I started writing twenty-seven years ago when a friend asked me to discuss whether good scientists could also be Christian. Her daughter had been told by a high school Biology teacher that this was not possible. Since my father was a pioneer NASA scientist my friend felt that I’d have something to say. This conversation resulted in a list that my sister and I developed and disseminated for years. I’m not working on my list anymore since the Society of Catholic Scientists keeps a list on its website. Anyone who wonders, in general, whether science and faith can exist in harmony has lots of information to help decide the question. Their list is not exhaustive, not including, for example, John Aloysius O’Keefe, III or Vincent Dethier, both of whom are great Catholic scientists.**

But since the topic interests me and I like to keep it fresh in my mind, I go read biographies on the SCS website (https://catholicscientists.org/ ) now and then, and especially, I read biographies for people I never discovered when I was hunting for Catholic scientists. And hunting is the right word. There’s a little two step that has gone on for years and years.

Step One. Say that someone’s personal beliefs are completely unimportant in any discussion of their scientific works, so that information gets stripped out of most public writing about a person.

Step Two. Say that there aren’t any Christian scientists. It’s difficult to show how silly this is, because the information to refute it has been deliberately lost.

In one case I looked at loads of public information about an engineer without being able to say anything about his beliefs. Finally, I learned that he wrote music for Episcopal liturgical celebrations. Okay, I’d have to suggest that he wasn’t Catholic but he was definitely Christian. In another case, I discovered that the scientist in question had written a book about Masses he remembered. Okay, he’s Catholic.

Today at the Society of Catholic Scientists website, I randomly clicked on Camille Jordan, a French mathematician and engineer. https://catholicscientists.org/scientists-of-the-past/camille-jordan/ Jordan’s mathematics is so far beyond me that I’m not even going to try to summarize what he did. However, as a mathematician he shows up on the University of Saint Andrews website, MacTutor. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Jordan/ This website discusses religion for several other scientists, including Cauchy and the Cassini family for example, but it says nothing about Camille Jordan’s religion. I wondered how the SCS had discovered his Catholicism, and the article itself gives the answer. He was a member of an organization of Catholic scientists founded in Brussels in 1875. Also, when Jordan died his eulogy included this…

“Jordan was an honest man, a great honest man in all the meanings of the word. He continued in Paris, in the same district of Paris, the tradition of Christian philosophers and thinkers, to whom was due the revival of Parisian Catholicism in the beginning of the last century.”

So if I had access to a list of members of such a society I could discover other Catholic scientists, and then I could check on which people had done work that considered the most important, nowadays. I’ll let the SCS do that!

**When I started looking for examples for my friend’s daughter I realized immediately that I had an overabundance of material. There are so many scientists who believe in God that if I didn’t confine myself to the Catholics I’d be overwhelmed. Michael Faraday is an example of Christian but not Catholic. Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg are also examples. Both were brought up Lutheran and continued to believe in God. Planck thought God wasn’t personal but was still essential.