Courtesy - The Island By Carlo FonsekaThunder and lightning occurring during raging storms would surely have frightened our cave-dwelling ancestors out of their wits. They couldn’t figure out who caused what they saw (lightning) and heard (thunder). In their experience of everyday life visible living agents caused the significant things that happened to them and around them. For thunder and lightning there was no visible causal agent. Given their state of pathetic ignorance about the workings of the natural world, the thinking ones among our ancestors leapt into the unknown and assumed that thunder and lightning must be caused by invisible powerful beings - or gods – who controlled the heavens. So out of the depth of their abysmal ignorance about the natural order our ancestors became religious.
Astronomy
They saw the sun during the day and the moon and the stars at night. When they began to speculate about the nature of these celestial bodies, unbeknownst to them, they initiated humanity’s systematic search for knowledge subsumed much later under philosophy and science. For the most part, they lived by instinct doing what came naturally to them. Their first hypothesis about the sun and moon was that these wondrous bodies were gods who occupied the heavens. When our ancestors looked as far as they could see across a sea the sky seemed to them to meet the sea at the horizon. To the more imaginative ones among them the sky looked like an inverted bowl. Trusting the evidence of their unaided naïve senses they surmised that the earth must be at the center of things, with the sun and the moon and the stars going round it in circles. As to why the sun was seen only by day and the moon and stars only by night commonsense suggested a ready explanation. The sun traveled over the earth by day and under the earth by night, while the moon and stars did the reverse.
Enter Aristotle
Broadly speaking, such was the state of the art of astronomy - the oldest of all sciences – when antiquity’s undisputed Professor of Omniscience Aristotle (384-322 BCE) put his amazingly fertile mind to the subject. He laid it down that the earth was indeed at the center of the universe and that the sun and moon moved in perfect circles round it. Concerning what set them moving in the first place, he postulated God, the final cause of all activity. Clearly, therefore, the greatest scientist of antiquity was religious. The influence of Aristotle on western thought prevailed for the next 2000 years until the time of the renaissance in Western Europe. By the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) the influence of Aristotle spread to Egypt and Syria from Macedonia.
Ptolemaic Pantheon
In the 2nd century after Christ, there lived in the city of Alexandria in Egypt Claudius Ptolemy, the foremost astronomer of antiquity. He summed up the achievements of Greek astronomers since Aristotle in a model that put the earth at the center (geocentric). In the Ptolemaic pantheon the earth is encircled by the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This geocentric model held sway for more than a thousand years.
Nikolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
The man who rubbished Ptolemy’s geocentric model was a versatile Polish Catholic priest called Nikolaus Copernicus. Born in 1473 he studied astronomy, medicine, painting and philosophy in the universities of Cracow and Padua and at the age of 26 he was appointed Professor of Astronomy in the University of Rome. For four years he taught the Ptolemaic system of astronomy with increasing skepticism about its validity. At last he became convinced that the Ptolemaic system was fundamentally flawed. He had reason to believe that the earth rotates on its own axis once every 24 hours and revolves round the sun once a year. But to research the matter thoroughly and present this heliocentric doctrine, "not as a hypothesis but as a fact" - as he put it - he required time and seclusion for reflection. So Professor Copernicus chucked up his job in the University of Rome and became a priest in the remote Polish village of Frauenbourg. It took him 30 years to compile his ground-breaking book titled De Revolutionibus. He was acutely aware that the heliocentric doctrine not only contradicted the authority of Aristotle but was also not compatible with the official view of the Catholic Church. Perhaps that was why he waited until 1543 - the year of his death - to publish his book (Unsurprisingly in 1616 the heliocentric doctrine of Copernicus was pronounced to be "philosophically foolish and absurd and formally heretical" by the Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church.)
Kepler and Galileo
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) refined and expanded the heliocentric theory and summarized the state of the art in astronomy in his three laws (Kepler’s Laws). He was a professing Christian Protestant. He was in touch with his senior contemporary Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) widely acknowledged as the greatest of the founders of modern science.
Through Kepler he ardently embraced the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. He confirmed the theory for himself with the help of a telescope he had constructed. He professed to remain true to his Catholic faith, and having read the "Book of Nature" which was there for all to read, he concluded that Aristotle was wrong and Copernicus was right about the motion of celestial bodies. So he attempted to adapt the Bible to the heliocentric doctrine. The Catholic Church, however, would have none of it.
In 1633 the Inquisition convicted Galileo of heresy and notoriously compelled him to declare and swear that the earth does not move round the sun (1n 1993 the Catholic Church formally acquitted Galileo of heresy).
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Born in the year that Galileo died Newton achieved the final triumph for which Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had prepared the background. His Principia Mathematica published in 1687, embodied his three laws of motion (and pretty nearly everything else known to physics in his time).
Being a deeply religious man he said: "This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel of an intelligent and powerful being". His view was that at the creation the planets had been hurled by the hand of God in a tangential direction and left to the operation of the law of gravity. To sum up, it will not escape our attention, that the foremost scientist of antiquity, Aristotle, as well as the four founders of modern science - Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton - were all religious in outlook.
Darwin, Mendel and Einstein
Newtonian science was totally undisputed for about 300 years after Newton. It was only in the 20th century that Albert Einstein challenged Newton’s ideas on space and time. Between Newton and Einstein there were two great scientists, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel who compel attention. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is known to fame through his book called The Origin of Species published in 1859. According to Darwin the millions of species of animals and plants inhabiting planet earth had not been separately and specially created by God, but had gradually evolved from simpler forms over hundreds of millions of years by the mechanism of natural selection. The final paragraph of the first edition of Origin of Species proclaims that "there is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one…" In the second edition, Darwin felt constrained to add the words "by the Creator" after the word "breathed" in the above excerpt. The question, therefore, arises whether Charles Darwin should be classified as a "religious scientist" In a document meant to be a posthumous message to his family, however, Darwin declared that "agnostic" would be a more correct description of his state of mind regarding religion. Concerning Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) the founder of the science of genetics, one need only note that he was an Augustinian monk to include him in the category of religious scientists. There is some evidence, though, that Mendel took to the monastic life mainly because that was the only way open to him to pursue his science.
The greatest scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) confessed to a certain pantheistic reverence which arguably justifies his classification as a religious scientist. This is reinforced by utterances that escaped his lips from time to time. For example, after hearing child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin play the violin, Einstein exclaimed, "Now I know there is a God in heaven". Again, in connection with the quantum theory, he said "God does not play dice". On the basis of such remarks believers in a supernatural creator have been quick to claim Einstein as a fellow believer in a supernatural creator who is "appropriate for us to worship". However, in a multiple author book titled I Believe published in 1940, Einstein wrote: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God in short who is but a reflection of human frailty". Even more explicitly he once said: "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this… If something is in me, which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it".
Twentieth Century
Related no doubt to the state of humanity’s accumulated knowledge about nature and nature’s laws, great scientists who believe in a creator God have become rarer and rarer in the 20th century. Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize for figuring out the double helical structure of DNA, the stuff of life. When asked by Professor Richard Dawkins – the profoundest evolutionary theorist after Charles Darwin - whether he knew many religious scientists, Watson replied: "Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them and I’m a bit embarrassed because I cannot believe anyone accepts truth by revelation". As to Francis Crick, he actually resigned his fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, because the College decided to build a chapel. His reason: money should not be wasted.
