Dr. Martin: They are things that I can do that no one else has done before, and I started reaching for those things. It’s one of the necessities to get a PhD, to do something that is not only in the tradition of the science, but also is new. And I found that that was very exciting. All of those things were so fulfilling. In science, it was very gratifying. You become aware of the danger of pride. If you are the only one who knows something at a certain time, then you have discovered it. You want people to know that it’s you who discovered it. So that kind of addiction to newness and being the first to discover it was attractive to the sciences also, and having been an apprentice for so many years, and finally able to do some of that was very fulfilling. I knew that could be addicting also. And yet, I knew there could be an end to that also. That even the newness wears off after awhile. I was losing some of the fresh perspectives; I knew I would eventually lose the ability to really make significant advances.

Mike: Dr. Martin says the search for meaning and significance caused a surprising number of his colleagues to turn to him for answers. They came to him when they discovered he was a Christian believer who had attended seminary before deciding to make a career of physics. He remembers one such colleague in particular.

Dr. Martin: When I knew her in graduate school, she was sort of disinterested in the Gospel. We would talk on occasion about religious things, but it was something kind of distant to her experience, and she was very tentative about thinking about it much, and was just invested in doing your science, and having fun and having a fulfilling life with her friends, and looking for that fulfillment everywhere else. Just because of those conversations early on, it turned out she turned back to me asking more and more questions as she got married and had children and was trying to bring them up, and started thinking about ‘What do I teach my kids? I hadn’t thought about this.’ So she would start sending me e-mails, and here I was. I had to recognize I was dealing with a person who was just starting to think about the issues of God and who that is and how he reveals himself. She had a lot of caricatures and third-grader inherited understanding from Sunday School about who God is, and needed help fleshing that out. She was very scared of the church, and yet, felt like that might be the locus of ‘where I need to go and find out more of where I’m being tugged’. She eventually joined a church, and is still grappling with ‘How do I most accurately describe who God is and what He is trying to have me do’. So it has been a surprise to me that someone like that I would, early on, would have said, ‘If she becomes a Christian, it’ll be a miracle,’ because I just don’t understand how somebody can be turned like that. And she’s going to make a very unusual Christian, if she is one. Sure enough, she has kept me on my toes. She asks really hard questions, and I can give her some answers, but mostly have to depend on my experience and knowledge from studying the Scripture to try and feed her and show that the One to whom she is attracted has a slightly different character than the distant surface that she’d seen before.

Dr. Green: I like the phrase, it’s used by others too, ‘the fine tuning of the universe’. There are a handful of universal constants that, were they different by less that a few percent, everything would start falling apart as we know it. Plonk’s constant is a tiny, infinitesimally small number, and yet, if it’s much bigger than it is, then the way our eyes would work would be entirely different, necessarily entirely different. The speed of light being sort of an immutable constant; if that were bigger or smaller, that would change the physics on which we rest the very universe. Again, it’s almost amazing that they are so finely tuned. If we are too much closer to the sun, we burn up. Much farther away from the sun, it’s too cold. So, for some reason, the earth is in just the right place for life to be on earth. Life doesn’t exist on Mars; it’s too cold. Life doesn’t exist on Venus, even though it possibly could; it’s too hot. Certainly life won’t exist on Mercury, it’s way, way too hot. So there is something special about the earth. We live inside a very narrow pH range, for example. Our bodies can tolerate about a 7.35 pH all the time. If that ever gets up to, even close to a pH 8, which is slightly basis, not even as basic as Drano (a drain cleaner) we quit working; we just shut down. If we get too acidic, if we go down to as little as 7.1, it’s over. We have a very narrow range we work in. We take it for granted anymore that we’re even here. But the probability of making a molecule with a certain geometry twice, when there’s no template, is just amazing! And yet, you’re sitting here. You’re a highly improbable creature. And bacteria is no less improbable. And yet we are here. And that’s amazing, and that’s atoms and molecules seeming to know what to do. And, last time I checked, atoms and molecules don’t have brains, but they seem to know what to do. They seem to know how to find each other, given the right template, to make another one like us, or like my dog, or like my bird. And it seems to work over and over. That’s pretty amazing! Either it’s by design, or it’s by accident. But, gee, to do it the same way over and over and over, seems a little less than accidental to me.

Mike: No accident at all. In fact, Dr. Green is a believer who is convinced he sees God’s creative hand at work in the world around us.

Dr. Ega: Everything that we see around us in the world, from biology to chemistry to especially physics is really written in the language of mathematics. And it’s rather odd that this would be the case. It seems that mathematics is a whole bunch of rules that are made up by men, and yet when you actually explore it, you realize that there are a lot of things that we, as people, don’t really understand. And you get the impression that really, the people who developed mathematics were not inventing mathematics, but really were discovering something that God was already using and has been using since before the foundation of the world. You may hear other scientists talk about the beauty they see in nature, and the more you study nature the more intricate the beauty becomes. Well, there is such an example in mathematics. I think there are lots of examples in mathematics. A great example, I would say, is the mandelbrott. Mandelbrodtt came up with a shape that was created in a very particular way using ordinary geometric descriptions. Although the way of making it is very simple, the more you do this process, the more intricate the pattern becomes. The resulting picture was something that no one could possibly have imagined. The formula, if you are interested, goes by F of Z = Z squared plus C. Now those of you who may know something about fractuals might have heard of this formula before, but the point is, it’s so simple, I could have said it in a few seconds. And yet, if you see pictures of it, you probably have seen pictures on t-shirts and magazines and all sorts of designs like that, you can imagine how intricate the actual result is. And I think this has as much of a claim as the beauty of the trees and forests and so on to claiming real beauty that was created by God. This is something that could not have possibly have been put there by Mandelbrott, who came up with that equation, or other mathematicians. They simply discovered it. It wasn’t something that they invented. It’s something that was put there by God.

Mike: Mathematician, Dr. Kevin Ega. Finding God’s hand at work in the numbers that define out existence.