Science

Science - (Webster's 1828 Dictionary)

SCI'ENCE, n. [L. scientia, from scio, to know.]

1. In a general sense, knowledge, or certain knowledge; the comprehension or understanding of truth or facts by the mind. The science of God must be perfect.

2. In philosophy, a collection of the general principles or leading truths relating to any subject. Pure science, as the mathematics, is built on self-evident truths; but the term science is also applied to other subjects founded on generally acknowledged truths, as metaphysics; or on experiment and observation, as chimistry and natural philosophy; or even to an assemblage of the general principles of an art, as the science of agriculture; the science of navigation. Arts relate to practice, as painting and sculpture.

A principle in science is a rule in art.

3. Art derived from precepts or built on principles.

Science perfects genius.

4. Any art or species of knowledge.

No science doth make known the first principles on which it buildeth.

5. One of the seven liberal branches of knowledge, viz grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

[Note - Authors have not always been careful to use the terms art and science with due discrimination and precision. Music is an art as well as a science. In general, an art is that which depends on practice or performance, and science that which depends on abstract or speculative principles. The theory of music is a science; the practice of it an art.]

si'-ens: This word as found in the King James Version means simply "knowledge." "Science" occurs in the King James Version only in two places, Da 1:4, "children .... understanding science" (yodhe`edha`ath, "those who understand science"). The meaning of the term here is "knowledge," "wisdom." The only other occurrence of "science" is in the New Testament (1Ti 6:20, "avoiding .... oppositions of science falsely so called," tes pseudonumou gnoseos, "the falsely called gnosis"). "Science" is the translation of the Greek gnosis, which in the New Testament is usually rendered "knowledge." The science here referred to was a higher knowledge of Christian and divine things, which false teachers alleged that they possessed, and of which they boasted. It was an incipient form of Gnosticism, and it prevailed to a considerable extent in the churches of proconsular Asia, e.g. in Colosse and Ephesus. Timothy is put on his guard against the teaching of this gnosis falsely so called, for it set itself in opposition to the gospel.

See GNOSTICISM.

"Science" in the modern sense of the word, as the discovery and orderly classification and exposition of the phenomena and of the laws of Nature, is not found either in the Old Testament or the New Testament unless the passage in Daniel be interpreted as meaning the scientific knowledge which the learned men of Babylon possessed of mathematics and astronomy, etc. See also Ac 7:22. To the Hebrew mind all natural phenomena meant the working of the hand of God in the world, directly and immediately, without the intervention of any secondary laws.

John Rutherfurd