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The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words
By Nancy Frankenberry
Princeton University Press, August 2008
542 pp., $21.99

'God Never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.' Francis Bacon

I have often wondered what Christianity would look like if Jesus had appeared after the Scientific Revolution. Would our awareness of the vast cosmos and the likelihood of other life forms have altered the emphasis on the universal character of the Incarnation? How would our understanding of nature's order and rationality have informed the doctrine of Creation and God's revelation in nature? Would we be so inclined to say that "all Creation is fallen" if we knew that Creation included planets orbiting stars a billion light years away that are perhaps populated by creatures cavorting in blissful ignorance of Eden's shenanigans? How would knowledge of our kinship with the rest of the animal world, especially our primate cousins, reshape our understanding of humanity and our role in Creation?

These questions burned in my mind as I read Nancy Frankenberry's ambitious new volume, The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words (Princeton University Press), a collection of the writings of leading scientists from Galileo to Richard Dawkins.

Advisors who were totally unskilled at astronomical observations ought not to clip the wings of reflective intellects by means of rash prohibitions.
Galileo (1564—1642)

Frankenberry's volume is a frustrating reminder of science's struggle against numerous would-be wing clippers to find a home within the Christian faith. This struggle, I suspect, has much to do with its arrival so long after the biblical canon was closed and the creeds created.

Frankenberry starts with Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, and Isaac Newton, who all lived in the deeply religious 17th century. Their uncritical, even naïve, acceptance of the truth of difficult biblical passages—such as Joshua's long day, or the psalmist's assertion that the earth is fixed—is striking. But these architects of modern science all labored mightily to prevent their new science from contradicting the Bible.

An undercurrent of natural theology permeates their writings, born of their excitement in uncovering the deep and rational structures built into Creation. But they were frustrated that so many of their peers rejected the new science. Kepler, the most enthusiastic of the group, critiqued anyone "too weak to believe Copernicus without affecting his faith," recommending instead that they go home to "scratch in [their] own dirt patch, abandoning this wandering about in the world."

The God of Christians does not consist of a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements.
Blaise Pascal (1623—1662)

Faith for these founders of modern science was a given. But the Subject of their faith was neither generic nor confined. Christianity was not a limited, parochial worldview, or the Old Testament a collection of Bronze Age myths. Convinced that both nature and the Bible were revelations from God, they found ways to harmonize science and their faith. But they did more than harmonize. The eloquent and even devotional prose of Kepler, Pascal, Newton, and others shows that their science was inspired and even informed by their faith. This contrasts greatly with leading contemporary scientists who, if they care at all about religion, see it as something that interferes with science.

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December 2008, Vol. 52, No. 12