| Newton, Linnaeus, and Euler: Forging Science on a Foundation of Faith |
Excerpt from the Introduction by Jaan Vaino: (Mr. Vaino describing a lecture at Columbia University given
by his freshmen year astronomy professor…) “He derived from one end of the blackboard to the other the
famous equation that summarizes Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, e = mc squared. And for one brief
shining minute, we understood it! We understood it! We were impressed, more with ourselves than with him.
And the drama of the moment was not lost on our eminent professor. He strode to the edge of his platform,
and he told us the one thing that he said he wanted us to remember, and here is what he said. He said, ‘You
will never be a free person until and unless you decide never to worship anyone or anything.’
Breathtaking! Breathtaking! No one raised a voice in objection to what he said, but I can tell you if Einstein
was in the room, he’d have called that man down, because Einstein did not believe what our professor told us.
Does science have to be like this, exalting a man’s mind to pull God out of heaven? Is that science? Chris
White is going to tell you that science does not have to be that way, nor has it been that way. The world has
known giants who have owned God as the creator of the universe, who have built science and science
education on a foundation of faith…”
The Message:
together, but I have a hard time separating them, and I think that you will understand why by the time I am done
this evening.
with that separation today. Beginning in the “Enlightenment” of the 1600’s and 1700’s, men such as Voltaire,
Hume, and Locke sought to replace faith in God with faith in man. What Jaan Vaino spoke regarding his
astronomy professor, and certainly what I have heard from some of my own professors, is that faith in man has
been substituted for faith in God in much of academia.
from my classes when I was in school. It was not until the 1990’s that this label was discredited and removed
from the teaching of history, because the years the Enlightenment described as the Dark Ages were anything
but. Nevertheless, the tendency today is to ignore that many of the major scientific breakthroughs that
occurred before, during, and after the Enlightenment were made by men who were serious believers in God. In
the words of Peter Gay, “science could give the deists and atheists great comfort and supply them with what
they wanted—Newton’s physics without Newton’s God.” (Stark, 166-7) I will go into the issue of Newton’s God
later on.
human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and
religious belief.” (Johnson, 125) Granted, there are matters in the realm of religion, and some in the realm of
science, that are purely human imagination. But, separating the knowledge of God from the study of the
universe He created is like separating our knowledge about Leonardo da Vinci from the study of the Mona
Lisa. Why should we only look at what has been made—and ignore the nature and motivation of the One who
created all things?
in the academic realm. He insists that those who hold on to religious beliefs while accepting evolutionary
biology “have to check [their] brains at the church-house door.” I thank God that I neither had to check my
brain at the door of church, nor in my organic chemistry class at Yale. Provine also states, and please listen to
these words because they are echoed on many campuses today, “Modern science directly implies that the
world is organized strictly in accordance with mechanistic principles,” mechanistic meaning simply a machine,
just motions taking place. “There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no
designing forces that are rationally detectable…Second, modern science directly implies that there are no
inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society.” (Johnson, 126)
no absolutes, we are in great danger. That is when men like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin arise. When
there is no one to say, “This is wrong,” evil often prevails.
very root of the stupendous edifice of creation.” (Berlinski, 22) Students today are told that these are the facts,
and contrary views are dismissed. This past July, Daniel Dennett wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times
entitled “The Bright Stuff,” and this is what he wrote. “What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as
opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or
God.” (Op-Ed, "The Bright Stuff," 7/12/2003) But they do believe that the universe was created by blind
chance, and that to me is harder to believe than all the rest!
and someone had left a Bible there. I started reading the Bible, peering up every couple of minutes, making
sure out of the corner of my eye that they were behaving. It was an uneventful exam, but when I got to the end
of it, the girls almost threw their papers at me and ran out the door! I was left wondering, “What on earth is
going on here?”
arrived. I strode up to the department chair and said, “What was that all about?” She responded with a smile,
“Well, they came up to me, ‘Dr. Peeler, Dr. Peeler! Do you know what Mr. White was doing during our math
exam?’” And Dr. Peeler said, “No, what was he doing during your math exam?” “Mr. White was reading the
Bible!” And Dr. Peeler said, “So?” And the students said, “Can you imagine anyone intelligent reading the
Bible?” Dr. Peeler sat back in her chair and said, “Girls, I read the Bible all the time.”
talk about God all the time, but our culture and especially academic culture, disparages the idea of intelligent
people believing in God. In fact, in the modern university, Christianity is often singled out as an impediment to
the advancement of scientific knowledge. Students who hold on to a personal faith in God are criticized in their
college classrooms. And I am not saying this in theory, I am talking about facts. I have been involved for 30
years in Bible studies at Yale, Columbia, and for a few years at Princeton. I have known many students who
have been called on the carpet publicly for their beliefs by their professors.
beginning of a course on evolutionary biology. These were the questions: “Do you believe in God? Do you
believe in the Christian God?” (It did not say the Buddhist God, or the Hindu God. It said, “Do you believe in
the Christian God?”) “Do you read the Bible? Do you believe every word in it, literally?” Every student in that
course had to fill out that questionnaire. But the professor said that what surprised him was that, at the end of
the course when he gave out that same questionnaire again, the vast majority of those who had said “Yes” to
the questions at the beginning of the course said “Yes” at the end of the course, they still believed in God.
("An Insatiably Curious Observer…", The New York Times, 4/16/02) And Ernst Mayr went on to criticize not the
dogmatism of the professor, but of the students who held onto their personal faith in God!
students. The professor asked the class, “How many people here believe that God created man?” Just a few
hands went up, five or six including my two friends. Now I can guarantee that in classrooms at Yale or
Columbia many more than 5 or 6 out of a hundred and fifty believe that there is a God, but they are intimidated
from saying so. Yet the professor turned it around and said to the class, “I have to admit that it takes as much
faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe that God created man.” That was an honest professor!
view of the history of science and mathematics. In his recent book, For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark points
out that, “the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three
centuries,” going back to the Enlightenment, “been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack on
faith.” This has been especially true on the campuses. “From Thomas Hobbes through Carl Sagan and
Richard Dawkins, false claims about religion and science have been used as weapons in the battle to ‘free’ the
human mind from the ‘fetters of faith.'” (Stark, 123) I do not know about you, but faith in Jesus Christ has never
been a fetter to me. Jesus Christ broke my fetters and even helped me when I was studying organic
chemistry! It is not an easy subject as there is a lot to memorize. But I can also tell you that those molecules
cried out to me about the glory of God, the glory of God in an ethanol ring, for example. You can go down any
list of chemicals and see order and more order—everywhere you look there is order and design in chemistry.
accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar
system.” Now I grant you that it would be hard to find an American today who believes in a flat earth, or that
the earth is the center of the universe! But even The New York Times admits that about half of the American
public has serious doubts about Darwinian evolution! (“Darwin vs. Design,” The New York Times, 4/8/01)
oft quoted examples of the wisdom of science contrasted with the ignorance of religion… That is what I heard
when I was in school, but is the story true?
against people who believed the world was flat? Am I the only one who has heard this tale? The main problem
is that it simply isn’t true! If anything, the educated people of his time, the wise men of Spain who were advising
Isabella and Ferdinand against funding the voyage, did so not because they believed the world was flat, but
because they rightly believed that Christopher Columbus was greatly underestimating the circumference of the
earth. While he thought that the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was about 2,800 miles, they
insisted that it was more like 14,000 miles. If the New World had not been there, we would have never heard
from Christopher Columbus again! (Stark, 122) He was not sailing for the New World—he thought he was
sailing for Japan! If he had had 14,000 miles to go, he never would have made it!
circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.” (Isaiah 40:22) The Hebrew word for circle is “khoog,”
and it means circle, or compass, or circuit. It is a word that is used only once in the Bible, and it can also be
used for sphere.
Job: “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.” (Job 26:7)
The Hebrew word is “bel-ee-máh” which literally means “nothing whatsoever.” The ancient Greeks insisted that
space could not possibly be a vacuum, but Job most likely lived more than a thousand years before the ancient
Greeks!
told. He was trained in some of the best Catholic universities of Europe where scholars had been working on
just such a viewpoint for hundreds of years. (By the way, the university was not a secular invention! Columbia,
Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and many others were founded by devout believers in God. They wanted to
have places to search out what God had done from beginning to end.) The Franciscan scholar, William of
Ockham, proposed that space is a vacuum 150 years before Copernicus. He wrote that the heavenly bodies,
once set in motion by the will of God, would continue uninterrupted because there is no friction in space. By
contrast, Copernicus insisted that there were huge rotating shells that held the planets in place. (Stark, 138-9)
Yet Copernicus is described today as the great hero who triumphed over religious persecution and ignorance!
(Stark, 123, emphasis added) That is something not many people know today. Modern science arose in
Europe and in Europe alone, beginning long before the Renaissance, precisely because the universe is
declared in the Bible to have been created by a God who is orderly and reasonable. Predictable, scientific
order can only be found when you expect to find it.
rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.” In 1925, in one of his Lowell Lectures at
Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that science arose in Europe because of the widespread “faith in
the possibility of science…derivative from medieval theology.” His words shocked many of his contemporaries,
but they are historically accurate. (Stark, 147)
but it stayed in the realm of theory and never came far into the real world—with the exception of someone like
an Archimedes—precisely because of the disorderly nature of the gods the Greeks believed in. The same
could be said of other pagan and polytheistic gods and the cultures which worshipped them. Even to Chinese
philosophers, the universe “simply is and always was,” something that many secular Western scientists
believed up until the 1920’s, when the “Big Bang” came along. As one scholar wrote, “It was not that there was
no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being,
and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser
earthly languages the divine code of laws…” (Stark, 151) The Chinese made great advances in science in
many areas, and they still have great scientists today. But because in times past they did not believe in a
universe that was ordered by a rational God, they were not looking for a rational order. Predictable,
scientific order can only be found when one expects to find such order. Why would anyone waste their
time looking for something that they truly believed did not exist?
centuries, the Bible gives a very different view of the universe. Listen with me for a moment to Psalm 19. It is
one of my favorite Psalms, and I think you will understand why:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Day unto day utters speech,
And night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their line has gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
(NKJV)
I did not grow up in New York City. I grew up in farm country in northeastern Massachusetts where you can
actually see the stars. I can remember moonless nights, standing out in a field, and looking at the vast number
of stars. I don’t care how you put it, that is a religious experience, because the stars themselves declare the
glory of God. I did not know Jesus then, but I did understand as a little boy that these things were not
accidents, someone put them there! The large majority of the great names in western science and math were
believers in the rational, all-powerful Creator described in the Bible. For the sake of brevity, I will consider just
a few of them.
a mathematician because so much of what He has done, He has done mathematically. Galileo also wrote,
“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the Universe.” Note that he is speaking about nature,
not religion! That is what impresses me about this statement. Too many of us today confine the God who
made the universe to Saturday or Sunday mornings and institutional religion! But the God who really is, is far
larger than human religion!
language of mathematics.” This is a mathematician and a scientist saying that the chief purpose of my life is to
find out what God did. Even Copernicus, by the way, was deeply a religious man.
genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” (Stark, 167) Harvard’s Stephen Jay
Gould recently used similar words in an article about Newton in Nature magazine. But the great mathematician
himself wrote the following words, “The true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being… he governs all things,
and knows all things that are done or can be done.” This is not a God who is a clockmaker who makes all
things and then walks away from His universe. This is a God who knows all and rules all. In Newton’s words,
“He endures forever, and is everywhere present.” (Stark, 168) This is not a God who does not care about you
and me; this is a God who knows you and me and even “calls the stars by name.” That was the God that
Newton believed in.
teach calculus. Isn’t it amazing that the motion of objects can be explained by simple equations? Why can you
send the Voyager spacecraft out there, because equations allow you to program where that spacecraft will go,
and to model exactly where the planets are? The planets are always where they are supposed to be, unlike
some of us!), “Newton believed he had, once for all, demonstrated the certainty that behind all existence there
is an intelligent, aware, omnipotent God. Any other assumption is ‘inconsistent with my system.’” (Stark, p.
168) Yet the Enlightenment sought to use Newton as a good example of someone who did not believe in God.
You can read his diary—this was a man who believed in God!
eccentric—he never lost sight of how little he knew in comparison to the Almighty: “I don't know what I may
seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (Brewster, Vol. II, Ch. 27) Whose truth was that? The truth of
the Almighty! Newton’s candor is refreshing, especially in light of some of the intellectual arrogance that is so
common in our generation.
name for the genus and another for the species, he greatly simplified and standardized the classification
system used ever since in biology. As the University of California at Berkeley’s web site points out, “Linnaeus
loved nature deeply, and always retained a sense of wonder at the world of living things. His religious beliefs
led him to natural theology, a school of thought dating back to Biblical times but especially flourishing around
1700: since God created the world, it is possible to understand God’s wisdom by studying His creation.” In
Linnaeus’s own words, translated from the Latin, “The Earth’s creation is the glory of God, as seen from the
works of Nature by Man alone.” I like gardening, too. It is not just calculus that declares the glory of God, a
tulip can do that as well.
evolutionary theory. Put out the structure and the facts, and bring in the evolutionary theory! I am reminded of
the experience of two friends from Yale who are now medical doctors. One learned classical human anatomy in
medical school, and found it served him well when he actually became a doctor. The other learned
evolutionary human anatomy, but found it useless in practice, and ended up having to teach himself classical
anatomy.
Creator, he made large bounds forward in the study of analytic geometry, trigonometry, calculus, number
theory, continuum mechanics, lunar theory, acoustics, the wave theory of light, hydraulics, music, and other
fields. As Ball’s History of Mathematics states, Euler “revised almost all the branches of pure mathematics
which were then known, filling up the details, adding proofs, and arranging the whole in a consistent form. Such
work is very important, and it is fortunate for science when it fall into hands as competent as those of Euler.”
(Ball, 4th Edition, 393)
t understand what that means, suffice it to say that the car you drive, the ship you travel in, and the plane you
fly all owe the possibility of their design to methods of problem solving that Euler pioneered in the 1700’s.
Expecting order in Creation, he found order, and greatly advanced both science and math.
science and of the Gospel” of Jesus Christ. In his Reminiscences Silliman wrote, “I can truly declare, that in the
study and exhibition of science..., I have never forgotten to give all the honor and glory to the infinite creator,
happy if I might be the honored interpreter of a portion of his works...” (Fisher, 23)
God’s thoughts? Most of us assume that we cannot, but the fact of the matter is that we can, and I will go into
why in a minute.
most religious of all. (Stark, 194) Many of them, like those students at Yale, are intimidated into not talking
about what they believe, but they are present on the campuses.
“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” But scientists and
professors today who claim that everything is the result of blind chance are perfectly willing to stand on the
shoulders of giants like Newton, Linnaeus, and Euler—and ignore the fact, and never tell their students, that
these men believed in God.
that come after you, than to explain all things.”
prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.” We
know in part, but God knows all, and He knows us!
most of the Ivy League universities? “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” It is not enough to
know about science, or chemistry, or mathematics, or calculus. If we do not include God in the whole equation
of what we are looking at, we have missed the heart of the matter. It is like one of my twin boys when he was
about two years old. Someone parked his or her BMW in our driveway. I don’t have a BMW, I’m a
schoolteacher! He went over every pipe and piece under that car and came out all filthy when I dragged him
out. He was so busy looking at the parts, that he didn’t care about the whole car, or how dirty he got! It is in
God that we get a view of the whole of what life is about.
made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what
God has done from beginning to end.” We talk about eternity, but we don’t understand it. We talk about things
being forever, but what do we understand what forever means?
Harvard!” However, underneath, someone else wrote, “If God went to Harvard, why did He make the sky
blue?” As I was thinking about that tonight, I realized that Columbia’s blue is actually closer to sky blue than
Yale’s is.
There is a cost to making scientific discoveries, but there is a higher cost to knowing God! Jesus Christ is not
going to be an adjunct to your life, something else you add to your list of possessions. He is the fountain of
life! He is the creator of life! He is the beginning and the end of life, and that is what He wants to be for you.
The prophet Jeremiah declared of the Lord (29:13, NIV), “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with
all your heart.” When I was content to be a nice religious kid, the son of a Protestant pastor, I did not know who
God was. I thought I knew about Him, but I surely did not know Him. But when it mattered to me, I started
seeking for the Lord with all my heart, because it was either that or suicide for me as a twelve year old. I was
ready to give up on life. When it mattered to me more than life itself, that is when I found Jesus Christ. And He
was no longer some vague religious theory, but a living Savior who touched my life and changed me ever
since.
The God who made the stars became a man, and walked among us as one of us. The Apostle John wrote
about Jesus in the first chapter of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him
nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men....”
know that, before He was a man, He was with the Father in Heaven. He left behind all the glory, all the beauty,
and all the power of Heaven, to become a weak human being like you and like me. As I tell my boys, He was
hungry like we are, He was thirsty like we are, He was weak like we are. The one who made the stars became a
man like us, familiar with our struggles. Why? As someone said to an Indian tribe in South America a few
years ago, “If you want to know the ants, you have to become an ant.” God became an ant, a man like us, and
lived among us.
hear those words? He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, but the world did not recognize
who was walking here among us! We can recognize the movie stars, we can recognize the rock and roll kings
and queens, but we cannot recognize the Creator of the universe! But He is calling to you tonight. I know that
there are many of you here who know Jesus personally, but I would like to make an invitation to those of you
who do not know Him yet. Tonight can be the night that you come to know Him for yourself, not just to hear
someone else talk about Him, but for you to know Him for yourself.
kingdom of God unless he is born again. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You
should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.'” And in another place Jesus said, “If I have
told you of earthly things…,” and that is what math and science are about, things of this world, “If I have told
you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has
ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes
in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Bibliography:
by his freshmen year astronomy professor…) “He derived from one end of the blackboard to the other the
famous equation that summarizes Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, e = mc squared. And for one brief
shining minute, we understood it! We understood it! We were impressed, more with ourselves than with him.
And the drama of the moment was not lost on our eminent professor. He strode to the edge of his platform,
and he told us the one thing that he said he wanted us to remember, and here is what he said. He said, ‘You
will never be a free person until and unless you decide never to worship anyone or anything.’
Breathtaking! Breathtaking! No one raised a voice in objection to what he said, but I can tell you if Einstein
was in the room, he’d have called that man down, because Einstein did not believe what our professor told us.
Does science have to be like this, exalting a man’s mind to pull God out of heaven? Is that science? Chris
White is going to tell you that science does not have to be that way, nor has it been that way. The world has
known giants who have owned God as the creator of the universe, who have built science and science
education on a foundation of faith…”
The Message:
- I want to thank you for coming tonight. I count it a privilege to speak about three of the loves of my life:
together, but I have a hard time separating them, and I think that you will understand why by the time I am done
this evening.
- The idea that faith in God and scientific reasoning are separate and incompatible realms has gained
with that separation today. Beginning in the “Enlightenment” of the 1600’s and 1700’s, men such as Voltaire,
Hume, and Locke sought to replace faith in God with faith in man. What Jaan Vaino spoke regarding his
astronomy professor, and certainly what I have heard from some of my own professors, is that faith in man has
been substituted for faith in God in much of academia.
- The claim of the Enlightenment was that science had provided the proof that God was unnecessary.
from my classes when I was in school. It was not until the 1990’s that this label was discredited and removed
from the teaching of history, because the years the Enlightenment described as the Dark Ages were anything
but. Nevertheless, the tendency today is to ignore that many of the major scientific breakthroughs that
occurred before, during, and after the Enlightenment were made by men who were serious believers in God. In
the words of Peter Gay, “science could give the deists and atheists great comfort and supply them with what
they wanted—Newton’s physics without Newton’s God.” (Stark, 166-7) I will go into the issue of Newton’s God
later on.
- Such anti-religious thinking prevails in much of academia today. A 1981 resolution of the Council of the
human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and
religious belief.” (Johnson, 125) Granted, there are matters in the realm of religion, and some in the realm of
science, that are purely human imagination. But, separating the knowledge of God from the study of the
universe He created is like separating our knowledge about Leonardo da Vinci from the study of the Mona
Lisa. Why should we only look at what has been made—and ignore the nature and motivation of the One who
created all things?
- Cornell Professor William Provine, a leading historian of science, gives voice to views that many hold
in the academic realm. He insists that those who hold on to religious beliefs while accepting evolutionary
biology “have to check [their] brains at the church-house door.” I thank God that I neither had to check my
brain at the door of church, nor in my organic chemistry class at Yale. Provine also states, and please listen to
these words because they are echoed on many campuses today, “Modern science directly implies that the
world is organized strictly in accordance with mechanistic principles,” mechanistic meaning simply a machine,
just motions taking place. “There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no
designing forces that are rationally detectable…Second, modern science directly implies that there are no
inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society.” (Johnson, 126)
- I would like to ask you tonight, do you really believe these claims? Do you really believe that there are
no absolutes, we are in great danger. That is when men like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin arise. When
there is no one to say, “This is wrong,” evil often prevails.
- The Nobel-prize-winning chemist and evolutionist Jacques Monod claimed, “Chance alone is at the
very root of the stupendous edifice of creation.” (Berlinski, 22) Students today are told that these are the facts,
and contrary views are dismissed. This past July, Daniel Dennett wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times
entitled “The Bright Stuff,” and this is what he wrote. “What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as
opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or
God.” (Op-Ed, "The Bright Stuff," 7/12/2003) But they do believe that the universe was created by blind
chance, and that to me is harder to believe than all the rest!
Years ago, I was proctoring an exam at the school where I teach here in New York City. I only had three
and someone had left a Bible there. I started reading the Bible, peering up every couple of minutes, making
sure out of the corner of my eye that they were behaving. It was an uneventful exam, but when I got to the end
of it, the girls almost threw their papers at me and ran out the door! I was left wondering, “What on earth is
going on here?”
I walked down to the math office a little worried, this being my first year at the school. The students
arrived. I strode up to the department chair and said, “What was that all about?” She responded with a smile,
“Well, they came up to me, ‘Dr. Peeler, Dr. Peeler! Do you know what Mr. White was doing during our math
exam?’” And Dr. Peeler said, “No, what was he doing during your math exam?” “Mr. White was reading the
Bible!” And Dr. Peeler said, “So?” And the students said, “Can you imagine anyone intelligent reading the
Bible?” Dr. Peeler sat back in her chair and said, “Girls, I read the Bible all the time.”
- Now this happened at a Catholic school! What is it like in a secular school? I am talking about what the
talk about God all the time, but our culture and especially academic culture, disparages the idea of intelligent
people believing in God. In fact, in the modern university, Christianity is often singled out as an impediment to
the advancement of scientific knowledge. Students who hold on to a personal faith in God are criticized in their
college classrooms. And I am not saying this in theory, I am talking about facts. I have been involved for 30
years in Bible studies at Yale, Columbia, and for a few years at Princeton. I have known many students who
have been called on the carpet publicly for their beliefs by their professors.
- Last year, Dr. Ernst Mayr, professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard, told The New York Times the story
beginning of a course on evolutionary biology. These were the questions: “Do you believe in God? Do you
believe in the Christian God?” (It did not say the Buddhist God, or the Hindu God. It said, “Do you believe in
the Christian God?”) “Do you read the Bible? Do you believe every word in it, literally?” Every student in that
course had to fill out that questionnaire. But the professor said that what surprised him was that, at the end of
the course when he gave out that same questionnaire again, the vast majority of those who had said “Yes” to
the questions at the beginning of the course said “Yes” at the end of the course, they still believed in God.
("An Insatiably Curious Observer…", The New York Times, 4/16/02) And Ernst Mayr went on to criticize not the
dogmatism of the professor, but of the students who held onto their personal faith in God!
- On the other hand, two dear friends of mine from Yale, who are now married and working in inner city
students. The professor asked the class, “How many people here believe that God created man?” Just a few
hands went up, five or six including my two friends. Now I can guarantee that in classrooms at Yale or
Columbia many more than 5 or 6 out of a hundred and fifty believe that there is a God, but they are intimidated
from saying so. Yet the professor turned it around and said to the class, “I have to admit that it takes as much
faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe that God created man.” That was an honest professor!
- I would like to give a little historical perspective tonight on the whole relationship between science and
view of the history of science and mathematics. In his recent book, For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark points
out that, “the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three
centuries,” going back to the Enlightenment, “been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack on
faith.” This has been especially true on the campuses. “From Thomas Hobbes through Carl Sagan and
Richard Dawkins, false claims about religion and science have been used as weapons in the battle to ‘free’ the
human mind from the ‘fetters of faith.'” (Stark, 123) I do not know about you, but faith in Jesus Christ has never
been a fetter to me. Jesus Christ broke my fetters and even helped me when I was studying organic
chemistry! It is not an easy subject as there is a lot to memorize. But I can also tell you that those molecules
cried out to me about the glory of God, the glory of God in an ethanol ring, for example. You can go down any
list of chemicals and see order and more order—everywhere you look there is order and design in chemistry.
- One of the chief “weapons” used today to discredit belief in God is Darwinian evolution. Regarding
accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar
system.” Now I grant you that it would be hard to find an American today who believes in a flat earth, or that
the earth is the center of the universe! But even The New York Times admits that about half of the American
public has serious doubts about Darwinian evolution! (“Darwin vs. Design,” The New York Times, 4/8/01)
- What is going on here? Step back in history for a moment and look at the story that is being told! The
oft quoted examples of the wisdom of science contrasted with the ignorance of religion… That is what I heard
when I was in school, but is the story true?
- Christopher Columbus is described today as an adventurer who was opposed by a religious society that
against people who believed the world was flat? Am I the only one who has heard this tale? The main problem
is that it simply isn’t true! If anything, the educated people of his time, the wise men of Spain who were advising
Isabella and Ferdinand against funding the voyage, did so not because they believed the world was flat, but
because they rightly believed that Christopher Columbus was greatly underestimating the circumference of the
earth. While he thought that the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was about 2,800 miles, they
insisted that it was more like 14,000 miles. If the New World had not been there, we would have never heard
from Christopher Columbus again! (Stark, 122) He was not sailing for the New World—he thought he was
sailing for Japan! If he had had 14,000 miles to go, he never would have made it!
- Wherever else the idea of a flat earth came from, it did not come from the Bible! The spherical nature
circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.” (Isaiah 40:22) The Hebrew word for circle is “khoog,”
and it means circle, or compass, or circuit. It is a word that is used only once in the Bible, and it can also be
used for sphere.
- Also, the fact that the earth hangs in space, not on the back of elephants as some ancient pictures
Job: “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.” (Job 26:7)
The Hebrew word is “bel-ee-máh” which literally means “nothing whatsoever.” The ancient Greeks insisted that
space could not possibly be a vacuum, but Job most likely lived more than a thousand years before the ancient
Greeks!
- As for the sun-centered universe, contrary to modern claims, Nicolaus Copernicus was not the first
told. He was trained in some of the best Catholic universities of Europe where scholars had been working on
just such a viewpoint for hundreds of years. (By the way, the university was not a secular invention! Columbia,
Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and many others were founded by devout believers in God. They wanted to
have places to search out what God had done from beginning to end.) The Franciscan scholar, William of
Ockham, proposed that space is a vacuum 150 years before Copernicus. He wrote that the heavenly bodies,
once set in motion by the will of God, would continue uninterrupted because there is no friction in space. By
contrast, Copernicus insisted that there were huge rotating shells that held the planets in place. (Stark, 138-9)
Yet Copernicus is described today as the great hero who triumphed over religious persecution and ignorance!
- The fact is, and this is one of the points I hope you will understand tonight, that not only was Christian
(Stark, 123, emphasis added) That is something not many people know today. Modern science arose in
Europe and in Europe alone, beginning long before the Renaissance, precisely because the universe is
declared in the Bible to have been created by a God who is orderly and reasonable. Predictable, scientific
order can only be found when you expect to find it.
- As Stark puts it, and he is not the first to point this out, “Christianity depicted God as a rational,
rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.” In 1925, in one of his Lowell Lectures at
Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that science arose in Europe because of the widespread “faith in
the possibility of science…derivative from medieval theology.” His words shocked many of his contemporaries,
but they are historically accurate. (Stark, 147)
- The “gods” of the ancient Greeks were anything but reasonable and orderly, which is why the Greeks
but it stayed in the realm of theory and never came far into the real world—with the exception of someone like
an Archimedes—precisely because of the disorderly nature of the gods the Greeks believed in. The same
could be said of other pagan and polytheistic gods and the cultures which worshipped them. Even to Chinese
philosophers, the universe “simply is and always was,” something that many secular Western scientists
believed up until the 1920’s, when the “Big Bang” came along. As one scholar wrote, “It was not that there was
no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being,
and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser
earthly languages the divine code of laws…” (Stark, 151) The Chinese made great advances in science in
many areas, and they still have great scientists today. But because in times past they did not believe in a
universe that was ordered by a rational God, they were not looking for a rational order. Predictable,
scientific order can only be found when one expects to find such order. Why would anyone waste their
time looking for something that they truly believed did not exist?
- If European scientists had also believed that the universe was irrational and unpredictable, modern
centuries, the Bible gives a very different view of the universe. Listen with me for a moment to Psalm 19. It is
one of my favorite Psalms, and I think you will understand why:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Day unto day utters speech,
And night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their line has gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
(NKJV)
I did not grow up in New York City. I grew up in farm country in northeastern Massachusetts where you can
actually see the stars. I can remember moonless nights, standing out in a field, and looking at the vast number
of stars. I don’t care how you put it, that is a religious experience, because the stars themselves declare the
glory of God. I did not know Jesus then, but I did understand as a little boy that these things were not
accidents, someone put them there! The large majority of the great names in western science and math were
believers in the rational, all-powerful Creator described in the Bible. For the sake of brevity, I will consider just
a few of them.
- Galileo Galilei wrote, “The book of nature is a book written by the hand of God in the language of
a mathematician because so much of what He has done, He has done mathematically. Galileo also wrote,
“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the Universe.” Note that he is speaking about nature,
not religion! That is what impresses me about this statement. Too many of us today confine the God who
made the universe to Saturday or Sunday mornings and institutional religion! But the God who really is, is far
larger than human religion!
- Johannes Kepler stated, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover
language of mathematics.” This is a mathematician and a scientist saying that the chief purpose of my life is to
find out what God did. Even Copernicus, by the way, was deeply a religious man.
- And what about Sir Isaac Newton? The Enlightenment sought to portray Newton as one of their own,
genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” (Stark, 167) Harvard’s Stephen Jay
Gould recently used similar words in an article about Newton in Nature magazine. But the great mathematician
himself wrote the following words, “The true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being… he governs all things,
and knows all things that are done or can be done.” This is not a God who is a clockmaker who makes all
things and then walks away from His universe. This is a God who knows all and rules all. In Newton’s words,
“He endures forever, and is everywhere present.” (Stark, 168) This is not a God who does not care about you
and me; this is a God who knows you and me and even “calls the stars by name.” That was the God that
Newton believed in.
- In his letters to Richard Bentley, Newton “ridiculed the idea that the world could be explained in
teach calculus. Isn’t it amazing that the motion of objects can be explained by simple equations? Why can you
send the Voyager spacecraft out there, because equations allow you to program where that spacecraft will go,
and to model exactly where the planets are? The planets are always where they are supposed to be, unlike
some of us!), “Newton believed he had, once for all, demonstrated the certainty that behind all existence there
is an intelligent, aware, omnipotent God. Any other assumption is ‘inconsistent with my system.’” (Stark, p.
168) Yet the Enlightenment sought to use Newton as a good example of someone who did not believe in God.
You can read his diary—this was a man who believed in God!
- Isaac Newton was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. He studied an amazing array of
eccentric—he never lost sight of how little he knew in comparison to the Almighty: “I don't know what I may
seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (Brewster, Vol. II, Ch. 27) Whose truth was that? The truth of
the Almighty! Newton’s candor is refreshing, especially in light of some of the intellectual arrogance that is so
common in our generation.
- Carolus Linnaeus, often called the “Father of Taxonomy,” was also a devout believer in Jesus Christ.
name for the genus and another for the species, he greatly simplified and standardized the classification
system used ever since in biology. As the University of California at Berkeley’s web site points out, “Linnaeus
loved nature deeply, and always retained a sense of wonder at the world of living things. His religious beliefs
led him to natural theology, a school of thought dating back to Biblical times but especially flourishing around
1700: since God created the world, it is possible to understand God’s wisdom by studying His creation.” In
Linnaeus’s own words, translated from the Latin, “The Earth’s creation is the glory of God, as seen from the
works of Nature by Man alone.” I like gardening, too. It is not just calculus that declares the glory of God, a
tulip can do that as well.
- Linnaeus’s strong religious beliefs, by the way, recently provoked some biologists at Yale to propose
evolutionary theory. Put out the structure and the facts, and bring in the evolutionary theory! I am reminded of
the experience of two friends from Yale who are now medical doctors. One learned classical human anatomy in
medical school, and found it served him well when he actually became a doctor. The other learned
evolutionary human anatomy, but found it useless in practice, and ended up having to teach himself classical
anatomy.
- Leonhard Euler was also a deeply devout Christian, and one of the greatest mathematicians ever,
Creator, he made large bounds forward in the study of analytic geometry, trigonometry, calculus, number
theory, continuum mechanics, lunar theory, acoustics, the wave theory of light, hydraulics, music, and other
fields. As Ball’s History of Mathematics states, Euler “revised almost all the branches of pure mathematics
which were then known, filling up the details, adding proofs, and arranging the whole in a consistent form. Such
work is very important, and it is fortunate for science when it fall into hands as competent as those of Euler.”
(Ball, 4th Edition, 393)
- Another expert on his life stated, “Euler was the first to appreciate the importance of introducing uniform
t understand what that means, suffice it to say that the car you drive, the ship you travel in, and the plane you
fly all owe the possibility of their design to methods of problem solving that Euler pioneered in the 1700’s.
Expecting order in Creation, he found order, and greatly advanced both science and math.
- Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale is generally viewed as the father of American scientific
science and of the Gospel” of Jesus Christ. In his Reminiscences Silliman wrote, “I can truly declare, that in the
study and exhibition of science..., I have never forgotten to give all the honor and glory to the infinite creator,
happy if I might be the honored interpreter of a portion of his works...” (Fisher, 23)
- Even Albert Einstein told a fellow scientist in 1921, “I want to know how God created this world…I want
God’s thoughts? Most of us assume that we cannot, but the fact of the matter is that we can, and I will go into
why in a minute.
- By the way, surveys of American scientists done in 1914, 1969, and again in 1996 show that “a
most religious of all. (Stark, 194) Many of them, like those students at Yale, are intimidated into not talking
about what they believe, but they are present on the campuses.
- And what is our conclusion tonight? When we consider the real accomplishments of modern science,
“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” But scientists and
professors today who claim that everything is the result of blind chance are perfectly willing to stand on the
shoulders of giants like Newton, Linnaeus, and Euler—and ignore the fact, and never tell their students, that
these men believed in God.
- With timeless wisdom, Newton also once remarked, “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any
that come after you, than to explain all things.”
- Only God can explain all things! Only God can explain all things, the claims of some modern
prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.” We
know in part, but God knows all, and He knows us!
- The Bible declares in Proverbs 9:10, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the
most of the Ivy League universities? “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” It is not enough to
know about science, or chemistry, or mathematics, or calculus. If we do not include God in the whole equation
of what we are looking at, we have missed the heart of the matter. It is like one of my twin boys when he was
about two years old. Someone parked his or her BMW in our driveway. I don’t have a BMW, I’m a
schoolteacher! He went over every pipe and piece under that car and came out all filthy when I dragged him
out. He was so busy looking at the parts, that he didn’t care about the whole car, or how dirty he got! It is in
God that we get a view of the whole of what life is about.
- My question to you tonight is, are you satisfied with purely mechanistic explanations of life, or do
made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what
God has done from beginning to end.” We talk about eternity, but we don’t understand it. We talk about things
being forever, but what do we understand what forever means?
- Finding God is neither easy nor automatic, but it is worthwhile! We used to advertise Bible studies at
Harvard!” However, underneath, someone else wrote, “If God went to Harvard, why did He make the sky
blue?” As I was thinking about that tonight, I realized that Columbia’s blue is actually closer to sky blue than
Yale’s is.
- Finding God is neither easy nor automatic, but as Proverbs 2 declares,
- My son, if you receive my words,
And treasure my commands within you,
So that you incline your ear to wisdom,
And apply your heart to understanding;
Yes, if you cry out for discernment,
And lift up your voice for understanding,
If you seek her as silver,
And search for her as for hidden treasures;
Then you will understand the fear of the LORD,
And find the knowledge of God.
For the LORD gives wisdom;
From His mouth come knowledge and understanding;
(Proverbs 2:1-6, NKJV)
There is a cost to making scientific discoveries, but there is a higher cost to knowing God! Jesus Christ is not
going to be an adjunct to your life, something else you add to your list of possessions. He is the fountain of
life! He is the creator of life! He is the beginning and the end of life, and that is what He wants to be for you.
The prophet Jeremiah declared of the Lord (29:13, NIV), “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with
all your heart.” When I was content to be a nice religious kid, the son of a Protestant pastor, I did not know who
God was. I thought I knew about Him, but I surely did not know Him. But when it mattered to me, I started
seeking for the Lord with all my heart, because it was either that or suicide for me as a twelve year old. I was
ready to give up on life. When it mattered to me more than life itself, that is when I found Jesus Christ. And He
was no longer some vague religious theory, but a living Savior who touched my life and changed me ever
since.
- If God did not reach out to us, we would never find Him, even though all creation declares His glory.
The God who made the stars became a man, and walked among us as one of us. The Apostle John wrote
about Jesus in the first chapter of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him
nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men....”
- Why is there life in Jesus Christ? Because He is not just another teacher or prophet, though He was
know that, before He was a man, He was with the Father in Heaven. He left behind all the glory, all the beauty,
and all the power of Heaven, to become a weak human being like you and like me. As I tell my boys, He was
hungry like we are, He was thirsty like we are, He was weak like we are. The one who made the stars became a
man like us, familiar with our struggles. Why? As someone said to an Indian tribe in South America a few
years ago, “If you want to know the ants, you have to become an ant.” God became an ant, a man like us, and
lived among us.
- John also wrote about Him, “That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the
hear those words? He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, but the world did not recognize
who was walking here among us! We can recognize the movie stars, we can recognize the rock and roll kings
and queens, but we cannot recognize the Creator of the universe! But He is calling to you tonight. I know that
there are many of you here who know Jesus personally, but I would like to make an invitation to those of you
who do not know Him yet. Tonight can be the night that you come to know Him for yourself, not just to hear
someone else talk about Him, but for you to know Him for yourself.
- Do you want to become a child of God tonight? This is not a matter of denomination, or ethnic
kingdom of God unless he is born again. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You
should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.'” And in another place Jesus said, “If I have
told you of earthly things…,” and that is what math and science are about, things of this world, “If I have told
you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has
ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes
in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
- Copyright ©2003 Christopher N. White
(Message given at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, November 10, 2003)
Bibliography:
1. Ball, W.W. Rouse. A Short Account of the History of Mathematics, 4th Edition. Mineola, New York:
Courier Dover Publications, 1960.
2. Brewster, Sir David. Memoirs of of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855).
Vol. II, Ch. 27.
3. David Berlinski, “The Deniable Darwin,” Commentary, June 1996.
4. Dennett, Daniel. “The Bright Stuff,” The New York Times, July 12, 2003.
5. Dreifus, Claudia. “A Conversation with: Ernst Mayr; An Insatiably Curious Observer Looks Back on a
Life in Evolution,” The New York Times, April 16, 2002.
6. Fisher, George P. Life of Benjamin Silliman, M.D.,LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner and Company,
1866, Volume II.
7. Glanz, James. “Darwin vs. Design: Evolutionists’ New Battle,” The New York Times, April 8, 2001.
8. Johnson, Phillip E. Darwin on Trial, 2nd ed. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993.
9. Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.
10. Waggoner, Ben. “Carl Linnaeus.” Available at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html
(visited on 11/2/2003).
(Unless otherwise stated, the New King James is the version being used.)
NKJV: The New King James Version, Thomas Nelson, Inc.:
Miami, Florida, 1982.
NIV: The New International Version, The Zondervan
Corporation: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1995.