Chapter Nine
THE HEAVENS DECLARE THE GLORY OF GOD
Guess what?
Only in Christian Europe, full of churchgoing believers, did mankind begin the systematic study of nature.
The rational theology of the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation led directly to the discoveries of modern science.
The scientists who founded entire disciplines or made landmark scientific discoveries were primarily devout Christians.
When it comes to the development of modern science, the enemies of the Bible—from Voltaire and David Hume to Penn and Teller and Richard Dawkins—tell the same tale.
For millennia, Christianity in general, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, attempted to keep mankind locked in a dark prison of superstition and irrational dogma—and it was only when mankind threw off the shackles of revealed religion during the Renaissance and Enlightenment that modern science was able to develop.
As long as mankind looked to the Bible for the truth about the world and man’s place within it, these critics say, science was prevented from being born.
“The Bible, it seems, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology,” sneers Sam Harris in his 2005 polemic against religion, The End of Faith. “We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”
This has been the conventional view of atheist intellectuals throughout most of the twentieth century.
After the flourishing of Greek and Roman civilization, mankind entered a prolonged and terrible Dark Age, an age of blind faith instead of reason, in which “millions” of women were put to death as witches, Crusaders attacked the peace-loving Muslims for no reason, and everyone believed the world was flat.
The Catholic Church did everything in its power to keep people ignorant and illiterate. But despite its best efforts, a few courageous intellectuals arose in the sixteenth century and began to seek out the lost knowledge of classical antiquity. This “Renaissance”—or “rebirth” of knowledge—taught men to think for themselves and led to the development of modern science.
Once freed of the dogmas of biblical Christianity and its taboos against learning and experimentation, mankind was able to realize such useful things as physics, chemistry, and medicine—but only after battling the churches, which fought science each step of the way.
“Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology,” explained the militant atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his book
The Faith of a Rationalist.
1 “Ousted from one position, they have taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is.”
This conventional view of the development of science, taught as absolute truth in most American universities, from Berkeley to Boston, has one flaw: It is 100 percent demonstrably false—and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of early modern science knows that.
As a new generation of historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science has proven, biblical religion was not the enemy of science but rather the intellectual matrix that made it possible in the first place.
Without the key insights that Christianity found celebrated in the Bible and spread throughout Europe, science would never have developed. That is why, as sociologist Rodney Stark points out, the scientific enterprise as such developed in only one place and at only one time in history: in Christian Europe.
Scripture Says
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Psalm 19:1
What we know as empirical science and the scientific method did not develop in any other of the advanced civilizations on earth—not in China (with its sophisticated society), not in India (with its philosophical schools), not in Arabia (with its advanced mathematics), not in Japan (with its dedicated craftsmen and technologies), not in Mesoamerica, not even in ancient Greece or Rome.
Only in Christian Europe, among millions of pious, churchgoing believers, did mankind begin the systematic study of nature—quantified by precise measurement and experimentation—which led to a whole new way of understanding.
The evidence is incontrovertible: It was the rational theology of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation—inspired by the explicit and implicit truths revealed in the Jewish Bible—that led to the discoveries of modern science.
The biblical origins of modern science
If what we know as modern scientific research—with its emphasis on direct observation and experiment, precise measurement, and the formulation of laws of nature—developed only in the context of Western Christendom, the question that naturally arises is: Why?
What is it in Western culture—which key ideas—that led to the development of modern science?
Sociologists such as Rodney Stark have hinted at some of the key scholastic concepts that were the necessary precursors to the development of the scientific method, but many scholars point directly to the ideas found in the Bible that permeated Western society and prepared the way for such geniuses as Galileo, Newton, Gregor Mendel, and Max Planck. Most of these insights are not stated as philosophical assertions explicitly in the biblical texts, of course. They are, rather, the operating assumptions that undergird the entire worldview of the biblical writers—and which can often be seen more clearly when contrasted with the assumptions operating in other ancient religions.
Who Said It?
“Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical.... The things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much . . . .But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.”
G. K. Chesterton
One recent attempt to identify these key biblical insights was made by Dr. Charles B. Thaxton (a chemist), and Nancy R. Pearcey (who writes often on religion and science), in their 1994 book, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy. Among the biblical concepts that gave birth to modern science, Thaxton and Pearcey identified:
Biblical Insight #1: The world is real, not an illusion
“To begin with, the Bible teaches that nature is real,” the authors say. “If this seems too obvious to mention, recall that many belief systems regard nature as unreal. Various forms of pantheism and idealism teach that finite, particular things are merely ‘appearances’ of the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Individuality and separateness are illusions. Hinduism, for instance, teaches that the everyday world of material objects is maya, illusion. It is doubtful whether a philosophy that so denigrates the material world would be capable of inspiring the careful attention to it that is necessary for science.”
Biblical Insight #2: God made the world good
Once again, modern Westerners so take for granted the biblical worldview—one part of which is that a Creator made the world and “saw that it was good”—that they are blind to the very real alternatives found throughout history and in many parts of the world.
One of those alternative worldviews is that the world is
not good but evil—not something they should investigate, but something from which spiritual seekers should seek to escape. This was, in fact, the worldview of the now-famous and “politically correct” Gnostic cults that arose in the first centuries after Christ. It was also the worldview of the Manichees, the followers of the third-century Persian prophet Mani, who was greatly influenced by contact with Buddhism. They believed the material world is a place of darkness and pain. St. Augustine, the greatest Christian theologian of the first millennium of Christianity, was converted to Christianity from Manicheeism: “Behold God, and behold what God has created!” Augustine wrote in his
Confessions. “God is good. Most mightily and most immeasurably does he surpass these things. But being good, he has created good things.”
2 This definitive reaffirmation of the biblical notion of the inherent goodness of the world, Thaxton and Pearcey say, was a profound impetus to the development of science. The idiosyncratic Christian view was that the world, created by a loving God, was good, inherently interesting and therefore worthy of systematic and careful study. Thaxton and Pearcey quote the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who wrote, “I give you thanks, Creator and God, that you have given me this joy in thy creation, and I rejoice in the works of your hands.”
Biblical Insight #3: The world is a garden, not a god
This is the same insight that G. K. Chesterton was pointing to when he said in Orthodoxy that nature is not our mother but our sister. In virtually all pagan religions, including Buddhism, an animistic substratum runs throughout the various worldviews, so that pagan culture saw all of nature imbued with spirit or mind. But the Bible changed all that in Western culture. “God does not inhabit the world the way a dryad inhabits a tree,” say Pearcey and Thaxton. “He is not the personalization of natural forces. He is not the world’s ‘soul’ ”—which is precisely what Newton said in his General Scholium—“He is its creator.”
The Bible makes clear that natural phenomena—the sun and moon, the trees—were created by God according to his purposes, not divinities to be worshipped. Modern atheists like to claim that it was Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes who pioneered the “disenchantment” (die Enntzauberung der Welt) or “disgodding” (Entgötterung) of nature, but in fact the process began at Sinai: “I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery: You shall have no other gods besides me” (Ex 20:2–3). As we saw in an earlier chapter, the Bible views pagan religion as madness, the worshipping of inanimate wood and stone.
The biblical rejection of nature worship was commented upon explicitly by the author of The Book of Wisdom, a deutero-canonical book written in Greek about a century before Christ:
For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature . . . they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world . . . .If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the One who formed them (13:1–4).
That is precisely why science never arose in such sophisticated, highly philosophical societies like India or China where everyone “knew” that the natural world was imbued with spirit and mind.
“The de-deification of nature was a crucial precondition for science,” conclude Pearcey and Thaxton, and this “de-deification” was made possible only by centuries of reflection on the truths revealed in the Bible.
Biblical Insight #4: A rational God created an orderly, dependable world
If you believe that all of nature is imbued with spirit, then any natural phenomenon—a tree or a river, the ocean or the moon—could quite literally have a mind of its own. There is little point to searching for a systematic pattern in the movement of the wind or the stars because the deities or nature-spirits that control them could easily just change their minds tomorrow.
What’s more, polytheism usually implies that the various gods of nature can be in conflict, whereas monotheism tends to result in a belief in a unified, coherent universe. “Thy word, O God, stands fast in heaven,” the psalmist sang (Ps 119:89).
In contrast, the ancient Greeks—just to take one example—did not think of the world as an orderly, dependable place. For Greek thinkers such as Plato, the world was but a pale shadow of the “really real” world of Ideas. Truth was to be found in the philosophical contemplation of abstract Ideas, not in the inherently flawed and messy material world.
Biblical Insight #5: God created the world according to fixed laws
In the Hebrew Bible, God is melech ha-olam, king of the universe, whose decrees alone make the world the way it is. In a remarkable essay entitled “The Biblical Basis for Western Science,” the famous philosopher of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki (a priest and professor of physics), argues that science suffered a series of “stillbirths” in all ancient cultures precisely because of the absence of a belief in natural laws. Because of the Bible’s overwhelming conviction that “the earth is the Lord’s,” there naturally arose a corollary belief in the underlying unity of the cosmos—the belief, as Jaki puts it, that “the heavens and the earth are ruled by the same laws.”
Thaxton and Pearcey emphasize the crucial importance of this truth. “The biblical god is the Divine Legislator who governs nature by decrees set down in the beginning,” they say. “The order of the reasoning here is important. The early scientists did not argue that the world was lawfully ordered, and therefore there must be a rational God. Instead, they argued that there was a rational God, and therefore the world must be lawfully ordered.” In other words, it was their profound faith in a good and rational God that made the early Christian scientists seek out a rational order before they even knew what it was. Christian theology taught the early scientists the principle of heuristics: that there is a “known unknown” that can be searched for, described, and ultimately discovered.
Biblical Insight #6: The world was created according to a precise plan
This insight is related to the belief in laws of nature but added an element only found in Western culture: the notion of precision. In the Book of Job, God asks the questioning Hebrew, “Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding! Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? . . . Have you grasped the celestial laws? Could you make their writ run on the earth?” (Job 38:4–5).
A Book Atheists Want to Burn
Scientists of Faith: 48 Biographies of Historic Scientists and Their Christian Faith, by Dan Graves; Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1999.
The prophet Isaiah describes the God of the Bible as:
[one] who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure,
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance . . . .
This vision of a Creator who “measured the waters in the hollow of his hand” and “weighed the mountains in scales” led the early scientists to expect precision in nature. It was because of this biblical concept—that God “measured” the waters and “weighed” the mountains—that the early scientists began, in imitatio Dei, to also measure things.
It seems like common sense, after all, that a cannonball would fall faster than a feather. This was, in fact, what the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught. But the early scientists of western Europe, inspired by the biblical notion of precise measurement, decided to observe and measure to find out if this common sense idea was, in fact, true. The famous (but probably apocryphal) story of Galileo dropping two different size balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa—one a small wooden ball, the other a large cannonball—illustrates this experiment. The early scientists embraced the truth that, by precise measurement, it’s possible to discover the way the world actually works—and this is sometimes not the way human beings think it works. As a psalmist said, “Your ways, O Lord, are not our ways.”
Biblical Insight #7: Human beings, being made in the image of God, can discover the truth
The belief in a rational order in the world that was created by God, but which is not always what human beings initially expect, led the early scientists of Christian Europe to struggle long and hard with problems and perplexities that pagan societies simply dismissed as being beyond human comprehension. Thus, today’s atheist polemicists, such as Sam Harris, have it precisely backwards: The Bible did not keep Western man in darkness; it was biblical religion that gave the early scientists the faith and tenacity to keep looking for answers when they seemed beyond human reach.
This can be quickly seen when comparing Western culture with other sophisticated, ancient societies. Thaxton and Pearcey quote the cultural historian Joseph Needham on why the Chinese, for example, never developed empirical science. The Chinese did believe in an order in nature, after all—the Tao. But a belief in an orderly universe wasn’t enough: For science to develop, it was also necessary for men and women to believe that human beings could also discover what that order actually is—and this faith the ancient Chinese did not possess. Nature, while orderly, was simply an inscrutable mystery.
“The Tao is forever undefined,” says the
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu (c. 570–490 BC). “Small though it is in the unformed state, it cannot be grasped.”
3Concludes Needham: “There was no confidence [among the Chinese] that the code of Nature’s laws could be unveiled and read because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.”
But the Christian and Jewish scientists of Western Europe had such confidence. Thaxton and Pearcey point to the example of Johannes Kepler (c. 1571–1630), who struggled for years to understand the “slight difference of eight minutes observation and calculation of the orbit of the planet Mars.” This stubbornness led Kepler to abandon the idea, held for more than 2,000 years among astronomers, that the planets orbited in perfect circles rather than in ellipses.
Atheists try to take credit for science
So, if biblical religion was the necessary intellectual precondition for the gradual development of scientific method, how did the myth of the “scientific revolution” come about?
One reason: For the past 400 years, the partisans of irreligion—from the Marquis de Sade to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins—have deliberately misrepresented the way science actually developed in the West as part of their ideological crusade against Judaism and Christianity.
What’s worse, the partisans of atheism have been intellectually dishonest in the extreme: They have tried to take credit for the development of science when, in fact, they had little if anything to do with it.
Many of the most ideological and dogmatic of atheist crusaders, although continually referring to science, and seeking to use science to justify their own philosophical assumptions and declarations, were not scientists themselves.
In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation.
That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).
In dramatic contrast, most of the true giants of empirical science—the people who founded entire scientific disciplines or who made landmark scientific discoveries—were primarily devout Christians who believed that their scientific studies, far from being in conflict with their religious faith, ultimately were dependent upon it.
The Bible in American History, Part IX
“The study of the Bible is a post-graduate course in the richest library of human experience.”
Herbert Hoover
Here is just a sampling:
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), pioneer of modern astronomy, a canon in the Catholic church; he did not see his system in conflict with the Bible and often referred to God in his works: “When a man is occupied with things which he sees established in the finest order and directed by divine management, will not the unremitting contemplation of them and a certain familiarity with them stimulate him to the best and to admiration for the Maker of everything, in whom are all happiness and every good?”
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), pioneer physicist, who squabbled with the church, but remained a loyal Catholic: “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), astronomer and physicist, a pious Lutheran: “I had the intention of becoming a theologian . . . but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for ‘the heavens declare the glory of God.’ I am a Christian . . . I believe . . . only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ.... In Him is all refuge, all solace.”
Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), founder of modern physics and devout Christian: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord of all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God, or Universal Ruler.”
4Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1627), philosopher and devout Anglican: “It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”
René Descartes (1596–1650), mathematician, scientist, and faithful Catholic: “I am convinced that those who examine carefully my arguments about God’s existence will find that, the more trouble they take to look for mistakes in them, the more demonstrative they will find them, and I claim that, in themselves, they are clearer than any geometrical demonstrations. Thus it seems to me they are obscure only to those who do not know how to lead their minds away from the senses.”
Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the founder of modern chemistry and devout Christian with a special interest in promoting Christianity abroad: “Christ’s passion, His death, His resurrection and ascension, and all of those wonderful works which He did during His stay upon earth, in order to confirm mankind in the belief of His being God as well as man.”
Michael Faraday (1791–1867), inventor of the electric generator and the transformer, a Christian who believed nature substantiated the existence of God as creator: “A Christian finds his guide in the Word of God, and commits the keeping of his soul into the hands of God. He looks for no assurance beyond what the Word can give him, and if his mind is troubled by the cares and fears which assail him, he can go nowhere but in prayer to the throne of grace and to Scripture.”
Matthew Maury (1806–1873), the father of modern oceanography followed the Psalms expression “paths of the sea” and found warm and cold continental currents: “The Bible is true and science is true, and therefore each, if truly read, but proves the truth of the other.”
James Prescott Joule (1818–1889), a Bible-believing Christian, authored the first law of thermodynamics: “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), physicist credited with pioneering statistical thermodynamics, field equations of electricity, magnetism and light; devout Christian: “Almighty God, Who has created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service.”
Lord William Kelvin (1824–1907), physicist, inventor of absolute temperature scale in his name; committed Christian who diligently studied the Bible: “Overwhelmingly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us . . . the atheistic idea is so non-sensical that I cannot put it into words.”
Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901–1976), Nobel Prize winner in physics for the creation of quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle and a devout Lutheran: “At this point we also recognize the characteristic difference between genuine religions, in which the spiritual realm, the central spiritual order of things, plays a decisive part, and the narrower forms of thought, especially in our own day, which relate only to the strictly experiencable pattern of a human community . . . .Religion proper speaks not of norms, however, but of guiding ideals, by which we should govern our conduct and which we can at best only approximate. These ideals to not spring from inspection of the immediately visible world but from the region of the structures lying behind it, which Plato spoke of as the world of Ideas, and concerning which we are told in the Bible, ‘God is a spirit.’ ”
Wernher Von Braun (1912–1977), first director of NASA, pioneer of space exploration; Lutheran: “Scientific concepts exist only in the minds of men. Behind these concepts lies the reality which is being revealed to us, but only by the grace of God.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), physicist who developed the Theory of Relativity that governs modern physics: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”
Sir Isaac Newton and Einstein are both interesting cases.
For centuries, anti-Christian intellectuals, from Voltaire onward, pretended that Newton’s theological vision was either irrelevant to his scientific research or, alternatively, merely an insincere and cynical concession made to the religious authorities of his time.
Indeed, there was even a deliberate effort to suppress Newton’s vast theological writings. The Royal Society of London actually ordered that his theological works—more than a million words on everything from biblical prophesy to the Second Coming of Christ—not be printed.
Incredibly, it wasn’t until 1935—more than 200 years after his death—that scholars were able to evaluate just how thoroughly Newton’s religious vision shaped his scientific research.
5 That’s when the Cambridge economist and avid Newtonia collector, John Maynard Keynes, bought a collection of Newton’s manuscripts offered by Sotheby’s and made them available, for the first time, to the academic world.
If the founder of modern physics was a devout Christian and a believer in God, what about the man many people believe was a “second Newton,” the great Jewish physicist Albert Einstein?
Obviously, Einstein was an original thinker of profound depth and precision. Rather than merely accept the received opinions of the past, he sought to take a new look at the conundrums that had plagued physics for generations. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Einstein thought for himself when it came to religious questions.
Although he was born Jewish, it has been a matter of controversy for years whether he believed in God or not. That’s because Einstein wasn’t entirely sure himself. He spoke frequently about God—such as his famous maxim, uttered about the theory of quantum mechanics, that “God does not play dice”—yet plainly he was not an orthodox believer in any sense of the term. Atheists routinely claim him as one of their own, yet Einstein repeatedly and explicitly repudiated atheism as an accurate characterization of his beliefs.
In his book The God Delusion, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins once again tries to reclaim Einstein for atheism, citing quotations at length in which Einstein denied belief in a personal God, but the truth is that Einstein was struggling to enunciate a middle position between atheism and classic theism and couldn’t seem to make up his mind how to describe it. “There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic,” Dawkins writes. “ ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense.”
A Book Atheists Want to Burn
Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, by Robert Spencer; Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007. Part of the atheist attack today is to lump all religions together, as if they were all the same—which only shows how primitive, ignorant, and bigoted the modern atheist assault on Judaism and Christianity is.
Perhaps. Yet when Einstein was explicitly asked whether he believed in “Spinoza’s God”—meaning an impersonal Deistic God—this is what he said:
I can’t answer with a simple yes or no. I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
6Not an orthodox Jew, certainly, but hardly a snide atheist ideologue along the lines of Dawkins, Chistopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, either.
What Einstein was quite clear about, however, was the origin of the scientific quest in biblical religion. “To the sphere of religion belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason,” he said. “I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Nor is Einstein alone in his belief that the faith in an orderly universe was the legacy of biblical religion.
The great Max Planck (c. 1858–1947), the inventor of quantum theory, perhaps the most influential physicist in the twentieth century after Einstein, was a churchwarden from 1920 until he died.
Again, like Einstein, Planck could hardly be called an orthodox believer—but he was not an atheist, either. Like Einstein, Planck sought the divine through the medium of advanced theoretical physics—which left him with more questions than answers but full of awe.
In his famous essay “On Science and Religion,” Planck argued that, at the very least, science and religion are compatible, not opposed as scientifically illiterate atheists like to claim. What’s more, both science and religion agree on the existence of a rational world order:
The religion and science meet, on the contrary, in the question about the existence and essence of the supreme power governing the world, and here the answers they both furnish, are at least to a certain extent mutually comparable. They are in no way, as we have seen, in contradiction, but they agree in that firstly, there exists a reasonable world order (vernünftiger Weltordnung ) independent from man and secondly, the essence of this order is never knowable directly, but only indirectly, or it can be only intuitively guessed.
To sum up: We have two rival claims.
On the one hand, we have scientific (let’s be charitable) amateurs—from Nietzsche and Ingersoll to Chrisopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—insisting that science and biblical religion are fundamentally incompatible.
On the other hand, we have the greatest minds in the history of science, the people who actually made most of the discoveries that created modern science to begin with—luminaries like Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, Werner Heisenberg, and even Albert Einstein—who insist that, not only is religion not at odds with science, but biblical religion is what made science possible in the first place.
Whom should we believe?
Should we believe the attorney Clarence Darrow, who said, “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose” or should we believe Albert Einstein, who said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind”?
Frankly, in the great debate over religion and science, faithful Christians and Jews stand with the more enlightened half—those who make the actual discoveries in science.
