Abstract
The Biblical worldview uniquely asserts the reality of a personal deity who is creator ex-nihilo of all that exists. The Biblical cosmos is an open system because there is communication between the created cosmos and its creator. The secular and pagan cosmoses are closed systems because there is nothing outside of the cosmos with which to communicate. The resources within the closed system were not sufficient to raise up Western science. We have steered ourselves differently over the ages depending on our worldview. Most of “steering” took place by civil government, and was done coercively, with the strong keeping the weak and poor subjected. The only force which with any consistency worked to level the playing field among the rich and powerful with the weak and poor was the Judeo-Christian worldview and good news. Basic concepts such as all humans being made in the Image of God, and thus of equal worth, and the moral order being based on the two great commandments of love, created in the West a sea-change in the way politics was done, and thus the way the future was planned. And there was the unique development of Western science under the Biblical worldview because the Biblical God provided a rationality to the cosmos which no other worldview did. Western science began with the union in the Middle Ages of the Greek talent for abstract analysis with the Hebrew focus on the particular, personal, space, and time. So, science, morality/politics, and religion combined to form Western civilization, with its freedoms, economic dynamism, and the first (and hopefully not missed) chance at world peace.
F Earle Fox