China’s head of The State Administration of Religious Affairs, Wang Zuoan, recently told The Study Times that China needed to “liberate” its people from the influence of religion, and that it should use scientific knowledge to do so.

"For a ruling party which follows Marxism, we need to help people establish a correct world view and to scientifically deal with birth, ageing, sickness and death, as well as fortune and misfortune, via popularising scientific knowledge." Zuoan went on to acknowledge that if the shift from religion to science in China is to be successful, patience and hard work will be required.

It is fairly ambitious to believe that a shift, the magnitude of which Zuoan has in mind, will come about just as long as China’s State administrators are patient and keep their noses to the grindstone. By considering the intellectual climate which fostered the scientific revolution in the West it is possible to see that something more is needed for science to thrive.

In Europe, scientific thought did not emerge directionless from a pool of ignorance. It began as a theological pursuit. And it operated on premises grounded in the religious claim that the natural world was created by a rational, knowable and personal being. Simply put, for the scientific method to work, order must be assumed; and for the scientific method to be thought of, you must already expect order.

Alfred North Whitehead made the above point more eloquently in his 1925 Harvard Lowell Lectures. After identifying the belief that “every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents” as the greatest contribution medieval Europe made to the formation of the scientific movement, Whitehead said that, "when we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah." 

Whitehead did not only explicate the theological principles which enabled science to flourish in the West. He articulated a view of why, historically, China had developed as a civilization, but did not discover science. Whitehead held that China did not have science because it did not have belief in an almighty Creator.

Whitehead’s view is echoed by Marxist historian Joseph Needham in his life’s work, Science and Civilization in China. Needham holds that the Chinese did not develop science because “the conception of a divine celestial law-giver imposing ordinances on non-human nature never developed in China.” 

It is popular to see science as the antagonist of religion. And, it is true that, since its religious beginnings, thinkers have often used scientific thought to argue against religious world views. It is understandable why Zuoan might hope that through popularizing ‘scientific thought’ in China, the Chinese people could be freed from the influence of religion. But as the story of science in the West reveals, if Zuoan wants science to liberate the people of China from religion, he will need more than patience and hard work. He will need to rewrite the history of science, and find a way to restructure its basic principles.

Guest blogger Brennan Jacoby is a philosopher and freelance writer based in London, UK. 

Image: Philip Jagenstedt from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.