The Mistrust of Science

[Joe Chi Minh]

14. Two massive fails there, so truly, your psot cannot be

taken seriously :

Newton was what today would be called a religious 'nut', so obsessed was he with formulating his own, somewhat eccentric, biblical exegesis and theology. Indeed, he ended up despising physics. He's mocked today for his participation in the belief that was widespread in his day, at least tentative, in alchemy, although it was no more a gratuitous conjecture than phlogiston. In any case his achievements in mathematics and physics are unassailable.

Likewise, like so many of the greatest sceintists in that age of faith, Galileo was not merely a Sunday Christian, but a so ardent a believer that only the power of his father in their society prevented his becoming a priest. His quarrel with the pope, was actually with a cardinal, with whom he had a stormy relationship concerning physics. The whole saga has been misrepresented. Of course, the Church would in no wise have been irreproachable throughout most of its history, which is why Francis is so busy now. But Galileo's religious fervour was never in question, and he died the convinced Christian he'd lived.

As for Tesla, again, your post is totally wrong. Tesla is well known to have been an extraordinarily devout Christian. Indeed, some of his remarks sound to me of a curiously fundamentalist hue. But if he said he found many of his answers to scientific problems in the Bible, who are we to doubt him. Parenthetically, Arno Penzias, co-discoverer with Robert Wilson of the background radiation from the Big Bang, stated :

http://www.bethinking.org/god/did-einstein-believe-in-god

Pascal, another Christian mystic, was not responsible for a new paradigm but was no back number in Maths, either, independently discovering the first so many theorems of Euclidian geometry as a schoolchild. Likewise, Kurt Godel was a major paradigm-shifter with his Incompleteness Theorem, and a firm, if somewhat timid, believer of the Lutheran Church.