Dr. Stephen Meyer

the scientific, what we call the scientific revolution, which is differently dated by historians, but pretty much all agree something really big happened between about 1500 and 1700 in Western Europe in a decidedly Christian context or milieu, as the scholars call it.

But as you study that, it goes back even further into about the late medieval period.

So it's interesting.

There's a Jewish contribution to this from the Hebrew Bible,

There is a Catholic contribution to this.

The Catholic philosophers in the medieval universities were developing methods of studying nature, isolating variables, the kind of things that we learn about in science class.

Those were coming out of places like Oxford and the University of Paris.

And then there's a contribution from the reformers, the reformed Protestant perspective.

They especially were – emphasized the – both –

That we were made in God's image, number one, and therefore we had that rationality that enabled us to understand the world.

But we were also fallen, and that affected our minds.

So we had to guard against flights of fancy, expressing biases.

We always had to test our ideas against the evidence.

So you had a—

And in the Hebrew Bible, you've got the idea of this kind of order that God had built into nature.

The concept of the laws of nature arguably comes out of the Hebrew Bible.

So it's just a kind of interesting ecumenical Judeo-Christian contribution to the rise of modern science.

And it happens, I think—

in the West really decidedly between about 1300 and 1700.

And then especially those two centuries of the 16th and 17th centuries are really, really dramatic.