THE FOUNDATION OF SCIENCE

WAS BUILT UPON

CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS

 

Numerous scientists in the early history of science were dedicated and committed Christians.

 

EXAMPLES

 

Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642

Galileo Galilei though famous for his scientific achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and physics, and infamous for his controversy with the church was, in fact, a devout Christian who saw not a divorce of religion and science but only a healthy marriage: “God is known by nature in his works, and by doctrine in his revealed word.” Galileo’s understanding of the relationship between science and the Bible has frequently been celebrated as anticipating a modern distinction between the essentially religious nature of scripture and the claims of the natural sciences. Galileo thought that the Bible contains scientific truths and that it is the function of wise interpreters to discover these truths. Galileo thought that the Bible contained truths about nature. He lived and died just as faithful to the Roman Church as Boyle was to the Anglican or Kepler to his Lutheran roots.

 

Johannes Kepler 1571-1630

Kepler was a deeply devout Protestant and therefore had to leave Graz when the Counter-Reformation demanded his conversion. He went to Prague to the court of Emperor Rudolf II and became assistant to the famous court astronomer Tycho Brahe. Kepler is best known for discovering the three mathematical laws of planetary motion (“Kepler’s Laws”) that established the discipline of celestial mechanics. He also discovered the elliptical patterns in which the planets travel around the sun.

 

Blaise Pascal1623 – 1662
A Roman Catholic theologian. Pascal’s wager justifies belief in God. Devised Pascal’s triangle for the binomial coefficients and co-founded probability theory. Invented the hydraulic press and the mechanical calculator.

 

Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691
Robert Boyle put chemistry on a firm scientific footing, transforming it from a field bogged down in alchemy and mysticism into one based on measurement. He defined elements, compounds, and mixtures, and he coined the new term ‘chemical analysis,’ a field in which he made several powerful contributions. He discovered Boyle’s Law – the first of the gas laws – relating the pressure of a gas to its volume; he established that electrical forces are transmitted through a vacuum, but sound is not; and he also stated that the movement of particles is responsible for heat. He was the first person to write specific experimental guidance for other scientists, telling them the importance of achieving reliable, repeatable results.

 

Nicolas Steno 1638 – 1686
Born a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism and became a bishop. Beatified in 1988, the third of four steps needed to be declared a saint. One of the founders of modern geology and stratigraphy.

 

Isaac Newton 1643 to 1727
Passionate dissenting Protestant who spent more time on Bible study than math and physics. Profoundly changed our understanding of nature with his law of universal gravitation and his laws of motion; invented calculus; built the first ever reflecting telescope; showed sunlight is made of all the colors of the rainbow.

 

Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783
Leonhard Euler was one of the greatest mathematicians in history: not only did he produce outstanding mathematics, he produced it at an outrageous rate, publishing more than any other single mathematician before or after him. If quality of output multiplied by quantity of output is equal to greatness, then Euler is the greatest mathematician ever.

 

Albrecht von Haller 1708 – 1777
A Protestant, wrote religious texts and helped organize the construction of the Reformed Church in Göttingen. The father of modern physiology.

 

Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
Antoine Lavoisier revolutionized chemistry. He named the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; discovered oxygen’s role in combustion and respiration; established that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen; discovered that sulfur is an element, and helped continue the transformation of chemistry from a qualitative science into a quantitative one.

 

Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
A Roman Catholic who declared that he had never wavered in his faith. Invented the electric battery; wrote the first electromotive series; isolated methane for the first time.

 

John Dalton 1766 – 1844
A faithful Quaker who lived modestly. Dalton’s Atomic Theory is the basis of chemistry; discovered Gay-Lussac’s Law relating temperature, volume, and pressure of gases; discovered the law of partial gas pressures.

 

Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
A Lutheran Protestant who believed science revealed the immortal human soul and that there is complete unity between science and God. Gauss revolutionized number theory and invented the method of least squares and the fast Fourier transform. His profound contributions to the physical sciences include Gauss’s Law & Gauss’s Law for Magnetism.

 

Humphry Davy 1778 – 1829
Said that God’s design was revealed by chemical investigations. Discovered the electrical nature of chemical bonding. Used electricity to split several substances into their basic building blocks for the first time, discovering chlorine and iodine; produced the first ever samples of the elements barium, boron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and strontium. Invented the safety lamp.

 

Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
Michael Faraday, who came from a very poor family, became one of the greatest scientists in history. His achievement was remarkable in a time when science was usually the preserve of people born into wealthy families. The unit of electrical capacitance is named the farad in his honor, with the symbol F.

 

Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871
A Protestant devotee who devoted a chapter of his autobiography to a discussion of his faith. The father of the computer, invented the Analytical Engine, a Turing Complete computer in 1837 – the first general purpose computer.

 

Samuel Morse 1791 – 1872
A Calvinist with Unitarian sympathies who funded a lectureship considering the relation of the Bible to the Sciences. Took part in the invention of a single-wire telegraph and patented it. Developed the Morse code.

 

Samuel Morse 1791 – 1872
A Calvinist with Unitarian sympathies who funded a lectureship considering the relation of the Bible to the Sciences. Took part in the invention of a single-wire telegraph and patented it. Developed the Morse code.

 

Mary Anning 1799 – 1847
A devoted Anglican, spent her spare time reading the Bible. Discovered the first complete specimen of a Plesiosaur; deduced the diets of dinosaurs.

 

 Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
An Anglican who believed God spoke to her, calling her to her work. Transformed nursing into a respected, highly trained profession; used statistics to analyze wider health outcomes; advocated sanitary reforms largely credited with adding 20 years to life expectancy between 1871 and 1935.

 

Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
A Roman Catholic Augustinian abbot. Founded the science of genetics; identified many of the mathematical rules of heredity; identified recessive and dominant traits.

 

Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895

Louis Pasteur is best known for inventing the process that bears his name, pasteurization. Pasteurization kills microbes and prevents spoilage in beer, milk, and other goods. In his work with silkworms, Pasteur developed practices that are still used today for preventing disease in silkworm eggs. Pasteur had a strong religious and humanitarian spirit. He firmly believed in God, as the Creator of all living things. From his knowledge of the Gospels, he wanted to benefit mankind by having his ideas used to “heal the sick.” Absolute faith in God and in Eternity, and a conviction that the power for good given to us in this world will be continued beyond it, were feelings which pervaded his whole life; the virtues of the gospel had ever been present to him. Full of respect for the form of religion which had been that of his forefathers.

 

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) 1824 – 1907
An elder of the Free Church of Scotland. Codified the first two laws of thermodynamics, deduced the absolute zero of temperature is -273.15 °C. On the Kelvin scale, absolute zero is found at 0 kelvin. Invented the signalling equipment used in the first transatlantic telegraph via an undersea cable.

 

Bernard Riemann 1826 – 1866
Son of a Lutheran pastor. A devout Christian who died reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Transformed geometry providing the foundation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity; the Riemann hypothesis has become the most famous unresolved problem in mathematics.

 

James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
An evangelical Protestant who learned the Bible by heart at age 14. Transformed our understanding of nature: his famous equations unified the forces of electricity and magnetism, indicating that light is an electromagnetic wave. His kinetic theory established that temperature is entirely dependent on the speeds of particles.

 

Willard Gibbs 1839 – 1903
Member of the Congregational Church who attended services every week. Invented vector analysis and founded the sciences of modern statistical mechanics and chemical thermodynamics.

 

John Ambrose Fleming 1849 – 1945
A devout Christian who preached about the Resurrection and founded the creationist Evolution Protest Movement. Founded the electronic age with his invention of the vacuum tube (thermionic valve); devised the hand rules for electric motors and generators.

 

J. Thomson 1856 – 1940
A practicing Anglican who prayed and read the Bible daily. Discovered the electron; invented one of the most powerful tools in analytical chemistry – the mass spectrometer; obtained the first evidence for isotopes of stable elements.

 

George Washington Carver 1864 – 1943
A Protestant Evangelist and Bible class leader whose faith in Jesus was the mechanism through which he carried out his scientific work. Improved the agricultural economy of the USA by promoting nitrogen providing peanuts as an alternative crop to cotton to prevent soil depletion.

 

 Charles Barkla 1877 – 1944
A Methodist who believed science was part of his quest for God. Discovered that atoms have the same number of electrons as their atomic number and that X-rays emitted by excited atoms are ‘fingerprints’ for the atom.

 

Arthur Eddington 1882 – 1944
A Quaker, who believed the hand that made us is Divine. He was the first scientist to propose stars obtain their energy from nuclear fusion. Experimentally verified Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

 

Ronald Fisher 1890 – 1962
A devout Anglican: made religious broadcasts, and wrote religious articles. Unified evolution by natural selection with Mendel’s rules of inheritance, so defining the new field of population genetics. Invented experimental design; devised the statistical concept of variance.

 

Arthur Compton 1892 – 1962
A deacon in the Baptist Church. Discovered that light can behave as a particle as well as a wave, and coined the word photon to describe a particle of light.

 

Georges Lemaitre 1894 – 1966
Roman Catholic priest. Discovered that space and the universe are expanding; discovered Hubble’s law; proposed the universe began with the explosion of a ‘primeval atom’ whose matter spread and evolved to form the galaxies and stars we observe today.

 

Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976
A Lutheran with deep Christian convictions. One of the primary creators of quantum mechanics. Formulated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

 

Ernest Walton 1903 – 1995
A devout Methodist, who said science was a way of knowing more about God. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics after he artificially split the atom and proved that E = mc².

 

John Eccles 1903 – 1997
Christian and sometimes practicing Roman Catholic. Believed in a Divine Providence operating over and above the materialistic happenings of biological evolution. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the physiology of synapses.

 

Charles Townes 1915 – 2015
A member of the United Church of Christ. Prayed daily. Wrote books linking science and religion; believed religion more important than science. Invented the laser and maser. Established that the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center.

 

Francis Collins 1950 – Present
Atheist turned devout Christian. Invented positional cloning. Took part in discovery of the genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and neurofibromatosis. Directed National Human Genome Research Institute for 15 years.

 

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“Christian theology was essential for the rise of Science!”  Rodney Stark (Sociologist). 

 

You can see that “Foundational Christian Convictions Led to Modern Science.” (Red Pen Logic) 

 

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Three Concepts of Christianity Led to the Development of the Science we have today! 

 

CONCEPT ONE:

 AN ORDERLY AND MAGNIFICENT WORLD CAME FROM AN ORDERLY AND MAGNIFICENT GOD! 

 

CONCEPT TWO:

 THE RATIONAL INTELLIGENT HUMAN MINDS WE POSSESS CAME FROM A RATIONAL AND INTELLIGENT GOD! 

 

CONCEPT THREE:

 IT IS A TRUTHFUL CONCEPT THAT STUDYING THE CREATION MADE BY GOD IS A FORM OF WORSHIPING THE GOD WHO CREATED AND MAINTAINS CREATION.