Marie Curie, her scientific fellows and God

Last weekend, amid the sound of nearby fireworks, I talked to a friend in a Cape Girardeau coffee shop who began discussing Marie Curie, the renowned Polish-French scientist, who died on America's Independence Day, July 4, 1934.

I suppose Curie's death date is the reason the discoverer of two elements in the periodic table came to mind in our conversation.

My friend told me Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person in history to win the Nobel twice and managed it in two scientific fields: physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.

Even the most knowledgeable people can't know everything -- and Madame Curie did not know it all.

She used to carry bottles of radium, atomic number 88, and polonium, atomic number 84, in the pocket of her lab coat, my friend told me -- a fact biographies of her life verify -- and continuous exposure to those radioactive elements shortened her life.

Curie passed at 66 of aplastic anemia after spurning the danger such materials posed.

Even today, most of Curie's papers and books remain radioactive and are stored in lead-lined boxes, which the curious may only view after donning a protective suit and signing a liability waiver.

Even the brilliant among us have limits and do not possess all knowledge.

Religion and scientists

In an illuminating 2018 article in Forbes magazine -- "Did History's Most Famous Scientists Believe in God?" -- we read Curie's own theological perspective was akin to one of her scientific contemporaries, German-born Albert Einstein.

Curie, the daughter of an atheist father and a Catholic mother, did not reject belief in God but admitted to agnosticism -- a position mirrored somewhat by Einstein, who himself rejected the notion of a personal deity and thought intercessory prayer foolish. Yet the man best known for the equation, e=mc squared, did not claim the mantle of atheism. Einstein wrote that he embraced "Spinoza's God."

Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch philosopher, wrote that God is "a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence," adding, "whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God," a notion usually interpreted to mean God is identical with the universe.

If you invited most church people to examine Spinoza's statements, they might not cause alarm, but orthodox theologians of the Judeo-Christian tradition would no doubt disagree. God, the theologians would probably argue, stands apart from the created universe -- which the book of Genesis attests.

England's Charles Darwin, writer of "Origin of the Species" in 1859, held more conventional religious views.

A believer in what he called the "Abrahamic God," Darwin, whose grave my wife and I once visited in London's Westminster Abbey, penned the following in 1879: "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God."

Sir Isaac Newton, the Englishman who gave the world the three laws of motion, the bedrock principle of modern physics, was a firm believer in the idea of God who self-identified as a theist yet did not accept the concept of the Christian Trinity -- Father, Son, Holy Spirit -- as divine. Newton, who died in 1727, is buried near Darwin inside the Abbey.

Galileo, the 16th century Italian astronomer and physicist whose life predated all the men identified so far, was tried by the Inquisition, found guilty of heresy and forced to recant.

Despite a Church-enforced house arrest, which lasted the remainder of his life, Galileo's writing demonstrated his theist tendencies.

To wit: "I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

The insightful Forbes article, after examining the views of Curie, Einstein, Darwin, Newton and Galileo, includes a summary statement which makes sense to this writer and forms the conclusion of this essay.

"The most famous [scientific] figures all have nuanced religious views that tend toward a belief in a higher power. Some of those views faltered over time [e.g., Curie] and the others are unconventional but are theist beliefs nonetheless. So, yes, it is possible to be a religious individual and be a scientist. The two are not mutually exclusive."