How Have Christians Contributed to Science?

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Throughout history, Christians have been at the forefront of scientific discovery. Let's take a look at a few famous Christians in the sciences, to get a sense of Christianity's impact in the scientific world:

Nicholas of Cusa was a German bishop who lived from 1401-1464. Even though bishopping surely kept him busy, he made time to do scientific work as well. He developed a theory that the universe did not have Earth at its center (well before Galileo did). He figured out that air has weight and concluded that plants draw nourishment from it. In addition to science, he was trained in mathematics, philosophy, and the arts. He helped produce a map of Europe, collected ancient manuscripts, and founded a hospital. (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2014) He was a true Renaissance man, who personified a humble search for knowledge.

Blaise Pascal, a Frenchman who lived from 1623-1662, was the inventor of the digital calculator, predating Casio by several years. He also invented the syringe and came up with Pascal’s law, which explains the distribution of pressure through a liquid. He was a Catholic who devoted himself to the convent at Port-Royal. His letters in defense of Jansenism (a theological position within Catholicism) became popular as Les Provinciales and are regarded as great religious and literary works and the beginning of modern French prose.

Pascal later started a work of Christian apologetics, now known as the Pensées (which, as it turns out, is not the French word for a body part). Even though it was unfinished when he died, Pensées is still read and studied today, which is a testament to Pascal’s brilliance. (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2014) As a talented physicist, mathematician, artist, and Catholic theologian, Pascal demonstrated that faith and scientific reason go hand-in-hand.

Laura Bassi (1711-1788) was a groundbreaking Italian physicist. In 1732 (when she was 21 years old) she became the first female appointed to a professorship in Europe when she became professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna. She went on to teach philosophy and then taught Newtonian physics for 28 years.

Mrs. Bassi's own education came after encouragement from Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, who would go on to become pope. When he was poped, he appointed her to his own organization of accomplished academics. In the last two years of her life, she held a professorship in experimental physics at the Institute of Sciences. And, being a strong, Catholic woman, she did all this while raising eight (!) children with her husband. (sciencemuseum.org)

Mary Anning (1799-1847) made incredible fossil discoveries in the cliffs of western Dorset, England. As a child, she liked to take walks on the beach with her family and find fossils that emerged as the cliffs eroded. When she was twelve years old, her family found the skull of an ichthyosaur, and Mary spent the next ten years digging out the rest of the seventeen-foot-long prehistoric reptile. She later found a plesiosaur skeleton (not Nessie, but perhaps his cousin), and a pterodactyl.

These discoveries laid the groundwork for the paradigm shift that would result from Charles Darwin’s work, by showing that the animals of the fossil records really had gone extinct, not just moved to another part of the Earth, as many people then assumed. She also discovered the turds of ancient creatures, which, of course, are very important (New World Encyclopedia,2015).

Despite her incredible discoveries, Anning was not permitted to join the Royal Geological Society (or even attend its meetings) because she had committed the unpardonable offense of not being a man. The details of her discoveries were published by men, often without even mentioning Anning. She ended up setting up a shop near the sea and selling fossils, and died of cancer at forty-seven years old.

Anning was a Christian woman, who was born into the Congregational Church, (whose members were discriminated against because they dissented from the Church of England). She changed affiliation to the Anglican Church, and was described as devout and involved in her church community. Mary Anning, without a formal science education, made several incredible discoveries, though she didn’t get the credit she deserved. Her life story has been told in The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling (2011).

Asa Gray (1810-1888) was an American doctor and botanist. He started out as an assistant to a chemistry professor, but left chemistry to become a master of plant knowledge. He travelled around America and Europe studying and writing about plants, and he eventually became a Harvard professor and helped start Harvard’s botany department. Though Gray was a devout Christian, he was a friend and confidant of Charles Darwin, and he defended the Theory of Evolution, even while he denied that it was sufficient to completely explain variation in species (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2014).

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Austrian Catholic monk who is sometimes referred to as the "father of genetics." He cultivated 20,000 pea plants in his monastery (apparently, the monks were living on a high-pea diet), where he conducted experiments to determine how the plants pass on traits from generation to generation. He presented his findings to the Natural Historical Society of Brunn in 1865, and sent copies to other scientists, including Charles Darwin. But his groundbreaking research was mostly ignored until well after his death. Mendel loved science and the natural world, and he didn’t see a conflict between his roles as a holy man and a scientist (New World Encyclopedia, 2014).

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was a Scottish mathematician and physicist who is known as the "father of modern physics." He is considered one of the greatest physicists of all time, along with Newton and Einstein. He published his first scientific paper when he was fourteen years old, and in his twenties he made predictions about Saturn's rings that would be proven correct by the Voyager space probe over 100 years later. His revolutionary ideas about electricity, magnetism, and light changed the field of physics, and he's also known for his work in color and thermodynamics (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2015). He was also an evangelical Presbyterian and elder in the Church of Scotland. If he hadn't died of cancer at forty-eight, it’s staggering to imagine what else he might have accomplished.

Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) was a Belgian physicist who formulated the concept of the Big Bang Theory (the science concept, not the TV show). He also happened to be a Catholic priest. After being ordained, he studied at Cambridge and MIT, before becoming a professor of astrophysics at the Catholic University at Leuven. That's where he introduced his theory that the universe was created in a great explosion of energy from an infinitely tiny point and has been expanding ever since (Britannica Online Encyclopedia, 2014). The theory, of course, dovetails nicely with the Christian idea that the universe had a beginning and was created by God from nothing.

Francis S. Collins (born 1950) is the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he led the successful Human Genome Project, an enormous effort to map a human DNA sequence, helping determine the functions of different genes. (The project finished under budget and ahead of schedule.) Then he served as the director of the Institutes of Health. He has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina, and he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (www.genome.gov). He is also the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2007), in which he discusses the synthesis between Collins' faith in God and his passion for science.

This is just a small sampling of Christians who have played major roles in scientific progress. When people suggest that faith and science are in conflict, they forget (or are ignorant of) the rich history of scientific advances made by Christians. These men and women clearly succeeded in combining their faith in a supernatural God with their fascination with the natural world. Most Christians in the sciences will tell you that their faith enhances their scientific work, by placing it in the context of a wondrous God-made universe and providing motivation to serve God and humanity with their curiosity.