Here are some of the greatest scientists in history who were also deeply committed to their Christian faiths.
Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691. Said that a deeper understanding of science was a higher glorification of God. Defined elements, compounds, and mixtures. Discovered the first gas law – Boyle’s Law.
Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794.A Roman Catholic believer in the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. A founder of modern chemistry; discovered oxygen’s role in combustion and respiration; discovered that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen;
Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783.The son of a Calvinist pastor. Wrote religious texts and is commemorated by the Lutheran Church on their Calendar of Saints. Published more mathematics than any other single mathematician in history, much of it brilliant and groundbreaking.
Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867.A devout member and elder of the Sandemanian Church. Discovered electromagnetic induction; discovered the first experimental link between light and magnetism; carried out the first room-temperature liquefaction of a gas.
James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879.An evangelical Protestant who learned the Bible by heart at age 14. Transformed our understanding of nature: his famous equations unified the forces of electricity and magnetism, indicating that light is an electromagnetic wave. His kinetic theory established that temperature is entirely dependent on the speeds of particles.
Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884.A Roman Catholic Augustinian abbot. Founded the science of genetics; identified many of the mathematical rules of heredity; identified recessive and dominant traits.
Arthur Compton 1892 – 1962.A deacon in the Baptist Church. Discovered that light can behave as a particle as well as a wave, and coined the word photon to describe a particle of light.
Ronald Fisher 1890 – 1962.A devout Anglican: made religious broadcasts, and wrote religious articles. Unified evolution by natural selection with Mendel’s rules of inheritance, so defining the new field of population genetics. Invented experimental design; devised the statistical concept of variance.
Bernhard Riemann 1826 – 1866.Son of a Lutheran pastor. A devout Christian who died reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Transformed geometry providing the foundation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity; the Riemann hypothesis has become the most famous unresolved problem in mathematics.
Georges Lemaître 1894 – 1966.Roman Catholic priest. Discovered that space and the universe are expanding; discovered Hubble’s law; proposed the universe began with the explosion of a ‘primeval atom’ whose matter spread and evolved to form the galaxies and stars we observe today.
Isaac Newton 1643 to 1727.Passionate dissenting Protestant who spent more time on Bible study than math and physics. Profoundly changed our understanding of nature with his law of universal gravitation and his laws of motion; invented calculus; built the first ever reflecting telescope; showed sunlight is made of all the colors of the rainbow.
Charles Townes 1915 – 2015.A member of the United Church of Christ. Prayed daily. Wrote books linking science and religion; believed religion more important than science. Invented the laser and maser. Established that the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center.
Mary Anning 1799 – 1847. A devoted Anglican, spent her spare time reading the Bible. Discovered the first complete specimen of a plesiosaur; deduced the diets of dinosaurs.
Willard Gibbs 1839 – 1903.Member of the Congregational Church who attended services every week. Invented vector analysis and founded the sciences of modern statistical mechanics and chemical thermodynamics.
John Dalton 1766 – 1844.A faithful Quaker who lived modestly. Dalton’s Atomic Theory is the basis of chemistry; discovered Gay-Lussac’s Law relating temperature, volume, and pressure of gases; discovered the law of partial gas pressures.
Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855.A Lutheran Protestant who believed science revealed the immortal human soul and that there is complete unity between science and God. Gauss revolutionized number theory and invented the method of least squares and the fast Fourier transform. His profound contributions to the physical sciences include Gauss’s Law & Gauss’s Law for Magnetism.
Charles Barkla 1877 – 1944.A Methodist who believed science was part of his quest for God. Discovered that atoms have the same number of electrons as their atomic number and that X-rays emitted by excited atoms are ‘fingerprints’ for the atom.
George Washington Carver 1864 – 1943.A Protestant Evangelist and Bible class leader whose faith in Jesus was the mechanism through which he carried out his scientific work. Improved the agricultural economy of the USA by promoting nitrogen providing peanuts as an alternative crop to cotton to prevent soil depletion.
Francis Collins 1950 – present.Atheist turned devout Christian. Invented positional cloning. Took part in discovery of the genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and neurofibromatosis. Directed National Human Genome Research Institute for 15 years.
Ernest Walton 1903 – 1995.A devout Methodist, who said science was a way of knowing more about God. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics after he artificially split the atom and proved that E = mc2.
Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910.An Anglican who believed God spoke to her, calling her to her work. Transformed nursing into a respected, highly trained profession; used statistics to analyze wider health outcomes; advocated sanitary reforms largely credited with adding 20 years to life expectancy between 1871 and 1935.
J. J. Thomson 1856 – 1940.A practicing Anglican who prayed and read the Bible daily. Discovered the electron; invented one of the most powerful tools in analytical chemistry – the mass spectrometer; obtained the first evidence for isotopes of stable elements.
Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827.A Roman Catholic who declared that he had never wavered in his faith. Invented the electric battery; wrote the first electromotive series; isolated methane for the first time.
Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662.A Roman Catholic theologian. Pascal’s wager justifies belief in God. Devised Pascal’s triangle for the binomial coefficients and co-founded probability theory. Invented the hydraulic press and the mechanical calculator.
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) 1824 – 1907.An elder of the Free Church of Scotland. Codified the first two laws of thermodynamics, deduced the absolute zero of temperature is -273.15 °C. On the Kelvin scale, absolute zero is found at 0 kelvin. Invented the signalling equipment used in the first transatlantic telegraph via an undersea cable.
Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871.A Protestant devotee who devoted a chapter of his autobiography to a discussion of his faith. The father of the computer, invented the Analytical Engine, a Turing Complete computer in 1837 – the first general purpose computer.
Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976.A Lutheran with deep Christian convictions. One of the primary creators of quantum mechanics. Formulated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Albrecht von Haller 1708 – 1777.A Protestant, wrote religious texts and helped organize the construction of the Reformed Church in Göttingen. The father of modern physiology.
Nicolas Steno 1638 – 1686.Born a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism and became a bishop. Beatified in 1988, the third of four steps needed to be declared a saint. One of the founders of modern geology and stratigraphy.
Humphry Davy 1778 – 1829.Said that God’s design was revealed by chemical investigations. Discovered the electrical nature of chemical bonding. Used electricity to split several substances into their basic building blocks for the first time, discovering chlorine and iodine; produced the first ever samples of the elements barium, boron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and strontium. Invented the safety lamp.
Arthur Eddington 1882 – 1944.A Quaker, who believed the hand that made us is Divine. He was the first scientist to propose stars obtain their energy from nuclear fusion. Experimentally verified Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
John Ambrose Fleming 1849 – 1945.A devout Christian who preached about the Resurrection and founded the creationist Evolution Protest Movement. Founded the electronic age with his invention of the vacuum tube (thermionic valve); devised the hand rules for electric motors and generators.
Samuel Morse 1791 – 1872.A Calvinist with Unitarian sympathies who funded a lectureship considering the relation of the Bible to the Sciences. Took part in the invention of a single-wire telegraph and patented it. Developed the Morse code.
John Eccles 1903 – 1997.Christian and sometimes practicing Roman Catholic. Believed in a Divine Providence operating over and above the materialistic happenings of biological evolution. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the physiology of synapses.
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Author of this page: The Doc
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At least Ampere is missing
I get so frustrated watching programs on PBS such as
NOVA for they all seem to be attempting to dispel our heavenly Father…Faith is a personal experience which is difficult to put into a mathematical equation…
Faith is not a reliable path to truth.
A person can believe false things just on faith and true things as well. Muslims and Christians hold contradictory beliefs based on faith.
Consequently we should base nothing important on faith alone.
We should rely on evidence.
Well, God is a spirit and we need to have faith in God with no evidence. Even evolution has no evidence.
…because faith IS the evidence of things not seen 🙂
Paul:
As a scientist myself, I can certainly testify to the need for evidence. There is more than enough for it though to debunk the myth of Darwin & al. I would highly recommend: Cold Case Christianity by Warner Wallace, In six days by John Ashton or Undeniable by Douglas Axe.
Apart from that, you seem to be unaware of the fact that the Bible also has plenty of prophecies that can be easily tracked in terms of what was said when and how and when did it become a reality. That also is part of good evidence to consider.
More importantly though is REVELATORY information. The Bible informs us in Romans 10:17, “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God”.
Evidence-based information is not necessarily the thing that makes a person put his faith in Christ. It’s perhaps a beginning or the final piece, depending on the person’s walk so far. Evidence alone leaves the matter in the human realm, making faith an intellectual undertaking. Not so though! It is the Word of God, as given in the Bible, that convicts a person and reveals to him his true state without Christ; Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
May you find the Truth as embodied in Jesus Christ; may you be led to embrace Him as the Covenant-keeping God that He is, and may you then begin to rejoice in His awesome mercy and grace, dear Paul.
In His service,
yes the book does say in 1 Thessalonians ch5v21 to ‘Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.’
Where is Xavier Le Pichon? He is a very commited, living christian and the father of plate techtonics. Surely one of the greats.
I noticed something, most of these guys are pre-Darwin. This suggests that they did not understand science as it is described today. In other words, they did not have the explanation Science gives to show that gods are not needed in the creation and/or maintenance of the universe.
Now I would what I would find if I had to look up a list of say 50 famous modern scientists, how many of those would be religious? I would suggest a lot more would be godless, because they understand what science has explained about the universe.
I’m a scientist who disagrees that natural selection and survival of the fittest are a sufficient explanation for the brilliance of life. The public are not made aware of the giant gaps in actual knowledge or the serious serious problems involved the 6th grade version of the typical explanation for how the universe came to be. Whole books are written on questions like, “How did life start?” And the answers are merely best-case scenarios, (which are still highly problematic). Multitudes of scientists with graduate degrees are skeptical that Darwin’s ideas – though valuable in certain ways – do the job to explain how we all got here.
https://dissentfromdarwin.org/
So, are you saying there is an active conspiracy to hide the truth about evolution from the public?
Hi! I suggest you read through the comments because there are some valid points as to the statement you made.
I suggest that you should do research not about God himself, because His existences can not be proven or disproven, but about the evidence that we are left with today. The Case For Christ is a great book to read or movie to watch, and I don’t consider it Christian propaganda. The research is based on facts. You can also read about the great flood, which has been proven to be the only explanation for why the continents/ earth is the way it is.
There have also been multiple arguments against evolution that not even atheist/ scientist could answer, I suggest that you go read about that as well!
In my opinion, all of these answers point to God. It is parallel to the Bible.
There are many more, these are just a few that I can remember. I do not mean to attack you in anyway, I respect everyone and their beliefs. These might just point to a few things that have actually been answered. Louis Pasteur said that a little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you close to Him.
English is not my native language, sorry if I made mistakes.
The only thing that you do not have to disprove something that it is not proven in the first place. Can you disprove Superman’s existence?
Here is a quick point of clarification that might be helpful. Jesus claimed to be God in human flesh, and he is a real, historical figure. No one disputes his existence, and the historical records–both secular and religious–attest to this. There is no such “history” for Superman and rightly so. Everyone knows he belongs to the fictional realm, for that is how he is presented; indeed, he is not a part of history. He is a character in a great piece of literature, to be enjoyed and received as such! I just thought this needed to be clarified for argument’s sake. There is much more to be said, but I liked the other suggestion to consider reading The Case for Christ. This is a good starting place for some honest questions and objections that people may have.
Cheers to open, civil discourse! 🙂
Ergo, false equivalency
Perhaps you should get more familiar with the writings and ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s friend, contemporary, and also credited together with Darwin for the development of the theory of evolution.
Darwin or Evolution are far from disproving God.
You should research the vast amount of MIT professors who are Christians. There are SO many, including 1st female president, Susan Hockfield.
I am surprised people still believe in evolution 😂
If you go to discovery.com, you can find a list of current scientists that have signed “A Dissent From Darwinism”. Many are at ivy-league schools.
90_95% scientists were Christian bcos of the mercy and grace of God.
Jesus loves us!
Mary Baker Eddy in her writings gave a marvelous contribution bringing science and religion together calling this oneness Divine Science.
Christian professors exist too – they are rare and often kept hidden in obscure nooks and crannies of the university- but we are out here. We are not a myth.
Ivy! Thank you so much for articulating this…exactly what I was wanting to express. If only people knew how many brilliant scientific minds are out there who believe in God and his creating of the universe. There is so much unabashed discrimination by some in the scientific field, it’s almost criminal. It seems like, more and more, people have to fly under the radar if they don’t want to deal with repercussions. I’m so proud of the scientists who hold true to their beliefs, use their minds to bless the world and their respective fields, and understand that science and God most certainly go together. We are supposed to be a free-thinking, respectful society that believes in free speech, freedom of religion, etc. Instead of canceling people, and effectively silencing them, perhaps we should engage more in civil debate and preserve the right to respectfully disagree on certain points.
The heavens declare the glory of God! And it’s a beautiful thing that you, the reader, have the right and dignity to agree or disagree with that statement in our democracy for now! Never let this go….
Do you really want to live in a country that will not afford us this great privilege? Be worthy of this in the way you treat others of opinions dissenting from yours. Land of the Free…!
Steve says,
A reply to Edwin. You say you would love to see great scientists of faith after 1950? Then we would need to unshackle the minds in control in universities across the land. The climate of political correctness says that any one who publicly espouses their faith will lose their tenure and their position. A scientist at Iowa State University lost his just a few years back for acknowledging God in his work!
Yes that has happened many times.
I think it’s a shame that the so called intelectuals are unable and unwilling to accept truth.
Believing in God is believing in an eternal life. Not believing in God is not believing in an eternal life. Easy, yes?
We can’t prove He exists, nor can we prove that He doesn’t. Not everything is known with certainty. But in our hearts, at least we believe that the truth will be handed out at the end of our lives, and that hope is what we look forward to. This hope is a chance with absolute certainty from our perspective, but from another, its false hope. Having a chance with certain probability is better than having zero, and just by doing a little extra (believing) if you are already a good person is enough to get you that chance.
Have you ever considered this- Everything we found as “evidence” are planned accordingly to the existence of God.
I’ll have you know, these people are not looking for certificates to boost their pride. They are driven by passion towards Mathematics and Science.
Being ‘a good person’ has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Salvation- believing- or eternal life!
As JESUS said, why do you call Me good? There are none good but God!!
Salvation comes to those called whether we see them as good or not!
Thank you for this specific example. One of many…
I wrote my comment to Ivy before even reading your reply here.
People honestly have no clue how insidious this is at the university level. I don’t necessarily expect them to be aware, but I think we should ALL be expected to consider these occurances outrageously shameful. I would be horrified if a conference on atheism were to be shut down because some administration disagreed with their beliefs. I am certainly not an atheist, but they have every right in the free world to hold these views and to discuss them openly. Open, fair, civil discourse–isn’t that what is supposed to happen at universities? I know. Many of us unfortunately know better how this plays out in reality. Keep speaking out for our freedoms.
Youngest one is born in 1950…
Finding modern ‘great’ Christian Scientist would be more interesting!
There are plenty. Just go to creation.com to find any. They have compiled a list of scientists who are creationists, there would be even more who are Christians but sway on origins. Interestingly, many scientists are not forward about faith or origins because they would lose their job or not be published in journals. True fact.
Atheists try to debunk Christianity with science, without realising that most of what we know today came from Christian Scientists. Everything around us is proof that God is real.
This is absolutely true. Studying science is understanding God’s mind..
Sadly, the world, today, is making it harder for Christians to follow that path.
Nice to see the prove that science and God aren’t rivals but united.Science is the discovery made in a universe created by God.
If I were an Atheist and had the opportunity to have lunch with Newton, Galileo, and perhaps some of the choices listed above I would have a question. I would like to ask them, why do you believe in God? Perhaps they might answer, After examining the facts we do not have enough blind faith to be an atheist. Just a thought.
you left out Emanuel Swedenborg
So glad to see that science and God are one. They should not be separated (in my opinion). So glad to see many scientists agree with me.
34 Great Scientist ,who believe in God 🙏 so blessed to know this.Thank you so much for this information ❤️😘
Great collection