JAMES IS A PLASMA SCIENTIST and an evangelical Christian who believes his work affirms his faith and vice versa. When we met, he talked about his scientific work as a spiritual calling, and he believes his spirituality has encouraged him to continue this work. He says, “I need science, from my perspective as a scientist, to then make me understand that the scientifically impossible makes Jesus Christ’s resurrection so extraordinary and substantiates his claim that he is the Son of God and that he died for our sins and is resurrected just as we have hope in the resurrection.”1
James says his coworkers seem accepting of his faith. “I have a poster on my office wall that says, ‘Slow me down, Lord,’ things like that, and sometimes I get kidded about the fact that sometimes I should read the poster on my wall when I work too hard,” he says, laughing. James also considers himself fortunate to have attended churches where his scientific work has not been an issue with leaders or congregants. He recounts several instances of his pastor speaking about the relationship between science and faith from the pulpit, and even inviting him and other scientists in the congregation to serve on panel discussions in Sunday school classes or at other churches. James addresses his scientific work directly in his discussions with other congregants and says they have been very receptive to this dialogue.
James is part of two different communities: a community of scientists and a community of Christians. Talking with him reminded me that attitudes toward science and faith are established, separately and differently, within these communities—and these attitudes in turn have an impact on the relationship between the two communities. Core virtues are also established within these communities, and we learn the core virtues and values of our communities, and strategies to practice them, from the people around us. We might think of virtues as the glue that holds well-functioning communities together. Scientists who are Christians have the potential to be special because they have developed both scientific virtues and Christian virtues, sometimes recognizing similarities, sometimes feeling tension, and sometimes bringing the virtues of one community to the other.
Christians in Science
Still, many Christian scientists say they feel marginalized in the scientific community. Some I interviewed say they feel scrutinized by colleagues who seem to see faith as a limiting factor for scientific understanding. Some also report feeling uncomfortable in their workplace due to the negative attitudes and stereotypes they feel some colleagues hold toward faith and people of faith.
When I conducted a study of US scientists who work outside of universities in research and development, I found that evangelical scientists were much more likely than other evangelicals to believe scientists are hostile toward religion.2 Many evangelical scientists believe that nonreligious scientists are suspicious of them because some scientists think that evangelical faith—even more than other forms of Christian faith—has the potential to compromise scientific work and rigor. My interviews with nonreligious scientists support this view. A graduate student in biology, for example, described an evangelical Christian colleague as
all about God all the time, and Jesus; all Jesus all the time. She is very vocal about it and often she will say how God is great or like, “Thank you, Jesus,” for like doing blah, blah, blah thing. . . . [Scientists who are Christians] are very quiet because they know their colleagues either will ridicule them or will question their scientific work and their objectivity, . . . but I definitely see that there’s a conflict in how she’s able to understand things. Her work is good for what it is, but it’s never going to get past some level of reflection because of [her faith].3
In my experience studying scientists’ attitudes toward religion, it is extremely uncommon for a Christian scientist to talk this much about faith in the scientific workplace. But what is typical is for nonreligious scientists to feel like the faith of evangelical Christian scientists might compromise their scientific work. And conversations like the one with the scientist above simply confirm such stereotypes.
For example, one evangelical professor of physics said, “I do find that it is extremely common to be in casual conversation with my professional colleagues and they say incredibly ignorant and stereotyping things about people of faith.”4 A scientist who works in genetics said he has encountered the perception that Christians in science are foremost trying to spread their faith as opposed to focusing on their studies, and in his perception, some non-Christian scientists view evangelical scientists in particular as using their positions in the scientific community to “dismantle secular ideas from within the vanguard of academia.”5 Other scientists who are Christians say that such attitudes might exist because scientists who are not religious “have just never encountered a Christian that can make sense to them and that they trust.”6 Because nonreligious scientists do not personally know a large group of evangelicals who are scientists—or even those evangelical Christians who are friendly to scientific ideas—such stereotypes continue.
The findings from one of my studies show that a sizeable minority of US evangelical scientists—about 32 percent—have perceived religious discrimination in the workplace.7 This is a good deal higher than the 21 percent of evangelical non-scientists who reported religious discrimination in the workplace. My survey of academic scientists also revealed that Protestant and Muslim scientists in the US are more likely than other US scientists to feel they have experienced religious discrimination in the workplace;8 in fact, 40 percent of Protestant scientists in the US say they have experienced some degree of religious discrimination in the workplace. Among Muslim scientists, the share was even higher at 57 percent. For comparison, only 11 percent of non-Protestant and non-Muslim scientists reported the same. My colleague Chris Scheitle and I found that, among physicists, the higher rate of religious discrimination experienced by Protestants and Muslims is related to their higher levels of religious practice. In biology, however, where the tensions between science and religion have been more public and prominent—around topics such as evolution and human embryonic stem cell research—we found that “simply identifying with certain religious traditions might violate the professional norm and move a biologist from ‘us’ to ‘them.’”9
I have also met evangelical and non-evangelical Christian scientists who say they have not experienced overt discrimination as Christians working in science, and yet they feel their colleagues treat or look at them somewhat differently due to their faith. As one scientist told me, “There are some people here who view my Christian faith as a curiosity, maybe an oddity, hard to say.”10
Like James, several Christian scientists say their faith does not often come up at work. A number of Christian scientists say that many of their colleagues continue to be completely unaware or surprised that some of their colleagues are religious. An evangelical professor of physics told me, “It’s amazing the degree to which I think the vast majority of professional scientists do not realize that they actually do know some people who are people of deep religious faith.”11
Some Christian scientists are pleasantly surprised at how nonreligious scientists react to their faith when it’s discovered, leading these Christian scientists to re-examine perceptions they have of how the scientific community judges faith. “I’ve been surprised at how gracious people can be,” says Sarah, a biology researcher, “and I think I have to take a lot of my own medicine, where I tell religious folks that scientists aren’t out to get them.”12 When Christian scientists discover that not all of their nonreligious science colleagues are hostile to people of faith, then they may begin to talk more about their faith.
Scientists in Church Communities
Research shows that trust in science has steadily declined over the past thirty years among people who regularly attend church,13 yet I have found in my research that Christians in the US tend to be more skeptical of scientists than of science itself. Christians often talk to me about being more worried about the agenda and aims of scientists than about the implications of scientific findings. According to one scientist I interviewed, people in churches sometimes expect that scientists “browbeat Christians with science. Then that makes Christians understandably upset, and then [Christians] themselves begin to equate science as being something that is at the heart of disproving their faith.”14
One evangelical scientist who teaches at an Ivy League school speaks of a “rich history of partnership between science and faith that often goes ignored.” He said that “it’s more scientists and people of faith” who are at odds. He explained, “I think there is a fear there that perhaps there’s an agenda or an attempt to kind of marginalize people of faith, and I think there are things that have happened in our history . . . that have brought us to this point where there’s this pretty deep chasm that separates us.”15
Some Christians feel that scientists specifically aim to disprove Christianity through science. One evangelical Christian woman I interviewed said, “I think that [scientists] would be more apt to find a bone in the ground and say this is the missing link, this is what proves evolution, we can finally shut up those rotten Christians.”16 I have met Christian parents who worry their children will encounter scientists who will discourage their faith, and in one of my surveys, 25 percent of evangelical Christians said they place “hardly any” confidence in general in colleges and universities.17
Sarah, a biologist who studies evolution and climate change, grew up in a faith community that told her she had to choose between being a Christian and being a scientist.18 While she was undeterred from pursuing science, she suspects that others in her church were led to believe that being a scientist was not a possible path for a committed Christian, especially a Christian woman. She said many of her fellow believers view her as an anomaly and find it hard to fathom how she reconciles her work and her faith. A Christian professor of physics similarly told me in a sort of resigned way, “I have never experienced support for being a scientist at church, but then again, I don’t think at most churches that anyone really experiences support for their scientific work.”19
I have met some scientists, however, who do feel a more collaborative relationship between faith and science within their churches. Many scientists who felt their church supported their scientific work offered possible reasons for this attitude, such as church size, congregational makeup, and an environment that encouraged questioning and discussion. One biologist I interviewed told me he feels valued in his church and that its leaders appreciate hearing his perspective. “I tend to be deployed as the ‘science guy’ here,” he said, “which is to say when somebody needs a talk on science and Christian faith, whether it’s a student [in a campus] ministry or Sunday school session, . . . they will ask me, ‘Will you give a talk on this?’”20 A professor of medicine similarly described how his fellow congregants value his scientific work and perspective. When they learn he is a scientist, they “actually really embrace it. They’re actually heartened by it, and they’re interested, and . . . they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re a doctor and you’re a believer, you do science and you believe that? That’s really cool. . . . Tell me more about what you do.’”21
Jaime, an evolutionary biologist, grew up in a church with positive attitudes toward science. “My impression of pastors and Sunday school teachers was that their view was that there were a lot of ways to glorify God,” she said, “and understanding the world [as a scientist] was a way to glorify God.” Her current church is “very supportive” of her scientific work and has come to view her as an expert and resource, asking her to lead Sunday school classes and youth classes for congregants in order to explain scientific topics and dispel stereotypes. To be encouraged in this way in her church is extraordinary, she said, and a bit unusual compared with other churches she has attended. She is not quite sure what motivates her specific faith community to want to learn more, yet she recalls one occasion in which her pastor asked her to lead a Sunday school class on evolution. “The parents of the confirmation students were feeling very stressed out that their children were being told in school that evolution was problematic for religious people,” she remembered. “And so these . . . thirteen- and fourteen-year-old people were buying into their school’s perspective that if they want to be a scientist, . . . they might find religious faith more challenging.”22
Other Christian scientists told me they believe their church community could be supportive, but they do not yet feel comfortable discussing their scientific work in their church. A professor of chemistry told me, “There was sometimes in the church the idea that children needed to be protected from the university, not only because of science but in part because of scientists.” She found this ironic because she was present when people in her church were talking about their fear of scientists. She went on: “And here I was a scientist sitting next to my ten-year-old daughter in the church, a professor at that very university [they were referring to].”23
A professor of medicine who works with children with a rare form of cancer said he has a lot of things he is struggling with in his scientific work. And he feels like he should be talking to his pastor, but he doesn’t quite know how to get the conversation going:
I do feel like I could go to him and say, “Hey I’m really wrestling with this.” . . . Maybe I should be more vulnerable because I don’t really seek his counsel for things like this [chuckles]. . . . I guess there’s somewhat of a separation there [between scientific work and church life]. . . . I’m not necessarily looking to spiritual leaders to help me make those hard decisions [about treating children or what kind of science I should do next]. I am instead looking to colleagues and, you know, science.24
A Christian biologist told me,
We just are in the middle of wrapping up a four-week adult education series on science and Christian faith, and [I am going to be] interviewed as part of that class. So, you know, overall I feel pretty valued, but . . . I would echo what [I’ve heard] . . . a lot of Christians in science say about their life in church, and that is that they do feel a bit lonely in the sense that maybe they don’t have opportunities to think out loud about Christian faith and their professional science or to share the fruits of what they’re doing with people in the congregation very often.25
These quotations underscore that many of the Christian scientists I have interviewed over the years practice a “secret science” where they just do not talk about their scientific work at church. In part, this is because no one invites them to talk about it. Because of their secret science, churchgoers can continue to believe that no one at church is a scientist. In reality, the best interlocutors for the science-and-faith conversation might be the scientists sitting right in the pews.
Collaboration and Community
When I surveyed adults in the US about science and religion, 14 percent said they view science and religion as in conflict, and they are on the side of religion. This means that if they perceive a disagreement between religion and science, they will favor the teachings of their faith. Among evangelicals, that number rises to 25 percent. The more surprising finding, however, is that many evangelical Christians do not believe science and religion are necessarily in conflict. My surveys show that they are more likely than the general population to think that science and religion can collaborate. Among US adults overall, 38 percent believe science and religion can be used to support each other and that collaboration between the two realms would be possible and beneficial. Among evangelical Christians, the number goes up to 46 percent. Evangelical scientists are even more likely to believe in collaboration between science and religion: nearly 60 percent express support for collaboration between the two realms. When I surveyed scientists who work outside universities, I found that in general more scientists believed that the relationship between science and religion is one of collaboration than that science and religion are in conflict or completely independent.26
One scientist in immunology I spoke with told me he felt science and faith could fill gaps the other may leave or provide possible solutions for questions the other cannot answer. “There are certainly areas where religion, . . . or spirituality, or Scripture, has not been able to shine light on understanding, you know, on what the underlying answer is,” he said, but “every scientific field, mathematical equation, breaks down at some point.”27
Another scientist said, “Being a scientist helped me to think hard about theology.” He worked as a scientist for three decades. He explained, “One of the things that scientists . . . are pretty good at is they have to look at their hypotheses, weigh them against the empirical data they have, and, you know, sometimes their hypotheses don’t fully account for the data, and so they have to hold their hypotheses somewhat loosely, and I think that’s been of great value to me when I think about my Christian faith and think about theological constructs that Christians like to generate to think about the Christian faith.”28 This scientist had begun to hold both theological and scientific constructs loosely, not to doubt their truth but to humbly expect that his understanding of them was inherently limited. A professor of genetics told me about her work trying to connect the school of genetics with the school of divinity at her university. She has plans to speak with the dean about her goal, which is “to bring science and spirituality together [through the people who teach each].”29
One evangelical scientist told me that, in his view, “the church needs basically to drop its fear of science.” As he sees it, “Both the church and science are interested in the truth. Now, they are a little bit different aspects of the truth, but I don’t think that either side needs to view the other antagonistically. And I understand how science feels because of some of the past oppressions from the church. So maybe there needs to be a little forgiveness . . . on both sides.”30
As Robert Pennock’s study of scientific virtues showed us, those in scientific communities may hold core virtues that are similar to the virtues upheld in many Christian communities, such as curiosity and humility.31 My own research has uncovered other common virtues between the two communities, including creativity, awe, joy, and gratitude. Both communities strive to heal the world around them. Churches should become a place where Christian scientists can highlight these shared virtues—in adult education classes, sermons, teachings, or other public roles that allow them to share their work and knowledge with those in churches.
Communities are incredibly important. Research has shown time and again that we judge people we perceive as similar to us as more moral, trustworthy, and competent, and we tend to see ourselves as similar to those who are part of our communities or who share our values.32 Indeed, this research shows that participation in communities is really important (and often even necessary) for long-term change to result in individuals.
Research also shows that when people believe a scientific expert shares their values, they can be more likely to accept that expert’s conclusions.33 By focusing on values and virtues that Christians and scientists have in common, scientists who are Christians can act as boundary pioneers, helping the members of their faith communities better connect, cooperate, and be in dialogue with members of the scientific community and helping the scientific community better connect with faith communities.
A few years back, my congregation received a grant from the Scientists in Congregations program.34 It has since run a series of programs in which scientists in the congregation speak about their scientific work and about their perspectives on and struggles with science and faith. The congregation also had well-known scientists from around the world give talks on hot-button science and religion issues, such as the role of God in the origin of the world, creation and evolution, the meaning and the sanctity of life, what it means to be human, and how we can approach the relationship between science and faith.
Initially, the congregation was hesitant. Some were concerned about how the program would be received and how it might affect the faith of church members. Yet the program was a resounding success. “I always thought of my work [as a scientist] as completely separate from my actual faith or something that needed to ‘be dealt with,’” a scientist in my church and on our science-in-congregations planning committee told me. “But through presenting my own perspective on the compatibility, for me, between science and Christian faith, I came to see how my work and my Christian faith can be deeply integrated.” Both adults and youth enthusiastically and thoughtfully participated in the discussions, and turnout at adult education classes tripled. Even participants who did not agree with the viewpoints being presented remained civil and open to the program, agreeing to disagree and to continue their involvement in the dialogue. One church member said that thinking through divisive issues during the program showed her ways she can “stay in the conversation without walking away” when faced with future debates involving science and religion. She felt the program was particularly meaningful and effective because it utilized the expertise of church members whom other congregants knew and trusted. In other words, even though some of the very best scientists in the world had been invited to participate in the church program, key to the program’s success were the scientists actually from within the congregation’s own community.
In discussions about science and faith, it is especially important to engage young congregants, who are in the midst of considering their future educational pursuits and careers. A biologist told me that every few years his church has a “science and Christian faith all-day seminar, and . . . we try to have some scientists come and talk about how amazing the natural world is and just to kind of get university students marinating in the joy of discovery.”35 In my own experience of running the Scientists in Congregations program at my church, I found that it is youth who are particularly hungry to hear more about the science and faith interface, to have honest conversations about genuine struggles.
Scientists can participate in churches in many ways. A scientist told me about a talk she gave to her congregation, which she titled “My Life as a Scientist,” and explained, “I’ve done a faith and science integration talk, and my husband and I have also led a Sunday school series where we’ve looked at the divisive issues over the last sixty years, including climate change, abortion, evolution, dancing (from long ago), [and] women in office.”36 Scientists also talked about leading the worship services and singing for the church so that congregants trusted them as fellow Christians who could still worship God while participating in science. One evangelical scientist talked about a sermon his pastor gave him the opportunity to deliver:
So this was asking a few of us to stand up and say, well, what is actually your work? . . . It was super cool. And that’s one of the reasons I really love him and love his church. And so that was neat, because then I could stand up and talk about some of the cases I’ve worked with and some of the genetic analyses we’ve done and some of the papers we’ve published. And so people were actually very, very interested. And there was definitely no “how can you do this as a Christian?” It was very much like, “Oh that’s cool, you know, that’s really interesting!”37
And there are rare occasions when we see scientific and religious communities really engage each other. In an essay in Physics Today, physicist Tom McLeish (a committed Christian, who is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the UK’s greatest scientific honors) writes about attending a public debate about a controversial scientific issue and witnessing something unique: “This gathering was different. Strongly opposing views were expressed, but their proponents listened to each other. Everyone was keen to grasp both the knowns and the uncertainties of the geological science and technology. Social science and geophysics both drew sustained civil dialog.” McLeish goes on about his experience that night: “The notion of different priorities was understood—and some people actually changed their views.”38 Only when we engage groups that we think of as “the other” in a genuine way is there the possibility to cross boundaries and change minds.
For some Christians, it may seem odd to think of “scientific” virtues. But values form the foundation of the scientific community and how scientists think about and practice their work, just like they form the basis for how Christians practice their faith. Before we explore these virtues, it is important to examine another building block, the one that gives us the capacity for virtue—our humanness, something that seems at stake for many Christians when they begin to discuss evolution.
Further Discussion