Welcome to BioLogos, Faith!

If anything, studying religion at a secular college presented a greater challenge to my faith than studying astronomy did.  My religion courses challenged me to consider how other religions answered many of the same big questions as Christianity and to come to terms with the ways that the Church has not always lived up to its high calling. But when my religion courses left me grappling with hard questions about God and faith, I would walk to the Astronomy department, where they had a large poster of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field hanging on the wall.  I would stare at that image showing tens of thousands of galaxies collected in the tiniest patch of the night sky and think, “The God who created each of those distant, massive galaxies also created me.  And he knows me and loves me.”  And that would help keep me rooted in my faith.

“The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future.  And what he was promising for the future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose—and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger work.” (Surprised by Hope, p. 192)

It felt like something clicked for me, bringing the disparate pieces of my faith back together in a new, more complete way.  Ever since then, I have been working to find ways that my fascination with the universe and my love of teaching can contribute in some small way to the building of God’s kingdom.

Ciara: Between college and graduate school, you were part of the DoSER program at the AAAS where you served as Project coordinator.  What type of work did you do while you were there?

Faith: Well, like many millennials, my first job out of college was based as much on my innate knowledge of social media as on my academic preparation!  I joined DoSER to develop a social media presence for the program and to redesign their website.  Later on, I got more involved in organizing DoSER events and collaborating with other science and faith organizations, which is how I heard about BioLogos in the first place.  My favorite DoSER event, which I got to design and organize, was called “Losing the Night Sky.” We screened a film—“The City Dark”—about the ways artificial light has created vast amounts of light pollution and reduced our ability to see the night sky.  After the film, we brought together an astronomer, a National Parks Service Ranger, a sleep scientist and a professor of religion to discuss the ways the loss of the night sky has fundamentally altered our society and even our bodies.  It was a great event and opened my eyes to just how vast the field of science and faith really is—it’s more than just a conversation about origins!

Ciara: You have an MS in Science Education and an MS in Astronomy.  What were your Masters theses on?

Faith: Both of my Master’s degrees are a little unusual.  Even though I knew I wanted to teach in the classroom, I was also intrigued by the idea of doing education research, which most teacher training programs don’t include.  So I found a program that allowed me the flexibility to do some original research while also taking traditional pre-service teacher training courses.

As for my Masters in Astronomy, I didn’t do a formal thesis, but like a true liberal arts student, my favorite project during the program was a paper I wrote on the ways that the religious and philosophical beliefs of Albert Einstein, Georges Lemaître and Fred Hoyle influenced the early years of cosmology. Einstein, for example, was so deeply committed to an eternal and immutable God (though not the traditional Judeo-Christian God) and universe that when his theory of General Relativity implied that the universe was dynamic and may have had a beginning, he chose to arbitrarily add an extra term to his equations to make them align with his philosophical views. Georges Lemaître was the Catholic priest who first proposed that the universe began in a small dense state that expanded outward rapidly, which went on to become the Big Bang theory we are all now familiar with. Given its reputation among many Christians today for being a fundamentally atheistic idea, it is surprising for many to hear that it was actually first conceived of by a priest!

But what’s even more surprising is that some in the scientific community at the time actually rejected the Big Bang model precisely because it seemed too “theistic” and too conveniently aligned with the biblical creation account in Genesis.  Fred Hoyle was one of the most famous detractors of the Big Bang model; he even coined the term “Big Bang,” intending to poke fun at the idea!  While his alternative model, the Steady State model, initially had similar plausibility and observational evidence as the Big Bang model, Hoyle’s strong anti-religious views appear to have caused him to hold on to his Steady State model long after the preponderance of the evidence had shifted in support of the Big Bang.  The entire story of our understanding of the early universe provides a great example of the nuances of the nature of science and a fascinating case study in how our personal beliefs and biases as scientists can so easily become entangled with our science.

Ciara: You’ve taught physics and astronomy for several years in high schools before coming to BioLogos.  Recently, you’ve exchanged the classroom and set down your “proverbial chalk” as you’ve described it, to work at the intersection of faith and science.  What inspired this transition and career change?

Faith: A lot of things coalesced in life about a year ago to make the shift from the classroom to BioLogos a perfect fit for me.  My goal has always been to point my career toward the intersection of faith, science, and education.  My dream is to see Christian schools convey the harmony of science and faith to their students and to raise up a generation of scientists who are Christian and who are empowered to use their work to love God, serve others and bring a little bit of heaven to earth.  As a 22 year old fresh out of college, I had no idea what pursuing that dream would look like, but I knew that having experience teaching science in Christian schools would be vital preparation no matter what the future held.

After getting Master’s degrees in both education and astronomy, and teaching physics and astronomy for seven years at one of the largest Christian high schools in the country, I was starting to feel that the time might be right to take a step back from my own classroom and start thinking and working in Christian education on a larger scale.  Around this same time, my husband and I welcomed our first child into the world, and the realities of teaching during COVID while also adjusting to parenthood proved to be untenable for us as a family.