iApologia (@iApologia)

"Needham, Hodgson, and many other historians, such as Herbert Butterfield and Ian Barbour, identify the missing “X factor” in the realm of ideas. They point to Judeo-Christian ideas prevalent in Europe before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barbour argues that “science in its modern form” arose “in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”36 As Butterfield, former professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, explained, “It was supremely difficult to escape from the [previous] Aristotelian doctrine by merely observing things more closely. . . . It required a different kind of thinking cap, a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself.” These historians found that the reaffirmation of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation during the Catholic late Middle Ages and Protestant Reformation provided the needed transposition. That was the change that led to the break with the Greek thinking that had previously limited the advance of science." "Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe" by Stephen C. Meyer