YOU REMEMBER some conversations for the rest of your life. When I met Jill, she was already at the top of her field, a biologist leading a successful laboratory at an elite research university.1 As I walked toward her office, I noticed her door had a sign of the Darwin fish eating the Christian fish (the ichthus symbol). I was conducting my first study on scientists’ attitudes toward faith, and the sign made me nervous. I knocked tentatively. Maybe it would be OK if Jill had forgotten the appointment for our interview, I thought. But she came to the door right away.
Jill did nothing to put me at ease. She did not greet me with a handshake or a smile. Instead, she curtly asked me to come in and directed me to sit on a metal chair across the desk from her. She told me she had nothing to say about science and faith. She was participating in my study only because, as a researcher herself, she wanted to support research. I cannot remember now if the air conditioning in her office was on full blast or if I just felt cold.
Even in that first year of my research, I noticed that scientists were responding to my study in vastly different ways. Sometimes their busy careers meant they had no time to talk about existential things. Others seemed as if they had been waiting all their lives to have a conversation about the big questions and meaning of life. Others were deeply uncomfortable or hostile. Sitting in Jill’s office, I assumed I needed to steel myself for one of those harder conversations.
I told Jill a little about my study; I explained that I was a sociologist who wanted to move beyond anecdotes and stereotypes to study systematically for the first time what scientists think about faith and what people from different religious traditions think about science. Then I asked Jill if she practiced a religion or considered herself a person of faith. “No. I am simply an atheist,” she responded tersely. I then asked whether she had been raised in a faith tradition. It was the type of question that could have been answered yes or no.
I was taken aback when Jill looked away from me and her eyes began to fill with tears. In the years since then, I have interviewed more than a thousand scientists about their views on faith; Jill is one of the only ones who cried. As her tears welled up, my own feelings turned from apprehension to compassion. I also wanted to know more about why the question about her faith background elicited such emotion.
Jill told me that she came from a Christian family and, as a child, had spent a lot of time at church. Raised in a rural community, Jill also spent a lot of time outdoors, and she began to see the beauty in nature and to develop a real love of the natural world. She spent a lot of time on her schoolwork too; she particularly loved her biology and chemistry classes. She was a “total geek,” she said, and her grades were “fantabulous.” She thought she might become a teacher or a doctor.
But as she became more curious about the natural world, Jill also became concerned about aspects of her faith. For instance, while scientists had determined that the earth is billions of years old, her church was part of the community of Christians who read the Bible as teaching that the earth was created by God in its present form just thousands of years ago. She brought questions about the origin and development of life on earth and the role of God in creation to her parents and her pastors. Jill was also curious about whether Christians could be scientists.
At that point, Jill did not know she would go into science and she was not yet considering whether she would remain part of a church. Church and school were both central to her life. She was simply an inquisitive kid, following and feeding her natural curiosity. But “when I asked hard questions, I was told by my pastor just to make a decision to believe . . . to forget about science,” she said. It was an answer that did not satisfy Jill. She tried several times to talk with her youth group leaders about the questions science brought to mind, but her experiences with them were similar; she was consistently told not to explore so much. “I feel like religion was a mechanism by which judgment was passed on people who were different,” she recounted. “And for me, in my personal history in my childhood, it was judgment. It didn’t work out so well for me.” By the time Jill was in her teens, she had left her church.
Sometimes, even now, she said, she yearns for a sense of what it would mean to have faith. “What is it that keeps people believing? I feel like when religion works you get a sense of community,” she said. “You get a way to teach morality and ethics in the sense of how you teach someone the difference between right and wrong. But when it doesn’t work it just turns into judgment.”
Nurturing Curiosity
“As a character trait,” the philosopher Elias Baumgarten writes, “curiosity is a disposition to want to know or learn more about a wide variety of things. The more one has this character trait, the more often or the more intensely one will on particular occasions experience a desire or urge to investigate and learn more about something.”2
In our current culture, being curious is undervalued. It brings to mind a child wondering what is around the corner before she takes a look. Our culture prefers seemingly stronger roles like being an expert or being a leader. We often want to be next to people who seem like they already know the whole truth. Curiosity is a fundamental value of my own discipline; at its core, sociology is about listening carefully and being curious about other people and their stories. I highly value the ability to ask questions that help us better understand both others and ourselves and that help us lead better lives.3 I see curiosity—when used wisely—as a show of strength, a yearning to push the boundaries of knowledge.
Scientists like Jill are often known for their curiosity. Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”4 The physicist Mario Livio, in his well-known book Why? What Makes Us Curious, argues that the best scientists are passionately curious, often in several different domains. Fabiola Gianotti, the first woman to serve as director-general of CERN, the famous European Organization for Nuclear Research, told Livio that first she was passionately curious about music and only later did she switch from studying the humanities to studying physics: “I was always a curious child. . . . I always had many questions. At one point I decided that physics will actually allow me to try to answer some of those questions.”5 And the most successful scientists report that their curiosity was nurtured from a very young age, often by their families and larger communities. For example, the string theorist Sylvester James Gates Jr., the first African American to have an endowed chair in physics at a major research university, speaks publicly about the relationship between religion and science. Gates says that he got used to being curious, to asking hard questions at an early age: “I remember once I asked [my dad], ‘Dad, do you remember me as a kid asking all kinds of questions?’ and he said, ‘yes.’ I said, ‘you always had answers for everything.’ And he said, ‘yes.’ I said, ‘How did you do that?’ and he said, ‘What you don’t remember son, is if I didn’t have an answer immediately I would tell you hold off, and I would go and get some resource and in the next day or so I’d come back and answer your question.’” Even though no one in Gates’s family was a scientist, they created an environment that nurtured his curiosity.6
For some in the Christian community, curiosity can sometimes seem risky or scary. When Jill brought her questions about faith to her parents and pastors, her curiosity elicited fear. As a parent and member of a church community, I identify to an extent with Jill’s parents and pastors. I think about the kinds of questions about science and faith my own daughter might have some day and how they might impact her relationship with our faith. But as someone who had her own questions about the relationship of science and faith as a child, I can identify with Jill’s curiosity as well. As someone who also left a church when her questions and quest for knowledge were dismissed or discouraged, Jill helped me realize how important it is to nurture curiosity as a virtue in our faith communities.
In fact, Christianity calls us to be curious. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely [or beautiful], whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” As Greg Cootsona writes, “Whatever human knowledge discovers in nature, we are bound to listen, to learn, and to engage with it. Why? Because God has spoken and continues to speak through Scripture and through the natural world—through both words and works—albeit in different modes.”7
In the churches I visited during my studies, I heard many Christians express fear of scientists. They believe all scientists are atheists and hostile to religion. They hear a lot from the New Atheists, a small but outspoken group led by scientists who are anti-religion and argue that science and religion are inherently in conflict. For a number of Christians, the New Atheists actually stifle curiosity about science and its relationship to faith and create rigid boundaries between the scientific and faith communities. Moreover, many Christians also told me their pastors or church leaders never talk about science. This, too, can suppress curiosity.
It is time we honor curiosity about science in church. Interpreted from a Christian perspective, science can be seen as a tool to pursue knowledge and truth about creation and to better understand the words and works of God and how we can live better lives.
My husband, Karl, and I are both professors who have devoted our careers to science. Karl is a particle physicist, and between us, we have nearly twenty years of higher-education and postdoctoral training in the natural and social sciences. About ten years ago, when Karl and I learned that we were going to have a baby, we did what came naturally to us as scientists. We applied our scientific and academic training and skills. We read and studied a lot of books about babies and childcare. In this way, we thought we could learn the whole truth about child rearing before our child arrived.
Then our daughter was born. For about three weeks after Anika arrived, we always had at least one family member with us who could provide support. Then they all left. We were alone and afraid. That first night, we experienced our first test. Anika would not stop crying. We did everything the books suggested: we checked for gas and burped her, checked for fever, and changed her diaper. This all led to severe distress on her part—to the point where projectile matter ended up both on us and on the wall next to her changing table, and we had to use some cloth diapers to wipe down ourselves and the wall with disinfectant. She kept crying. Both my husband (the very smart particle physicist) and I (the sociologist, who is supposed to have some special intellectual insight into the human condition) had sweat from the stress pouring off our faces. We were two adults who had not slept in twenty-four hours, and we were using the remaining clean cloth diapers to wipe our dripping brows.
We had done everything we had read that we should do, and nothing had worked. We became convinced that we must have missed a crucial piece of information in one of the baby-care manuals, that our level of study had not been enough. I turned to my husband and said, “Go get the baby book.” We were going to read our way out of it!
Today, with some years of parenting under my belt, I chuckle when I think about that night and our belief that all we needed was the right passage in a book. Our studying helped feed what Mario Livio calls “epistemic curiosity,” a desire to learn new knowledge. What we needed that evening, however, was a better way to address what he calls “perceptual curiosity.” Perceptual curiosity is “the curiosity we feel when something surprises us or when something doesn’t quite agree with what we know or think we know.” He writes, “That is felt as an unpleasant state, as an adversity state. It’s a bit like an itch that we need to scratch. That’s why we try to find out the information in order to relieve that type of curiosity.”8 That night we did not need to be curious about the words in a book; we needed to be more curious about the peculiarities of our particular child.
I now believe that on that night with Anika, I should have turned to another mother or father, to a member of my community, to someone who had experience and expertise raising a child, to ask them questions and listen to their perspective. This would have been the best way to get the information we needed to solve our problems and alleviate our fears.
My research shows that many Christians are curious about the relationship between science and religion and how they can integrate science with their faith. This curiosity can be painful and stressful. In one study, Livio writes, researchers showed that “perceptual curiosity appeared to produce a negative feeling of need and deprivation, something akin to thirst.”9 Satisfying this curiosity, the research showed, can feel like a reward. Christian communities can become safe places for the curious, especially those who are curious about science and faith. The most valuable resource in the Christian community is the believers who have personal experience and accomplishment, the fellow Christians who have successfully integrated science and faith before the youth in their churches. From these Christians, we can learn new ways of looking at the relationship between religion and science and why curiosity for science should be fostered and supported within the church. Churches need to become places that offer the reward of nurturing and satisfying curiosity, where Christians can reduce the conflict and stress they feel when thinking about the relationship between science and faith. Curiosity is a necessary part of the process of scientific discovery and of understanding the interface between science and faith. But for many, curiosity leads to doubts about faith.
Further Discussion