The Scientific Failure of Man-Centered Rationalism

The ancient Greeks came so close to inventing modern science—and yet they never quite got there. What prevented them? Perhaps the answer lies in the attitude expressed by Protagoras, one of the earliest of Greek philosophers: “Man is the measure of all things.” Ancient Greek science was rationalistic, but it was a human-centered rationalism. When Aristotle sought scientific explanations, he derived them solely from his own reason. Science was to be pursued in the same way as philosophy—simply by thinking about things, not by experimentation. Or as Everett Ferguson says in Backgrounds of Early Christianity, for the Stoics “the universe is orderly. Problems in understanding it are logical problems and can be solved if one works on them.”

Now contrast Protagoras’s statement of man being the measure with the Bible’s declaration in Isaiah 55:8-9: “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts’” (NASB).

If you realize that the Creator of the universe thinks differently than you might think, then you don’t assume that your own thoughts will reveal to you the principles of the universe. You have to go out and try to find those principles in nature itself. Though modern science surely has roots in ancient Greek science, perhaps it was the biblical world view of Christian Europe that provided the missing element necessary for science as we know it to emerge. Man-centered rationalism, as opposed to God-centered rationalism, is doomed to failure.