I want to introduce myself before I begin, as I’ve never written here before. I’m a graduate student in the physics department at a large research university. James Davisson is a friend of mine from college. I am not a particularly religious person, but some events that happened a couple years ago got me thinking about combining religion with professional life. James invited me to write about it here.
The following stories feature a former colleague and classmate of mine, who I will call Quentin. Quentin is an Evangelical Christian whose personal faith came up against the secular world of academic research. His very public enthusiasm for Christianity led to him becoming isolated from the rest of his colleagues, who largely did not understand his views or how to react to his behavior. At the same time, Quentin’s inability to separate his personal religious life from his work life seemed to indicate a misunderstanding of how one should behave at work. Eventually, he decided that Christianity was more important to him than physics, and left the department to pursue a stint of missionary work in Africa.
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I first encountered Quentin over the Internet: before myself and my cohort of graduate students arrived in the Fall, he started a Facebook group to help all of us get to know one another. About a week into our first semester, he posted a note to all members of the group. Being physicists, he knew that we would all appreciate the challenge of an order of magnitude problem. Instead of asking us to estimate the number of piano tuners in New York City, his note used scripture and a great deal of jargon to argue that Jesus is Lord with probability 1.
Quentin’s argument began:
The basis of this argument is the idea that information cannot travel backwards in time, which is a fundamental principle of general relativity. In other words, one cannot accurately predict the future. I hold that the Old Testament scriptures contain enough accurate prophesy [sic] that they seemingly demonstrate a violation of this Physics “law.” Further I hold that there are no other religious documents that foretell the future as accurately, specifically, and abundantly enough to rule out statistical chance. A violation of this Physical “law” is really a way that God demonstrates his sovereignty, not a violation of physics itself.Upon seeing this, a lot of us were perplexed to say the least. Wasn’t the Facebook group intended for a secular, academic group? If Quentin really believed that the acts of God superseded physical laws, what was he doing studying physics in graduate school? There was also a great deal of derision that followed – people found it very easy to dismiss the post as evidence of craziness or stupidity.
Over the next few months, the other graduate students learned more and more about Quentin’s beliefs and religious practice. He thought evolution was a lie. He had very negative things to say about homosexuals and same-sex marriage. Outside of his office, he posted a large, friendly sign proclaiming that the Kingdom of Christ lived within him, and offered laying on of hands and prayer to whomever wanted it (I emphasize: this was at work, at a secular university). At one time, he claimed that he could raise the dead. His beliefs were baffling and offensive to many in the department. Quentin’s colleagues began to talk about him behind his back. He became a topic of conversation at parties, a focal point of derisive curiosity. Most of the mockery took place from afar (although there were a number of passive-aggressive flame wars that took place over Facebook). Needless to say, my colleagues’ (and perhaps my own) reaction to Quentin was not kind.
A lot of us scientists are vexed by the counterfactual beliefs maintained by many Americans. Creationism, for example, doesn’t make any sense to us, and to hear about how so many people cling to the notion that evolution must be wrong2 (a hyperbolic example here), is deeply frustrating. At best, it reveals poor education. At worst, it is an attack on our modern, secular way of understanding the world. I believe that to some of his colleagues Quentin became the perfect picture of mindless, backwards ignorance. It is no wonder that so many people reacted with frustration and anger at Quentin’s presence in the department.
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During our second year Quentin offered to give a presentation at the Physics Graduate Student Organization-sponsored lunch seminars. At the time, I was part of the PGSO (our department’s student organization), and organized some informal talks where students were invited to present and discuss their research interests or other ideas. A week before his presentation, Quentin emailed me his title and abstract:
Authority TheoryI replied to Quentin that his talk did not seem to be within the purview of physics. I suggested to him that he focus on the graph theory and mathematics, rather than proving that God exists. I also requested that mentions of God be removed from his abstract. Quentin agreed, on the condition that I substitute “exactly one being with ultimate and final authority” for God. I made the changes and notified my fellow graduate students of the upcoming talk. Within minutes I had received several complaints that the talk was obviously religious in nature, and that our academic student organization should not be sponsoring a Christian polemic. I wanted to keep Quentin’s talk on the schedule if possible. I didn’t want him to feel separated from or censored by the department because of his interest in religion. But at the same time, the students who complained were right that a religious talk would not be appropriate in that academic setting.
Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that makes right things “right” or wrong things “wrong?” In this seminar I will unveil a brand new philosophical argument about the nature of authority using very simple ideas from graph theory mathematics to help answer such questions. We start with some definitions, use some logic, and demonstrate some interesting and important philosophical implications that impact our society at every level. Lastly, I will show the proof of the following theorem: God exists if and only if a finite number of beings with authority exist. This discovery has many interesting implications which we can hopefully discuss.
Kicking myself for not talking to Quentin about this before making the announcement, I talked to him about whether or not his talk did contain academic content. I told him that several people had complained because of what seemed like a religious agenda. Was there any way for him to remove the religious emphasis and focus instead on his mathematical or philosophical interests? Quentin told me that he had been confused: His talk had no physics in it, but I had never explicitly told him that the talk needed to be related to physics or research. (To be fair, he was right in that regard.) There was no way for me to allay the suspicions of the grad students who had complained, so I canceled his talk. I told Quentin that the PGSO’s lunch talks were not the appropriate venue for him to publicly discuss his interests, but encouraged him to find a different venue. At the time, I felt bad that I had to reject Quentin’s talk (and embarrassed that it had been made public before), but was relieved that his talk would not be associated with the PGSO.
What followed was this: several weeks later, Quentin scheduled the use of a classroom himself and gave his presentation publicly. Almost fifty people showed up. A few of them were interested in learning about Authority Theory, and how one could use graph theory in the context of theology and philosophy. Many others, by contrast, were there to nitpick Quentin’s arguments. They interrupted him while he spoke. They peppered him with questions and made it hard for him to work through the talk. They wanted to see him fail. Frankly, they were very rude to him, in the loud, smug way that arguments are made anonymously in Internet forums. At one point, Quentin’s former office mate spoke up and told everyone to be quiet and let him finish.
As for the content of the talk itself, it would be an exaggeration to say that Quentin had thought everything through clearly or argued convincingly. His talk borrowed concepts from graph theory as a way to justify the belief in a single God.3 It was clear that he had begun at the conclusion and worked backwards, as the assumptions were nonsensical, and the argument itself didn’t actually prove his thesis in the end. A friend of mine said to me later, “If this is what he spent a year thinking about, and then presented it as a completed project, then something is wrong.” Quentin’s talk certainly didn’t deserve the scorn that it received from some people, but it was very, very flawed. It seemed to confirm what many people already believed about him: that he was so distracted by his creed that he was incapable of reasoning.
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I want to be clear: I’m not writing about this because I want to reveal the hypocrisy of non-religious liberals. It would be easy to interpret these events that way, after all, since this does seem like an example of how self-professed free-thinking academic types turned on one of their colleagues for being a Christian. This story is more complex than that. Yes, Quentin was a Christian, and yes, my colleagues (and, I admit, myself at times) were rude to Quentin and marginalized him because his beliefs seemed foolish. But, as time has passed, I have come to think of Quentin’s presence in the department not as a reaction to Evangelical Christianity, but how any average social group will react to an outsider who does not know how to behave.
There are plenty of religious people in my department. I have friends who go to Church and shul regularly. A couple of my coworkers wear kippahs, and a collaborator in my research group wears Sikh religious articles. A Christian colleague I know would wear a cross but cannot do so at work for laboratory safety reasons. So these colleagues of mine are openly religious, and in conversation they will occasionally bring up their religious practices. The community doesn’t react badly to this kind of casual behavior at all. Personally, I’m quite comfortable living in a work environment that accommodates people who follow different religions.
Quentin, as anyone, was entitled to his personal religious beliefs and practice. That being said, Quentin decided to bring his religion to work with him and advertise it loudly and up front. I have no idea why he thought this was a good idea, although I speculate that part of his faith included active pursuit of disseminating his religious ideas to others.
The first impression Quentin made with his Facebook message, his public display of evangelism in his office, his attempt to deliver a theological talk at a venue for discussing scientific research, and other events all seemed to indicate that Quentin was confused about what was appropriate for work and what needed to stay at home. Quentin’s colleagues turned against him not because he was a religious conservative, but because he that he was aggressive about advertising his enthusiasm for Christianity in a professional context where nobody else talked about religion in the same way. His behavior was far enough outside the established norm that he made the people around him uncomfortable. I don’t know whether any of his mentors in the department, his academic or research advisors, ever confronted him about mixing work and religion, but it certainly seems that conversation might have helped Quentin fit in a little better.
Overall, Quentin seemed to lack a degree of what is often called common sense, meaning an understanding of tacitly agreed-upon rules of social engagement. In this case, his lack of common sense manifested itself in such a way as to present to his colleagues the image of a ludicrous religious fundamentalist. He did not deserve the mockery that was directed at him, but I find myself wondering whether there was a way for him to keep his personal beliefs private so as not to confuse or annoy others in the workplace.
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Quentin left the department after two years, completing a Master’s but not a PhD. He worked as a missionary in Africa for six months, and has moved on to work as a programmer for a large software company. I wish Quentin well for the future. I hope he figures out what he wants from his career, and that he finds a work environment that’s a little more accepting of him than we were. I hope he figures out how to balance his professional and private life.
1. Editor's Note: Today's guest poster wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that will probably be clear from reading the post. If you're offended, confused, or delighted about this, email us about it at theologyinprogress@gmail.com. The title picture are not related to the author of the post; we just thought it looked nice.
2. Editor's Note: Evolution and creationism is actually a subject which we've tackled on the blog before from a Christian perspective; read about it here.
3. Quentin tried to model the relationships between all beings as master-slave, where the upper tiers commanded the lower tiers, allowing him to "model" everyone as belonging to a directed graph. Quentin then tried to argue that the "authority structure" meant that those graphs must be treelike (having no loops). He disregarded (or at least, had no convincing argument against) the possibility of having two "ultimate authority" nodes in the same graph, as well as the possibility of having two disjointed graphs. In other words, even if you did buy his argument that there was an ultimate authority figure, there could have been more than one of them. So, for all we know, there is an equally powerful God on Neptune who has never been to Earth
Photo source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/1198523560/
Great post! I've seen people similar to Quentin in professional and academic settings, who become obsessive about ideas and pet theories that aren't religious. They often (though not always) give rise to a certain amount of eye-rolling and talk behind their back, but rarely the kind of more open hostility described here.
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