Doing Science and Living with Faith

In my “Welcome Message” I describe how my eye often goes to the line where two different colors meet, such as that familiar ceiling – to – wall intersection.   A friend has since told me that she has a long history of gazing at this particular meeting place, too, and was relieved to learn that she wasn’t alone.

From my vantage point as a clergy spouse with virtually no religious upbringing in my youth, I see this kind of one-thing-meets-different-thing reality in many areas of the culture.  One of these, and one getting a lot of attention these days, is certainly the juncture between Science and Religion.  Both of them have been around for a long time, and they have had occasion to meet in many venues, but their conversations have become particularly animated and far-reaching in recent years, and this is surely all to the good.  There has been an outpouring of books from people on “both sides” of the aisle – some calm and optimistic, others caustic and even incendiary – and conferences on the topic are happening all over the country.  With questions like, “Where did we really come from?” and “What is the true nature of the universe?” this is pretty compelling stuff, no matter what field you’re in.

Despite being neither a scientist nor a theologian, I am drawn in to seek understanding of at least some of what is being discussed in this arena.  Through the 20 years that I have been married to a priest, I have gained a deeper awareness of the tenets of Christianity, partly by asking lots of questions.  In my early life, I was influenced by great aunts and uncles who became naturalists and one aunt in particular (for whom I was named) who got a Ph.D in Microbiology when few women were taking that path.  Mary (Polly) Ingraham Bunting Smith went on to become a college president during the turbulent decade of the sixties.  I was privileged to be able to spend a good deal of time with her during my early adulthood, and I learned how she sought to empower women of all ages to identify something that really mattered to them and then study it deeply enough to be able to find fulfillment as well as perhaps even make a lasting contribution.  She was not religious in any conventional sense, but in some ways she was a prophet.

Since we have been married, my husband has been a priest in three different academic towns, so I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with a number of scientists who are also devoted church members.  While I do not make it a regular practice to interview them about how the different parts of their lives fit together, recently I did sit down to talk with a friend and recently retired professor of Chemistry whom I have known through the past decade.

When I first met Nancy Lowry, about a decade ago, she struck me as an atypical “church lady.”  As part of the small number of people who were designated official greeters to my husband and me when he started his new job as priest-in-charge, she identified herself as very involved in the life of this Episcopal congregation.   But she did not come across as your standard, devout middle-aged woman who cares about doing everything properly and making it all look and sound nice.  Of course now, after 20 years as a clergy spouse, I recognize that there really is no “standard” and that deeply religious individuals come in all stripes.

What I learned about Nancy, right from the beginning, was that she has her own ministry within the church: she is in charge of the youth acolytes – training and scheduling them, making sure they know they have an important role to play in services. She also takes wonderful pictures of these kids “in the line of duty” and also just around the church, with their siblings or others.  And when a child has a birthday, she often sends a collection of several pictures, pasted on card stock and folding out, of that child through the years at church.  Indeed, many of the very best pictures we have of our three kids were taken by her.  Looking back, I am truly astounded by her quiet generosity.   And, as another friend from church who has known her many years says, “She pays attention.”

When you meet someone in just one context, it often takes a while to see that person in his or her full dimensions.  So it was with my coming to know Nancy, gradually through the past decade.  While I knew that she was a scientist, I didn’t see her at her workplace — except once when I took my daughter to a program on her campus that she helped to start, “Girls in the Lab Day.”  Only very recently, when I sat down and really talked with her, did I learn about the path she took to become someone who is expert in the field of Organic Chemistry and posts “Molecule of the Month” entries on a website for both her students and general readers, and also an Episcopalian actively engaged in the life of her church.

As a girl, she went to a Catholic school where she recalls being good at math as well as mixing up concoctions in metal Band-Aid containers; she would put in some kind of liquid and some kind of solid and see what would happen.  At Smith College, she discovered she had a real knack for visualizing the shapes of molecules and thinks that the closeness to the world of art helped to draw her in.   Anything was so much more fascinating when you learned its components.  Still today, her mantra is “One’s world view is better observed from the molecular point of view.” (Read more on her website http://helios.hampshire.edu/~nlNS/ ) You can look at a table as just a table, or you can identify the amazing structures that lie beneath the surface and see so much more.  And any bit of organic matter is a treasure trove of different chemicals and their corresponding effects – just waiting to be understood.

Nancy had some dangerous episodes in the lab in her undergraduate days, at least one involving a sudden fire, but she and a few friends earned the respect of a professor who urged them all to apply to graduate school.   She went to Harvard, got married and then to M.I.T to earn a doctorate.  When she became pregnant earlier than planned and went with trepidation to tell her professor, fully expecting him to recommend that she pull out of the program, she was thunderstruck when he said instead, “Isn’t that wonderful!”  So she completed her dissertation at the university her two year old daughter called “Mama’s Tea House.”

While she went to an Episcopal church early on, she remembers being disappointed that girls could not serve as acolytes.  “I asked questions, “she said, “but I got no answers.”  Looking back, she also remembers – less than fondly – the “heavy indoctrination” she had.  About the same time she was doing lab experiments at Smith, however, she also took a course called “The Bible As Literature” and loved it.  She attributes her enthusiasm almost completely to the professor, an exceptional teacher who was also a woman.  The stories really came alive for her then, and, even though she departed from the church during her most demanding academic years, she eventually returned mostly because of the pull of those stories.

Indeed, it was when her toddler son Alex invented his own imaginary world complete with characters and events and her other son Sam began wondering what would happen “if time went backwards and we all went back into God’s stomach” that she felt ready to try going to services again.  She explained that, for her,  “seeing the church as a place of stories and meaning without having a check-off list of things you have to believe” put her at ease.  And, when she started going to the church where my husband now serves, she was asked to teach a course called “Women in the Church.”  This, in combination with changes that allowed girls to serve at the altar, helped her to become an Episcopalian again.

Nancy is fully aware that many people are skeptical that Science and Religion can peacefully co-exist; she knows scientists who are offended by elements of worship, such as communion, believing they have no basis in reality.   To them she would say, “Isn’t the fact that we’re even here incredible?”  She goes further in saying that, for her anyway, “Thinking about and doing science is itself a religious experience.”  Being able to investigate things that are so beautiful, so miraculous takes her closer to the divine, she’s sure of it.  She believes strongly that “God is continually showing us the way out of darkness and towards the light.”

The theological perspective “God of the Gaps” holds that God can be found just in the places that natural forces can’t explain.  But what happens when scientific inquiry fills in, as it inevitably will, more and more of the gaps?   Nancy believes this way of thinking is flawed; she prefers the term “God of the Mystery” but knows that even this doesn’t quite capture what is really going on.  She will keep paying attention.