Ancient Greek Knowledge

It may be hard to imagine, but there once was a time when science as we know it today did not exist. During the Roman empire, when Christianity itself was getting started, medicine was a basic, if not crude, practice; mathematics was used chiefly for business and surveying; and astronomy was closely associated with astrology. There were no readily identifiable forms of chemistry, physics, or biology, although the civil engineering of roads, buildings and aqueducts had developed through trial-and-error experience. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that people back then were stupid and ignorant: classical Greek and Roman scholars put their intellectual efforts into philosophy and ethics because the systematic study of nature was not …show more content…
By pondering the creation around us, we can marvel over God’s handiwork and craftsmanship, and thus praise him for the things he has made, as is so often done in the Psalms. Thus early science in the West came to be viewed as the “handmaiden to theology.” While the greatest human endeavor is the study of God himself through theology, the study of God’s works also clearly points people to God and is thus a worthy pursuit. When the modern university system of formal higher education was founded by the church in the 1100s, the systematic study of nature was given a stable platform within the academy (prior to this, if practiced at all, it was mostly a hobby of the idle rich or a few of their benefactors).
Aristotle Rediscovered
With the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West, around the same time universities were starting, the proper analytical tools to observe nature and quantify new knowledge became available—this time without the pagan bias regarding the material world. One of the important analytical tools which Aristotle presented was the four ways we can answer the “why” questions. Philosophers today categorize these as the “four causes”:
The material cause: That from which an item is made (e.g., the bronze of a …show more content…
Thus Aristotelian philosophers focused primarily on the purpose or teleology behind physical events. While this approach worked well with biology questions (“Why does an acorn grow into an oak tree?”), the assumption that all objects had a personality or an internal driving force (like the DNA in the acorn) did not work very well in physics for example (“The rock falls because it wants to get closer to the ground”). Ascribing motives and desires to inanimate objects was problematic, since in a Christian view such things were not gods or the manifestations of