As an unbecoming trend started by Charles Darwin who used science to further his atheism agenda, an increasing number of atheists also find it convenient to use science to attack the Christian belief. Public figures like Bill Nye (the science guy), Richard Dawkins (Foundation for Reason and Science) and Phil Plait (Slate contributor) have openly spoken out that Christians are science deniers and hinderance of scientific progress. But atheists do not attack naturalists, taoists, buddhists, and muslims like that. Their attacks are aimed squarely at Christianity.
It turns out that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is unscientific, and Christianity has been a proponent of scientific progress since the days of Roman Catholic Church.
Over the years, I have also come across some well-known contemporary science or engineering figures who are Christians, although the fact that they are Christians are sometimes lesser known. I will add them to this list from time to time, and I welcome suggestions.
D. Richard Hipp
Best known as the creator of SQLite, a widely-used open-source embedded database that can be found on every computer and smart phone. SQLite comes with a unique “blessing” license that reads,
May you do good and not evil
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Hipp professes that he is a Christian on his Twitter profile.
Destin Sandlin
Best known for his YouTube channel Smarter Every Day, he makes videos covering a variety of topics such as the cognitive bias of bike riding, arrow bending of the archer’s paradox, how Earth rotation influences toilet swirling, glass tension in the shattering of Prince Rupert’s drop. At the end of his videos, he gives a reference to a Bible verse that is relevant to the topic at hand.
Donald Knuth
Professor Emeritus of computer science at Stanford University best known for his multi-volumes book The Art of Computer Programming as well as his TeX and METAFONT computer typesetting software used to produce camera-ready prints of his books. The books are critically acclaimed to be must-have reference books on the shelf of any self-respecting computer scientist, and the typesetting software is widely used by the computer science and mathematics community in the academia to publish papers. Knuth gave a series of public lectures at MIT about the intersection of Christian theology and computer science, and the lecture transcript is published as Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.
Francis Collins
Before becoming the Director of the National Institute of Health in 2009, Collins directed the National Human Genome Research Institute for 16 years and successfully carried out the Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire DNA sequence from the human genome and identified the functions of these genes. His book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief describes his conversion to Christianity and how he reconciles faith and science with his belief in theistic evolution.
Katharine Hayhoe
Climate scientist and associate professor of political science at Texas Tech University, listed by the Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2014 , Hayhoe directs the Climate Science Center which collects scientific data about global warming and develops comprehensive solutions to address climate change. Her book (coauthored with her husband) A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions explains that it is a Christian obligation to understand global warming and fight against climate change.
Larry Wall
Father of the Perl programming language which is consistently ranked within the top 20 programming languages in the TIOBE index and widely distributed with Linux operating systems as well as Mac OS X, Larry Wall has spoken about his Christian faith in several occasions, most prominently in an online Slashdot interview in 2002. In the interview, he explained that the Perl philosophy of “There’s more than one way to do it” is a direct result of observing how God the creator “is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways.”
Jonathan Kew
We can all thank Jonathan Kew, among others, for Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which enriches websites with custom fonts delivered over the web to visitors without requiring the fonts to be first installed by the user on their computer. Kew is also well-known for XeTeX, a typesetting system that extends Knuth’s TeX (see above) with Unicode support and the ability to use advanced font features. Kew also contributed to Arabic support and the bidirectional algorithm in Unicode.
Kew did some of this work while working for SIL International, a Christian faith-based non-profit that digitizes rare minority languages and facilitates Bible translation to these languages. This career path was defined by his commitment in the Chrstian faith. More about this can be read from an interview he did with the TeX Users Group.
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Steele is known for his work in the computer languages Common LISP, Scheme, and Java. He was a panelist that discussed “Creativity, Spirituality, and Computer Science” with Knuth as the final part of the Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About lecture series (see above). He discussed his faith in The Veritas Forum at Harvard University.
His Ph.D. dissertation The Definition and Implementation of A Computer Programming Language based on Constraints has the following dedication:
This work is dedicated to the greator glory of God Almighty.
His father Guy L. Steele, Sr. served as Pastor around the country.
Fred Brooks
Brooks invented the 8-bit byte and event driven interrupt I/O while working as an architect on IBM Stretch. He is a Turing Award winner in 1999 for his contributions.
Brooks is best known for his book, The Mythical Man Month, which stipulates that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” drawing from his experience working at IBM. It was also at IBM where Brooks was reintroduced to Christ by Gerrit Blaauw, a fellow doctoral student advised by Howard Aiken at Harvard and coworker on the Stretch team. Brooks recounted this story in an interview by the Computer History Museum.
Outside of his professional life, Brooks taught Sunday School at Orange United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill for over 50 years. Brooks passed away in November 18, 2022.