthrough against religious suppression. After finishing the book, that view was completely overturned.
What does “the Fall” mean?
The idea comes from the shared tradition of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and more concretely from the Old Testament story in the Bible: Adam and Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate the fruit of wisdom and turned away from God, and so humanity fell.
In this account, God created the world, created Adam, and also created the animals and plants. He then gave Adam the task of naming them. That act was not just a practical assignment—it was a sign that Adam had been granted supernatural wisdom and the responsibility of governing creation. Adam could name all things because he possessed a God-given ability to grasp their essence.
But Adam rebelled against God, and through that rebellion came evil and original sin. From that point on, Adam and his descendants were punished by God. They lost supernatural power, and even some of the natural capacities proper to human beings were taken away.
Before Noah, human lifespans were said to be around 900 years. After the Great Flood, they dropped to about 70 years. In this reading, that change is not just a biological detail but another sign of divine punishment and one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the doctrine of original sin. It suggests not only that human wisdom was weakened, but that the body itself was diminished.
So how could fallen human beings return to God’s presence, recover the natural abilities they had lost, and perhaps even regain the supernatural wisdom once granted to Adam?
Different Christian answers, different views of science
Before Thomas Aquinas, and among the scholastic thinkers before him, human natural capacities were seen as merely hidden. In that view, if a person did good deeds, God would naturally favor them and allow that wisdom to reemerge.
But beginning in the 15th century, with Martin Luther and John Calvin, Protestantism took a very different position. It taught that after the Fall, human reason and moral disposition were utterly destroyed. No amount of good works could restore them. Only acts of worship such as prayer could lead to forgiveness.
From that split came two very different attitudes toward science. Could human beings explore the light of wisdom that belongs to God? Should church schools teach Greek philosophy, mathematics, and related subjects at all?
In the 16th and 17th centuries, all scientific inquiry still took place within a framework allowed by God. The fields that advanced the most were astronomy, mathematics, and geometry. There was a reason for this. Human beings had fallen, but what was cursed was the earth where they lived; the heavens remained pure. So when people looked up at the stars, they could still see the light of divine wisdom.
Geometry was also considered sacred, because it was believed to be knowledge God used in the act of creation itself. That gave it a transcendent status. Astronomy, joined with geometry and accompanied by mathematics, helped open the age of modern science.
Physics developed thanks to astronomy. Chemistry developed from alchemy. When most people hear the word alchemy, they think of making an elixir of immortality or turning stone into gold. But in its original Christian setting, alchemy aimed at something different: to cleanse impurity and recover the pure matter belonging to God, and through that, to seek redemption.
To put it simply, the book argues that scientific method was first designed to ease the cognitive damage caused by human sin, and that modern science is ultimately an effort to recover the knowledge Adam once possessed.
For someone unfamiliar with Jewish and Christian history, or with the history of Europe, this may sound almost unbelievable. But many figures we know well—Descartes, Copernicus, Bacon, Locke, Newton, and even Einstein—conducted their scientific inquiries under the guidance of theology, and all of them believed that wisdom belongs to God alone.
I am an atheist myself, but I still try to approach the gods of different cultures with reverence, and to understand them from a historical perspective. As an individual, one may choose not to believe in God, but one cannot simply deny him, because he lives so plainly in history and culture. For that reason, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Christianity, theology, European history, human history, or the history of science. It was published by the Commercial Press, as part of a scientific history translation series, which in itself is already a kind of guarantee of quality.
One last digression: when reading books about history, never judge the past by today’s values and worldview. It is like deciding whether old food tasted good only after you are already full—especially if you are the kind of person who overeats until you feel sick.