This essay originally appeared on the website The Ministry Theorem at Calvin Theological Seminary along with a number of similar essays written by other scientists. This essay and the others are also part of the book Delight in Creation: Scientists Share Their Work with the Church, Deborah Haarsma and Scott Hoezee, eds (Center for Excellence in Preaching, 2012).
I am married to a scientist — to be specific, an experimental physicist (which I’d like to think is the very best kind). For more than 15 years now I’ve accompanied Catherine through a life in physics, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress that began in the Slough of Graduate School, continued through the Testing Fields of the Job Search and the harrowing of the Vale of Tenure, and is now wending its way through the Elysian Fields of Mid-Career Teaching, Research, and Administration. Along the way, just like Christian in Bunyan’s classic, she has encountered plenty of both helpful and dangerous characters, some reassuringly metaphorical and others all too literal. And I, like Christian’s friend Hopeful, have tried to be a faithful companion, though often I’ve been able to do little more than cheer or wince at the twists and turns of a life in science.
There’s a serious point in my playful invocation of Pilgrim’s Progress. Like many of the most complex human endeavors — parenting, farming, becoming a Christian — the life of a scientist is not just an “occupation,” something that occupies us for a while and might then be followed by something entirely different. Being a scientist is as much about being as doing, as much about a particular way of being formed as a person as it is a set of activities or even skills. Training in science is induction not so much into a particular worldview (though it includes absorbing plenty of the kind of cognitive presuppositions that that word suggests) as it is a kind of posture or stance toward the world, toward one’s work, and toward one’s fellow human beings, both scientists and non-scientists. And the life of a scientist is a journey, one freighted with ultimate concerns and laden with values. It is a journey into a set of virtues, the habits and dispositions that make one a person of a particular kind of character.
When we talk about faith and science, we tend to focus on the cognitive content of both endeavors, the truth claims and worldviews that animate these two crucial dimensions of modern human life. These are important matters, and I don’t at all mean to diminish them. At the same time, there are inevitable limits to what any pastor can do to constructively integrate the knowledge content of science — so vast and rapidly expanding that even scientists cannot pretend to be expert in anything but a tiny portion — with the content of Christian faith. But there is another way to approach faith and science which I believe might well be more within reach of most pastors, and more essential to their job description than being deeply literate in the latest scientific discoveries and theories — and that is simply to attend to, and prayerfully support and encourage, the scientific life itself as a vocation that can reflect the image of God and be a place for working out one’s own salvation.
So here is what I wish our pastors — and fellow Christians — knew about the life of a working scientist.
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