First, some caveats: (1) Although "evolution" appears in the title I am not going to talk about the creationism/evolution controversy in this piece. (2) By "God" I mean specifically the Christian conception of God.
Now let me start in the middle with Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727). Most people are only familiar with him from fable and probably think of him as a confirmed atheist. But he was, in fact, the opposite. During his lifetime he was an orthodox Christian and actually wrote much more on religious topics than scientific ones. He was well respected member of the community of theologians and other religious thinkers. One of his great works, "Optics", contains a large section at the end laying out his thoughts about the relationship between "scientific" truth and "religious" truth. He believed both were valid and that they complimented each other. He recommended combining them to achieve some kind of super truth that was greater than either component alone. Newton is only the best example of the many scientists who are also noted for their deeply held religious beliefs.
Now let me move to Copernicus (1473 - 1543). Copernicus is famous in this context for his publication "De Revolutionibus", a work on Celestial Mechanics. What does Celestial Mechanics have to do with religion? Good question! And unfortunately religious people had an answer. Before Copernicus, the prevailing system was one named after Ptolemy, who was not a Christian, by the way. The Ptolemaic system posited that there were a series of crystal spheres surrounding the earth in the heavens, one each for the Sun, Moon, the stars, etc. But pure spheres did not work especially in the case of reproducing the motions of the planets. So the Ptolemaic system postulated that the main spheres had smaller spheres attached resulting in something called epicycles. By the time of Copernicus the Ptolemaic system had gotten quite elaborate and still didn't work very well.
Why did theologians care? Well there were two key ideas in the Ptolemaic system that they ended up invested in. The first was that the Earth was the center of everything. The idea was that the earth was the home of "God's people". They were the most important thing so they must be in the center. The second idea was that the circle, and its three dimensional extension the sphere, were the most perfect shapes. So God would naturally put the Earth at the center of things and he would use spheres to create the heavens because God was perfect. This logical construct eliminated any other possibility so to consider any other possibility was heretical.
As I said, the Ptolemaic system didn't work that well. So Copernicus came up with a different system. He posited that although some things like the moon revolved around the Earth, most things revolved around the Sun. Switching to this system greatly simplified Celestial Mechanics calculations. And he was careful to say "I'm not saying this is how it is. I'm only saying this is a way to make the mathematics easier to do".
But it turns out that the Copernican system is no great shakes either. Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601) embarked on a series of the most accurate celestial observations done before the advent of the telescope. These observations demonstrated that neither the Ptolemaic nor the Copernican system worked that well. Copernicus assumed that the orbits were circular and that the origin of the circle was at the center of the larger body. In truth, orbits are elliptical and the origin is at the center of mass, which is sometimes significantly displaced from the center of the larger body. There was a delay of from 3 to 60 years before the reaction of the religious establishment to Copernicus' ideas became heated. But heated it eventually became.
The next player in this Celestial Mechanics game was Galileo (1564 - 1642). Copernicus dodged the controversy by dying about the time "De Revolutionibus" was published. Galileo was not so lucky. The Galileo affair is complex so I am only going to point out a few aspects. Galileo was one of the first to build and use telescopes. One of the uses he put his to was to observe Jupiter. In the process he discovered the "Galilean" moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). This Galilean system of a celestial body, not the Earth, with things orbiting it is a perfect counterexample to the idea that everything circles the Earth. And, to make matters worse, Galileo indicated in a 1610 letter that many of his opponents refused to even look into a telescope to see if they saw the same thing Galileo did. They were unwilling to examine the evidence Galileo advanced to support his position. Galileo was censured for his ideas without a fair hearing because they challenged cherished religious beliefs.
All this Celestial Mechanics business now looks comical. Why did they care? Celestial Mechanics now looks like a bunch of obscure mathematics that has nothing to do with theology. But at the time it had everything to do with theology, according to the theologians of the day. Scientists (that's what we call them now) ended up involved in theological discussions even if they didn't want to. This is in spite of the fact that the Bible has little or nothing to say on the subject. Most people have at least heard of the Celestial Mechanics controversy. Now I want to move on to a couple of subjects most people are not familiar with. The first one had a much more obvious theological connection. And initially Scientists were in complete agreement with the religious types as to the correct approach.
Chemistry is divided into two main branches: Inorganic and Organic. Inorganic materials like rocks had no "life force" in them. Organic materials like kidneys were parts of organisms like cows that appeared to have a life force in them while they were alive. And the chemistry of inorganic materials appeared to be different than the chemistry of organic materials. There seemed to be separate rules for each. Why even the constituent components seemed somehow different. You could make, at least in theory, any inorganic material by doing the "beaker, retort, chem lab" thing whereas this did not seem possible with organic chemicals. Scientists of the time were comfortable with the idea that "only God can create living things".
But that did not mean that organic chemicals could not be investigated. The idea was that you would end up with two sets of rules, the first set for inorganic chemicals, and the second different set for organic ones. Now there was some overlap. It was simple to make carbon dioxide using inorganic techniques. Yet carbon dioxide was known to be strongly associated with living creatures. But scientists figured that with careful work they would be able to tease out the rules of these "boundary" situations.
But then a totally unexpected thing happened. In 1828 Wohler came up with a completely inorganic method for manufacturing Urea. Until this time Urea was firmly seen as one of those mystical organic compounds that should follow different rules. And within a short period of time many other compounds that had historically been seen as completely organic were synthesized using strictly inorganic methods. Now we see organic chemistry as carbon chemistry and, other than its fiendish complexity, see no difference in the rules for inorganic versus organic chemistry.
As part of this "figure out the organic rules" process there were efforts to detect and characterize life force. There have also been efforts to weigh the soul. Supposedly it has been determined to weigh 21 grams by Duncan McDougall in 1907. Modern techniques can easily and accurately measure a weight change in a human that is far smaller than 21 grams but no one has reproduced McDougall's results. They now get no weight change at death. Despite a lot of hard looking, scientists have also not found any evidence for the existence of a life force or a soul. A successful detection of any of these would instantly result in fame and fortune for whoever pulled it off. So there is a real incentive to do it.
Finally, I want to move on to consider something that theologians and religious people have never had any interest in. But it resulted in a profound change in scientific thinking to the detriment of religious beliefs among scientists. This is something called the "lumeniferous aether". There has been a long debate among scientists as to whether light is a particle or a wave. The modern belief is that in some situations it behaves like a particle and in other situations it behaves like a wave. So it is neither fish nor fowl. But let's assume for the moment that we are examining light in a situation where it behaves like a wave.
Waves in sound are oscillations. Something oscillates (vibrates) and eventually these oscillations reach our ear and we hear the sound. So sound waves in particular and waves in general seem inextricably bound up in the idea of something vibrating. And that's the idea behind the lumeniferous aether. If light is a wave it must vibrate something. Since we don't know what it is let's give it a name and start looking for it. And that's what scientists did in the late 1800's. And, even if you don't know exactly what it is you should be able to determine some of its attributes. So Scientists started out with a simple idea. It's everywhere, kind of like air. Now with clever experiments you can find out how fast air is moving and in what direction using only sound, just by doing the right experiment. So that's what scientists did. They came up with clever experiments using light that would tell them the speed and direction of the lumeniferous aether.
One such set of experiments were done by Michaelson and Morley. The speed of light is so fast it was hard to measure using equipment available at the time. So they set out to measure the difference in speed of two beams of light. Using a very clever setup they were able to detect tiny differences in the speed of two beams of light. Then they set out to measure the speed of a light beam traveling in a North-South direction versus the speed of a light beam traveling in an East-West direction. Now the earth rotates on its axis. And it travels through space. And as it goes around the sun it's direction changes 90 degrees every three months. So it didn't matter which direction the lumeniferous aether was moving, the beams should travel at different speeds at least some of the time. In the extreme case, the speeds should be different three months from now than they are now.
Michaelson and Morley did a bunch of experiments. They did them very carefully. And eventually others did the same or similar experiments. Everyone got the same result. The two beams always went the same speed. Now it didn't matter what "lumeniferous aether" theory you subscribed to. Every theory predicted that for at least some of the experiments, the speed of light would be different in one direction than the other. Scientists could not think up a set of characteristics for lumeniferous aether that resulted in this "the speed of light is always constant" result.
Why does this matter? Because after many years they concluded that there was no such thing as the "lumeniferous aether". And Einstein made "the speed of light is always constant" a foundational idea of his theories. Einstein and other Scientists came to a profound conclusion as a result of the lumeniferous aether episode. They named this conclusion the "Occam's Razor" principle. If you have multiple theories to chose from, always pick the simplest one that accounts for all the data. A corollary of this is "don't assume the existence of anything not necessary for the theory to work".
The Occam's Razor principle leads Steven Hawking in his recent book "The Grand Design" to say "One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary". Scientists have been looking carefully for hundreds of years for evidence that God exists. They haven't found anything. Celestial spheres, life force, and the soul are examples of other things that scientists have carefully looked hard for over a very long time without finding anything. As Hawking says, this does not mean that none of these things exist but it does mean that science has not found them. And without evidence of their existence, science deems them "unnecessary".
Over most of the history of science most scientists have had sincerely held religious beliefs. But the "Occam's Razor" revolution spawned by the failure of "lumeniferous aether" caused scientists to change their way of thinking. And looked at in this new way there is no "need" for religion. Without this need, an examination of the tenets of religions finds them not only unnecessary but nonsense. So most modern scientists have reluctantly become atheists.
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