Catholic science teacher blog

June 29, 2025

A few years back during the Notre Dame Faith and Science Initiative’s Weeklong Conference, I discovered two new heroes in my life. I have taught physics for 25 years and I am a strong believer that whatever we do in an academic environment, we must remain obedient to THE TRUTH. That might seem obvious, but there is enormous pressure in our world to surrender to ego, financial pressures, charismatic personalities, and even peer pressure. It takes great humility to place truth at the center of everything we do in science.

I have always loved studying science, and for most of my life, faith was a sunday checkbox. It was a thing I had to do once a week out of obligation so I could stay moral and committed to the needs of others. Church was something that pulled me out of myself and kept me other focused. It reminded me I am on this planet to serve others, not myself. But I don’t think I would have ever tried to claim anything in the faith domain as TRUTH. Well beginning with the pandemic, I have felt an enormous gravitational pull towards FAITH and the TRUTH that lies in that arena. But I have a lot of questions and not a whole lots of answers. Empirical truths I find quite comforting because if it’s empirically verifiable, I can say it’s true or the model fits (at least on the surface of planet Earth), but theological truths. These are more difficult. I have to sit with these. And sometimes I am sitting with these truths along time before they make sense. And what makes these theological ideas true if there’s no empirical verification?

So that is what this blog journey is about. I would love to have your ideas and your feedback and I would love it if you would journey with me. I don’t have answers. But I do have two new heroes to point me along the way. I’ll write more about these two later, but for now a brief introduction.

Fr. Georges LeMaitre – Belgian priest, cosmologist, and developer of the Big Bang Theory. He is famous for the quote “I was interested in truth from the point of view of salvation just as much as in truth from the point of view of scientific certainty. It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them.”

Karin Oberg – Swedish astrochemist, convert to the Catholic faith, Harvard chair of Astronomy, “I think we should feel quite confident that having a true philosophy, and a true religion, should make it easier to make scientific discoveries, and not the opposite,”