by Stacy Trasancos
Some say they were pursued by the Hound of Heaven, a grace that would not take leave, not in the “nights” or “down the days,” the “arches of the years” or the “labyrinthine ways”.
That poetry never much resonated with me. When I first heard it I wondered,
“At what rate did he travel, this hound?” Poetry is hard for literalists to
appreciate. But if I had to pick a metaphor, being a scientist and a non-believer was more like working in the presence of something large and obvious that no one talked about … the elephant in the lab.
Anyone who’s done a lab experiment knows experimentation needs persistence
to get the equipment to work as planned. Even then, you have no guarantee your samples will produce useful data.
I worked, in part, on artificial photosynthesis. That work would go fruitless for long stretches. Weeks and weeks of preparation, day after day in the laser
room, only to learn over and over again that the next idea had not worked. I often took comfort and found inspiration in a high school biology textbook, the chapter about real photosynthesis. It fascinated me that scientists figured out the complex mechanism in such precise detail. Leaves are living nano-machines.
Sometimes I let myself wonder who designed it all in the first place. That question is kind of hard to ignore. But avoiding the bigger question is
easy enough as scientific work is so specialised.
Without knowing the facts of faith, you’re not really sure what to do with those thoughts anyway. But here’s the thing — the truth of God’s presence
is always there. Everything any scientist does in a lab, from substances measured into test tubes, to structures scanned under electron microscopes, to telescopes pointed to space, is a study of something we expect to be ordered, intelligible, predictable, and magnificent. That truth pervades the scientific
method, and we know it.
This is why I think science is ripe grounds for evangelisation.
People often think scientists see science as a god and themselves as godmakers,and that may be true for certain popularisers.
However, in my experience, science imposed on us exceeding humility and docility. A professor once warned me that I should only become a scientist if I liked failure, because 99.99 per cent of experiment is failure. What kept me going was that I knew I was pushing into the unknown and but glimpsing it — and it was thrilling. Why do you think scientists get so worked up over the smallest discoveries?
When I finally acknowledged the elephant in the lab, I began to understand
science is a privilege uniting humanity.
With faith, science made sense and a fuller reality I’d avoided came into view. If you hesitate to talk to science minded people about God and the facts
of faith, don’t be. Scientists interact directly with his handiwork every day, even before they are ready to see it.
Stacy Trasancos is a wife, mother of seven, and joyful convert to Catholicism. She has a PhD in chemistry from Penn State University and an MA in dogmatic theology from Holy Apostles’ College and Seminary.
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