SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Jennifer Wiseman, a Christian astrophysicist at NASA, came to my church to give a talk.1 My husband introduced her: “I was reading Psalm 19 and I appreciate the verse that says, ‘The Heavens declare the glories of God’ [v. 1], but when Jennifer reads this, she sees so much more than I do,” he said. “She has a much deeper sense of the awe that comes through witnessing the expansion of the stars through her work as an astronomer. And she is here with us tonight to bring us—the people in our church who are not scientists—a deeper sense of that awe.”
Many scientists talk about how seeing the beauty of the natural world through their work fills them with a sense of wonder and awe, which they hold in high value. Dissecting, examining, and understanding the natural world—even its smallest, most intricate parts—only increase their feelings of astonishment, amazement, and appreciation. “First of all, the beauty that [the average person] sees is available to other people—and to me, too. . . . I can appreciate the beauty of a flower,” said Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of our modern era. Feynman also knew that a deep curiosity could bring deep awe:
At the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There’s beauty not just at the dimension of one centimeter; there’s also beauty at a smaller dimension.
There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. . . . All kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.2
Even atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins describe feeling awed by science. “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable,” he writes. “It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”3
Awe is a virtue, connected perhaps most deeply to the virtues of humility and curiosity. Being “passionately curious,” to quote Einstein, leads us on the search, and the end of that search is often awe.4 Awe is a deep appreciation of the “other” and of the potential beauty and goodness of the “other.” And awe flows, in part, from a deep acknowledgment of our own limitations. Possibly charting a path between humility and awe, Paul Piff (assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine) and Dacher Keltner (professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley) explain that awe is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”5 And the philosopher Kristján Kristjánsson, a professor of character education and virtue ethics at the University of Birmingham, explains his own experience of awe this way:
I first visited Hljóðaklettar—a well-known area of columnar-craters, presenting unique “basalt roses,” in a national park in the north-east of Iceland—on an early October day as a seventeen-year-old. All the tourists had gone; there was not a single person in sight, only the “rosy” columns surrounded by low birch trees in autumn colors, with a mighty grey glacial river providing a stark background contrast. I experienced feelings of aesthetic ecstasy, mingled with a sense of enormity, oneness, and of time standing still. I have never been fully able to recapture that feeling, there or elsewhere although I have caught glimpses of it when listening to great pieces of music such as Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.6
For Kristjánsson the deepest sense of awe—like it is for many of the scientists I interviewed—can feel like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The natural world and scientific explorations of nature can elicit an awe akin to the awe solicited by God, and scientists who are Christians (those who have a foot in both communities) may show us how scientific awe and religious awe may be one and the same.
Discovering Awe in Science
Many Christian scientists talked to me about seeing beauty in nature and about the feelings of awe and wonder that nature evokes. For some, this fascination with nature is a huge part of why they do science. One Christian physicist described feeling “awe and wonder at nature in general.” He said, “I feel like there’s no point doing science if you don’t feel that. Why go into this low-paying, high-stress field . . . if you don’t think that there’s something amazing about nature and that it’s a fun and interesting thing to study? . . . I can’t imagine not having that feeling, I guess,” he concluded.7 A Christian biologist expressed similar feelings: “We’re fascinated and absolutely awestruck at what we find, and the harder you look and the more you know, you realize you don’t know how cool every little new thing is, and it’s just absolutely astounding to get into the stuff.” 8
Another biologist described the beauty and awe he experiences during observations of cells in his research:
So it turns out that cells undergo this really intricate, delicate choreography in the sense that cells move in very precise directions, and they do it as groups, so it’s kind of the embryonic equivalent of line dancing. . . . It is just utterly astonishing. Even though we’re beginning to understand the molecules that control these cells as they do their dance, the dance itself is just perpetually amazing to me . . . and watching these glowing cells using these very sophisticated microscopes, I just never get tired of that.9
For some Christian scientists, their scientific work fills them with awe and wonder that strengthens not only their appreciation of science but also their deep sense of wonder of God. Throughout history, pursuit of God through the natural world has led a number of Christians to great scientific discoveries, and many Christian scientists today start their studies with the sense that they are pursuing God’s beauty found in the natural world. For them, their scientific work is a form of worship that lets them better see and appreciate God’s creation and brings them closer to God. “I think there are two things in science that you see. There’s a lot of mystery and there’s a lot of beauty,” said a biologist I interviewed. “I think . . . mystery provokes wonder, and . . . beauty provokes awe.” He went on, “This universe is inconceivably large and created, so I think there’s this point where you just fall into worship when you see these things, and it’s beautiful, so then it’s amazing that [God] chose to make this world understandable to us too. I mean, in so many ways, it’s really phenomenal. I mean, I encounter beauty every day.”10 A geneticist I spoke with echoed a similar sentiment: “It’s this wonderful thrill of discovery not just on the natural plane but of a God who made that, you know?” he said. “And so it’s really kind of cool and wonderfully awe-inspiring, and so it keeps me connected, right to God.” 11
Christian scientists also see beauty in the process of science and in the scientific career. They feel awed by the details uncovered and discoveries made. “A lot of what we spend time really learning, like how things work, . . . I’m really intrigued by. I think it’s amazing how it works and who came up with it and how intricate everything is,” one Christian physicist explained.12 A Christian biologist, when asked if she saw beauty in her work, said, “I definitely see beauty and . . . even nonreligious scientists, that’s why we do science. We’re fascinated and absolutely awestruck at what we find, and the harder you look and the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know and how cool every little new thing is, and it’s just absolutely astounding.”13
I quote all these Christian scientists talking about their scientific work itself—not only what they can do with the scientific work or the practical ways that it might help people (although these are certainly important)—so that you might see from scientists themselves how they find awe of God in the very nature of their scientific work. The act of doing scientific work itself is a way that they might worship God. And this experience of awe through scientific work is a way that they build common ground with scientists who are not Christians.
Awe in Nonreligious Scientists
My research has found that scientists who are nonreligious also experience feelings of awe and wonder at new discoveries, the beauty of the natural world, and the vastness and intricacies of what they examine and explore. One biologist told me, “I think my non-Christian colleagues, even my atheist colleagues, I really feel like they’re on the doorstep of worship. Especially if they’re good scientists, they are there [on the doorstep of worship] all the time.”14 This is his way of saying that he believes his nonreligious colleagues feel awe, reverence, and elation, which are traditionally thought of as emotions evoked by religious experiences.
A number of nonreligious scientists I have spoken with over my fifteen years of research have described experiencing beauty, awe, and wonder through their work. “I think that in particle astrophysics there’s a lot of room for that because . . . you’re dealing with the sort of very broad questions that span . . . billions of years of time and all of space and it’s sort of easy to . . . kind of feel the bigness of it all,” one nonreligious physicist said.15 And a nonreligious biologist similarly told me, “I feel like on a daily basis, if I do experiments, I cherish the beauty of truths. For example, I stain some cells with pigments of what we call neon fluorescent . . . proteins. If we stain cells with some color, and you will see this spread . . . of the color, and it’s like stars shining in the universe. . . . That’s something I think is a privilege [of being a] scientist.”16
A number of scientists spoke about feeling wonder at what has yet to be uncovered and observed and about feeling awe at how much more there is to discover. They also described the elation they feel when they do discover something new, an exhilaration that comes from solving a mystery and adding to our understanding of the world. One nonreligious scientist said, “I derive a great deal of satisfaction from understanding something after I’ve made a set of natural history observations or done experiments, like ‘Oh, I know how that works now. I got it, this is how it happens, and I’m the only one in the world that knows that at least for this moment because I did it; I did the work, I asked the question and I answered it.’ . . . So yeah I really—I love that part of it.”17 Another nonreligious scientist told me, “When you really understand things, that’s another thing, that’s another great pleasure. . . . There’s a bunch of confusing effects and you really figure it out. You know that is just great. Now is it beauty or awe? . . . I certainly take a lot of pleasure in other people’s results as well, when there’s some new insight, some new cosmology measurement that tells you something that’s new, that fits in as a piece of the puzzle, and that is pretty fantastic.”18
Some nonreligious scientists even linked their sense of “scientific awe” to spirituality. One scientist, who does not consider himself to be part of any religious tradition, told me, “You know that feeling you get standing by the seashore looking out over the endless expanse of water—or standing in the rainforest listening to the insects and the birds and their huge diversity and incomprehensibility? Or the feeling you get considering the age of all things in existence and how long it could go on? Sort of awe at the totality of things? If that’s what spirituality is, then I get it.”19 The sense of awe gained through pure scientific discovery is a type of antidote to the way we in Christian communities sometimes think of science. We think of it either in utilitarian terms, focusing on how we can use science through medical applications to help others (and this is good, but it is not the entire picture), or in terms of propositional statements, where we are noticing claims of science and filtering them to see how the claims of science compare to the claims of faith. Science is indeed these things. But here we are seeing that it is also much more. We are seeing that science is also an experience, a deep experience of awe over which the Christian scientist might build a bridge with scientists who do not have faith. And that deep experience of awe of God through science needs to be brought to church.
Bringing Scientific Awe to Church
In my research, I have found that Christians are “more likely to recommend that a child go into an applied science occupation, such as [being a] physician, than a pure science occupation, like [being a] biologist or a physicist.”20 Christians tend to view applied science roles as more clearly connected to some of the values and goals our faith emphasizes, such as helping others and reducing suffering. In one study I conducted, 24 percent of evangelicals and 27 percent of mainline Protestants said they considered themselves “very interested in new scientific discoveries.”21 Yet, when asked in the same survey if they agreed with the statement “scientific research is valuable even when it doesn’t provide immediate tangible benefits,” only 12 percent of evangelicals and 16 percent of mainline Protestants agreed—the lowest percentages of all religious groups surveyed.22 In other words, Christians do not show the same level of support as other groups do for science done simply for the sake of scientific discovery. I believe this is partly because Christians are not aware of how—as I mentioned above—the practice of pure science can elicit awe, strengthen faith, and draw Christians closer to God.
This is where the testimonies of Christian and nonreligious scientists, like those we have heard in this chapter, can help. By sharing their personal experiences in science, Christian scientists can help other Christians experience “scientific awe.” And in hearing nonreligious scientists express appreciation for the sacred qualities of scientific discovery, Christians may find something akin to faith. As a result, research suggests, Christians might be encouraged to pursue science themselves. A recent study found that those who are in awe of nature are more aware of the gaps in their knowledge and are thus more likely to explore scientific interests.23
How can we use science at church to experience awe of God? Church leaders can start by helping youth and their parents see science as a viable career path that will not hurt their faith but that actually has the potential to support and enrich it. For example, during a sermon, pastors could interview scientists about their experiences of appreciating beauty through science. Pastors could begin by preaching on Psalm 104, where the psalmist marvels at all that God has made and then include interviews with scientists. Or they could invite Christian scientists to talk about how their exploration of the natural world deepens their understanding of creation. Even better, they could organize events in which congregants directly experience the beauty of science for themselves—perhaps through hands-on experiments run by scientists or visits to a lab, observatory, or field site. In this way, congregants can experience firsthand the awe that science can evoke. The Christian writer Paul Tripp says, “God created an awesome world. God intentionally loaded the world with amazing things to leave you astounded. The carefully air-conditioned termite mound in Africa, the tart crunchiness of an apple, the explosion of thunder, the beauty of an orchid, the interdependent systems of the human body, the inexhaustible pounding of the ocean waves, and thousands of other created sights, sounds, touches, and tastes—God designed all to be awesome. And he intended you to be daily amazed.”24
Further Discussion