Latest / Theology Made Podcast / The Monk Who Discovered DNA (Before DNA)

Transcript

The Monk Who Discovered DNA (Before DNA) · Theology Made Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Today, we're going to look at the man who discovered DNA before DNA.
0:18
It's the mid-1800s in Bruno,
0:20
a small city in what is now the Czech Republic.
0:23
Inside the quiet walls of an Augustinian monastery,
0:26
the friar walks through the garden.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: His robes brush against rows of plants.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: He bends down, not to pray, but to pinch a pod from a pea plant.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: The garden is alive with the buzz of bees,
0:38
SPEAKER_00: the creak of wooden benches,
0:40
SPEAKER_00: and the rustle of leaves in the summer wind.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: But the friar is paying attention to something most of us would miss.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: The color of a flower, the smoothness or wrinkling of a pea.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: His name is Gregor Mendel.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: He will never travel the world,
0:58
SPEAKER_00: never deliver fiery lectures to packed halls,
1:01
SPEAKER_00: never have statues erected in his honor during his lifetime.
1:04
But here,
1:05
in this quiet garden,
1:07
he's about to uncover a secret hidden in plain sight.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Mendel discovered the basic laws of inheritance.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: the way traits pass from one generation to another.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: In other words, he found the key that unlocks modern genetics.
1:24
Darwin may have given us evolution,
1:25
but without Mendel,
1:27
we wouldn't understand heredity.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Without Mendel,
1:30
SPEAKER_00: we don't get DNA,
1:31
SPEAKER_00: we don't get the Human Genome Project,
1:33
SPEAKER_00: we don't get modern medicine as we know it.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Here's the paradox.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Mendel's discovery,
1:38
SPEAKER_00: the building blocks of biology,
1:40
SPEAKER_00: came not from a laboratory or from a cloister,
1:43
SPEAKER_00: not from a skeptic,
1:45
SPEAKER_00: from a friar who believed creation was ordered by the hand of God.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: And yet, no one listened.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: His research was published in 1866.
1:55
It was thorough,
1:57
brilliant,
1:58
and honestly decades ahead of its time,
2:00
and completely ignored.
2:02
It would take more than 30 years after his death for the world
2:05
to recognize what
2:06
SPEAKER_00: had happened in the monastery garden.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: So what do we do with a story like this?
2:14
SPEAKER_00: a story where the godfather of genetics wasn't a celebrity scientist,
2:19
SPEAKER_00: but a man who took vows of poverty,
2:21
SPEAKER_00: chastity,
2:22
SPEAKER_00: and obedience.
2:23
A man who believed that tending a garden could be an act of
2:26
both science and worship.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: If Charles Darwin was the celebrity scientist of the 19th century,
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Mendel was his opposite,
2:34
SPEAKER_00: the invisible one.
2:35
Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859,
2:39
and it spread like crazy.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: People argued about it in pubs, pulpits, and parliament.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Darwin became a household name.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: He was praised and hated, but he was always in the discussion.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Mendel,
2:51
he published his finding seven years later in 1866 in a small
2:55
local journal called
2:56
SPEAKER_00: The Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Wren.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: Hardly anyone subscribed.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Hardly anyone read it.
3:03
The most revolutionary insights in biology were buried in a
3:08
publication that was gathering dust.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: So why was he ignored?
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, timing for one.
3:15
Darwin's theory needed a mechanism of inheritance,
3:17
but Darwin himself didn't know about Mendel.
3:20
Mendel sent him a copy of his paper,
3:22
but there's no evidence that Darwin even opened it.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it sat on his desk, one more elephant among many's.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Maybe he just thought it was some fan mail.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: But then there was the problem of language.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Mendel wrote in the technical vocabulary of mathematics.
3:36
ratios,
3:37
probabilities,
3:38
numbers,
3:39
and biologists of his day weren't trained to think in that way.
3:42
He didn't fit the categories they had,
3:44
so they dismissed it as irrelevant.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: And the result is that Mendel lived and died in obscurity.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: His final years were spent as an abbot of the monastery,
3:53
SPEAKER_00: embroiled in bureaucratic disputes over taxes,
3:55
SPEAKER_00: church property,
3:57
SPEAKER_00: and not celebrated as a genius.
3:59
He passed away in 1884,
4:01
known as a faithful friar,
4:03
but not as the father of genetics.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: And it's a reminder, isn't it?
4:07
SPEAKER_00: That truth doesn't always win the spotlight.
4:09
That sometimes the most important insights go unrecognized for
4:13
a generation or two.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: And it makes you wonder,
4:16
SPEAKER_00: how many ideas,
4:16
SPEAKER_00: how many acts of faithfulness,
4:18
SPEAKER_00: how many seeds planted in quiet corners of the world are just waiting for
4:21
SPEAKER_00: rediscovery?
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And in Mendel's case,
4:23
SPEAKER_00: that rediscovery would come in the year 1900,
4:26
when three different scientists stumbled upon his forgotten
4:29
paper at almost the
4:30
SPEAKER_00: same time.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, the monk who bred peas became the godfather of genetics.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: But before we get there, we need to pause...
4:38
Because the rediscovery only makes sense if we first understand
4:43
where Mendel was
4:44
SPEAKER_00: doing his work and why.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a university laboratory.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a royal research institute.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: It was a monastery.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: If you picture the great laboratories of history,
4:54
SPEAKER_00: you might think of sleek steel benches,
4:56
SPEAKER_00: beakers bubbling with colored liquid,
4:58
SPEAKER_00: microscopes lined up under fluorescent lights,
5:01
SPEAKER_00: and if you're a millennial,
5:02
SPEAKER_00: you might have just pictured Bill Nye.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: But Mendel's laboratory, it was a monastery garden.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: The Augustinian Abbey of St.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Thomas in Reno wasn't exactly a cutting-edge research center.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: It was a place of prayer and study.
5:17
The friars rose early,
5:18
prayed the hours,
5:19
and lived within the rhythm of the church calendar.
5:22
And from the outside,
5:23
it looked like a world devoted only to the spiritual.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: And yet, it was precisely this environment that made his work possible.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: For one thing,
5:32
SPEAKER_00: monasteries valued learning,
5:34
SPEAKER_00: and the Augustinian order traced itself back to Augustine of Hippo,
5:38
SPEAKER_00: who taught that all truth is God's truth,
5:40
SPEAKER_00: and that the order we see in creation,
5:42
SPEAKER_00: it reflects the order of the Creator.
5:45
That belief made the natural world not just interesting,
5:49
but worth studying.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: And for another, monasteries were self-sustaining communities.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: They had gardens, fields, and animals.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: The friars were no strangers to agriculture.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Mendel didn't have to beg for access to research material.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: He had pea plants in abundance right outside his door.
6:03
But perhaps most importantly,
6:05
monasteries gave space for slow,
6:08
careful observation.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Science in the modern world can be frantic.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Deadlines, funding cycles, and competition for recognition.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: But Mendel's life was structured by bells, not by the race for tenure.
6:21
He had time to plant,
6:22
to wait,
6:23
to crossbead,
6:23
to count,
6:24
again and again,
6:26
season after season.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: It's almost poetic.
6:30
A life ordered by prayer became the soil in which ordered
6:33
patterns of creation were discovered.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: And here's the irony.
6:36
Centuries of critics have painted monasteries as places where
6:40
curiosity was
6:40
SPEAKER_00: stifled,
6:41
SPEAKER_00: where the church smothered science.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: But in Mendel's case, and in many others, the opposite was true.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: The monastery wasn't a cage.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: It was an incubator.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Newton worked at Cambridge.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: Darwin on his voyages with the Beagle.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Einstein at the patent office.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: Mendel?
6:57
SPEAKER_00: He worked in a cloister.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: The monastery garden?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Well,
7:00
it belongs on the same map of scientific discovery as the Royal
7:03
Society or the
7:04
SPEAKER_00: University of Cambridge.
7:06
And that raises the question,
7:08
what was it exactly that Mendel discovered in this unlikely
7:11
lab?
7:15
To really understand Mendel,
7:16
you have to understand the Augustinian lens he inherited.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Augustine of Hippo,
7:20
SPEAKER_00: the giant of early Christian thought,
7:22
SPEAKER_00: had taught centuries earlier that creation was not chaotic,
7:26
SPEAKER_00: but ordered.
7:28
He spoke of the hidden seeds of potential that God placed in
7:31
creation waiting to
7:32
SPEAKER_00: unfold according his design.
7:34
For Augustine,
7:35
studying the natural world wasn't a distraction from theology.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: It was another way of tracing the mind of God.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: And the theological DNA, it ran deep in the Augustinian order.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: By the time Mendel entered the monastery in the 1840s,
7:49
SPEAKER_00: that vision was woven into his intellectual world.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Creation reflects creator.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: Order reflects logos.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: Patterns in nature are not random quirks, but whispers of divine reason.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: So when Mendel looked at his pea plants,
8:00
SPEAKER_00: he wasn't just looking as a gardener or even a scientist.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: He was looking as a theologian of creation.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: If God is a God of order,
8:07
then even something as humble as a pea pod might carry with it
8:11
the fingerprint of
8:12
SPEAKER_00: divine logic.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: And notice how he studied them,
8:17
SPEAKER_00: not with frantic pace of a researcher chasing a grant,
8:20
SPEAKER_00: but with the patience of a monk shaped by prayer.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: He planted thousands of peas,
8:26
SPEAKER_00: year after year,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: meticulously counting wrinkled versus smooth,
8:30
SPEAKER_00: green versus yellow.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: He didn't just glance at the surface.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: He trusted that underneath, there was structure.
8:35
And that trust,
8:36
that conviction,
8:37
that order was really there,
8:39
was a theological conviction.
8:42
And it's here that Mendel's story forces us to rethink the
8:44
narrative we've been handed.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: That science flourished when it finally broke free from religion.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: No, Mendel's science wasn't in spite of his faith.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: It was because of it.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: There's an almost liturgical rhythm to his experiments.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: Plant, water, observe, record, repeat.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Like the Psalms,
9:02
SPEAKER_00: sung seven times a day,
9:04
SPEAKER_00: Mendel's work carried the cadence of patient repetition.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: His faith trained him for science.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: And out of that repetition came something world-shaking.
9:14
Patterns so simple that a schoolchild can draw them today with
9:17
a pencil and paper.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: And yet so profound, they underpin the entire science of genetics.
9:22
But before we get ahead of ourselves,
9:24
we need to enter the garden with him.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: Not just to see the friar, but to see the peas.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: Step into the monastery garden with Mendel.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Rows upon rows of pea plants line the soil.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: Green stalks reaching upward.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: Pods are swelling with potential.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Now, to most of us, they're just vegetables.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: But to Mendel, they are the mysteries that are waiting to be unlocked.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Why peas?
9:48
Because they're ordinary,
9:50
accessible,
9:51
and most importantly,
9:52
full of distinct,
9:54
visible traits.
9:56
Some peas are smooth,
9:58
others wrinkled,
9:59
some are yellow,
10:00
others are green.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Flowers can be purple or white,
10:04
and these clear binary differences made them the perfect canvas
10:08
for Mendel's
10:08
SPEAKER_00: questions.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: And here's what he did.
10:10
He began crossbreeding pea plants,
10:13
carefully transferring pollen from one to another.
10:16
And then he counted thousands of plants,
10:18
thousands of peas,
10:19
year after year.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Each plant was labeled,
10:22
SPEAKER_00: each generation recorded,
10:23
SPEAKER_00: and as the numbers piled up,
10:25
SPEAKER_00: patterns began to emerge.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Smooth peas didn't just appear randomly.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: They showed up in predictable ratios.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: The same with yellow and green.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: There was order beneath the chaos.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: Mathematical order.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: Mendel began to see what no one else had seen before.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Traits aren't blended like paint on a palette.
10:45
They are inherited as discrete units,
10:47
what he called factors,
10:48
what we now call genes.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And the ratios, they were astonishingly consistent.
10:54
You cross a pure smooth with a pure wrinkled,
10:58
and the first generation always came out smooth.
11:01
But breed that generation together and suddenly Brinkle
11:04
returned about one in four.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: But it always seemed to be one in four.
11:08
It was like listening to music and suddenly hearing the
11:10
underlying rhythm.
11:12
The surface looked random,
11:13
but underneath there was a beat,
11:15
steady and reliable.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: And from this, he articulated the basic laws of inheritance.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: Traits are passed down as distinct units.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: Some traits dominate over others.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: These units separated and recombine in predictable ways.
11:31
He had cracked the code of heredity decades before we even knew
11:34
DNA existed.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: But here's the tragedy.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Mendel presented his findings,
11:39
SPEAKER_00: carefully written out in his paper,
11:41
SPEAKER_00: complete with mathematical tables.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: He stood before his peers and shared what he had seen,
11:47
SPEAKER_00: and instead of amazement,
11:48
SPEAKER_00: he met confusion.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: The biologists of his day weren't ready for numbers.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: They thought in terms of fluids and essence, not probabilities.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: His insight was almost too simple, too clean to be believed.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: So his paper was filed away, his name forgot, and the garden went quiet.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: But here's where the story tilts towards theology again.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: Because Mendel's peas are not just a story of science.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: They're a parable.
12:13
The kingdom of God,
12:14
Jesus once said,
12:15
is like a seed,
12:16
small,
12:17
unnoticed,
12:18
buried in the soil.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: You don't see it at first.
12:20
You don't understand it,
12:21
but give it time,
12:23
and it grows into something that changes everything.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: Mendel's peas were that seed.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: When he finished his years of painstaking experiments,
12:32
SPEAKER_00: He must have thought he had stumbled onto something monumental.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: Imagine him carefully preparing his paper,
12:37
SPEAKER_00: rehearsing his presentation,
12:39
SPEAKER_00: walking into the room of fellow naturalists with a spark of excitement.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: And then, silence.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Blank stares,
12:46
SPEAKER_00: maybe polite nods,
12:48
SPEAKER_00: maybe confusion,
12:49
SPEAKER_00: but no breakthrough moment,
12:50
SPEAKER_00: no flood of recognition.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: His words fell like seeds on rocky soil.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's tempting to think of this as a failure.
12:59
But scripture teaches us that some of the most important truths
13:02
arrive in hiddenness.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: So small, it seems insignificant.
13:11
He compared it to yeast,
13:12
buried in flour,
13:13
invisible until it changes everything.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: The prophet Zechariah warned against despising the day of small things.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And Paul reminded the Corinthians that God often chooses what is hidden,
13:24
SPEAKER_00: weak,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: and overlooked to shame the wise.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: Mendel's peas, they fit right into that narrative.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: His discovery was buried in an obscure journal ignored for decades.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: It looked like nothing.
13:36
And yet,
13:37
it held the potential to transform the way humanity understood
13:40
life itself.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: And there's a theological comfort here.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Because many of us, we can feel like Mendel at times.
13:46
Faithful in small,
13:48
unseen corners of the world with little recognition to show for
13:51
it.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: We pray, we teach, we parent, we serve, we love.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: And it feels like no one notices.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: But hiddenness is not failure.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: It's often the place where God does his deepest work.
14:03
Mendel spent years bent over plants no one cared about,
14:06
counting peas one by one.
14:08
He died without a claim,
14:10
and yet his work became the foundation for modern genetics.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: And it makes you wonder, what hidden work is God doing through you?
14:18
What seeds are you planting that may not sprout until long
14:21
after you're gone?
14:22
SPEAKER_00: His story is a reminder that obscurity does not erase significance.
14:26
In fact,
14:27
sometimes,
14:28
God hides his greatest truths in the smallest,
14:31
most ordinary places.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: like a friar in a garden.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: And just as Jesus promised, what is hidden will one day be revealed.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: For Mendel, that revelation came in 1900.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Long after his death,
14:46
three scientists working in different countries rediscovered
14:49
his paper and suddenly
14:50
SPEAKER_00: realized they were holding the key to heredity.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: The friar became the father of genetics.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: It's the year 1900.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: Europe is buzzing with new scientific questions.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Darwin's theory of evolution has been stirring debate for over 40 years.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: But a nagging problem remains.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: How are traits passed down?
15:10
SPEAKER_00: If life evolves, what's the mechanism?
15:13
SPEAKER_00: And no one had a good answer.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: Enter three scientists.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: Hugo, they rise in the Netherlands.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Karl Kornens in Germany.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: and Erik von Schemach in Austria.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Working independently,
15:25
SPEAKER_00: each one begins experimenting with plants,
15:27
SPEAKER_00: and each one,
15:27
SPEAKER_00: to their astonishment,
15:28
stumbles across the same mathematical patterns Mendel had
15:31
discovered decades
15:32
SPEAKER_00: earlier.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: One by one, they realize, we're not the first to see this.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: They dig through old journals,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: dusty shelves,
15:39
SPEAKER_00: forgotten publications,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: and there it is,
15:42
SPEAKER_00: the 1866 paper by Mendel,
15:45
SPEAKER_00: tucked away in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Rund.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: The friar had already done the work.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: He had already mapped the laws of inheritance.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: They weren't making a new discovery.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: They were rediscovering his.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Almost overnight, Mendel went from obscurity to celebrity.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: The man who died as a humble abbot,
16:03
SPEAKER_00: embroiled in tax disputes and pastoral duties,
16:06
SPEAKER_00: was after death crowned the father of genetics.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: His name was now attached to the laws that govern heredity.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: Mendel's Laws.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: And there's an irony there.
16:17
During his lifetime,
16:18
his work was dismissed,
16:19
but once rediscovered,
16:20
it was indispensable.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Today,
16:22
high school biology students around the world draw peanut
16:25
squares and calculate
16:26
ratios without realizing they're echoing the work of a 19th
16:30
century friar and a
16:31
SPEAKER_00: monastery garden.
16:33
And in a way,
16:33
this rediscovery tells us something about vocation and legacy.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Mendel never lived to see his influence.
16:39
He planted seeds,
16:40
tended them faithfully,
16:40
recorded his results,
16:41
and died in relative obscurity.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: The harvest came later in a generation he never met.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: That's not just science.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: That's a parable of the Christian life.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Now, we've all heard of the stories before.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Science and religion are enemies.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Faith belongs in churches.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: Science belongs in the laboratories.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: And history is supposedly one long battle between the two.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Galileo silenced.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: Darwin attacked.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Religion holding back progress until science finally breaks free.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: But the story of Mendel tells us something very different.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: Here was a friar,
17:10
SPEAKER_00: a man of prayer,
17:11
SPEAKER_00: whose life was shaped by liturgy and the theology of Augustine.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't get much more religious than that.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: And it was precisely in that setting,
17:19
SPEAKER_00: a monastery garden,
17:21
SPEAKER_00: that he discovered the laws of heredity.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Not despite his faith, but because of it.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: The rhythms of prayer taught him patience.
17:28
The obscenity and conviction that creation was ordered gave him
17:31
confidence to
17:32
SPEAKER_00: search for patterns.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: The monastery gave him stability, land, and time to do his research.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: In other words, Mendel's faith didn't suffocate his science.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: It sustained it.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: And he isn't an outlier.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Throughout history,
17:45
the line between science and faith has been more blurred than
17:47
the myth suggests.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: Many of the pioneers of modern science were people of faith.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: Kepler, who said he was thinking God's thoughts after him.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Newton, who wrote more on theology than on physics.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: Faraday, a devout Christian who helped pioneer electromagnetism.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Mendo belongs in that lineage.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: The godfather of genetics was also a man who chanted psalms,
18:08
SPEAKER_00: celebrated the sacraments,
18:10
SPEAKER_00: and believed the world was full of divine rationality,
18:13
SPEAKER_00: just waiting to be uncovered.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Theology Made.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: If this episode helped you think a little deeper,
18:27
go ahead and hit like or follow on whatever platform you're on
18:30
and maybe share it
18:30
SPEAKER_00: with a friend who'd enjoy the conversation too.