By looking to Christian scientists of the past. Charles Reid writes in a HuffPo column:
... the greatest danger Christianity confronts at the present moment is not incipient persecution, but increasing marginalization and irrelevance. If Christians cannot engage reasonably and responsibly with science, there will be no place for them in the public life of advanced societies. ...
From left: Copernicus, Mendel, Lemaître
Christians have not always been such enemies of science. ... A brilliant man and a Catholic monk, Copernicus (1473-1543) held important positions in both secular and ecclesiastical government, all the while writing voluminously. ... But what he is remembered for today is his heliocentric theory of the solar system. Through patient observation and calculation, Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of things, reorienting the way we view everything and thereby ushering in the modern world.
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Augustinian monk and professor of natural philosophy and eventually became the abbot of his monastery. And today he is recalled for his path-breaking studies of pea plants which showed the existence of recessive and dominant genes, an essential cornerstone of modern genetics.For a refresher on the Big Bang, check out MinutePhysics' quick overview.
But of them all, my own favorite is the unjustly obscure Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the "father of the big bang." A Belgian priest, Fr. Lemaitre did his graduate work in theoretical physics at Cambridge University and Harvard. In 1927, while still a junior lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain, he proposed an expansionary theory of the universe at odds with the then-prevailing belief that the universe had always existed in a steady state. Four years later, in 1931, he asserted that the entire universe began with what he called a "cosmic egg" or "primeval atom" -- a theory that Sir Fred Hoyle derisively dismissed as "the big bang." Later that same year, Fr. Lemaitre argued that not only was the universe expanding, its expansion was accelerating in speed. While it has taken decades, Lemaitre's theories have been confirmed in every major particular.
