I'm a geek and a nerd
by heart. I love the technical aspects of things, you know. I
as a kid tore apart clocks and built radios - and
love, love, love that kinda stuff and I think it would be very hard for me if I
saw
science and religion at odds with each other.
MIT's a little bit different in that you
are trained to look for the one answer as fast as you can,
and you take your test - they're all science or math
questions that have actual answers to them - and so
you're just trying to do that as fast as you can. And so you're trained to look for
the one answer,
and in some ways that sort of primes you a little bit
to look for an answer when it comes to
life and faith.
There actually are a lot of people who are religious.
It's fascinating how many
religious groups there are on campus.
I think it has something to do with the institution, too.
The scientists there - there are a lot of people who follow,
who follow God. There are a lot of people who are spiritual.
I think a lot of that is because they're studying the cosmos - they're studying
creation.
They're looking around at all the data
of the world, and that leads them to believe
that something out there must have created this.
It's a beautiful world. I would imagine that
it would allow places of worship
over test tubes and measurements because you're seeing how
neatly and beautifully things are designed.
Whereas at other liberal arts colleges or colleges across the river
or up the street where you're studying people and mankind and
societies,
and you can see when you're studying each other and the stuff that we do to each
other
and the junk that's, that we're a part of -
that it'd be easy to lose sight of who God
might be, it'd be easy to lose sight
that God might exist because you're studying us.
But yeah, at MIT,
I don't really see science and religion being at odds with each other.
They just deal with different things.
I really think that science deals with the "how,"
the mechanics, how things work and religion deals with the "why," the
purpose, the meaning,
the stuff behind it so
they don't really, they shouldn't really contradict
if, if all of this is God's truth and
if this really is God's world, then let the scientists
dig deeply to see what's there because
they're just showing us what, how things work and let the
theologians and the pastors and spiritual people - let them figure
that stuff out there because they're helping us with purpose and meaning.
They're different realms, and the problem is when one starts crossing into
the other -
you know, where you have scientists because of the way they
see evolution working out on our planet,
and then they take the leap from there to say that God doesn't exist because of
what they found here. Well, they've just crossed the line.
They're not staying within their realm and when
theologians then, like you know, back in the middle ages when they were
arguing
that the earth is the center of our solar system
based on what they were reading in the scriptures, well then they, they jumped
as well. They took a book that was supposed to help us with purpose and
meaning and tried to make it,
make science say something else. That's, that's where
religion jumps its space but
if you fundamentally let the fields do what they're meant to do, then you
can have
scientists who are practicing, faithful, spiritual people. You can have
theologians who are studying - who figure out what's going on in the sciences,
but they respect the limits of
each of the realms, and in that way I think they
absolutely go together because
both speak of a different kind of truth, but you need both kinds of truth
in our world
to continue to find both how things work as well as how we're supposed to
live,
and so I, I just see them as going like two wings of the same airplane.