It is not a fun time to be a person who has studied both history and science, and even less fun for a person who has a specific interest in the history of science.

E is currently studying the Renaissance in her world history class, and over the course of helping her study, I was reminded how interesting it is to learn about people learning about things.

I find it interesting the levels of persecution, including death sentences, that people faced over the centuries for pursuing science. Frequently, this persecution came from the dominant religious order of the day, or at least from religious zealots who feared that their power might be diminished in the face of scientific discovery.

Another fun fact, though, is that many important scientific discoveries came out of the scholarly pursuits of those in religious orders.

Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and an Augustinian monk, is probably one of the most obvious examples. Many religious orders prize education and discovery as part of their mission. I remember my father, a “reformed” Catholic, and late in life Agnostic, telling me, as we toured potential colleges, that I could “never go wrong with a Jesuit education. They knew their stuff.”

I have had this on my mind a lot lately, as I’ve seen more and more Internet arguments starting over statements like, “We don’t need vaccines, God made our bodies perfectly the way they are.” That’s the nutshell argument; substitute in any other public health measure for “vaccines,” as needed.

I find this argument particularly irritating because when I was pregnant with A, aware of his congenital heart defect, and searching for ways to help him, one particularly unhelpful person told me that I should just trust God to take care of him. And, by this, they meant that I should stop seeking medical interventions and just ask for thoughts and prayers.

I have puzzled over that argument since that day, and even more so, as I see it on the rise again. I do not understand why we cannot consider a surgeon talented enough to perform a lifesaving surgery or a scientist capable of figuring out how a vaccination works as instruments of God or answers to prayers.

Bodies are seldom born perfectly, or even if they are, it usually doesn’t take long for them to need some kind of intervention. By the time I was 6, I needed the divine assistance of a pair of glasses. Imagine our ancestors who didn’t have that benefit. With my eyesight as bad as it is, I would have been forced to be a vegetarian, as I couldn’t have hit a woolly mammoth standing 20 feet in front of me. Glasses as we know them didn’t exist until about 1300, although lenses had been around for a lot longer.

Imagine the process that it must have taken to understand that grinding and shaping glass one way made close up things bigger, while doing it another way would make things farther away more visible. Today, we can see things as small as atoms or millions of miles away, in other galaxies. It’s really kind of remarkable. We didn’t get there through thoughts and prayers. We got there through people gifted with curiosity, creativity and brilliance.

I have often debated this subject with friends, and with people that I know have a profound faith. One of the wisest responses that I got from a faith leader was that she thought: “If God gave us a problem, he probably gave us a solution. We just have to be willing to find it.” Put slightly more tritely, “God helps those who help themselves.”

Science isn’t perfect, but part of the scientific method is learning from past mistakes. I was frequently questioned about how I could pursue a degree in biology and in history, two such separate disciplines, and yet for me, they couple together so perfectly. We can’t understand where we are going until we understand where we have been. Sometimes, it can be helpful to reexamine that road, and other times, you need to take the leap of faith and forge a new one.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News