Elizabeth Urbanowicz with Foundation Worldview talked with our physicist colleague Brian Miller about a crucial subject, “Helping Kids See God in Science.” Dr. Miller, who is Research Coordinator for the Center for Science and Culture, has great advice — not just for parents of young children but of young adults and for those young adults themselves.
“This may seem odd,” he begins, about 50 minutes in, “but I think learning about emotional intelligence is really important.” Yes. The context is when students with a religious background enter the sciences at the undergraduate or graduate level. They will meet people who don’t share their beliefs, or who may have been burned in their past (“perhaps their church used very outdated materials,” or they “were even bullied into accepting a viewpoint that wasn’t necessarily right”). All these encounters require sensitivity, understanding, and compassion.
That sometimes gets forgotten even by people with the best intentions. Miller also addresses questions about a “young earth” and being willing to accept tensions or seeming contradictions of various kinds as you study Scripture and study science.
Tensions in Science
After all, he notes, faith aside, science itself has its own massive tensions:
Let me give an example. In science, everyone believes in quantum mechanics. It describes basically the [realm of the] very small: how electrons are around nucleuses and atoms. Everyone believes in general relativity, which deals with the very large. It talks about how light bends around stars, which we can see, how mass and energy bend space. But scientists know these two theories are absolutely in conflict each with each other. Their assumptions are completely different. It seems virtually hopeless to bring them together. Yet they’re both true.
Urbanowicz, a graduate of last year’s Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design, mentions that Brian Miller is one of Seminar students’ favorite instructors. And you can see why.