Evidence · Case 08 · Science
The roster of believing scientists
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives” (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Objections & responses
- Nearly everyone in seventeenth-century Europe was a Christian. That the founders of science were too is a fact about the population, not about any link between faith and science.
This is the strongest objection and it deserves a direct answer. Two replies. Several of the founders (Kepler, Boyle, Newton) said in their own words that their theology motivated their science, which is more than demographic coincidence. And the stronger thesis, that Christianity caused modern science, is deliberately not claimed here. What is claimed is that faith and science coexisted in the founders without conflict, which answers the popular assertion that science advanced by escaping religion. The demographic point does not touch that narrower claim.
- Newton was an anti-Trinitarian who would have been a heretic by the standards of every church of his day, and he spent as much time on alchemy as physics. Isn’t “devout Christian” doing a lot of work?
Newton was heterodox on the Trinity, and devout theist who wrote extensively on Scripture is the more accurate description. The alchemy is beside the point. The claim needs only that Newton saw his science as the study of God’s ordered creation, which his letters to Richard Bentley confirm, not that he was orthodox. A heretic who did physics to trace the hand of God is still a counterexample to the warfare story.
- A list of believing scientists can be matched by a list of unbelieving ones: Laplace, Darwin in later life, most twentieth-century physicists. Lists prove nothing.
True, and the claim is not that scientists tend to be believers. It is the historical claim that the founding generation was largely devout and saw no conflict, which answers the specific popular assertion that science advanced by throwing off religion. The modern demographics of scientists are a separate question and nothing here implies otherwise.