Winston Ewert one of our writer at Mind Matters News, has just published a book, The Heavens, the Waters, and the Partridge (Inkwell 2025). It is a discussion for a general readership of the history of science and faith issues before the advent of modern science (roughly in the seventeenth century).
People who think that that history consisted largely of burning scientists at the stake are doubtless in for a surprise. (But those people should have known better anyway.)
As Jed Macosko notes in the Foreword,
… after reading Ewert’s book, one begins to admire the ancients’ reasoning powers. Despite their difficulties in measuring the size of the heavenly bodies, the nature of the Earth’s core, and other topics that their limited technology did not allow them to explore, pagan and Christian thinkers were still able to tease out many of the ways our universe works. Our generation no longer has these technological constraints, but are we reasoning as carefully as our predecessors? (p. 12)
Indeed. If we were on trial for intellectual negligence, the prosecution would have plenty of evidence that we are not reasoning anywhere near as carefully as they did.
We live in an age where private truth frequently trumps public truths such as science. We need to remind ourselves of how strange many current developments — the war on math, for example — would seem to those ancient thinkers. And just think, they had many fewer opportunities to find out the facts of nature than we do.
As Ewert explains at his substack, he first became interested in the question as a result of pondering a comment by early Christian philosopher Augustine (354—430 C.E.) a millennium and a half ago, concerning Christians who offered uninformed opinions on the science of the day:
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
Ewert asked himself,
But what was Augustine talking about? He lived long before conflicts over evolution, the age of the earth, or even heliocentrism. I realized that I had no idea what he could possibly be talking about. Thus began journey studying how historical Christians thought about and interacted with the science of their day. This book is the result. (June 3, 2025)
The book explores the science issues that thinkers in the early church, the medieval church, and the Reformation confronted and how they interacted with them. It considers the lessons we can learn, in light of how modern science later resolved these debates.
In Chapter 1, Ewert identifies some common misconceptions about these issues:
Science is a distinctively modern phenomenon, or so we moderns tend to think. As such, it may seem doubtful that we can learn anything from our spiritual forefathers when it comes to science. However, this mindset is rooted in some misconceptions that need to be resolved.
The first misconception is that the pre-modern world was completely scientifically ignorant. For example, many moderns are under the impression that everyone in the ancient world believed that the earth was flat. But this is a misconception. The ancient Greek and Roman world not only knew that the earth was spherical, but they also had a good idea of its size. They made great strides in fields such as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. They believed many things that would turn out to be incorrect, but they were not utterly ignorant.
The second misconception is that their theories were simply baseless speculations. Instead, their ideas were based on experience and reason. They observed the natural world and tried to make sense of what they saw. They came up with sophisticated arguments for particular explanations. They considered and debated different theories, choosing the ones that seemed best. One can certainly find fault with aspects of their methodologies. This is because the methods of science have been refined over time and are continuing to be refined. However, it would be a great mistake to dismiss their science as baseless speculation.
While we know that the ideas of classical science were flawed and would be overturned, the Christians living at that time did not. For them, classical science was science. These were the ideas deemed correct by centuries of scholars who had carefully considered them. Disputing those ideas would have seemed akin to challenging the claims of modern science today. They could no more easily dismiss classical science as baseless than we could dismiss its modern counterpart as baseless. (pp. 23–24)
Note this sentence from the excerpt above: “While we know that the ideas of classical science were flawed and would be overturned, the Christians living at that time did not.”
That’s a key observation. Whatever Christians thought about the claims of classical science back then should be seen in light of the fact that the science, not the faith, was later overturned.
Modern science is the result of thousands of years of such observation and argument. It offers a much clearer picture of the world we live in than was available millennia ago. But, like classical science, it is subject to disproof in its particulars. Efforts to defend the Big Bang, multiverse theory, Darwinian evolution, climate claims, psychology fads, and a host of other headline grabbers as The Assured Facts of Modern Science are best seen in that light. Ewert’s new book will provide a useful foundation.
Hooked? Find the book here.
