Science and Religion in the Chapel
The Science window deserves special comment. Because the Chapel is attempting
to argue, contra materialism, that faith and science are not in conflict, it is no surprise
that their harmony is one of the building’s special themes. In the early years of the College
as the curriculum expanded beyond Greek and Latin to the sciences, Walter Minto became one the
College’s first science professors. In his 1788 inaugural address he proclaimed:
“Instead of these sciences being hurtful to religion and
morality, they will be found to be of the greatest advantage to them… Indeed I consider
a student of… science as engaged in a continued act of devotion… This immense beautiful
and varied universe is a book written by the finger of Omnipotence and raises the admiration
of every attentive beholder.”
33The tradition continued with Princeton President James McCosh (the bronze statue in the
Marquand Transept) who insisted, contra Princeton Seminary's Charles Hodge, that evolution was no more harmful to one’s faith than the
law of gravitation. “We are not precluded from seeking and discovering a final cause, because
we have found an efficient cause,”34 McCosh declared.
The Chapel consciously seeks to preserve this venerable tradition. The most
evident example of this is the way the circles of the days of creation in window (view) are
mimicked by the circles in the Science window where great scientists unpack the mysteries latent
in creation. These include (central) Hippocrates, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and
around them from the top left are Aristarchos of Samos, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy,
Galileo (who also appears in the Great West Window), Pascal, Newton, Harvey, Pasteur, and
the famous professor Joseph Henry who taught at Princeton from 1832-1842.
