Steve: Prof. Dustin Van Hofwegen, thanks so much for agreeing to chat to me about science and faith.
Dustin: Glad to be here.
Steve: Let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What it is you studied, and what is the work that you’re involved in currently?
Dustin: Sure. Currently, I teach molecular biology and microbiology to undergraduates at a University in Minnesota, the University of Northwestern – St Paul.
I teach in the Department of biology and biochemistry, and I mainly teach students that are interested in health science professions, like: nursing, PA, medical school, and related areas. Prior to this, I worked as a scientist for several years, for probably 10 years. I worked in the US government and the National Institutes of Health, where I did basic research on pathogens, specifically, the molecular biology of pathogens and infectious diseases.
Steve: So, did you spend a lot of time in the lab yourself working with pathogens?
Dustin: Yeah, I was doing the bench work. My specialty was the plague organism. So I did experiments with the plague organism and trying to figure out how it behaved and how it was transmitted. Also looking at questions of how we treat it? And how is disease caused? Those types of things.
Steve: That’s really fascinating stuff. I loved my time doing lab work, but it can be back-breaking after a while! So, you have your PhD., tell us a bit more about that.
Dustin: I finished my PhD at the University of Idaho, where I also did microbial genetics and a kind of spin on evolutionary biology along with that. I looked at how organisms change to adapt to their environment. Are they changing through an evolutionary process, or is this a pre-defined, engineered adaptation process? Doing experiments that tried to answer those questions.
Steve: I’m always interested to hear how people end up where they do. What led you to that? What was it about the sciences that attracted you to? I mean, did you always know that you wanted to go into the sciences?
Dustin: I did, yeah, ever since even junior high. I think I knew I wanted to do something in the sciences, I was always drawn to that. I was the kid that liked to investigate nature, look under the microscopes, do chemistry experiments and blow things up! I was fascinated with the natural world, with how, how the details of the natural world work.
Steve: I can definitely empathise with that. I think we’re cut from the same cloth. Okay, so you’re real scientist, I don’t think anyone can disagree with that. But, you are also a Bible-believing Christian.
Dustin: I am.
Steve: Tell me a bit about that.
Dustin: I was raised in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon in the church. Both of my grandfathers were elders in the church. So I grew up in a Bible teaching family. At family dinners we prayed and talked about Scripture church every Sunday. So I grew up in a very Christian household.
Steve: Often there’s an idea that if you’re brought up in a Christian family, they would be against going into the sciences. How was it for you, did your family encourage you to ask questions and to pursue the sciences?
Dustin: There was definitely an openness and encouragement from my family, although some people in my church weren’t very encouraging, sadly. My dad was actually the one that got me interested in genetics when I was in high school. Around the time the Human Genome Project was going on my dad brought home a Time Magazine one time, and it said the secret of life decoded. And I just remember reading about all the insights that we could gain from looking at the human genome, and what implications that shed on our uniqueness as humans. Already then I knew that there was going to be an explosion in the field of genetics, and I just wanted to be a part of that.
Steve: Let me press in a bit based on what you just said about the church experience being a bit different from your family experience. I’m sure you’re aware of the idea that there is science, and science is how we get to know about the world. It’s how we get to know any kind of facts about things. And then there’s faith. There’s religion. And that’s just blind faith. And according to some, it’s against the evidence, so how can someone be a Christian and a scientist?
Have you experienced that kind of attitude? In what ways?
Dustin: Yeah, I’ve experienced that from a lot of people in the in the church that don’t really have scientific training and haven’t spent much time thinking about it. So what I’ve experienced is that science is asking different questions of the world around us than theologians do. Science is merely just a process by which we ask questions of nature, and how we understand how the world around us operates. And then scripture, you know, that’s God’s special revelation to us, and that gives us truths about the world from God’s perspective. So for me as a Christian who’s also trained as a scientist, I see obvious parallels between how we approach the world. If God made the world, we should be able to investigate its secrets from a scientific perspective, from using the methodology of science to investigate it.
So I go about understanding the natural world as God’s general revelation, which he gives to everybody. Everybody can see the works of the Lord, as we read in Romans 1 where it says that God can be perceived from what has been made. All can see the glory of God in nature. And then there’s special revelation, how God’s speaks more specifically through the Biblical text – I believe the two work together.
Steve: It sounds like you’re saying that from Romans 1, that it’s almost like the Bible is kind of pushing us to say “Hey, go and have a look at the natural world”. That doesn’t seem very anti-science to me.
Dustin: I completely agree with that. I think we also get that in the creation story in Genesis as well. When God tells Adam to have dominion over the world it means go figure this thing out. Go put it in in place. Go be a steward of this world.
Steve: Would you say then, that your Christian belief – based on the Bible – in a way, compels you to your science.
Dustin: Exactly. Yeah, I find them completely compatible.
Steve: I know some people, definitely many of our atheists friends would very much disagree with that. Very often you hear stories of people in the sciences coming up against some antagonism when they find out that you’re a Christian. Is that something you’ve experienced in any in any way over the years?
Dustin: Oh, certainly! Especially in my field of biology.
You run up against that all the time as it’s the biological sciences that seem to have the most vitriolic response to any kind of religion. It’s this warfare hypothesis that a lot of atheists or agnostics would have about the relationship between science and faith. I don’t subscribe to that, but many biologists do so. I see my science and faith as overlapping. They’re integrated.
Whereas the warfare thesis says that they’re at odds with each other, or even non-overlapping magisterial – the view of Stephen Gould, which is that they’re mutually separated from each other. I don’t subscribe to that one. I think that we can learn so much about the world around us from the perspective of this all being God’s handiwork. Now, go organize it. Go piece it together.
Steve: Thinking about that warfare idea and the antagonism that can go with it sometimes; in what ways do you think that that has impacted young people, especially young Christians, in terms of considering going into the sciences. Do you think it’s had an effect?
Dustin: I think it certainly has. Like I mentioned before, there was not necessarily hostility, but there was a recommendation to not go into the sciences from people in my church, who were probably thinking in that same way. They maybe had the idea that the sciences are filled with atheist and you’re going to become an atheist too if you pursue that.
I think they were primarily well-meaning people, but they accepted too much of that warfare thesis. And so I think because of attitudes like that there are very few Christians in the natural sciences, this recommendation for decades from well-meaning Christians. It really saddens me, because there just aren’t enough Christians in the sciences who can communicate that there isn’t a war between Biblical faith and science, or they’re not in major positions to express that perspective, anyway.
Steve: That’s really helpful, and I think we’ve covered some really good ground. Two more questions.
The first: you teach a good number of students who hold a different worldview perspective to you, who maybe don’t share your Christian faith. When they see that you are a Christian and also that you’re also very accomplished and credentialed scientist, do you ever get any questions about that? And, how do you respond?
Dustin: Oh, yeah. The question is always “wait, you can be a scientist and a Christian?”
Yeah, that’s always the question. Sometimes if I’m at a conference and go talk to another scientist to and share what I’m working on right now, and they also know I’m a Christian, they just look at me, puzzled. Then the question comes, “how can you be a Christian and scientist? I thought they didn’t agree with each other?”
So that perception is still very much alive and well, and especially in the academy, especially with scientists. But I think we’re moving away from that slowly. I think there is increasing evidence that suggests that there is evidence for a creator in the world around us.
When I teach the students of science that are coming into my classroom and coming in to work in my lab, I’m always trying to give them the different perspectives, one being that I believe we can see God’s handiwork in the things that have been made. We can unpack this. We can see it. We can reveal it. We don’t have to shy away from that as an explanation – it’s often the best explanation of what we see.
Steve: Last question. If you had a young person sitting in front of you who might be wrestling with whether to go into the sciences – maybe they’ve heard of this idea of warfare between faith and science, what would you say to them? How would you encouraging them into to the sciences generally, but also particularly within the field that you work in?
Dustin: Sure. I would say God likes us to be very good at our jobs. God created us to do something, each of us with a unique role in this world, and part of that is the investigation of nature, where we are revealing His handiwork.
And so a young person that’s in my classroom, especially if they’re a Christian, that’s wrestling with this call to potentially be a scientist, I encourage them to be the best scientist that you can and also maintain a very strong prayer life God.
God reveals insights to us as we go about our work, and the sciences are no different. We’re not going to get conclusions from that, but I think the insights that we can get from a daily prayer life and a walk with the Lord tells us that He speaks to us and he might give us some hints on where he wants us to pursue.
Steve: That’s really encouraging. I’m sure there’s so much more that we could say. But thank you so much for agreeing to chat to me about science and faith today. I hope we get the time to chat again soon,
Dustin: My pleasure.
