A masterful and educational history of the most famous Christian biologists

Niels Arboel’s The Wonder of Creation: The Most Famous Christian Biologists in History is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Of all the natural sciences, perhaps biology is most often seen as at odds with traditional religious faith. Yet, as Arboels demonstrates, our current knowledge of living organisms and the evolutionary processes that make them what they are would be incomplete without major contributions by Christians.

In 1998, the National Academy of Sciences conducted an often-cited survey revealing that only 10 percent of the members of this elite body believed in God and life after death. Among biologists, only 5 percent profess those beliefs. By contrast, 81 percent of Americans believe in God, meaning that the nation’s leading biologists are sixteen times less likely to profess faith in a Creator than the average citizen.

In the introduction to his fine book, Arboel, who is a Danish biologist with more than thirty years of teaching experience at the senior high school and university levels and a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists, describes four views of the relationship between science and religion: the conflict, independence (echoing the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that science and faith are “non-overlapping magisteria”), dialogue, and integration models.

Arboel argues that the independence model has been “by far the most dominant one for more than a century.” As someone who was a college student in the late 2000s, when authors from the “new atheist” movement spearheaded by Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins sold millions of books claiming that Darwin made it possible, as Dawkins himself said, to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist,” the dominance of this peaceful model seems optimistic. However, as Arboel proves, it is absolutely impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist without acknowledging the contributions of numerous Christian biologists.

The Wonder of Creation consists of twenty biographical sketches. Their protagonists have all made indispensable contributions to biology and were Christians. Yet, in every other sense, they are quite different. Arboels’ subjects include Catholics, Protestants, and one Orthodox Christian (Theodosius Dobzhansky). Two are on their way to becoming Catholic saints (the author’s fellow Dane, Niels Stensen, known in English as Nicolas Steno, was beatified, while Jérôme Lejeune has been declared Venerable), while Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was a Freemason (Arboels explains that Fleming was a Scottish Presbyterian and that the Protestant churches are not as wary of masonry as Catholicism).

One remarkable feature of the book is its non-polemical tone. Given the numerous works by “new atheist” scientists like Dawkins or Victor J. Stenger and the numerous ripostes to their bestsellers, one would expect a work of apologetics. Yet Arboels’ commentary is minimal, limited to the introduction and epilogue. This is a major strength, as it lets the evidence amassed by the author speak for itself; this is more convincing than succumbing to the temptation of overly subjective interpretations of history.

Nor is The Wonder of Creation a work of hagiography. Arboels does not overlook the embarrassing weaknesses of some of his subjects: for example, he notes that Carl Linnaeus, whose classification of living organisms is found in every high school science textbook ever, employed a similar taxonomy with respect to humans, believing that white Europeans were biologically superior to other races; such unsavory views were shared by two other protagonists of Arboel’s book, the Swiss American biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz as well as the French father of paleontology Georges Cuvier.

On the other hand, Arboel proves that scientists do not need to be smug and detached prisoners of the ivory tower, but can combine a life of study with practicing love for one’s neighbor. He points out that Nicolas Steno, who converted from Lutheranism in Italy, was ordained a Catholic priest and later bishop. Then, he became something like a Scandinavian St. Francis, living a radically austere life, wearing a shabby cloak, condemning financial abuses among the clergy, and giving the vast majority of his income to the poor.

Meanwhile, Jérôme Lejeune, the French pediatrician and geneticist who discovered that trisomy (an extra copy of chromosome 21) causes Down syndrome, did not rest on his laurels upon making this groundbreaking discovery. On the contrary, Lejeune was devoted to his patients and tirelessly campaigned to make their lives better. He also publicly rallied against abortion, which many consider the “solution” to Down syndrome. This, as he realized, was probably why he never won the Nobel Prize. Whereas the vain pursuit of the glories of this world is common in academia, Lejeune was a rare example of a far-sighted scholar who was attracted more to his eternal reward.

The ghost of Charles Darwin casts a long shadow over The Wonder of Creation. Arboels explains that Christian objections to his theory of evolution (much more widespread among Protestants than Catholics) had less to do with a literalist reading of the Book of Genesis and more with the notion that a biological process based on randomness seems to leave little room for a Creator.

Yet Arboels makes it clear that theistic evolutionists have been around since, well, Darwin himself. They include Asa Gray, Darwin’s primary ally in American academia and a devout Presbyterian. Arboels notes that Darwin’s agnosticism had less to do with his scientific discoveries and more with the problem of theodicy (the reconciliation of a loving God with the presence of evil and suffering), as the English naturalist was heartbroken after seeing his young children die. Yet Darwin gave explicit approval to Gray’s synthesis of evolution and Creation. Ironically, the most anti-Darwinian of Arboel’s protagonists, Louis Agassiz, was not a fundamentalist Bible thumper but a rather progressive and unorthodox Protestant drifting towards Unitarianism.

Furthermore, Darwin’s theory of evolution would be incomplete without the contributions of several Christians. Foremost among them is Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Augustinian monk who discovered the basic principles of genetics. Neo-Darwinism is the synthesis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s findings, and one of the major authors of this synthesis was the Russian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, another of Arboels’ subjects. Whereas many have seen Darwinian survival of the fittest as at odds with a benevolent God, Dobzhansky offered a response to theodicy by synthesizing Christian theology and evolutionary biology. According to Dobzhansky, humans are given freedom, thanks to which they can either do evil or good. Similarly, nature is given freedom, and when nature chooses good, it leads to evolutionary progress.

Is it simply non-causative correlation that so many leading biologists were, indeed, believing Christians? Arboels’ book suggests a negative response to this question. Referring to Stanley Jaki, Arboels argues that while Christian Europe was by no means the only great civilization, the Scientific Revolution took place there, and not in India, China, or the Muslim Middle East, because the Judeo-Christian worldview eschewed pantheism and distinguished between the Creator and His creation, which has independent agency.

Furthermore, Arboels demonstrates that many scientists’ views of their work were guided by their Christian beliefs. Lejeune’s work in discovering the cause of Down syndrome was an impulse for him to serve God by serving the least of his brothers (Matthew 25:40). Fleming’s Presbyterian upbringing, which emphasized predestination, convinced him that God had created him to discover penicillin for the betterment of humanity. Meanwhile, Louis Pasteur, who discovered that germs cause disease and the basic principles of vaccination, argued that “chance favors only the prepared mind” and that to make the world better, we need to take the world in our hands and fulfill God’s will.

Meanwhile, the Christian faith of many of the protagonists of Arboel’s book helped them to reject the materialist superstitions common among scientists. For example, the recently deceased primatologist Jane Goodall, laureate of the prestigious Templeton Prize for the reconciliation of faith and science, did not share the British zoologist Desmond Morris’ conviction, common to scientific materialism, that Homo sapiens is merely a “naked ape.” On the contrary, Goodall, who helped us discover that chimpanzees are more complex than previously thought (she was the first scientist to observe that chimps are capable of making tools), believed that although apes are capable of advanced emotions, they cannot commit evil or pure altruism like we can. This is consistent with the Christian notion that humans are the only creatures (apart from angels) with free will.

Likewise, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris rejected the notion that consciousness is simply an illusion caused by the firing of neurons and that the only intellectual difference between humans and earthworms is that the former have more evolved brains. Instead, he argued that the mind and the brain are distinct, consistent with the view that humans, unlike the beasts, were created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).

The Wonder of Creation is a fantastic resource for Christian science educators and for anyone interested in the history of science. I wish the book could have been published sometime between 2006 and 2010, at the peak of the new atheists’ popularity. A debate between Niels Arboel and Richard Dawkins on the relationship between faith and science would have been quite a spectacle.

The Wonder of Creation: The Most Famous Christian Biologists in History
By Niels Arboel
Queenwood Media Productions, 2025
Hardcover, 507 pages

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