Editor’s note: This address was given at the 2025 Grove City College Faculty Retreat.
The famous hymn, “This Is My Father’s World,” was written about 125 years ago by a minister named Maltbie Babcock. The hymn expresses God’s creative power, His superintendence of nature, and His kingship over it. The first stanza begins:
This is my Father’s world
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and roundly rings
The music of the spheres
And stanzas five and six assert that:
This is my Father’s world
Why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King, let the heavens ring
God reigns, let the earth be glad
This is my Father’s world
He shines in all that’s fair
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass
He speaks to me everywhere
I’m going to comment on that last line later, because it is not a given that the Creator of the universe would want to communicate with us—but He does, with glorious repercussions.
This hymn resonates with a lot of Christians in science. I was an atheist when I began studying physics at Clemson University, but I always loved science, and I think God used the grandeur of creation to keep me sane until the time came that I heard and responded to the Jesus revealed in Scripture. I think this simple poem pertains to all of us as we wrestle with our callings in light of who God is. What does it mean to be a Christian social worker? Historian? Engineer? Businessperson? Accountant? The corollary to this is the age-old question, how do we integrate our disciplines with our faith? And how do we instill in our students this passion for the Christian intellectual life that we have?
I can’t give specific details to you, my colleagues—those you will have to fill in yourselves. But I hope I can give some guidance as I have wrestled with this “How?” as a scientist.
Of paramount importance is that we live in a moral universe (though it groans in its fallenness until its consummation), and there is no neutrality. It is all God’s and He owns it all. As the Psalm says, “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein, for He has founded it upon the seas, and He has established it upon the rivers.” (Ps 24: 1,2) God says to Job, “Who has given to me that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole world is mine.” That’s Job 41:11, but over four chapters near the end of the book, God pointedly expands on this idea to Job. And Paul writes to the Colossians, “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on Earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” (Col. 1:16,17).
Thus, our disciplines are inherently good (i.e., Christian) if we do them well and for God’s glory. If I am doing physics well and with the intent to promote God’s kingdom, I do not need to worry about whether teaching quantum theory is a Christian pursuit. It most emphatically is. It is beautiful, because God is beautiful.
I want to give students confidence that they are not interloping onto some secular intellectual marketplace, as culture far too often insists we are doing. In the sciences, we often hear something akin to, “Christianity has nothing to do with science. And if you are going to be a scientist, you have to act like a methodological naturalist when you step into the lab, acting as if a supernatural Creator does not exist and that matter and creation are at best neutral things.”
On the contrary, I think that you cannot truly integrate secularism and science (or secularism or anything else). I think that scientists must act like methodological Christians, depending on logic, rationality, and a raft of assumptions about the created world that stem from a biblically derived conception of God.
So, while we want our students to have plenty of epistemological humility so that they can gratefully learn from others (a Christian attitude), they know they are doing the Lord’s work if they are godly entrepreneurs, field biologists, teachers, etc. And this is especially emphasized when we couple our vocations to the creational mandates, God’s marching orders for us.
The command to take dominion is given at the beginning in Genesis and reiterated after the flood. First, I would define terms very carefully with our students. I think that Biblical dominion does not imply despoliation but rather service to those entities over which we have dominion. But given this idea, surely taking dominion implies that all of our callings are necessary. It’s not just a STEM thing—all of us do our part in our own spheres. If we are called to be teachers, we are surely doing our part to take dominion. I hope our students feel this same compulsion to make a difference, as it were, and help to advance God’s kingdom through their vocations.
God usually doesn’t give us details within the various human knowledge categories. Even in theology, the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has enabled us to mine data from scripture to develop our creeds and theologies. The Bible didn’t give us the Einstein field equations of General Relativity or the time-dependent Schrödinger equation of quantum theory. And I am glad He did not. All that would prove is that whoever wrote the Bible had the same level of scientific and technological sophistication that we have. Rather, the privilege (and the difficulty) of humanity is that we must figure all these things out ourselves. That’s a very deep honor that Christ the Creator has given us. But it is also sometimes disturbing and discomfiting. Our limited minds can struggle to reconcile data sets that seem, at first glance, at odds with our faith.
Galileo knew that. In his famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” he wrote that if we had perfect knowledge, we would know that the Bible is always consistent with itself and with science. But the best theologian is an imperfect interpreter of scripture. And we are never vouchsafed that kind of divine knowledge, so in trust we need to lay hold of Christ, as the old theologians used to say, and trust that there is always an answer, and that God’s Word is true.
Our students will sometimes struggle with ideas they have learned in our classes. Sometimes these are simply intellectually tough, esoteric concepts that are hard to wrap one’s brain around. Sometimes they are the kind of things that, prima facie, might seem to challenge one’s faith. But at the end of the day, have they learned to cherish scripture and the God who wrote it—do they love it more, or less?
Sometimes people can’t live with the tension. But let’s help our students realize the honor of dealing with ideas in our heads that appear to be in conflict. As humans, we deal both with limited knowledge and the effect of the sin that perfuses our innermost being. Scientists live by trial and error. I don’t know about your experiments, but mine usually failed—until I persevered.
So how can we give students the tools to think Christianly about their vocations? I think that since creation reflects the attributes of the holy God who created it, our vocations should, too. I’ve already spoken about the inherent goodness of our work. But any vocation can be suborned by evil. I want students to recognize that all godly and legitimate things that we do stem from the nature and attributes of God. If we are conducting our teaching and research with integrity, we are always integrating faith and discipline. Here I’ll use science as an example:
It helps to recognize that attitudes towards nature and empirical investigation are not themselves rooted in science alone but evolve from theology and ideas about the nature of God. Let’s consider the incommunicable attributes first. A single God (monotheism) who is characterized by immutability, eternality, aseity, and the infinities is the only possible underpinning for the scientific method, which assumes uniformity in nature. The laws of science are universal; they apply throughout space and time.
But there are universal truths in any discipline. The squabbling gods of polytheism, with their competing fiefdoms, each with different rules, can’t form an ideological basis for conducting science. The conduct of science depends on ideas and attitudes not derived from science—and that reality is well known by those who study the history and philosophy of science. (See, for example, the work of philosopher J.P. Moreland and others.)
Science—taking dominion over creation—is a creational ordinance and thus it is inherently good. The ability to perform science developed in the Christian West over centuries—into what we call the empirical or scientific method.
Closer to home, roughly speaking, God’s communicable attributes correspond to the traits that render us in the Imago Dei. At creation we were designed to be good, holy, just, loving, and merciful, as God is.
Many Christians become scientists because they want to build God’s kingdom through kingdom service. As Imago Dei creators (or sub-creators), we can honor God by using the truths we discover to further God’s kingdom. We can use our vocations to reflect the perfect Image of God, who is Jesus. We can use our vocations to heal, preserve, and protect. In my case, I wanted to use tools in physics to understand the determinants of a chemical structure that render it carcinogenic so that we could avoid the cancer and I could thus improve human life for the glory of God. Theology matters when we do science.
Some do science because scientific truth is beautiful, as God is beautiful. Years ago, I read an interview of Charles Townes, a Christian and one of the discoverers of the laser principle. He never gave a thought for the practical applications that a laser might have, but he thought that atomic physics was beautiful (and it is). That pursuit was a godly one.
I think God’s love should provide a great impetus for any scientist’s work. We think of the highest form of love being that gracious and unmerited love displayed to us by God, who in a work of the Trinity redeemed us from our sin—and happily, this is all true. But 20th-century theologian Louis Berkhof defined God’s love this way: love is that perfection of God by which He communicates to us eternally.
And this returns us to stanza six of “This Is My Father’s World,” for indeed, “In the rustling grass I hear Him pass, He speaks to me everywhere.” God wrote two books expressly for us to read: the Book of Nature, and the Book of Scripture. Science thus becomes a joyous possibility. But so do any of our disciplines. For example, I cannot imagine any better way to communicate truth than through music, literature, and the visual arts. How much is the world improved by these things. God’s love gives me confidence that I can learn truth about the natural world, because this endeavor has God’s imprimatur.
And the same is true for all of you as you apply your energies to your vocations. Our work is not for nought, and we should have confidence that our students’ work will be useful to God’s kingdom as well. I have confidence in you, my colleagues, that this will be the case. But even more, we should have confidence in the God who made this multi-faceted world to reflect His glory.