The Kairos Journal – an online resource for pastors — includes the following quotation with an example of a man committed to Christ and science.  Count this as at least one piece of evidence that those who hold to a Christian worldview are, likewise, able to make significant contributions to modern science. It’s interesting that Leeuwenhoek’s Christian principles led him to superior hypotheses than those presented by other “scientists” of his day.

Seeing God through a Microscope—Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723)

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek is commonly regarded as the father of modern microscopy. A devout Dutch Calvinist, he marveled at God’s creative wisdom in fashioning the organisms he was observing—his “little animalcules,” he called them. To this forefather of modern science, the idea that life could “spontaneously generate” from a piece of rotten flesh (or a “primordial soup,” for that matter) was absurd. Creatures of such magnificent complexity could only have come from the hand of God.

The preceding kinds of experiments I have repeated many times with the same success, and in particular with some of this sediment which had been kept in my study for about five months. . .  From all these observations, we discern most plainly the incomprehensible perfection, the exact order, and the inscrutable providential care with which the most wise Creator and Lord of the Universe had formed the bodies of these animalcules, which are so minute as to escape our sight, to the end that different species of them may be preserved in existence.¹

Footnotes :

1	Abraham Schierbeek, ed. Measuring the Invisible World: The Life and Works of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (New York: Aberlard-Schuman, 1959), 171.

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