Science, a Creation of God

By Gailon Totheroh

CBN News Science and Medical Reporter

April 29, 2007

CBN News.com - ATHENS, Georgia - Many people believe that science has somehow disproved God's existence.

In reality, science owes its existence to God.

Christian believers employed their faith and biblical understanding to spark modern science.

Today, huge numbers of scientists stand in that historical faith, just as Isaac Newton did long ago.

Ever wonder who came up with the basic theories behind cell phones, microwave ovens, or laser surgery? If you had to pick out one person, it would be this man.

Meet Charles Townes, physicist, devout Christian and a winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize.

"What does science do?" asks Townes. "Its purpose is to try to understand our universe and how it works. What's the purpose of religion? Its purpose is to try to understand the meaning of our universe."

"One can argue plausibly that Charles Townes is the greatest experimental scientist of the last 100 years. I mean, he discovered the maser, which immediately led to the laser, and he got the Nobel Prize eight years after that." That tribute comes from leading chemist Henry Schaefer, himself a devout Christian and author of the book Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?

Schaefer and Townes are only two examples of Christians who are seeking the truth about nature and God. Their approach is that modern science is founded on biblical thinking -- that there is an order in creation.

Schaefer says that the logical outcome of biblical thinking is modern science. That is, the seeds planted by the Christain scholars of the Middle Ages blossomed into the robust flowers of the scientific revolution.

Unlike the gods of mythology, random evolution or some "Big Bang," the God of the Bible created a stable, orderly world that can be described with mathematical precision.

Christian believers made up a Who's Who of the scientific revolution.

Sociologist Rodney Stark calculated that a great majority of early scientists were followers of Jesus Christ. More specifically, he found that about 96 percent of innovators from the mid-1500s to 1700 were Christian believers. And the great majority of those-- 61 percent -- were devout Christians.

But wasn't everybody back then a Christian? The answer is no. The views of leading intellectuals like Hobbes, Voltaire, and Rousseau show that fields like philosophy were often the province of unbelievers.

Schaefer said, "You can give basically a library list of all the great contributors to philosophy, and they're all skeptics - skeptics, agnostics or atheists -- so it is clear that science has been a particularly Christian activity."

Like the one-two punch of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. Copernicus figured out that the sun was the center of the solar system, and Kepler did the math to prove it.

Then there's Blaise Pascal.

"We could describe him as the father of modern probability and statistics," said Schaefer. "He was also a great physicist -- so many contributions, and clearly a very passionate Christian."

In his book, "Pensées", Pascal wrote, "Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves."

And in the mid-1600s, there was Robert Boyle. Shaefer said of Boyle, "He was a close friend of Richard Baxter, one of three great Puritan theologians, as well as what we would really call the first chemist."

And don't forget Isaac Newton, perhaps the most famous scientist of all. In addition to being the father of gravity, he's a pioneer of mathematics and optics, the very foundations of our modern world of technology.

And Newton was no more Deist. He wrote, "There are more sure marks of the authenticity of the Bible than there are in any profane history.'

More than 100 years later, Christian Michael Faraday, a scientific genius, blazed a trail in a field that would change the world: electricity. He was an engineer before there were engineers, and he was considered the greatest experimental scientist of all time.

Faraday was "very active in his church," said Schaefer. "You know, he used to give sermons -- I'm told they were pretty boring. He used to read his sermons. He was very committed to Christ."

Our modern electronic marvels go back to Faraday's work -- from cars to power generation for homes and industry.

And Faraday's work took on new meaning when James Maxwell explained and applied Faraday's work to everyday life, in what is known simply as the Maxwell Equations.

Maxwell was "a theoretical physicist," said Schaeffer, "who took everyting that Faraday found in the laboratory and made sense of it..."

And there was J.J. Thomson who discovered the electron -- and put the text "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" over the famous Cavendish Laboratory in England.

"And on and on and on, right into the present," said Schaefer. "A number of the pioneers in nanoscience and nanotechnology are deeply committed Christians."

But what do all these Christian roots of science mean for us today and for other cultures?

Schaefer said, "Although every culture -- or virtually every culture -- can succeed in science, they're borrowing on a Christian heritage."

There is an increasing recognition of the faith that undergirded the rise of science in the 16th century.

And in conjunction with the testimony of current scientists about their faith, there appears to be a movement to reclaim that historical connection.

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