The Gift of Spirituality

H. Floris Cohen argued for a biblical Protestant, but not excluding Catholicism, influence
on the early development of modern science. He presented Dutch historian R.
Hooykaas' argument that a biblical world-view holds all the necessary antidotes for the
hubris of Greek rationalism: a respect for manual labour, leading to more
experimentation and empiricism, and a supreme God that left nature open to emulation
and manipulation. It supports the idea early modern science rose due to a combination
of Greek and biblical thought.
Oxford historian Peter Harrison is another who has argued that a biblical worldview was
significant for the development of modern science. Harrison contends that Protestant
approaches to the book of scripture had significant, if largely unintended, consequences
for the interpretation of the book of nature. Harrison has also suggested that literal
readings of the Genesis narratives of the Creation and Fall motivated and legitimated
scientific activity in seventeenth-century England. For many of its seventeenth-century
practitioners, science was imagined to be a means of restoring a human dominion over
nature that had been lost as a consequence of the Fall.
Historian and professor of religion Eugene M. Klaaren holds that "a belief in divine
creation" was central to an emergence of science in seventeenth-century England. The
philosopher Michael Foster has published analytical philosophy connecting Christian
doctrines of creation with empiricism. Historian William B. Ashworth has argued against
the historical notion of distinctive mind-sets and the idea of Catholic and Protestant
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