Christianity and Science

One of the fascinating things about the scientific revolution is that when you look at the luminaries of the events of the late 16th but mostly the 17th century, you come up with names of people like Galileo, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Rene Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and the list goes on. These are names that even schoolchildren bumped into when they studied an outline of the Western European intellectual history of science. These are all people who were deeply committed Christians. If it's the case of the scientific revolution meant reason letting go of religion, it would be odd to set that up in such a way when many of the leaders themselves saw themselves doing God's work.

Take, for example, Kepler, who himself was a Lutheran. He originally thought he would be a Lutheran minister, and he went to seminary but ended up instead going the route of mathematics and astronomy. He was thrilled later on in his life when he came up with his law of planetary motion that his work was being useful; he said, "I originally thought that I would become a preacher seeing that I can glorify God and do God's work this way I'm happy to see myself effectively reading the book of nature."

One of the prevailing metaphors was the metaphor of God's two books, in which he reveals Himself through His words and His works. Many of the scientists of the scientific revolution saw themselves as an exegesis of nature and that they were reading the handy work of God and laying it bare as they were seeking to recover the lost knowledge Adam once had.

Isaac Newton actually wrote more on theology than he did on science. If you took a pile and stacked up all his theological musings, he was particularly interested in Old Testament prophecy. He wrote more about theology and speculated upon the divine and his natural philosophy than he did in his comparably briefer scientific works.

Robert Boyle, one of the leaders of modern chemistry, was very much concerned with doing his science as an exercise in natural theology, showing God was a designer who reveals His own power, wisdom, and attributes in His book of nature.

-Dr.Mark Kalthoff