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Religious faith mixed with scientific wonder

Two important examples are relevant to the question of whether faith can adversely/positively affect attempts at scientific reasoning.

Pasteur came up with a valid way of disproving spontaneous generation. His motivation for coming up with argument might well have been the desire to disprove Lemarkian evolution, and he have objected to that because of Pasteur's convictions as a Catholic. Yet he came up with a repeatable experiment (placed a piece of meat under a glass with a twisted opening so that air could circulate in and out of the area around the meat but flies could not figure out how to enter that area and hence could not deposit larvae or whatever on the meat)

Kepler saw the universe as a divinely instituted mathematical harmony. Looking at it this way was sufficient (but not necessary) to cause him to look for mathematical symmetries where others saw complex patterns. As a result he replaced the complex explanations of the oribts offered by Copernicans (a combination of circles with post-Ptoemaic epicycles added to them) with ellipses.


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