Hi all,

Many of the men who made the most important, foundational discoveries in the field of science were Bible beleiving christians, who lived shortly after the reformation, whose driving motivation for understanding the world around them was their belief in a Creator God, a rational, thinking God, who created an orderly universe which could be better understood by thinking, rational people, "thinking God's thoughts after him".

Here is a list of some of these men and their discoveries:
Johann Kepler (1571-1630) Father of modern astronomy
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Father of the scientific method
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) Father of modern hydrostatics, hydrodynamics
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) Father of modern chemistry, gas laws
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) Gravitation, 3 laws of motion, calculus, the reflecting telescope
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) Father of modern taxonomy
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) Electromagnetic inductance, electric generator, capacitance and measure thereof (farad), many other discoveries
John Dalton (1766-1844) Father if modern atomic theory, recognized color blindness
Samuel Morse (1791-1872) Father of modern telecommunications
Matthew Maury (1806-1873) Father of modern hydrography and oceanography. Was inspired by the mention of the "paths of the sea", in psalm 8 of the Bible, to map the ocean currents.
James Joule (1818-1889) Mechanical equivalent of heat, thermodynamics
Louis Agazziz (1807-1873) Paleontology-built the great museum of comparative zoology at Harvard. Began the era of great museums of paleontology.
Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902) Father of modern pathology
Gregor Mendel (1882-1884) Father of genetics. Ignored until years after his death because of Darwin's theory.
William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) (1824-1907) First and second laws of thermodynamics
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) Microbiology, pasteurization (never patented), various vaccines, improvements in Italian wines. Disproved the theory of spontaneous generation of flies and bacteria from non-living matter, under great opposition from the scientific community.
Sir Joseph Lister (1831-1879) Father of modern antiseptic surgery. His ideas were heavily opposed and scoffed at in Darwinistic England. When tried out in Munich, Germany, the death rate frome post-surgical infection dropped from 80% to 0% and he became a hero.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1875) Electromagnetic field theory, statistical physics

Were very many really important discoveries overlooked by these christians? Perhaps in order to get the general population more interested in science we should encourage them to study more than one story concerning the origin of the universe and the meaning of life as well as showing them how good science originated.

Brady Hess

Science Integration Institute wrote:
> "Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing in the culture of science,
> no matter how much you learn and write about science. Scholars in the
> humanities also make discoveries, of course, but their most original and
> valuable scholarship is usually the interpretation and explanation of
> already existing knowledge. When a scientist begins to sort out knowledge
> in order to sift for meaning, and especially when he carries that knowledge
> outside the circle of discoverers, he is classified as a scholar in the
> humanities. Without scientific discoveries of his own, he may be a
> veritable archangel among intellectuals, his broad wings spread above
> science, and still not be in the circle. The true and final test of a
> scientific career is how well the following declarative sentence can be
> completed: "He (or she) discovered that..." A fundamental distinction thus
> exists in the natural sciences between process and product. The difference
> explains why so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and
> why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists."
>
> - E. O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, pp 56-7)