Part I – On becoming a scientist
It is hard to pinpoint when, where, how, and why I became a scientist, in general, and a geologist, specifically, as it is with many of the origins of the inherent nature of human beings. So, to try to determine what led me in this direction, let’s first begin with defining inexactly what I think are the attributes of the highest quality scientists I know and have known.
I think that without a question, one must first be aware of the natural world. But a lot of people and especially young students become aware of the natural world and some of its unanswered questions without becoming scientists. The next important attribute of a scientist is that of curiosity, wanting to know how the universe, the world and even parts of the natural world works and why it works in the ways it did. But, again, a lot of people are curious, and many of them don’t become scientists. So, for me still another attribute of a scientist is a desire for answers, and an impatience with unanswered or incompletely answered or incorrectly answered questions. But, even many of the people who are impatient with inexactness of scientific knowledge still don’t become scientists. To become a scientist, one must have all of the above attributes. But, in addition, he or she must be willing and able to act on this impatience and delve into these unanswered questions with enough patience to stick with the often tedious task of following what we know to be the “scientific method” for answering science questions and to bear with the incorrect tangents on which we too often go, that lead to inappropriate conclusions.
Finally, a scientist must realize that scientific knowledge is often incomplete and can change. What we do is to strive for basic truths, scientific laws that explain why the universe and all of its components work as it does. We must realize and we must appreciate that most of us work toward these basic truths, but that many of these truths remain out of our individual reach.
My first memory of “liking” science came when I was in junior high school. (Those who knew me when I was younger might have argued that my inclination in this direction began much earlier, but they are all dead now. So, I am limited to what I remember.) I can remember seeing a program in school that dealt with archeology and it really appealed to me. That was probably in the 8th grade, and apparently helped me decide that I wanted to take as much science in high school as possible. At my high school, Alamo Heights High in San Antonio, to the best of my recollection, that meant taking biology, chemistry and physics. Interestingly, even in Texas during one of the oil booms of the ‘50s, there was no opportunity to take a course in geology, Earth science or any of the other Earth sciences.
Biology was interesting enough, but it didn’t grab me. Chemistry, on the other hand, did grab me. During the summer prior to my taking chemistry, the old chemistry teacher died. The school hired a replacement chemistry teacher from the industrial ranks. I’m certain now that he was not certified to teach science. But, he was a natural teacher. He had been a “toothpaste chemist” for Proctor and Gamble and whenever possible he used his own research to demonstrate chemical principles. I absolutely loved this course and feel that he was one of the most important teachers in my life. His discussion of the hardness of minerals compared to the hardness of teeth was one of the reasons why I became interested in this aspect of geology. Physics, like biology, was interesting enough, but it didn’t grab me either.
When I was admitted to Rice, I was still undecided between chemistry and geology for a major. I put “chemistry” as my proposed major on the Rice application, mostly because I thought that would help me to get admitted. Anyway, Rice did not offer any geology courses until the sophomore year. After my freshman year, I still loved chemistry. Chemistry provides one with a structure for understanding what natural materials are made of, and how natural materials are put together and why these natural materials have the distinct physical and chemical properties that they have. There is “orderliness” to chemistry that is very appealing.
In my sophomore year, I enrolled in the first geology course, physical geology, which I loved. It was this first course that sealed the deal as far as a major goes. I didn’t like chemistry any less, I just liked geology more. I think what really made the case for me was discovering that I could work outside as a geologist, as opposed to working all the time in a laboratory as a chemist. I soon learned that, unlike much of chemistry, there were still a lot of unanswered and fascinating questions in geology. Geology provides us with the opportunity to discover answers to questions about how the Earth works.
I also discovered that a geologist could be involved with a lot of chemistry, if he or she chooses that sub-discipline. I loved studying the properties and compositional variations of minerals and rocks, where knowledge of chemistry is an absolute necessity. Chemistry is an important tool that can be used to answer some of the most fascinating unanswered questions in geology. Not surprisingly, I chose geochemistry as my sub-discipline of most interest. I continued to study geochemistry through two graduate degrees, and to apply geochemistry in my first post-graduate job as a research marine geochemist and when I was hired as an assistant professor at USC.
Part II – On becoming a Christian
I haven’t always been a committed Christian as I am now. I was born into a very loosely committed Christian family. I was baptized in the Trinity Episcopal Church in Galveston and confirmed in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Alamo Heights, after my family moved from Galveston. So by all accounts I have always been some sort of Christian. Throughout my early years, I attended church somewhat irregularly. I believed in God; I believed that Jesus came among us and did good works, but I wasn’t sure of this business about a resurrection, and I didn’t even begin to understand this Holy Spirit stuff.
As I have explained in an earlier blog (Christian Community in Action), my life has included a series of gifts, often received following powerful positive and negative experiences, some of which included “ah-hah” moments into spirituality. Until recently, these gifts were followed by long periods of back-sliding. I didn’t realize that these gifts were from God. When I was 13 or 14, I had one of my first personal crises, one that caused me to fear loving someone outside my immediate family. Perhaps the most profound gift of my life came in 1953 when God led me Charlie. As a result, I learned that I could love again. We were married in ’58 and we started going to church a bit more regularly. I see now that I was moving slowly, with interruptions, in my spiritual growth. But for much of that time, I didn’t recognize what was happening.
In 1963, on the way home from field work for my doctoral dissertation, heard Dr. King’s speech to the assemble marchers in Washington, DC. This is when I became a strong civil rights proponent.
In 1969, I was on a geological expedition to the Japanese Islands and had the opportunity to visit the Museum and grounds at ground-zero for the 1969 dropping of the first atomic bomb. That experience was profound. As I walked through the grounds and park, I cried constantly that we could inflict that kind of damage to other human beings. This was when I changed from a supporter of the Viet Nam war to a pacifist.
In the early days, the choice to become a professional geologist did not make it my spiritual growth any smoother. It wasn’t easy to be a Christian. And becoming a science faculty member at a research-oriented university didn’t help much either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming my environment for my slowness in spiritual growth. I still believed in God, but I could not believe a literal reading of the Bible, especially things like the Genesis story of how God created the world and life. Geology has showed us definitively that the Universe was formed about 15 billion years ago and has been evolving since, and that life was first formed about 3.5 billion years ago and has been evolving since. We also learned that we did not need to call upon God or any super-natural explanation for how these processes had worked throughout time.
In addition, I was surrounded by friends and colleagues who were either atheists or agnostics at best, and I just wasn’t strong enough to tell them that I couldn’t be an atheist, like most of them were. So I just stayed quiet. However, the doubts of my university associates about God and my own internal conflict between what I believed and what I thought I should believe started working on me and after a while in this environment, I started losing my faith. My movement away from faith continued and was “helped along” by a decision that I made to get involved with the Hippie movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the humanistic education movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. During that time, Charlie and I had our most serious marital difficulties and at the most serious point I had to make some changes. My gift this time was that I didn’t lose Charlie. I started going to church a bit more regularly, but focusing mostly on those prayers that were not a challenge to my scientific knowledge. I still didn’t really believe in miracles or resurrections or eternal life. As a result, I simply maintained separate professional and more spiritual lives.
In about 1978, I made a career change at USC when I formed a Center for Science Education where I could devote most of my time to working with elementary and middle school teachers who were under-prepared to teach science. God was leading me to work with people and away from my esoteric geological research. In 1988, I temporarily moved to Washington, DC, initially for only one year, but without Charlie. Almost immediately I started having serious insomnia. I was desperately homesick for Charlie, USC and Columbia. I thought about praying, but decided that would be too risky. What if I prayed and nothing got better? What would I do then? But I finally got on my knees and talked heart-to-heart with God, who answered my prayers and helped me start getting some sleep, and also convinced me that I should quit my Washington job and return home as fast as possible. I was finally starting to get it.
In 1998, I was diagnosed with colon cancer. It didn’t seem to be too bad and the doctors were very optimistic. But, I was frightened. Then I remembered God’s help through prayer 10 years earlier with my insomnia. So, I had me another heart-to-heart with God. I didn’t ask God to cure me; I simply said that if I came through this, I would devote my life to him. I came through the surgery and started trying to hear what it was that God wanted me to do. But I couldn’t hear, or maybe I wouldn’t hear, until August of 2005 when hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf coast. That was it; I heard God calling me to help out the people who were and still are without anything, except maybe their faith. Our church, St. Francis of Assisi, became involved immediately and we joined in. After making one mission trip to the Mississippi coast with several of our church friends and some of the good Christians that our son in Texas was working with, the person who was organizing the trips told me that if I wanted to go back to Mississippi, I would have to start organizing the trips. We went back seven more times.
All of the above were leading me into a deeper, more intense relationship with God and Jesus, but I was still unable to internalize those Scripture readings and creed statements that compromised my scientific integrity. I knew that I was being called by God to do the mission work, and that God had a better plan for my life. But I was still torn inside because of the differences in what I could believe and what I thought I should believe. In February of 2007, Charlie and I with many others participated in Cursillo, an Episcopal leadership development retreat. I learned that God’s plan was even more fundamental. To be sure he wants us as part of our mission work to rebuild structures and lives, but his primary goal was to re-build the re-builders, to make us instruments of his peace. It was at Cursillo that I also began to understand better that Jesus’ primary message to the people of his time and to us today was that to follow him was less about getting to heaven when we die and more about transforming our lives today so as to take better care of those less fortunate than we and to take better care of God’s creation.
After Cursillo, I heard another call – this time to teach an adult Sunday School class about science and religion. It was during the preparation for this class that I began to see how science and religion don’t have to conflict with each other and in fact can complement each other. Science answers questions concerned with how natural processes proceed, but cannot answer any questions concerned with why. Religion, on the other hand, answers questions concerned with why, but cannot answer questions related to how. I also determined that I would be a more holistic scientist by also being religious, and I could also be a more holistic religious person by also knowing science.
In the last couple of years, I have become aware of a transformational movement in the religious community that is known as “emerging Christianity” and several other terms, especially through the reading of the works of Brian McLaren, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crosson. I won’t try to paraphrase all of these biblical scholars. Suffice it to say that, they are all trying to show that alternative explanations of some of the most troubling (to me) passages can help us to form a whole new view of what the Bible is trying to tell and show us. It was McLaren’s book, “The Secret Message of Jesus,” for example where I first understood that Jesus came to bring with him the Kingdom of God, a radical way of showing how Jesus dealt with relationships with and between the “haves” of the world and the “have-nots” in his day is a model for how we should deal with each other today. It was at a conference featuring Borg and Crosson in Anderson, SC in February of 2011, that I began to understand that much of the Bible was meant to be read metaphorically rather than literally and/or factually. It is less important to know whether some of the stories of Jesus, including his parables, really happened and more important to understand what these stories are supposed to mean, what they should be telling us. I now see that if I interpret metaphorically, not literally, those parts of the Bible, in the creeds, in sermons and in religious books and papers that I thought earlier were in conflict with what I understood from science, are actually beginning to allow me to see that what God wanted me to understand from religious sources are less in conflict and more in congruence with I believe from science.
Now, as I look back on my life, I realize that early in my professional career, without realizing it, I was being led to seek a greater understanding of how the Earth works, through my studies and through my research. But I was also being led to respond more to people who needed my help and away from isolated, esoteric professional endeavors. I now see the congruence between my deciding to work with under-prepared teachers and my mission work. I guess I have always been a “people-person.” In fact, in discussions with my Charlie, she has showed me that during those times after the cancer surgery and before Katrina when I thought that I either could not or would not hear God’s calling, I was actually doing God’s calling in my work with under-prepared teachers.
I guess God got tired of me trying to understand our relationship by myself. My life has changed. Since my 60th birthday, I have become a “permanent” Christian. I am committed to avoiding another episode of back-sliding. Still a sinner, but now, as a Christian, I am forgiven whenever I stray. As a result of my experiences the past 9 years I now believe with my whole heart that God loves me, just as he loves you, and that Jesus came into the world and died to save me, and you, and that the Holy Spirit works through me to:
… make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
This is the prayer of St. Francis and we say it together every Sunday at our church. It really captures where I am in my spiritual journey, why I am engaged in mission work, why I am teaching Sunday School on a regular basis, why I am involved with pastoral care in our church. I still feel like I have a lot to time to make up for and that there is more I could and should be doing. But at least I have started and my friends will know from one of my favorite hymns, “I am a Christian by my love.”
