Among my many joys in apologetics ministry is to introduce modern counter-intuitive ideas most especially to evangelicals who have a negative bias against anything secular. One of these ideas is the integral relationship between faith and science, especially big science -- the era of Newton, Galileo and Copernicus.
Notice that those three are engineers. Engineers are concerned with mechanisms (an idea pointed out by Steve Fuller -- philosopher-sociologist and Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the Department of sociology at University of Warwick, England). These were people along with others like Faraday, Boyle, Brahe, Kepler, and Maxwell who saw in nature mechanisms that are worthwhile and beneficial to discover and investigate. Once discovered they mapped out laws and also mathematical computations that would give an account of the phenomenon.
Notice also, that those scientists and engineers were professing Christian. They believed that nature’s mechanism is a worthwhile discovery because it was not only looking into the how God's mind worked but how it can be understood rationally.
Why believe nature is rational? Because the Creator is a rational being. Albert Einstein hints at the idea of a divinely-ordained rational universe: “I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason." In the era of the big sciences, scientists were more explicit about the relationship of science and their belief in God. Robert Boyle said, “God would not have made the universe as it is unless he intended us to understand it.” Sabi din ni Louis Pasteur, “A bit of science distances one from God, but much science nears one to Him . . . The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator."
So there you go. The engineers of modern science looked at nature and they saw a mechanism placed there by God. In the Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the Holy Grail of Newtonian physics, Isaac Newton wrote this, “Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.” This was the Newton who in one of his journals wrote, "Yet one thing secures us what ever betide, the scriptures assures us that the Lord will provide.”
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