Of God And The Elements

Of God And The Elements

Boyle’s keen mind was continually drawn to science.

SCIENCE has advanced so rapidly in the past few centuries that is hard to imagine that as recently as the Pilgrims’ founding of Plymouth, “scientists” across Europe were still working to be the first to turn sand into gold and physicians used leeches to suck the “ill humors” out of their patients’ blood.

Such was the world when Robert Boyle was born in Ireland in 1627. Boyle’s father was the earl of Cork, and his mother died when Boyle was only three. When he was eight, he was enrolled at Eton, one of Great Britain’s finest schools. There he displayed a precocious and fierce intelligence. But Boyle’s ability to read Latin and Greek and do algebra without paper and pencil was not sufficient for an aristocratic young man’s education. When Boyle was twelve, his father sent him to Switzerland to learn dancing, fencing, tennis, and French.

Years later Boyle wrote his biography, in which he named himself “Philatetus,” Greek for “lover of virtue.” In it he described an experience he had back in his school days in Geneva that changed the course of his life:

[He] suddenly awoke in a fright by loud claps of thunder and every clap was both preceded and attended with flashes of lightning so frequent and so dazzling, that Philatetus began to imagine them the sallies of that fire that must consume the world. The long continuance of that dismal tempest, when the winds were so loud, as almost drowned the noise of the very thunder, and the showers so hideous, as almost quenched the lightning, ere it could reach his eyes confirmed Philatetus in his apprehensions of the day of judgment’s being at hand. Whereupon the consideration of his unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition, made him resolve and vow that if his fears were that night disappointed, all his future additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully employed. The morning came, and a serene cloudless sky returned, when he ratified his determination so solemnly, that from that day he dated his conversion.

That morning was December 31, 1641.

Boyle’s keen mind was continually drawn to science. At Oxford College and on his father’s estate, Boyle set up laboratories where he made painstaking inquiries into the properties of gases and other natural substances. At the root of all his discoveries was order. It was the basis of the empirical method of scientific inquiry he helped pioneer. He was among the first to demonstrate that substances are made up of atoms and the first to create a vacuum in which the effects of temperature and pressure on gases could be studied. He discovered Boyle’s Law: When temperature is held constant, the volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure applied to it.

But as devoted as he was to science, he was equally devoted to God. Boyle loved the Bible and believed nature was in concordance with theology. Although God would always know infinitely more than people do, he allowed them a glimpse into his perfection through the window of science. The ultimate goal of science, then, was to know and to worship God. But God also revealed himself to people in his Word. Boyle devoted his later life and much of his wealth to distributing the Bible, portions of which he arranged to have printed for the first time in Irish, Welsh, Indian, Turkish, and Malaysian.

Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, died on December 30, 1691, exactly fifty years after the thunderstorm that awakened him to faith in God.

Reflection

Robert Boyle saw no contradiction between true science and the Bible. He believed that the ultimate goal of science was to know and worship God. Does it surprise you to learn that a famous scientist was a committed Christian who revered the Bible?

The heavens tell of the glory of God. The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship.

Psalm 19:1