When I Am At Lab, Some of the Best Conversations Happen - Abigail Lai

Coffee and a book - always perfect for your brain to churn.

The talk on Christianity and Science was refreshing. In NUS, I spend an average of 8 hours doing lab work a week. I do lab dressed in my white knee-length lab coat, in long pants and covered shoes, and most of the time with plastic gloves that make my hands smell very bad afterward. Much of it is repetitive work that seems to aim more to fit data into theory than the other way around. But because of its very nature much of the best conversations about Christianity and Science has happened and can happen in the lab. 

Once I had just inserted my samples into the centrifuge and my lab partner and I had 40 minutes to wait around. Somehow we started talking about religion, and he asked me the same question the speaker asked us: how can you believe in God if you’re a scientist? 

So I launched into how I was pondering one day how science can and has brought us deeper but it has never brought us finality. For example, we feel warm because heat is produced, because particles move faster, because energy from elsewhere was transferred to us so our particles could move faster. But why would particles moving faster make us feel warmer? And even if we explained the mechanism behind that, it remains a mechanism, and we can keep going deeper and deeper but there’ll never be answers to a final ‘why’. 

So now I think it’s beautiful how the very premise of Science is something I can use to explain why I’m a scientist and believe in God. Science looks into things, with the philosophy that there is a deeper reality and unfound truth behind the things we observe. If we do experiments for the sake of experiments, we are robots. But if we do experiments to dig out a deeper truth, then we acknowledge there is something else out there to find out. And I wonder for many of my friends what this greater reality is for them. 

I think we make an error when we try to use Science to explain God. There are lots of theories now going on about how God in Genesis is compatible with scientific fact and data. Things like how Light was first created and we were all made from Light, or how the Sun was indeed created first but combustion took awhile to occur for light to occur because it had to accumulate enough mass etc. God will never be explained by Science. God explains Science. 

God has made an order to things so that consequences will always follow certain events. What is wiser I believe is to look more carefully into His Word and understand Genesis, the Flood and all these things for what the author is trying to tell us about God. Surely there will be plenty of surprises. (After all, we have already heard last week how Genesis in its historical context can alter the way we read the book.)

Abigail Lai