Suzie Bohlson sits in a sun-drenched California plaza, a pale, slight 53-year-old with a Ph.D. in biology from Notre Dame. Fifteen years ago, she converted to Catholicism, a surprising choice, perhaps, for a young woman from Los Angeles raised in a family of materialist scientists.
Though her grandfather was a Lutheran minister in rural Pennsylvania, religion was seldom discussed in her family’s Los Angeles home. Her father taught at UCLA, where her mother earned four degrees. “Physics was my father’s religion,” she says with a slight smile. “I was raised with the belief that reality was physics, chemistry, and biology.”
Now director of both the Master of Science in Biotechnology and Biotechnology Management programs at the University of California–Irvine, she came to believe that, as she looked at the structure of biological life, she could feel some organizing intelligence in the systems she studied. “I started to realize that science and religion complement each other.”
Bohlson admits she did not share her Catholic faith with most of her co-workers until recently. “I was a closet Catholic,” she says. “I was in a culture of science filled with very anti-religious opinions. People assume if you are Catholic, you have certain conservative views on women and gender that I don’t share.”
In recent months, however, Bohlson has come out of the “closet,” speaking openly of her faith to colleagues and joining the growing ranks of Catholic scientists in America. For her, the trend isn’t about politics; like most of her colleagues, Bohlson is a Democrat. It’s about melding knowledge and faith, embracing the spirit of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order. “In a university where no one talks about God, it’s important for people to see how God can make you happier, and that, in learning science, we learn his existence is evident.”
Whatever their current religious orientation, many spiritually inclined scientists draw inspiration from recent breakthroughs in fields like biology and physics that have seemed to move us away from the mechanistic, predictable outcomes suggested by Enlightenment science and philosophy—and toward a view in which uncertainty and mystery appear to play a fundamental role.
Perhaps the key turning point was the Big Bang. In the early twentieth century, scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, believed in a steady-state universe that had no beginning or end. Later, theoretical physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître showed how Einstein’s own theory of General Relativity aligned with the astronomer Edwin Hubble’s then-controversial observations that the universe was expanding, and thus—if one followed the process backward through time—had a beginning. Today, Lemaître is known as the father of the Big Bang theory.
As Einstein pondered these and other findings, his views, particularly toward the end of his career, evolved in the direction of acknowledging a belief in a divine force. He looked to the Jewish philosopher/scientist Baruch Spinoza for inspiration and spoke openly of embracing “a cosmic religious feeling.” Einstein’s German contemporary Werner Heisenberg described a similar evolution. “The first gulp of the natural sciences will turn you into an atheist,” he wrote, “but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
For groups like the Society of Catholic Scientists, with more than 2,100 members and 28 regional chapters, the notion that science and religion are complementary is not as controversial as it may seem to some. Even billionaire tech innovator Elon Musk has called himself a “cultural Christian,” describing his beliefs as “a religion of curiosity” and “of greater enlightenment.” This view has gained some backing as well from leading intellectuals like Douglas Murray, historian Tom Holland, and psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Most remarkably, the revival of “natural theology” draws heavily not on the humanities but on science. This is occurring, noted the late physicist John Polkinghorne, at a time when many religious leaders seem too timid to address basic questions like the origins of life or the universe. Ironically, as some religiously oriented scientists emerge, it is increasingly the “established,” ultra-secular scientific establishment that is damaging its credibility by injecting political dogma into research. Yet this political power—tied to research funding for such things as climate change—makes it unlikely that we are witnessing “the fall of the New Atheism,” as suggested by Christian talk show host Justin Brierley. Roughly half of U.S. scientists, according to one 2023 study, are atheists or agnostics. Barely a third of European scientific researchers practice any faith, about the same as those describing themselves as atheist or agnostic. Some of the best known science figures of our time—serious scholars like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking, as well as popular figures like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson—still describe themselves as fervent atheists.
The proponents of “natural theology” are also pushing uphill in a society where churches are, for the most part, in decline. This is particularly true of mainline Protestant denominations. Once powerful, these churches have gone from counting roughly half of Americans as members to barely 9 percent. But this pattern can also be seen across almost all religions. In 1965, a Gallup poll found that 70 percent of respondents said religion is “very important” in their lives. Today, fewer than half of Americans (45 percent) say religion is “very important.”
Most Americans, notes Pew, see conflict, not harmony, between religion and science (though only a small fraction of believers, some 16 percent, agree). One survey found that two-thirds of atheists and one-third of agnostics believe that science makes “the existence of God less probable.” The case for harmony is even worse in Europe, where the share of people who claim that religion is important stands at one-third or even less. At times, professing certain beliefs can even prove dangerous, landing one person in court in Finland and causing a conference in Amsterdam to disinvite speakers who, among other things, insist that there are only two sexes.
Though it’s often forgotten today, religion and science have been strongly linked for most of human history. The search for the origin and structure of the universe appeals to religious minds, as it has since the times of the Bible and the Vedas. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mezo America, “priest astronomers” achieved remarkable findings without the benefit of modern technology. By some accounts, the Mayan calendar was more accurate, in astronomical terms, than the Julian version then used in Rome.
Even in ancient Greece, which incubated many of the basic scientific principles embraced today, most mathematicians and scientists did not reject the gods or the notion of the supernatural. Belief in the old Gods and myths persisted well into the dawn of the Christian era and were prevalent throughout the scientific world for a millennium. Ptolemy wrote that astronomy “allowed him to enter “company with God.”
Some scientists and historians—most famously the great British writer Edward Gibbon—saw the spread of the Mosaic religions as undermining the rational, scientific legacy handed down by the Greeks and their Roman acolytes. Yet. Judaism, the root of both Islam and Christianity, has generally accepted science as simply as another means of revealing God’s work, not a challenge to divine agency.
Edward Reichman, a medical doctor and ethicist at New York’s Montefiore hospital, notes that, though some branches of Orthodox Judaism reject widely embraced scientific ideas like evolution, most Orthodox intellectuals embrace science and discovery. Indeed, the most important figure in Hasidism, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was trained as an engineer at the Sorbonne and maintained a lifelong interest in new technologies. “For most Jews, including the Orthodox,” notes Reichman, “it is impossible to distinguish between religion and science because God created science as well.”
Even in their early years, Christians, too—St. Augustine, among many others—did not reject science as they jettisoned paganism. As historian Rodney Stark has observed, many early Church fathers saw science, much as Bohlson does, as revelatory of divine presence. Stark suggests that this attitude stems from the precept of Mosaic religion positing that God is “a rational being and the universe was his personal creation,” leading Christians to yearn to advance “human comprehension” of his work.
In the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Christian monks stood at the forefront of efforts to systematize knowledge, a key precursor to scientific discovery. When the light of learning was dimmest, they preserved the classical scientific traditions and, in some cases, as with the Bishop of Lincoln in the twelfth century, developed new insights into the physical world.
Nor did the Renaissance or Enlightenment sever the links between religion and science, as some suggest by citing, for example, the persecution of Galileo. As physicist William Barr suggests, many Enlightenment scientists—from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton, from Johannes Kepler to Blaise Pascal—openly embraced religion as they pushed the frontiers of science outward.
The connection between religion and science is not restricted to the West. Islamic science, starting from the base provided by translated Greek texts, advanced astronomy, mathematics, and medicine well beyond the state of the art in Europe and arguably the rest of the world. In the early centuries after Muhammad, wrote historian Bernard Lewis, the early caliphates achieved “the highest level so far in the arts and sciences of civilization.” Islamic scientists, mathematicians, and astronomers developed an archipelago of centers for learning that extended from Toledo to Baghdad to Tehran to Kabul. Yet amid their research, few strayed from belief in one God and instead saw in science a way to explain His work.
China’s rich and varied religious tradition, largely Confucianist, provided the impetus for the country’s technological advance. Confucianism embraced science as a way to perfect “the cosmic moral order.” Even under the Communist Party, this notion contributes to China’s present bid for technological leadership. Confucianism’s emphasis on learning and self-improvement remains an advantage not only for the Middle Kingdom but also for similarly oriented states like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan.
Hinduism’s embrace of science and mathematics predates that of the Mosaic faiths. Early Hindu scholars asked profound questions about human origins and speculated about the origin of life, both human and divine. The Hindu tradition incorporated scientific and mathematical ideas even within the Vedas. By the fifth century, Hindu mathematicians and astronomer like Aryabhata the Elder were mapping the heavens and developing algorithms; he devised an annual calendar that turned out to be only 12 minutes longer than the current accepted norm.
Whereas many people of the Mosaic faiths tend to see science and religion as somewhat separate, Hindus, noted a recent Pew study, tend to see them as overlapping. The proclivity to embrace science, notes Ashwin Rangan, former chief information officer of ICANN, the Internet supervisory body, helps explain somewhat the remarkable emergence of India as a center of technology and mathematics.
Suzie Bohlson and her religiously minded colleagues see themselves as describing a reality beyond that of the atheist, who, in the words of Richard Dawkins, offers a universe driven by “blind, pitiless indifference.” The late Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, wondered, as do many religiously oriented scientists, what such a strictly materialistic worldview would leave in its wake. He pointed to the work of Israeli philosopher Yuval Harari as creating a vision of humanity that is reduced to algorithms. Without religion’s moral compass, Sacks suggests, societies are doomed to failure, whatever their level of technology.
In combating the mechanistic view of life, scientists like Bohlson are rediscovering a vision imbued with a sense of human values—a humbler understanding of how the world is constructed. Science and technology, understood as disciplines removed from or even superior to questions of morality, cannot provide a sense of meaning, and that is a cause of distress, particularly for the young.
“The world is always a mess, irrespective of science,” Bohlson suggests. “But with religion we can endure it and make our work worthwhile. We gain so much in our understanding when we realize that God permeates science.”
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