Much of what we now think of as science was developed by these thinkers and for reasons directly related to their theological convictions.
Far from being a forum that allows for spiritual contemplation alongside hypothesis, experimentation, and data collection, science is an invaluable methodology for understanding one aspect of our metaphysical reality.
Max Planck
When Max Planck entered the University of Munich in 1875 to study for his doctorate in physics, Professor Philipp von Jolly warned him that the subject he had chosen was more or less closed and he could not expect to discover anything new. Physics was almost complete, with only a few loose ends left loose. Planck, an extremely modest man, with no interest in fame and no worldly ambitions, replied to Jolly that he “did not wish to make discoveries, but only to understand and perhaps deepen on already established foundations.” In fact, Planck went on to deepen our understanding of physics, but in doing so he also started a revolution in science that shook the very foundation on which physics is built.
Planck believed that the laws and constants of nature, such as the h Planck’s constant, have their origin in the “Transcendent Consciousness of the Creator”. Therefore, for Planck, those laws and constants of nature have “superhuman significance” because they not only “reached to the foundations of physical reality” but also ascended to a Mind beyond material reality.
Georg Cantor
Cantor founded the set Theory, discovering that some infinities are greater than others. Through these discoveries, explains mathematician-physicist John Barrow, “Cantor produced a theory that answers all the objections of his predecessors and reveals the unexpected riches hidden in the realm of infinity.” Cantor’s set theory was a revolution in the history of mathematics because it overturned all the assumptions that previous generations had about infinity.
According to Cantor himself, his understanding of the nature of mathematics and infinity was revealed to him by God. As he said in an 1883 letter: “I am far from declaring that my discoveries are due to my own personal merit, for I am only an instrument of a Higher Power which will continue to work long after me. As it revealed itself to thousands of years ago to Euclidean and Archimedes”.
Charles Darwin
In 1809, the year Charles Darwin was born, no one (except “religious fanatics”) believed in the common ancestry and evolution of human beings. Enlightenment scientists before Darwin dismissed the notion of a common ancestor for humans as “backward” and “unscientific” theological doctrine of the Bible. And those scientists also steered clear of the word “evolution,” a religious term whose Latin roots referred to unrolling a scroll or developing a plan. In those days, the concept of “evolution”, which first appeared in English in the 17th century, referred to an orderly sequence of events, and was synonymous with a Divine plan.
Kurt Gödel
Albert Einstein used to comment that he only went to his office at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study “for the privilege of escorting Kurt Gödel home.” Gödel, a good friend of Einstein’s, was the most brilliant and influential mathematician and logician of the 20th century. A master of proofs that led non-Euclidean circles around the greatest minds of his day, Gödel devastated philosophical paradigms with the theorems he developed, exposing entrenched assumptions and cherished axioms as fundamentally unprovable. Gödel also mathematically proved something that many thought was beyond the scope of proof: the existence of God.
Nicolás Steno
Nicolás Steno, one of the founders of the geosciences, was the first to use science to challenge the Aristotelian view of the Earth and its inhabitants. In addition to being one of the most skilled dissectors and one of the most accomplished anatomists of his day, Steno was also an expert excavator who linked his knowledge of biology with key ideas about how fossils relate to different layers of sedimentary rock. By discovering “that the earth’s crust contained an archive of its most ancient history”, Steno inaugurated “an intellectual revolution as profound as that of Galileo and Copernicus”.
During his lifetime Steno was deeply devout, so much so that he was made a bishop and was even revered as a saint after his death, and his attempt to harmonize his geological observations with scriptural history was not a forced or insincere reconciliation. On the contrary, for him it was “a natural synthesis of two equally valid and complementary sources of evidence: the Book of the Word of God and the Book of the works of God.”
Isaac Newton
Albert Einstein said that Isaac Newton was the smartest person who ever lived and the greatest scientific mind of all time. Neil De Grasse Tyson says that as the most brilliant physicist who ever lived, Newton possessed a genius that was “scary”: he intuitively comprehended deeper levels of physical and mathematical reality in ways that seem beyond human capacity.
By revealing the hidden laws of nature, Newton shed light on many of the darkest mysteries in physics and even illuminated the true physical nature of light. Yet despite his love of solving scientific puzzles, Newton’s deepest interest and passion was to discover the very source of science, that is, the mind of the Creator, whose infinite genius etched into the cosmos the logic of science. laws of nature that Newton’s unrivaled insight strove to unravel.
James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell is the great unifier of physics, and it was his discoveries that made Einstein’s work possible. In fact, Maxwell was the “Einstein” of Einstein, and his ideas were Einstein’s main inspiration.
Although Maxwell described physical reality in accordance with mathematical laws in a way that portrays him as a visitor from the future (since it took many decades for scientists to understand the meaning of Maxwell’s work), the inspiration for his aspiration to unify physics came from a deeper source. For Maxwell, his physics was ultimately an expression of his faith in the Creator God, who governs the totality of reality through unified law and order.
2023-06-06 20:54:15
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