#22 UNDERSTANDING SPACE AND THE UNIVERSE, Biblically + Dr. Leslie Wickman

Science and Faith as Complementary Ways of Knowing

Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our creator, better.

Hey, so we are live with Biblically Speaking. I am absolutely honored to have the first female on my guest, which is weird, but I am so glad that you're here, Dr. Leslie Wickman. Dr. Leslie is a PhD and internationally renowned research scientist, engineering consultant, author, and inspirational speaker.

I hope you inspire us today. You also hold a master's degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and a doctoral degree in human factors and biomechanics, both from Stanford. What is human factors?

That's a great question. I mean, I'm so.

Close to it. I often forget that people don't necessarily know what that is. Human factors is looking at the user-friendliness aspect of systems. It's basically trying to make any human-created system user-friendly.

It goes by different names sometimes. Ergonomics is another term you might have heard. Ergonomics has to do with measurements of human capabilities to work, and that's part of human factors. In the aerospace industry, we often refer to this as crew systems, which is basically helping the crew to get their job done.

It covers a wide span of disciplines, including engineering, typically, often industrial engineering because industrial engineering deals with the human factor and worker productivity. So productivity is a big part of it.

Health and safety is another big part of it, and like I say, the user-friendliness aspect as well.

I mean, was that your core focus? Because I'm not even a third of the way through your biography, Dr. Wickman. I mean, you also were an engineer for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. You were working on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and you're considered Lockheed's corporate astronaut.

Yes, I was. I'm no longer working with Lockheed anymore, so I can't claim that title. But yeah, I was their corporate astronaut while I was there. Back to your question, though. I was considered a crew systems engineer, so most of what I did had to do with crew systems for those programs, the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station.

I did my dissertation work for that PhD program in conjunction with NASA Ames Research Center on spacesuit design for Moon and Mars exploration, which of course is very relevant today. So I did that. I did human factors and biomechanics related to spacesuit design, and then I also did the human factors, crew systems, user-friendliness for the Space Telescope in terms of what are the astronauts going to have to do, either for the deployment mission or the repair missions.

For the space station, we looked at assembly techniques as well as maintenance or repair activities. So yeah, all of the things that I've just mentioned were within that realm of human factors and biomechanics.

My gosh, big brain stuff. How did Christianity fit into all of this? Was it amidst it? Was it before it? Did you find it afterwards? I mean, how does somebody so within the engineering and secular world of science, kind of be a part of Reasons to Believe, an incredibly Christian organization?

Childhood Faith, Science, and a Telescope

Yeah. Well, I have to kind of go back to my childhood for that story. So I grew up in a Christian home and both of my parents were STEM people. So they were Christians in STEM. And my dad was an engineer in the forestry industry and my mom was a dietician.

And so both of them were STEM people. So I had strong role models in STEM to begin with. And really one of the big factors that persuaded me to go into the sciences was my dad had a telescope as I was growing up.

And so he used to take us kids outside and look through the telescope at the stars and the moon and the planets. And that just inspired such awe and wonder in me that I was just fascinated with space.

And growing up in a Christian home, I just always believed that God was behind all of this amazing wonder and in the creation. And it didn't take too long though before I ran into my first atheist science teacher in junior high.

Of course. Right. And he would go so far as to say, you might as well just leave your faith at the door because what we're going to be talking about in our biology class is going to almost certainly contradict what you've heard at church and Sunday school.

And even as a, whatever you are in junior high, 12, 13 year olds, I was like, that just doesn't make sense to me. I was like, if God really is the creator behind all of this amazing display of the universe and animal life and all this, how can studying what he created contradict the creator himself?

And it just didn't make logical sense to me even as a kid, but I didn't really know what to do with it. But looking back on that, I was like, I'm really actually grateful to have had that experience so early on so that I could start investigating how science and faith fit together.

So like as a junior high student,.

You heard this and you weren't deterred. There was no sense of like, Oh, maybe he's right. My parents were wrong. It actually provoked you to jump further into the word. Yes. And figure it.

Out, you know, because it's kind of flashing forward a bit. You know, I started to study really everything I could get my hands on that was written about, you know, the connections between science and faith or the possible compatibility.

And for time, I started to realize that the apparent conflict that we hear about, you know, not just in my junior high biology class, but in our culture at large. I mean, there's this real perception that science and faith are at odds with each other.

Yeah. But what I began to realize that is just kind of a misunderstanding of both fields that leads to that perception of conflict. And I had an experience when I was teaching at Azusa Pacific, one of my colleagues had asked me to come and speak to a senior seminar class about science and faith and the compatibility and whatnot.

And one of the things that she said has just stuck with me over the years. She said, you know, we here in the class, meaning herself and her students, are very concerned about a faithful reading of scripture.

And I said, Oh my gosh, you've just hit the nail on the head. A faithful reading of scripture requires study and figuring out, you know, what was the original audience? What was the genre? What was the original message?

What was the intended message of the first writers? And, you know, how do we faithfully interpret this? As opposed to what I think a lot of us do or grew up doing is, you know, just kind of picking up your Bible that's written in English, translated into English, and plopping it open and just going, I'm going to read this from a 21st century American perspective, you know, and just not think about the, you know, the history and the years and years of church tradition and very, very informed hermeneutics interpretation, you know, and looking at the original language and that sort of thing.

And so I think this is not only from the side of scripture interpretation, but also looking at science and really understanding how science works. I think actually, when you look at both fields and really understand them well, you see that there's a lot of commonality.

In fact, the scientific method uses evidence and induction. And I think there's a common misunderstanding in our society that the scientific method uses more of a deductive process that's kind of more of an open and shut case on the evidence.

And that's just not the way science works. You know, as I talk to my students, science basically is doing tests and experiments and observations to collect evidence, either to support or negate a hypothesis.

And so then ultimately, what science is trying to do is find the best explanation given the current set of evidence that we have, always knowing that we could have new evidence that turns up even tomorrow that would change what the best explanation is.

I mean, we see this throughout scientific history, right? I mean, everybody goes back to the case of Galileo in the church and Galileo's evidence that he collected through looking through a telescope to say that, you know, really the evidence affirms a heliocentric view of the solar system as opposed to a geocentric view.

And so then science changes its paradigm or its best explanation, right?

Yeah.

And I think on the faith side too, we use evidence, you know, we want our faith to be reasonable, right? And so again, you could say that, you know, an approach to faith would be looking for the best explanation given the evidence that we have, you know, and I think we do that in apologetics really for the Christian faith and looking at how do we defend our faith, right?

And if the best explanation goes along with the evidence, then that too gets us to a point where we think the best explanation is the God of the Bible and the story of the gospel. And then we take that step of faith based on that, right?

Yeah. What do you feel like is the

Commonality.

Absolutely. And I think that a lot of scientists that I've spoken with, I mean, they're all Christian, so they echo that, that science and theology compliment one another rather than negate. But when you're talking about testing a hypothesis and gathering evidence to either, you know, prove it or negate it, what do you feel like is the question that the hypothesis is asking?

Would it be like, is God real? Is that like what you're thinking?

I think everybody has their own questions in terms of their spiritual journey, right? And yeah, I mean, I think one very basic one is, you know, does God exist, right? And what is the evidence for the existence of God?

And that's certainly a big, big question, a big fundamental question. And that certainly might be part of someone's journey. And then another follow-up question is, you know, is the God that exists the God of the Bible, right?

For me, that's kind of the next logical step is, you know, does the evidence point to that? And, you know, we have to take kind of the full spectrum of evidence from every discipline and area. So, you know, scripture tells us that God reveals himself both in scripture and in nature, right?

Romans 1 .20, the truth about God can be seen in what he's made, so that no one has an excuse for not being able to see it or know it. And Psalm 19 is another great example of that. And Psalm 19 talks about how the heavens declare the glory of God night after night before first sort of speech.

And, you know, so the creation itself testifies to God. And then in that same chapter of Psalm 19, we see the latter part of that chapter talking about God's word and God's law and God's precepts being perfect, right?

And so it combines both of those, which I absolutely love because through the ages, Christians in science have used this kind of two books model, how, you know, God has revealed himself both through scripture as well as through nature.

And, you know, it's been referred to the book of God's words and the book of God's works, right? And I just think it's a beautiful thing, you know, and yeah, I think we need to.

Take them both together. Absolutely. I love how you jumped right into the word. Yes. For me, Romans, where'd it go? Romans 1 .20. Yes. Through him, we received grace. I'm in the NLV, I think. Okay. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse.

That is, I mean, amazing verse, but what you said is kind of stuck out to me is like, is this like, does God exist? And is it the God of the Bible or is it Allah or is it Buddha? You know, how do we deduce that?

What do we even need to look for to find the answers to that question?

Right. So yeah, I mean, again, I think everyone's on their own personal journey and has to figure out what the evidence is that is sufficient, right? To get to the point of making that step of faith. And for me, I mean, I think from, you know, looking at scripture from beginning to end, the consistency that we see, you know, and comparing that with our lived experience and comparing that also with what we have, what we know through human history, through prophecies in the old Testament that were fulfilled in the new Testament, um, through the promise of a savior and the specific circumstances of Jesus's birth, as well as Jesus's crucifixion.

Um, we see that consistency and the prophecy that it was fulfilled in Christ and how it all kind of hangs together in this end to end story and, and how, you know, it resonates with our personal experience, um, you know, and the, you know, the creation of, of human beings in the image of God in a, in a sense that is completely different from the rest of creation and is completely different from what we see with the angels.

And a big part of that, uh, Imago Dei being created in the image of God has to do with free will and rational thought and free will and being able to make your own mind up. Right. And I think that is such an essential part of the human experience, as well as God's plan for humanity to be able to have a relationship with individuals who are at, at freedom to make a decision of whether to, uh, relate to God and whether to connect with God and whether to follow God.

Right. And so I see all these different pieces that we get from scripture, as well as the consistency with, uh, creation and the consistency we see within creation of a faithful God, you know, and we see, like I say, in, in Psalm 19, as well as other passages where we, where it talks about, you know, the heavens declaring the glory of God and, and how, you know, what we can see in nature is obvious that the creator must've had just amazing intelligence, as well as amazing power to create these things.

Right. And, and most people I think would agree with that part of it, but if you look deeper, you see this coordination of details and this synergy and this intricacy of how everything fits together so beautifully that, um, what the, the result is for our home planet is not just a place where humans can barely survive, but a place where humans can flourish and thrive.

You know, it's not like we've got just barely enough oxygen in the atmosphere to suck in a breath and be okay for, you know, a few seconds, you know, we, we, God has provided everything we need and more.

And to me that speaks to a God of.

Love. Yes. And I think that you especially have a unique view on the intricacies and the capacity for God to create something so complex because you're familiar with what's on earth, but also what's not on earth, you know, you, you've studied the stars.

The Fine-Tuned Universe, Earth’s Habitability, and the Odds Against Chance

Yeah. And I think that, you know, I, I can't even wrap my head around like a black hole. I can't even wrap my head around gravity. And yet you have, you have studied the solar system. Yeah. I mean, quite honestly, Cassian,.

It's my study of the solar system and the rest of the universe as well, but just, just sticking to the local neighborhood in our solar system, just looking at the other planets and how incredibly hostile to life they are is just such an eye opener.

It's like, Oh my gosh, this, this planet that we live on is so perfectly suited to support intelligent life. I mean, it's just the perfect distance from the sun. It's just the perfect size to give us the right mass and gravity to hold on to the right atmosphere, the gases in our atmosphere.

One of the examples that I love to talk about is the fact that earth's gravity is just exactly right to hold onto huge amounts of water vapor. If you go back to your high school chemistry class, 18 grams per mole.

Gosh, would not have guessed that. Okay. And water, water vapor as part of the water cycle is essential for our environment. And so earth's gravity is just right to hold on to lots of that stuff, but not quite strong enough to hold onto the slightly lighter poisonous gases of methane and ammonia at 16 and 17 grams per mole.

So that, that division between life giving water vapor at 18 grams per mole and poisonous methane and ammonia at 16 and 17 grams per mole, just light enough to not be held onto in large amounts in the atmosphere is the difference between a life-friendly planet and not right.

A hostile planet. So even in the, I look at, you know, NASA's exploration for planets around other stars and you know, right now, because of our detection methods you know, it's, it's very difficult to detect small planets.

And so the planets that are easier to detect at those distances around other stars are typically Jupiter size or bigger. However, we, you know, everybody gets excited when we find something that's quote unquote a super earth that maybe is, you know, several times the size of earth, so much smaller than Jupiter.

But the fact remains that if it's even a little bit bigger than earth, it's not a life-friendly planet because of the fact of if it's bigger and has more mass, then it's going to have stronger gravity and it's going to hold on to more methane and ammonia.

Right? I didn't know that. Yeah. And that's just one factor among you just, you know, hundreds that, I mean, throughout the universe that make the universe life-friendly and you can change any one of these factors by the tiniest amount, like the value for gravity, the gravitational attraction between masses, the electromagnetic force of, you know, attraction or repulsion between charged particles, the strong nuclear force that holds the nucleus of an atom together.

I mean, you change any one of these things by the smallest amount and the possibility of life in our universe, not just in the solar system or on our planet, but life in the universe, the possibility goes just down the tubes.

Are you ruling out the possibility that there is another habitable planet out there?

So that is a great question. I'm so glad you brought it up because I love talking about this. I mean, so it's unlikely that we'd have even one planet like earth in the entire universe. And so, but yet there is.

And the reason I believe firmly that there is in defying the odds is that God created that. So if that's the case, then God could have certainly done something like.

This elsewhere. Okay. Absolutely. I was about to say, I wouldn't limit our God to just one planet capable of humanity. Exactly. If you look at the natural.

Probabilities of just by random chance, getting even one planet like this, I mean, a crazy, you know, odds, right? And so, so just to get all of the factors that we need throughout the universe and within our solar system, within our galaxy, within our planet itself together to port life would be like approximately one chance in 10 to the 280th power, which is not, it's a, you know, it's a number that you can't, I mean, nobody can really get your head around it.

But actually someone at reasons to believe came up with the analogy of it being like one person buying just one lottery ticket each time they play and winning on the one ticket that they buy every time they play twice a week, every week for 50 years in a row.

And I'll often just say to my students, if you read a news story saying that that had happened,.

What would your first reaction be? The luckiest guy on earth,.

Right? Or the system is rigged. Yeah. That's right. And we can say the same thing about the universe. The universe is rigged for life. It defies the odds, right? Statisticians will tell you that once something goes beyond one chance in 10 to the 50th power, it moves from a category of statistically improbable to statistically impossible because just too many things have to line up to get that thing to happen.

Whoa, whoa, that's insane. Yeah. And, and just for another reference point with that, there are only an estimated 10 to the 80th atoms in the entire universe. And if, and here's another thing, if, if you imagine, I know, right?

If you imagine that the multiverse theory is correct, or the multiverse hypothesis, I should call it. If you imagine that the multiverse hypothesis is correct, and let's say that there are 10 to the 80th universes out there, each with 10 to the 80th atoms, then the odds of picking just one specific atom out of 10 to the 80th universes is still only one chance in 10 to the 160th.

So we're not even close to how remote the odds are of getting all of these factors exactly what they are to get life in the universe, right? My mind is blown by all that. I'm going to take a walk. Oh my gosh.

I mean, yeah, it's just, it's incredible. Yeah. You know, it, it takes more faith to think that this would all fall together just by random chance. Yeah. Than it does to believe that an intelligent creator put it all together.

And that's what I'm talking about, you know, in terms of kind of the similarities in some sense between science and faith, because we look at the evidence and the most logical, most rational explanation is that there's an intelligence behind all this.

Yeah. Right. So yeah. I mean, you've talked about a.

Lot of stuff and I think like, you've really, really driven home the point that it's just so intentional, the life that we have and the earth that is inhabitable. But I guess I'm just curious, like, I don't think this was probably a common belief amongst you and your colleagues when you were studying the stars.

Big Bang, Steady-State, and the Fine-Tuning of Cosmic Expansion

So I am curious, you know, this podcast is meant for people to kind of ask the, like the entry level questions of like, okay, Christians, how do you explain the big bang? You know, like, how would you defend that being, you know, so deeply in that while also being a Christian, how do you find God in the big bang in the multiverse?

Absolutely. And in alien life, I would say those are the three main things. Oh my goodness. That's a lot to put.

On the table at once. Let's see, let's start with the big bang, shall we? Okay. Okay. So, so yeah, the big bang is actually the big bang model of the universe of the beginning of the universe is one of the most, I should say, one of the best supported scientific models that there is just that all the evidence that we see coming in has to do with, like, for example, I mean, initially, I was looking at the redshift of distant galaxies that we'd see in space and the redshift.

Yes, the redshift. So think about the Doppler effect that you hear when you have a siren coming towards you. And then going away from you as the as a siren on a, an emergency vehicle comes towards you, because of the fact that the sound waves are coming towards you on a mini moving vehicle, it compresses the sound rate waves so that they come closer together and you hear a higher frequency.

And so the pitch is increased from what it would be if you were, if both you and the siren were staying still, you hear a higher pitch as it comes towards you. Got it. As it goes away from you, because those sound waves are coming from a vehicle that's moving away from you, the frequency decreases because the waves are stretched out and you hear lower frequency.

And so you hear lower pitch as it goes away, higher pitch as it's coming towards you. Same thing happens with starlight. Okay. So if we look at light that is coming to us from a distant galaxy, and it appears to be shifted to the red end of the spectrum, where, you know, we'd kind of expect that light coming from a galaxy would be pretty well distributed across the spectrum in terms of what we would expect from a typical star.

And if we see that it's shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, that indicates that those wavelengths as they're going away from us are stretched out. So we see a lower frequency, longer wavelength of light than what we would expect.

So if that light is red shifted, that means that just like the siren that's going away from us, that star or the galaxy is moving away from us. Got it. And so people started seeing this red shift in galaxies every direction that they looked.

And the other thing that they saw was that the farther away the galaxy was from us, the greater the red shift. So basically what that meant is that everything is moving away from us in the universe. And the further away things are, the faster they're moving, which gives us this insight into what the universe is doing.

And if those things are moving away from us, then you kind of rewind the tape, so to speak, or rewind the videos, so to speak. And it means that everything was closer to, you know, eons ago. I see it.

I see it. So that's where the Big Bang model came from. And just as time has gone on, we've seen more and more evidence for this, for the red shift of distant galaxies, the consistency of the further away the galaxies are, the more red shifted they are.

And so this acceleration as things get further away from us. And then recently, actually, about 10 years ago, I guess, there started to be some evidence for what Einstein predicted as gravity waves, that we should discover these gravity waves in the time-space fabric of the universe that should be observable if the Big Bang model is correct.

Okay. And so we've started to see evidence for what Einstein predicted as these gravity waves. And it's kind of ripples in the space-time fabric that basically were caused, if you imagine a sheet or a towel, it's easier maybe to imagine, but if you have a towel that's wadded up and you stretch it out, you start gradually stretching it out and then you suddenly stop.

And maybe the towel isn't the best example, but if you had a sheet of something, let's just say, you're stretching it out and you abruptly stop, you get these ripples in it because of the abrupt stopping or slowing down.

And yeah, I'm just trying to think of something that would be more, maybe easier.

No, no, no. I'm following the sheet. I'm following it.

Okay, good. And so you should be able to see these ripples in space-time because the Big Bang model basically says that there was this rapid inflationary period right after the moment of expansion in the Big Bang that rapidly expanded the universe and then it abruptly slowed down.

And so we should What would have caused that slowdown? Great question. I mean, that's one of the mysteries, right? Got it. Yeah. And the Big Bang itself is just so interesting because in some ways it's very counterintuitive.

And that's actually, I mean, we're getting so off on tangents, which is fine, but it's kind of where the idea of dark energy came from too, is this weirdness of the expansion. If you look, you can't look at the Big Bang as just what we would consider an ordinary explosion because with any ordinary explosion that we're familiar with, you would see initial velocity is really high, but then it would slow down and lose energy.

And basically entropy would cause the energy to be less ordered and it would just kind of peter out. But with the Big Bang, what we see is, yeah, we had this rapid inflationary period early on and then a slowdown.

But what we're seeing now with this, like I say, greater red shifts on more distant galaxies, we see that something is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. And so we came up with this idea of dark energy to describe the energy that is causing this accelerating expansion.

And unlike almost anything that we're familiar with in our day-to-day experience, so for example, when you stretch a rubber band, you feel resistance. The more you stretch it, you're going to feel more resistance of it wanting to snap back to the original position.

Dark energy is kind of the opposite of that. The more you stretch it, the.

More energy it has to stretch more. That's a pretty hard concept to swallow. Yeah. So yeah, I was just, how do you find God in that? Because that's kind of secular. I don't know. It's pretty ice cold.

That's the only way I can explain it.

Okay. So where you find God in it though is, okay, let's go to the model of the origin of the universe that was commonly accepted before the Big Bang model. And that was called the.

Steady-State Model. Okay. I'm not too familiar. Sorry? I'm not too familiar with that. Yeah. Okay.

The Steady-State Model basically is reflected by Carl Sagan's old saying of the universe is all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be. Got it. So basically what the Steady-State Theory of the universe was that the universe has always existed.

And if the universe always existed, there is no need to explain a beginning. And the cosmological argument basically says that anything that begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. But if something has always existed, then there's no need to explain its beginning.

So similar to our belief in God is that he has always existed. So there's no need to explain his beginning. But if something comes into existence, then there is a need to provide, or at least acknowledge there had to be a cause.

So you can see how the shift from the Steady-State Theory, which basically says that the universe always existed, to the Big Bang Theory, basically is this shift in, is a very fundamental shift in philosophy to going from know that the universe is self-existent because it's always existed, to know the universe had a beginning, therefore there had to be a cause for it.

And so, and then when we start looking at the details of the expansion rate of the universe, and the mass density of the universe, how much stuff is it, and how much gravitation pull is there between all the stuff in the universe, so that it doesn't collapse back on itself because of gravitational attraction, expand too fast so that you don't have any gravitational clumping to create stars, galaxies, and planets.

And so that in itself is fine-tuned also, in terms of how fast the universe is expanding, that it allows some gravitational attraction and clumping of matter to get stars, galaxies, and planets, versus it's expanding too fast, has too much or too little stuff in it, so that it expands so fast that nothing's close enough to each other to clump into stars, galaxies, and planets.

So those things are also fine-tuned. And so you see this intelligence behind that too. Okay. I was about to say, so how do you not see.

That as just so much of physics working accordingly? How do you see that that's God's will in letting all of that happen? Because it seems so not Imago Dei. It seems so cold. It doesn't seem like there's a hand of a creator there because it seems like that's the laws of physics, and that's how things work.

It's hard to find the intention behind that.

Well, yes, but you have to then also... I mean, there's so many things we could talk about, but fundamentally, where do the laws of physics even come from to cause the clumping of matter, let alone this dark energy that comes into play?

And the dark matter too, which we haven't really mentioned, which basically says that based on our observations of the universe and the way galaxies move, there has to be some invisible, so to speak, matter out there because of the gravitational movement that we see in galaxies is not adequately explained by the amount of visible matter that we see.

See, that is so amazing. I'm so curious. What is the attitude in the room of these astronauts, these astrophysicists, these scientists, when you guys are in that field and you guys are so educated, but then you have that invisible force.

Are you guys like, oh, I think it's God. I think we just proved God.

Dark Matter, Astronaut Culture, and Why Scientists Miss the Big Questions

Yeah, so it's super interesting, all this, because I mean, I think sometimes people just don't think about all of this stuff. I mean, I know when I was working more in the aerospace industry, people kind of, I think they tend to maybe compartmentalize things and not consider as big of questions necessarily.

Okay. I'm not trying to dismiss anything, but I think that it takes some studious effort to kind of see how all the pieces fit together. I think oftentimes when you're working on a specific project, especially when you're looking, using science in a kind of more practical application sort of way to get something done, you're only looking really at the applicable factors to your project.

So you're not necessarily thinking about what the implications of some of the latest discoveries in astrophysics are. I think in some ways, people are wired to focus on what they need to do to get through the day.

What do I need to do to accomplish my task at hand and not necessarily think as deeply as the background science, so to speak. I don't think that's any kind of a diss to anybody. It's just human nature.

I mean, and the progress that we've made in science as well as other areas through the eons of time. It's kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You have to meet people's physical survival needs first, and then you can move up the pyramid to some of the things that are not life-threatening but important.

So security and safety, and then ultimately you get to a point where if you've still got time left in your life and in your day, then you can consider some of these more kind of metaphysical questions, right?

And so I think people have the capacity to consider those things, but they might not have the time. Yeah. I think that's a fair explanation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I really do think it kind of has to do with it's like, well, how much time is there in the day?

And do I have the luxury to sit and think about these really deep questions that maybe don't interest everyone, but at the same time, they're fascinating to consider, but they might not be part of my daily life.

Interesting. Do you feel like you fell into that category or do you feel like you were holding both beliefs at the same time and kind of watching others be caught up in their work and caught up in their discoveries and not having that capacity to be like, oh, I wonder if this is actually God explaining this, but it seems like you could.

Yeah. I mean, I think it was definitely a journey for me and a process. As a kid, as I mentioned back in junior high school, I didn't know what to do with this kind of apparent conflict, but I knew that I wanted to figure it out, that much I knew.

But at the same time, by the time I was finishing high school, and I'd gone to secular schools all the way from grade school on through grad school. By the time I was graduating from high school, I guess I didn't feel confident enough about how to address the relationship between science and faith to boldly go into a STEM field in college.