CHEMISTS AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

 

Chemists and Christian Faith

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom...” (I Corinthians 1:22, RSV)

“Your life of faith is a response to God's power, not to some fancy mental or emotional footwork by me or anyone else.” (I Corinthians 2:4-5, The Message)

“What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face-to-face. What we know now is only partial; then it will be complete – as complete as God's knowledge of me.” (I Corinthians 13:12; TEV)

“We know these things are true by believing, not by seeing.” (II Corinthians 5:7, The Living Bible)

“Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings...” (Hebrews 10:22, NIV)

“Faith gives substance to hour hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1, NEB)

There is no way anyone should talk on such a broad subject as faith and science since there are as many types of scientists as there are different kinds of faith. So I have narrowed down the subject somewhat. But even then, one cannot very well speak in generalities that apply in all cases, as I shall demonstrate.

Two PhD chemists I wish to contrast are a colleague of mine at work and myself. And even within the specific field of chemistry, there is a world of difference between its practitioners depending on the specialty within chemistry which they practice.

Two Types of Chemists

Let me start with my now-deceased friend Jim. He was a physical chemist by training, meaning that he could almost be described by outsiders as a theoretical mathematician. His job was to endlessly crunch numbers on his sophisticated, high power computer. His work was highly valued by our engineers in optimally designing and operating chemical production plants. But for his results to be at all meaningful, he needed to input a host of precise data. So others would provide him with information such as relative boiling points, heat capacities, and thermodynamic data. He would then combine these with the proper mathematical formulae and tell them exactly how tall their distillation columns should be, compute the optimum temperature to maintain in their reactors, etc. And as many working in such rarefied atmospheres where only he in the whole company could understand what he was doing, his brain tended to work on a different plane as others so that on occasion his social skills appeared to be a bit lacking.

Now let me describe briefly my own type of work. Whereas Jim was at the end of the long process toward commercializing a product, I was at the very front end. My job as a synthetic organic chemist was to come up with brand new useful products for the company or devise completely different synthetic routes to existing ones. Therefore, instead of requiring exact quantitative data before even starting my work (as did Jim), I would begin by asking myself such open-ended questions as: I wonder if anyone earlier has done similar work on which I can piggyback? What if I tried this? Maybe I could combine two steps together into one? I bet if I did this instead, it might work? In other words, instead of it being a straightforward problem in which one only had to have the necessary mathematical data and appropriate equations, the process I used was a highly speculative one, based more on hunches, educated guesses, and trial-and-error attempts. And even the unsuccessful attempts would often unexpectedly give me additional guidance as to what might work instead or lead me off into a completely different fruitful investigation.

Both Jim and myself were Christians, but in our approach to faith we were also worlds apart.

Two Approaches to Christian Faith

I will freely admit that having faith is somewhat of a mystery. I was raised in a rather fundamentalist church in which the various “proofs” given for Christianity were as transparently flawed as the occasional potshots taken at scientists in general. I took it all in somewhat amusedly but still saw behind all of it in order to discern a core of truth that couldn't be denied.

I did make one misguided attempt during junior high when I thought I could combine my budding interest in science with my belief in the Bible to determine mathematically the exact distance between earth and heaven from an obscure reference in Revelation 8:1 to a ½ hour silence. As I recall, I calculated heaven to be located somewhere between the orbits of two of the outer planets in our solar system.

But for the next few years I suppose it could be said that I basically divorced my life as a scientist from my life as a Christian and treated the two as being on somewhat separate planes which in no way interacted with one another. I didn't feel the need to “prove” my faith in any way since it was very real to me already, but on the other hand I tended to steer away from the more intellectual arguments advanced by atheists to disprove Christian belief. It was sort of like the old story of the man who accidentally fell off a high cliff in the dark, but managed to grab hold of something halfway down that stopped his fall. However, he was afraid to look up to see what it was, for fear that it didn't exist.

Turning to my friend Jim, I am not sure what attracted him to Christianity to begin with, but I am willing to bet it was reading one of the sensational books that began to come out in the 1960's making outrageous and total unsubstantiated claims as to discovering Noah's ark, analyzing Christ's blood, the secret plans in Israel to rebuild the temple, predicting mathematically the exact date of the Second Coming, etc. etc. These all had the outward appearance of concrete proofs which appealed to someone of Jim's professional bent.

All I know is that by the time I began to know him, there were two subjects which interested him immensely: the Shroud of Turin and biblical prophecies giving the exact date of the establishment of the modern state of Israel. I advised him to be cautious in accepting the first artifact as absolute proof of the resurrection of Jesus. My reasoning had to do with simple fact that if scientists did in fact manage to demonstrate that the power of His resurrection had scorched the cloth as Christ left this earthly sphere, the subject of faith would become moot and all those intelligent people in the world would soon become Christians based on factual evidence alone. The only remaining “unbelievers” would be those who were too dense to understand the import of the discovery or never got the opportunity to hear of it.

Sure enough, even Jim had to bow to the facts when a team of respectable scientists in several fields demonstrated that the cloth itself dated to later than the time of Christ, and the image on the cloth was caused by applied pigments, not by charring. After that discovery, Jim's Christianity was put on the back burner for a while until he came across a popular account by someone claiming that it was easy to piece together passages in the Old Testament to show that centuries before the event, the Bible predicted to the very day when Israel would once again be the home of the Jews in the 1950's, thus starting the timetable from which a good estimate could be obtained of the time when Jesus' return to earth would occur.

Jim's faith was greatly rejuvenated when he read it. He became wildly excited about this discovery since it “proved” that the biblical prophecies were true, in which case everything in the Bible must be true also.

Reactions to Opposition

As for myself, as I mentioned above, for years I went out of my way not to read or listen to any criticisms of the Bible, and I am sure that my motive was fear of my utter inability to counter the arguments of skeptics. It took me a long time to become secure enough in my faith to confront any opposition directly. But the few times I did go to the trouble to wrestle with some contentions of atheists, I was pleasantly surprised with how sophomoric their arguments were and how easy it was to use simple logic and facts to dissipate their criticisms. In addition, I soon learned that many of these critics knew full well that they were shading the facts and advancing fallacious argument in order to convince others. In fact, I found out that in some rather notorious cases, their supposed high-minded intellectual atheism was in reality rooted in their unwillingness to have their often hedonistic lifestyles cramped in any way.

The more I went out of my way to collect every “biblical contradiction and objection” I could find on the internet and investigate it for myself, the more I became convinced of the truth of the Bible. (My investigations are summarized in over 120 separate posts on this blogsite, many beginning with the keyword “Contradictions”). There was a once popular Christian book that came out in which the author challenged his readers to start out with a stance of faith as a working hypothesis and then experiment in their lives to see what would result with that starting point. It was not exactly the orthodox approach to faith and actually had more correspondence to the way in which a scientist works. However, you might try it some time and see what happens.

Moving on to Jim, it became obvious (at least to me) that he sensed deep down that his faith might be ill-founded, and therefore he was desperately looking for some concrete proof on which to base it. So it was interesting and a little disheartening to see how he reacted to criticism of his new discovery of the proof of the Bible through the prediction of the time the Jews would return to their land.

I asked him to provide me with a copy of the detailed reasoning behind this amazing example of fulfilled prophecy about which he had read. My response is found in an earlier post titled “Ezekiel 4:4-8.” In it I carefully pointed out all the fallacies, half-truths, and out-and-out lies in each of the six separate steps or assumptions that had been cobbled together from various places in the Bible, all of which had to be correct in order for the prophecy come out to the proper time of that event. Jim's totally unexpected response to me was “Well, it does give the right answer, doesn't it?” That is akin to saying that two wrongs make a right, only in this case it was six wrongs. I couldn't believe that this comment came from someone whose whole chosen profession depended on absolutely accurate data and precise reasoning.

Resulting Behavior

As might be expected, whereas I eventually got to the point where I welcomed dialogue with skeptics, Jim withdrew more and more into himself, isolating himself from old acquaintances, skeptics and loyal churchgoers alike, since he didn't know how to act or what to say when they disagreed with him on any subject, minor or major, whether it involve religion or politics.

I am not trying to put myself on any sort of pedestal as a paragon of faith, since it took a long while for God to work on me, but fortunately for me, and unlike Jim, I just happened to live long enough to see the process through.