Would you be surprised if I told you that theology is the basis of much modern science, including the very internet on which you are reading this article?

The scientific method consists of the following steps:

1. Coming up with a question or observation
2. Researching the topic
3. Deriving a hypothesis
4. Testing the hypothesis with an experiment
5. Analyzing the data
6. Reporting a conclusion

Any topic that can be addressed using this process counts as scientific. That is even more the case if the topic is the basis of many groundbreaking scientific discoveries. As we will shortly see, a number of scientific theories have come directly from theological considerations, either pro or con.

Here are some examples of scientific theories originating from those who believed in God in some fashion:

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), a priest, came up with a theory of genetic inheritance, intending to disprove Darwin’s views on evolution, espoused by anti-religious thinkers.

● Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was a direct refutation of Epicurean materialism, which denied action at a distance.

● The Big Bang theory was dreamed up by Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) to reconcile de Sitter’s and Einstein’s cosmological theories. He thus refuted the cosmology of an eternal, homogeneous universe favored by atheists.

● Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) used the idea of the unity of all things found in the Hindu philosophical texts, the the Vedantas, to explain particle–wave duality.

● Scientific opposition to the theory of spontaneous generation (simpler life forms arise naturally from the earth) stemmed in part from a rejection of the underlying assumption that simpler creatures were not created ultimately by God.

● Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) discovered the most profound mathematical theory of the past few centuries while analyzing the question of whether any truth lay beyond the physical world.

And now for the non-theist philosophical approach:

● Materialism was first developed by Greek philosophers to eliminate the need to explain reality by invoking divine action beyond the physical world. The Roman poet Lucretius (c.100 BCE – c.1 BCE) was a very influential proponent and Charles Darwin’s father’s fondness for his poem De Rerum Natura probably influenced Darwin’s own philosophical direction.

● Atomism is another theory that was derived from Lucretius’s work. There he describes what came to be known as the Brownian motion of dust motes.

● Alan Turing (1912–1954) invented his famous formalization of computers, the Turing machine, in an attempt to explain how evolution alone can generate minds. That said, he also came up with something called the oracle machine to model how intelligence can intervene in computation. Remarkably, Turing also thought the most compelling evidence that he might be wrong in thinking that computers could convincingly mimic human minds was telepathy, for which he thought the evidence was overwhelming!

● John von Neumann (1903–1957) invented the computer architecture that your phone, laptop and desktop use in order to explain how evolution can generate self-reproducing life, by making code and data the same.

● Information theory was invented by Claude Shannon (1916– 2001) in an attempt to create artificial intelligence. He failed, but current electronic communication, including the internet, would be impossible without the mathematics he came up with.

Circling back to the definition of science, we see that deep considerations about theological concerns generates many testable — and very important — scientific hypotheses. So, according to the definition of the scientific method, this makes theology the most important empirical science.

Do we ever hear about this in science class?

You may also wish to read: Can there really be an ultimate happiness machine? Technology can do so much. Can it really provide an answer to the eternal human quest for happiness? What if we had a machine that could access and manipulate the internals of the human mind? It would fall victim to the halting problem. (Eric Holloway)