Back in October, I had the opportunity to attend a Table Talk with Catherine Crouch, a physicist, and Andy Crouch, a journalist — both religious Christians with a unique view on science and religion. I came to the table as someone who does not subscribe to any organized religion or consider themselves religious in general, and so I was curious to hear how their views of religion and science informed each other. Personally, I found Catherine’s contributions to the discussion to be more interesting and easier to follow. She informed us that her faith and her field of study did not contradict one another; rather, they served as complements to each other. According to her, science and religion are two distinct entities at the macro scale, but this isn’t so at the quantum level — there is still much to be understood about how subatomic particles “work,” and an important question could also be “why” they work as they do. This gap in understanding at the quantum scale is where religion could enter the equation — perhaps a “god” is not a being that would watch over us, but rather the reason why atoms stick together and why the universe functions in the way that it does. Although I found these views to be novel and fascinating, I personally still do not consider myself to be religious (at least in the traditional sense), and for what it’s worth as someone who does not study physics, I would imagine that there is much more that can be attributed to science before religion enters the picture. However, I will keep an open mind.

This was one of the most interesting dinner conversations I’ve been able to attend. I would say I am somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic. The former because I have never been a religious person, I find it hard to believe that some being has control over everything in life. The latter because there are so many people that are religious so how do I know that I’m not wrong and that some being does exist. I have never mixed the two. Being able to hear from Catherine who is a physics professor and also religious and have her faith not be a contradiction of her field was a strange idea to wrap my head around. I felt like I didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation simply because I know nothing about religion or Christianity. Andy Crouch said that many of the great mysteries have been solved and although I don’t really understand the intricacies, I find it fascinating that science can strengthen someone’s faith. Instead of having science disprove religion and the Bible, I learned that science can actually support it, which is a new perspective for me.

For this Saturday’s dinner, we have the opportunity to meet Andy Crouch. He is a journalist with the evangelical magazine Christianity. My family and I rarely have conversations regarding this realm of matter. However, this table talk has made me realize how there is often a conflict between science and religion. It seems hard to be a person of religious faith and practice serious science at the same time. Catherine gave some insight into how one of her colleagues became a person of religious faith after diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately, her colleague survived fifteen more years while fighting with cancer. That is when she felt grateful for her life and starts to believe in God. However, at the same time, she is also a person who practices serious science, so she turned to Stephanie to seek advice on she finds a balance between science and religion. I find it interesting to learn how Stephanie acknowledges that the two institutions deal with different realm of human experience, but she finds a way to integrate both. Science investigates the natural world, while religion deals with the spiritual world — hence, the two can be complementary. This table talk has exposed me to the topic that I have rarely think about, and it propels me to challenge my presumption.

A day before this week’s Table Talk, Christian journalist Andy Crouch gave an excellent talk on the Church as an institution. In the Bible’s New Testament, a man named Paul stated that while Jesus ascended into heaven after being raised from the dead, he gave gifts to certain people, particularly prophets and teachers, so that they could benefit the Church.

(The capital “C” Church refers to all Christians in the world who are born again, who know and believe that Jesus the Son of God took on all their wrongdoings, took the punishment for that by dying, and came back to life so that they also have a new life, have a peaceful relationship with God the Father who now forgives all their wrongs forever, and they have the choice not to turn back to their old bad ways to show their love for God and Jesus who is also God. This is called “The Gospel.”)

Based on the model in the New Testament, some Christians believe that the gifts that they have are for the benefit for the Church. They ignore calls to “pursue your passion” because it is God who is working through them to do what he desires, which is mainly creating a place where everything is good. I am currently waiting on Him as he slowly unveils what he would like me to do. In the Table Talk, Andy Crouch and his wife pointed out a huge need in the Church: to know that the “Science and Religion” debate has already been solved in the research field. God is known to be the Orchestrator of scientific phenomenon; it’s just that the general public hasn’t caught on for 100 years.

What could benefit the Church is bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and general public knowledge since, as Andy’s wife Catherine pointed out, knowing about creation helps know more about God and gives even more cause to praise him. Moreover, this is extremely important for the Church, specifically for bridging the gap in between God and everything else in the world (such as homework and studies) in the Christian mind. God has so much to say about how the world began but also about how we manage our money, how we eat, and our career journeys.

Christians need to know how he thinks about these things not only to know their First Love more and “walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received (the new heaven and new earth)” but also to share his mind with other Christians. This leads to benefiting the whole Church with Truth and leads to unity (Ephesians 4:1).

“We [together] will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, [Jesus]” (Ephesians 4:15).

During this week’s Table Talk, Andy and Catherine Crouch discussed the relationships between religion and science. While often considered as two separate entities–an investigation of the physical world and musings of the spiritual–science and religion actually aren’t quite as isolated as we perceive. As a physicist, Catherine had some interesting points to make about the intersection between science and physics. When observed at the macro scale, physics and religion rarely converge. However, when one looks at the quantum scale, on the level of atoms and subatomic particles, the line between science and religion blurs. Another point that I thought was interesting from this talk was that the conflict between science and religion is largely over, but the lack of communication between scientists and theologians to the public is what causes public misunderstanding about the conflicts between science and religion. The public’s perception of the apparent dichotomy between science and religions often stems from lack of knowledge and education about the subject. This proves that communication and journalism is quite an important part of educating people about these issues, and other similar topics. Overall, I thought this discussion was sometimes a bit difficult to understand, but people brought up some interesting topics for discussion.

The dinner with Andy and Catherine Crouch was very enlightening, especially because I focus on the intersection of religion and science within my own studies. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that they both  were looking for ways to help regenerate the complementary function of faith and science that was lost at the birth of the Enlightenment period. They did an amazing job of breaking down the binary of science versus religion to create a unified version of knowledge production. As someone who studies critical theory outside of the western paradigm, applying more nuanced ways of understanding the self as an agent is salient when talking about the rejection of a dichotomy, especially when either side cannot be defined as fully present without its ‘opposite.’

Prior to attending the talk, I always viewed science and religion as two separate sets of epistemological frameworks that never crossed paths except when someone anomalously finds where the two support each other. But Mr. and Mrs. Crouch instead approached the topic by saying that scientific excellence has historically been fueled through religious faith.

And although they gave students more than enough time to ask questions and participate in the conversation with them, I would have loved to have more time to discuss specific aspects of their talk. I asked two questions- the first about how to encourage cooperation on the interpersonal level, and the other on how one can maintain a healthy amount of skepticism with the understanding that both religion and science are politically fabricated structures of knowledge. But I would have loved to explore how native and indigenous epistemologies that are seen as counter to the hegemony have for millenia unified science with faith. And how their erasure from the paradigm limits the imaginary that some can form in terms of ontologically building new ways of seeing.

I would have also loved to talk about how the creation of intersubjectivities and communal thinking influences perceptions of religion versus science. One other students talked about this a bit, and Andy gave us insight into his next project: understanding how people as non-static beings absorb and process knowledge that may seem contradictory at first glance. People do not enter spheres as unbiased, uninformed consumers. Their previous knowledge and opinions greatly affect the way they reflect on newly presented ideas, and this process creates a dynamic that inherently places people one neither side of the paradigm. Or at least that is what I understood… I may be crudely misrepresenting what he said.

I was able to briefly talk to Andy before leaving, and I expressed to him how I have recently been thinking of pursuing a ThD instead of a PhD. While I have not given much thought to scope or breadth of my studies, I am inspired by contemporary scholars like Omar McRoberts. Maybe the UChi School of Divinity is the next stop for me… but let’s not make any hasty decisions and rule out getting a JD just yet.

This evening was an interesting discussion of the relationships between Science and Religion – two areas that usually contrast each other. As I don’t really have much thoughts about religion nor the way it works, the conversation was hard to follow at times, but it was interesting nonetheless.

I liked the idea that interactions between two “things” define their identities, rather than the usual approach that each “thing” has their own identity which affects their corresponding interactions. This approach could be vital in helping us understand fundamental interactions of biological, physical and chemistry systems. By dissociating their identities from current knowledge, it allows us to study and understand them in a different perspectives – for instance, quantum mechanics to understand the mechanical model of the atom in which classical physics fails to.

This evening our Table Talk hosted Andy and Catherine Crouch to discuss religion and how they’ve come to recognize its representation in physics and journalism.  We were introduced to these threads by way of a history dating back to 1917.  There, we came to understand that the mechanistic world view, and optimism to place categories and ideal maths onto the world began to break down as the quantum world opened up to physics to contingent, relational tenants.  As Andy said, this was the moment when it “was the last best time to be an atheist.”

What ensued, of course out of the quantum realm was religion as an answer and, specifically to the discussion with Andy and Catherine, how much of a responsibility those doing science now had given they were in a position to interpret their results for a general public who might see into their remarks implications for religion.  Such might have not been their intent, but as a journalist would tell you, much depends on the implications of one’s arguments.  A person doing science may use categorical thinking, necessary of course to model reality, but also might be motivated to make a conclusion from that model which reduces the complexities of the world.  There was a sense that theologians, and I might be wrong in my interpretation, with their background in philosophy, had the intellectual toolkit that wouldn’t reduce a sophisticated world down into a confined science; there was just bound to be complications that would be elucidated because that too benefited the public.

I thought this would be a good place to ask a question that to what extent and where, given journalism and physics, was the innovation of bridging religion and high-tech or physics seen at these days.  If people were able to participate in fields that could account for both science and religion, where might they be?  The answer was informative, Catherine Crouch stated that a colleague went through a sort of revelation moment that allowed her to become more grateful of her place and her work gave new religious overtones and while it was not informed by religion it nevertheless was still the best analogous framework to use to describe her growth experience.