So far, I’ve survived over eight weeks of the semester with my grades and sanity (mostly) intact.

For that, I’m quite proud of myself, especially since I’ve committed myself to learning STEM in college, so that one day I can apply it to a worthwhile career. What that career may be? I’m not sure. But, I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. 

In the meantime, I’ve discovered that I really, really enjoy Biology. Sure, the class itself can be tough, not because the material is hard (it’s not, there’s just a lot of it), but because I don’t enjoy being around my peers in that class. Oh well… that’s just life. 

Everything else, however, is very, very interesting to me. 

As the leaves on the trees finally start to change, I’m reminded that the leaves aren’t changing just because the temperature is finally to cool off, but because they’re getting less sunlight. And as leaves get less sunlight, they’re getting less of the energy they need to survive, which means they have to turn the chlorophyl in their leaves (which is what makes most plants green) into energy, revealing all of their other light-reflecting pigments. Eventually, the leaves will eat the yellows, reds, oranges, and purples left behind in their photosystems, and finally fall to the ground, unless the frost finally comes around and kills them first. 

Also, now that it’s well into fall, all of the bucks in the Valley have scraped the velvet off their antlers, and have been getting increasingly frisky. When the rutting season rolls around between now and late November, they’ll fight each other, potentially to the death, for harems of does to breed. 

By January or February, the bucks will have lost their antlers, because they’ll have burned through all of the calcium stored in their cells by then, causing their bodies to digest the calcium ions that held their antlers in place. And, when spring arrives and the bucks restore all that calcium to their bodies, their antlers will grow back again, bigger and better than before. However, the bigger their antlers grow, the sooner they’ll drop them come winter. 

These two biological processes alone show just how epic nature truly is, and the more I learn about Biology, the more I’m entranced by nature. However, there’s one aspect of science, for lack of better words, that has been nagging me for awhile, but I’ve been ignoring it because I thought (wrongly) that I put it to rest years ago:

For whatever reason, almost all of the most popular/famous scientists I’ve learned about, so far (including in my Biology class), have been very outspoken atheists. 

Meanwhile, here I am. I’m no atheist. I have a lot of tough questions for and about God, many of which I wrestle with daily. But, as angry and resentful towards God I can be, I still believe that He exists, and think about Him every time I study His creation both inside and outside the classroom. And I believe that He cares about His creation and interacts with us every day, both in big and small ways. 

However, in all of my college classes so far, and even in some of my science classes from K-12, all but one of the modern scientists I’ve learned about have been staunch atheists. The one outlier was (and is) Dr. Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and the head of the National Institutes of Health until he retired in 2021. 

But, I’ll admit, I didn’t learn about Dr. Collins through school. I learned about him through my experience with Cystic Fibrosis. Hell, he’s the guy who signed some of the paperwork enabling me to combat my Pseudomonas infection with phage viruses (which I still can’t believe actually happened, but it did). 

However, everyone else, from science educators like Bill Nye and Adam Savage, to famous scientists such as Lynn Margulis (wife of Carl Sagan), and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, have been very outspoken atheists. And, that bothers me a little. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist/agnostic, or even with criticizing religion. I understand wholeheartedly where most atheists are coming from, because I too, wrestle with the existence of God and all that God’s existence implies. I also don’t like many aspects of the conservative Christian faith I grew up with, especially the evangelical tendency to distrust much of science (such as evolution and the reality of climate change). 

At the same time, as I prepare to enter university as a Biology major, I don’t know how my education will interact with my faith. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I worry about how learning about science will interfere with my faith. If I come out of university a staunch atheist like so many great scientists have, so be it. At the same time, I don’t see how my Christian faith, as it stands currently, conflicts with modern science. 

After all, I think science is the study of how God made the natural world. Theology, on the other hand, is humanity’s attempt to study the supernatural, which can’t be studied scientifically, which is then applied to the wider world. But like science, Theology changes overtime as people learn more about it and grow in their own faiths. 

Yet, for some reason, both atheists and Christian fundamentalists seem to believe that modern science is diametrically opposed to the Christian faith; that if science contradicts with the literal reading of Scripture in any way, shape, or form, then either Scripture must be incorrect and thrown out, or or science has to go out the window. But, one can’t claim both science and Scripture are true. 

In other words, I have to have some severe cognitive dissonance going on if I’m gonna believe in God as I do, while going to university as a Biology major of all things. At least, according to the new atheists and fundamentalist Christians of the world (and in my family). 

However, the idea that Christianity and modern science conflict is only true if one sees those two things as many new atheists and fundamentalist Christians do: that one must choose between believing in God or accepting science. But, before I go further, I should probably clarify what I mean when I say “new atheists” and “fundamentalist Christians”. 

Many “new atheists” are people who grew up in fundamentalist Christian communities and came to loudly reject it for a number of very valid reasons. After all, many fundamentalist Christians believe that Scripture is the literal, inherent word of God, and all of it must be taken completely literally in order for Christianity to be true. This includes everything from the creation story in Genesis, to the apocalypse discussed in Revelation. But, Scripture is a collection of 66 books of various genres, written over the course of 4,000 years or so by many imperfect human authors. Sure, some books and chapters document things that literally happened, and can be trusted as historical sources. But many books and chapters of Scripture are allegories and fictional stories meant to illustrate spiritual and moral truths, not literal truths. 

Therefore, when people are taught that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans on earth, handmade by God who formed Adam from spit and dirt, and Eve from Adam’s rib roughly 6,000 years ago (which was calculated by tracking the lineage of Adam to Jesus, as though it was meant to literal genealogy, which it wasn’t), then learn about the scientific fact of evolution and the age of the universe, of course those people will have a crisis of faith! If they’re shaken up enough by the fact of evolution, then they’ll probably ditch Christianity as a whole, even though that’s not necessary! 

At least, that’s exactly what happened to me; I first turned to atheism because I was taught that creationism was totally true, and modern science (specifically evolution) was not. Yet, modern science was what was keeping me alive, and modern science also perfectly explained why my antibiotics stopped working every couple months or so. 

Meanwhile, I was already very, very angry at God. Coming to understand and accept evolution as fact was the straw that shattered my faith, especially when I attended a private Christian school for one year of high school, where my science teacher (if you could call her a science teacher) taught us Chemistry and Biology via textbooks written by creationist “scientists”. 

These days, I’m trying to go through College Biology with a still-shoddy understanding of Chemistry and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Biology. I enjoy learning about Biology enough to stick with it and learn everything that I can in the class. But I can’t help feeling a little angry about my past, and the fact that I was taught creationism instead of real science for that one year in high school. 

Also, at that same private Christian school, we were invited to a science symposium being held by Front Range Christian school, where we were encouraged to go around the school in the morning and ask actual scientists the hard questions about science and faith. After that, we spent an entire afternoon in the auditorium listening to an Evolutionary Biologist talk about the reality of evolution and how it didn’t disprove Christianity, but rather how it could reinforce one’s faith. During that lecture, I felt like God was speaking to me in a way; telling me that it was okay to believe in God and still accept science. 

But, the following Monday, the teachers at my Christian school immediately dispelled the notion that modern science and faith can go hand-in-hand. “I don’t think that [evolutionary biologist] was even a Christian!” my science teacher hissed, “Real Christians don’t compromise God’s Word to fit worldly narratives in it.” 

Those words were so crushing for me to hear that I fought back tears for the rest of the day. As soon as I got home, I scribbled about it in a journal while crying my eyes out. Whatever faith in God I had left was gone at that moment, which, looking back, was absolutely terrifying as it was depressing to me. I mean… at that point in my life, I was only getting sicker, with no hope of getting better. Modern science could only help me so much, and it was rapidly failing me. 

For context, the main reason why I chose to attend a private Christian school with only nine or ten other students in the entire high school, was so that I could expose myself to less germs and stay in school the whole year, as my Cystic Fibrosis was progressing at an alarming rate. Every few months, I lost a little more weight and lung function. My face was puffy yet pale from all of the antibiotics I had to take to keep my existing infections at bay, my hair was terribly thin and frayed, and I was scarily skinny. If I got a simple, minor cold, I’d be out of school for two weeks, at least. Worst of all, I had no hope of getting better unless a literal, Divine miracle happened. 

Now that my faith was obliterated, so was the hope that I’d somehow get better, or that I’d move onto a better place if my physical body didn’t recover. Medical science was progressing, but not nearly fast enough to save me from an inevitable slow, painful death I was certain I’d suffer within the next ten years. I was already doing everything in my power to stay healthy and get better, but nothing was working to stop the progression of my genetic disease. Hell, my strict regimen of pills and treatments and a sugar-free, organic diet hardly slowed it. 

Honestly, I don’t remember much of what happened after all that (though I still have many journal pages that I wrote from those days). But, I definitely embraced anti-theism for awhile until God showed up in life again several times, which made me reconsider my position as an angry atheist a little more each time I experienced the inexplicable. 

One of those experiences happened when I joined a scientific study on phage viruses to treat my Pseudomonas infection, which had become completely resistant to all antibiotics and was ravaging my lungs and sinuses. In order to qualify for the phage virus study, I had to have permission from my doctors, as well as the scientists running the study to continue. One of the people who signed my paperwork was Dr. Francis Collins: the head of the NIH at the time, as well as the doctor who helped discover the specific gene that caused Cystic Fibrosis (I still don’t know how my mom got him to do that, but that’s besides the point). And guess what? Dr. Collins wrote a book describing how his career in science led him to God!

I didn’t read his book until years later. But the very fact that this extremely brilliant, kind-hearted biological scientist- who found the time to give me permission to try a medical therapy that literally saved my life- was also a deeply devoted Christian, caught my attention enough to make me reconsider my lack of faith. Very long, convoluted story short, here I am today: a devout (although very cautious) Christian who will soon be majoring in Biology. 

But that brings me back to my original question: Why are so many scientists, especially very famous scientists I keep learning about in college, so strictly atheistic? Or at the very least, are agnostic and extremely critical of religion? 

Well… I think the answer to my question lies somewhere in today’s increasingly secular culture. 

To be continued… maybe.