Flourishing together – The Faith Experiment

Davinder currently works as a Clinical Scientist, performing tests and planning radiotherapy treatments. Achieving registration as a Clinical Scientist in 2014, Matthew became a phototherapy physics lead. He also specialised in diagnostic radiology, as well as radiation protection applied to radiology and radiotherapy. 

Show notes: 

• How the Gardners came to faith. 
• Relationship between faith and science. Evidence thresholds. 
• Matthew’s journey of removing barriers to faith 
• Davinder’s experience of mental ill health in her coming to faith.  
• How intellectual arguments were no longer enough 
• Their awareness of how their work in science is healing  
• Exciting polystyrene person formulas!
• The faith experiment – accessible apologetics 
• Two reasons for the workshops – to affirm and educate Christians and show sceptics that you can connect science and faith 
• They share stories of encouraging feedback from the workshops. 
• The workshops create a safe space for people to ask questions 
• Tips to flourish – it’s OK to doubt/ faith can deepen/better able to help others/ love God with all our mind. Follow the questions.  

Links:
Faith in Science
ECLAS
Join the GoHealth Community

Twitter and Facebook @guildofhealth
Instagram @guildofhealth

[INTRODUCTION: I am Gillian Straine and welcome to the GoHealth Podcast. The podcast is run by the team at the Guild of Health and St Raphael, which is a charity that’s been around for over 100 years promoting and resourcing the healing ministry of the Christian faith. We’re in season three of the podcast where we’re exploring the topic, together we flourish and in this season we are looking at all the positive ways that people can combine health and faith.

So we chose this topic, together we flourish, because it is at the heart of the Go Health Community and indeed all the work of the Guild, because our vision is to see flourishing communities made up of flourishing individuals and the Go Health Community is a place of nurture, of sharing, of learning and practice, where we tend to our own journey towards health and wellbeing, but do it together with the faith of Jesus Christ at the centre.

In this episode, we are exploring this theme of Together We Flourish with Davinder and Matthew Gardener. They are a married couple with a shared passion for health, faith and science, Davinder studies physics at Leicester University and currently works as a clinical scientist in radiotherapy physics at a hospital in the West Midlands. And Matthew, he also studied physics, but at the University of Warwick. He also has an MSc in medical physics, and he is a registered clinical scientist in radiation physics. 

So I don’t think you need any, any reason to talk to physicists, I’m one myself, you often have great chats about life, the universe and everything when you talk to physicists. But the reason we’re particularly interested to chat today with Davinder and Matthew is that they co-direct a project called The Faith Experiment, which is a program exploring the interface of science and faith, but through the lens of health care science. And this is a program they developed and now deliver to local churches and community groups, to examine doing faith and science and how they fit together. So Matthew and Davinder are super interesting people and they’re doing something real to help people engage with science, but through the lens of what they’re experts in – health and health care, they bring it all together – faith, health and, as we discovered in the conversation, their own quest for health and healing. 

So this is what our podcast is all about, to share stories from amazing people that will help us all support our own quest to live well and faithfully. And it was great to chat to Matthew and Davinder about all this. They have some really beautiful insights to share, particularly about how it’s, you know, it’s okay to doubt. A great perspective for scientists to take – it’s okay to doubt

And another perspective, we can use our mind to find God. And finally, that if we follow the questions in our own heart, we can find flourishing. It was a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it. So on with the episode. 

[MUSIC]

So Matt and Davinder, thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us today. It’s great to have you on the podcast and you are a couple, a married couple. We’ve never had a couple before. We’ve never had more than one person to chat to as well, married or otherwise. So it’s great to have you both on together and we’ll do our best to kind of chat and have a conversation in this way. So I wonder if you could first tell us about your faith journeys as well. Just to give a bit of context. I’d be really curious because you’re both scientists and we’ll get on to that a bit later. But what about your faith journey, perhaps from your childhood? Have you always been a Christian? Did something happen on your journey to turn to Christ? Davinder, do you want to kick us off?

Davinder: I’m from a Punjabi household, and so culturally the family’s Sikh and I myself sort of oscillated somewhere generally over the years between there’s possibly something out there to something a bit more atheistic. Just kind of oscillating between those two positions. There became the period in my life where I struggled with my mental health. I had to leave university and sort of take some time out. I then met someone who I went into a relationship with, he was a Christian. And at that point, you know, I was partway through studying a physics degree. You know, I’d always loved science at school. So one of the first things I did was sort of essentially question him a lot, question the people around him, a lot about Christianity. And, you know, essentially, you know, how could Christianity be true if we’ve got things like evolution or, you know, those sort of classic questions? And what I found is no one could answer that question that well, but despite that, there was something I recognised as missing from my life. 

So there came a point where even though I didn’t feel those questions have been answered, I made the leap. Well, you know, I say that in that language. You know, God called me beyond that. And, you know, I gave my life to Jesus at that point. And I was like, well, I don’t know, but okay, yeah, I recognise that this is real. And then obviously that relationship ended, because it wasn’t with Matt, that it was someone else and that that ended. And I continued, I went to a different church, and I continued on the Christian walk and what really happened was, I guess, I compartmentalised my practice because I went back to university then and continued. And that was something actually God told me to do. So I got to university, I was doing science and I’d gone into a career which was scientific, and I had my church and faith, and those two were very separate things, which yeah, then sort of came crashing to a halt when I met you. And suppose you might want to pick it up from there.

Matthew:  I guess I was raised in…I guess you could call it a culturally Christian household and in the sense of I was christened as a baby and things like that, but it wasn’t…church life just wasn’t part of my life at all. And so I’d say it is very cultural, but not much practice of any Christian faith in my household, in the sense of taking part in worship and attending church and that kind of thing. And so I guess it wasn’t really something I thought about. 

I loved science, right from when I was a kid, and that was because I watched possibly an unhealthy amount of Star Trek when I was very young.

Davinder: He still does.

Gillian: [Laughter] We’re not going to go there. It’s okay…

Matthew: I started studying science a lot through school. It was all my options. It was all I wanted to do. I went to university to do a physics degree and off the back of that, I think at that point I was more I probably would have if anyone had tried to pin me down and ask me, I probably would have said I was a borderline atheist agnostic type. I think it’s fair to say I held God in some contempt, largely out of the basically the classic arguments around how can science and faith both be true at the same time? And, you know, as I look back at history over things like Galileo and all that, which was actually much more complicated, now I’ve looked into it properly. So I went in to work as a health care scientist because I wanted to do something with physics that was very applied to rather than, you know, I loved the physics of astronomy and cosmology and things like that and a lot of interest. But I found when I studied them, I didn’t want to pursue a career in them. I wanted to do something a bit more hands on or well, that’s the wrong word – but kind of applied. And I’d say…and then, yeah, I met Davinder at work and we entered into a relationship. At this point, I wasn’t a Christian and she was very clear that she was a Christian and it was a part of her life. I think you mentioned it on the first date and then and then, yeah, I think I was, I wouldn’t have said I was a Christian, but I you know, I wanted to be respectful of Davinder’s beliefs and all this kind of thing. So I didn’t really challenge it or say anything about it until we started getting close that and I realised I could ask her about it and things like that. And yeah, then I started grilling you on all the classic scientific questions that I had. I was kind of like, How old do you think the Earth is? And all these kind of things, and how, how do you reconcile these two supposedly opposing views? And yeah, and I think it’s fair, and you don’t mind me saying, that you didn’t really have answers for a lot of it.

Davinder: Yeah, quite a bit of it. And so there was somethings I was able to answer, but yeah, I realised that it was at that point that, yeah, I didn’t have the answers to those questions.

Matthew:  So then you invited me to go to church with you one Sunday and again, for me it was more of that – well, it’s important to her, I’ll go to be supportive’ and this kind of thing… it’s a one off just to find out what it’s all about and this kind of thing. 

I think up until that point, I’d always assumed that faith wouldn’t be intellectually satisfying.

You know, the concept in my head was that science is about work in itself, but faith is about being told what is and what isn’t, and accepting that fairly blindly without much intellectual involvement, or even that it’s any kind of evidence. And I found it really interesting the way our pastor, as his sermons is a very systematic theology approach, which I found really fascinating. And it kind of made me wish I’d studied like history and literature and things rather than science, because then I might be able to break things down a bit better. And so I found that very interesting. And then I was recommended by the pastor at the church, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, which I found absolutely life altering, really, because I went through…it goes through effectively the archeological and historical evidence of the resurrection and I think argued something that I agree with. If you can prove or disprove, or at least within a good evidence threshold that that happened or it didn’t, then for me, I could accept and begin in an intellectual way, a journey that I could figure out the rest as I went along. So I think that allowed me to kind of take the first step of basically stepping into faith, I’d say. That it was time for me, that my faith could be intellectually challenged, it could be intellectually validated, and it’s not something that you do just have to just blindly accept. There is very strong evidence for it.

Davinder: And from there, I think when you gave your life to Jesus, we quite quickly and you…so the recommendation from our pastor, he said, how could you do a session of science and faith? And we thought, okay. And then we did it. We wrote the session and we did it in our church. And then we kind of realised there’s more we wanted to say. And more and more that we felt God wanted to say. And there’s more questions from the congregation as well. So then we did another one, and then did another one and yeah, and then that became the faith experient.

Gillian: It’s fascinating. I just want to reflect back a little bit actually, when you answer my hugely broad question, you tell me about your faith journey you both started…I don’t know if you even know that yourself…the love of science came up really, really early. And this is quite, it’s quite interesting isn’t it? Because love is a thing of the emotions and of the heart and something we might associate more with faith and and what we do in church on a Sunday. Do you feel like looking back on your journey of faith, which is mixed in with the day job and all the rest of it, God’s presence much earlier, even if then you might not have been aware of it?

Davinder: I think for sure. And so certainly for me, if I hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through, if I’d have completed university in the time that I had done and I wouldn’t, I mean, yeah, I suppose we could have a debate about whether God would still have acted. You know, talking hypotheticals aren’t we? But that journey to me becoming a Christian and certainly meeting you wouldn’t have happened. And the is things in my life. I think they had to happen the way they did. And so I had to be in that searching place at that time where God called. And that had to happen by being brought a bit lower, in my instance. What I find interesting, it’s not quite answering your question, but it’s just a bit like what you mentioned about love and science and you know, love being more a faith thing than a  science thing.

We listened to a talk the other day, didn’t we, where you know, that science isn’t necessarily you know, the things in science aren’t necessary scientific themselves. So for example, it’s important for a scientist to be honest and to have integrity. And, you know, you don’t trust the scientist unless they have those things, but those things themselves aren’t scientific. So I think, yeah, sort of splitting science and faith…I think we’re coming to understand more and more that there isn’t that split, is there?

Matthew: Definitely. And I think for me, I definitely felt guided. I almost had to I think for us to do the projects that we’re doing now in terms of trying to actively explore science and faith questions, I think I had to go through a bit of a place to basically develop a bit of an antagonism towards faith so that I would start seriously probing those questions that these things that for me were for a long time a barrier to my faith that had to be there to come down to lend me, to be able to, I guess, reflect on that and grow from it and try and do something for that might help people to also see science doesn’t have to be a barrier to face.

Gillian: Can I just come back again to your journey, Matt there, and you described it so clearly and eloquently that you went on a journey with Davinder…let’s just go along and see that that’s just, you know, I like this girl, let’s go to church, it’s important to her, I’ll need to do anyway. And then you began to, to question it more and then you were converted or however, whatever language you put around it, with a book which was arguing for the evidence of of the faith.

Now, most people would say that there isn’t 100% evidence for the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There’s always an uncertainty. And, you know, we’ve a 2000 years of diversity of thought and interpretation of those things. In what way do you balance your identification of the evidence of the faith with openness to things that can never be proved or otherwise? How do you balance the faith element of it with the rational element of it.

Matthew: Obviously for me, that kind of evidence at the time was a barrier to me ever even looking at faith. So I wouldn’t even allow myself to kind of to go there. And, and I do, I do agree with you that, you know, the book the book I mentioned ‘the case for Christ’, I wouldn’t say it proves historical nature of the resurrection, but I think it builds up a really, really strong piece of evidence. And I think science in a lot of ways, I think particularly in our field, in health care science, which isn’t a, I guess you wouldn’t call it a pure academic subject, a lot of the time when we’re trying to make scientific decisions and a big part of our professional practice is about more, I guess, of a detective story of kind of weighing up evidence from different sources and more trying to reach a kind of reasoned conclusion than kind of depending on absolute proof, which I’m not sure is ever going to be there, because I think that almost would, you know, would there be faith if there was absolute proof –  it wouldn’t necessarily leave that much room.

So, yes, I think I was definitely looking for something because I knew my whole life I wanted to do something that was beneficial with my career, which, you know, even at the time I struggled with the concept of…in a purely scientific outlook, I’m a biological organism, looking out for my own interests, why would I even have such a strong sense that I’ve got to try and do something helpful with my life? Those kind of questions were there, I just tried to kind of close them off. So yes, I think that, yeah, that that reaching that kind of evidence threshold for me allowed me to kind of open my mind and then my heart a bit more to start exploring what my faith actually was…in this thing I basically been suppressing for a long time and I found that really helpful because again, because I’m very intellectually minded and, you know, I still work on evidence, but yeah, I almost needed that. So it’s more of bringing down a barrier than actively saying my faith depends on this evidence. It just removes the barrier more than proving anything for me.

Gillian: And actually I think that’s a really beautiful image to the evidence threshold that allowed you like almost like a like an a computer game. Onto the next level, I’d like to explore something else…because often I feel, what evidence do you use to back up your faith or to be an apologist for the faith is really personal as well.

I remember when I was studying, I met lots of, you know, theological students, a bit like me who are very excited about the evidence…archeological evidence and so on. And while I could read the papers, for me it didn’t really help because there was always a, there was always a doubt or error bars or something in the evidence.

I remember going on the radio to argue…it didn’t work very well…argue with an atheist. They got us onto argue with one another because they thought they’d identified the, the, the, star in the east that guided the wise men and they expect me to go, ‘Oh, it’s amazing’, you know, and I was like, no, it doesn’t really prove much, actually. And, and the radio guy was like, Oh, this is useless, she’s agreeing with the atheists and all this. 

[MUSIC]

Davinder, I was curious that, you know, your experience of mental health problems was part of your faith journey – a journey that helped you reconcile science and faith in God. I wonder if you could say any more. You used the term brought low, whether that’s something about vulnerability to a relationship with Christ that was important for you that I am not hearing in Matt’s journey. Is there something you share with us on the Go Health podcast?

Davinder

Yeah, so I think it’s a lot of this has kind of been things I’ve sort of realised in retrospect. I think I was, in adolescence, quite depressed and had problems with my body image and eating and those sorts of things. And essentially it all got to a point where I wasn’t really doing the day to day things. So that’s a massive problem if you’re trying to progress at university, you’re not turning up to lectures and you know, so on and so forth. So I think what had to happen though was there had to be, yeah, I think I was always quite a strong minded character and I think probably my parents certainly could attest to that, you know, as a teenager. It sounds like a bit of a paradox to be someone who felt that low but also be strong minded but there you go. Am, and I remember because I was, I was chatting with someone who was talking to me about God when I was a teenager. And, you know, I just was fairly pithily I thought, bouncing off the arguments and sort of going, well, you know, I don’t think that because, you know, there’s this evidence and so on and so forth.

And I think in particular, the whole thing with…when I was searching and sort of still trying to employ those intellectual arguments and finding they were falling short, I had to be in a place where you had to be the place where those intellectual arguments and my reliance on them wasn’t going to be enough anymore. So there had to be, I guess, a humility. And maybe God’s way with me was to have to strip me back so that there was nothing else. There was nothing else in my life that I could lie back on, to rely on, no sort of self security, whether part of my nature just needed to be really hammered out. We know God does that. He knocks off edges and perhaps in me you just need to knock off a little more. And I suppose…ultimately that all sounds quite depressing, but I had to get to a bad place. But I look back on it now and I know, I know in my heart it was the journey I needed to be on.

Gillian: You can see it in retrospect almost.

Davinder: Yes, absolutely. And I think it’s given what it’s given me, what God’s given me through that is empathy and sort of an understanding with where people might come from. So although it was a bad time, it’s given me a lot from God that I sort of take with me now, there’s stuff that I got from that time that I take forward and use. And so I’m perfectly okay with how it happened.

Gillian: Right, so bring us up to date on your day job. You mentioned you’re both scientists and Matt, you’ve mentioned your you’ve, I wrote it down, Applied Science to make the world a better place. Tell us about your day jobs.

Matthew: So, yeah, so we’re both healthcare scientists. We work in medical physics, both of us in NHS hospitals, although we’re in different hospitals at the minute. So I work mostly in radiation safety and imaging. So I do things like help design radiotherapy, treatment rooms, so they’re designed in such a way to contain the radiation that’s used to treat cancer. But we also need to protect the people who are walking around the department and working in the department. And so I input into the design of those. I help track patient x ray doses. So when people have an x ray in a hospital and they get a small dose of radiation. So part of my job is to kind of analyse databases of that of all those radiation doses to try and keep an eye on them and make sure that we’re operating at a level that we expect to in terms of radiation dose, because, you know, we want to try and get the benefits of radiation, but we don’t want to harm people unnecessarily as a result of that. And yeah, I also work on a few educational projects, so I was involved fairly recently with Health Education England helping to write a curriculum for the NHS Scientist Training program, and I’ve worked in technical qualifications in health care science as well, working on kind of curricula and exams.

Gillian: Thanks so much, Davinder?

Davinda: I do four days a week in the hospital setting, so I work in radiotherapy and what that involves in my job is I help plan patient treatments. So if a patient comes in for radiotherapy, what we want to do is give radiation to their tumour which will help kill cancer. But what we want to do also is maintain a good quality of life for them afterwards. So we would try and be careful about the amount of radiation that was given to vital organs. So we typically use patient images and use those to plan their treatment such that that their tumour can get the radiation and their organs as best as we can, have a minimal amount of radiation for their treatment. And I also do quality control on the radiotherapy machines. So that’s essentially making sure that given that the amount of radiation we think they are, we can’t have them giving out too much, that might cause harm, too little equally will cause harm because you’re not killing the cancer and we’ve been quite busy last couple of weeks because we’ve been setting up a new, more complex type of treatment. So we managed to start that in the last couple of weeks. So it’s quite exciting in the sense of there being a new technology that we’re using at our hospital that will help hopefully with better outcomes for patients.

Gillian: But as Christians and what we would say at the GoHealth podcast is a key part of the faith is offering healing. Now, it seems to me your day job, you are both hugely working in healing. Applied science, yes, but you’re healing. What awareness – do, do you go into work saying, got this scientific problem, I’ve got this to do, must do this? Are you…do you have an awareness you’re involved in healing as part of a bigger team when you do it, or is it very much a day job and getting on with it?

Davinder: I try and be more mindful of it because it’s a great way to bring faith into my work. And so I think it’s something that perhaps I am…won’t forget, you know, just doing the day to day stuff. But I think there’s a real joy in the sense seen in remembering that connection. So yeah, I do try and think about that more.

Matthew: So in my role and a lot of what I do actually goes, it kind of goes on in the background. And so I it’s very rare that I actually kind of directly encounter patients. I’m mostly involved, I guess you’d call it kind of quality control type things. And there was the thing that happened a few years ago, an idea that got me really excited, particularly about my faith at work, which was, I was involved in trying to do quality control on an ultraviolet therapy cabinet, which is a – it’s basically like a big sun-bed used to treat patients who’ve got psoriasis by using ultraviolet light. And the nurses were asking me and, you know, you come and do these tasks once a month, what if the machine breaks down or something goes wrong in the middle of the month and we might not know about it for two weeks? You know, my treating patients with their own doses that whole time and we don’t even know. And so they were asking if I could kind of work out roughly how long different treatments should take. But it got quite complicated because the brightness of the lamps isn’t always consistent. So I took some measurements using a polystyrene patient, which was great fun to carry around the hospital. Got some weird looks for that one. And I managed to get a graph, which I did some A-level maths and did some integration under the graph. I’ve got an equation which allowed me to work out. If you want to give this dose, it should take this amount of time and made a grid, which I then stuck in the room so the nurses could say that if we are going to give this dose, it should take this amount of time. If it takes too long or not long enough, we know something’s gone wrong straight away.

What I loved about it was that we we taken a physical measurement, put it into a mathematical world, if you like, which, you know, if you get philosophical about it that doesn’t even exist really – in some ideas of philosophy – did some equations put it back into the real world and did something that benefited people that I never even met because I wasn’t directly involved in the therapies. And I loved that God had given us the gift of science to be able to do that, that we could not only have the intellect and curiosity to understand the world and have kind of mathematical ideas about it, but then that we can also do that to kind of help people, which I think is as Christians, is a very big part of our calling, and that we should be involved in things that are of service to other people. It was one of the first things that I actually kind of just started praying in work and I was just so excited about it.

Gillian: I can hear you. I can hear the excitement still. What happened to the polystyrene person?

Matthew: It’s still in a cupboard in the hospital somewhere.

Gillian: It’s really interesting because it’s – so many people think science is just could be done by a robot. It doesn’t need to be done by humans. It’s entirely logical. But what’s so fascinating, if you get into science and know any scientists is that our humanity is at the heart of it, isn’t it? Whether it’s through wanting to care for someone or using our experience to inspire.

And one of my friends is Tom MacLeish, who is a senior physicist and also reader in the Church of England. He had a book out recently about the use of intuition in scientific discoveries, and he went round, he chats to heaps of scientists, top level scientists, and said, you know, where did you have your aha moment? You know, when did it suddenly click and you made movement forward in science? And he said to me, the amount of people that had that moment, that aha moment, either getting out of the shower or getting off a bus, you know, for me was when you weren’t thinking about something else, this something was happening at the subconscious level. And that for me is an interesting and interesting place because that’s where we connect to the world around us and what has happened, what is our flow of information or flow of knowledge that’s happening within us.

So for me, that’s where scientists, Christians can be really involved with science, which is, you know, of course a progression of knowledge of God’s world, as we would say it is, right. So I’d love to link more into the faith and science project we’ve mentioned a couple of times. So the Faith in Science Project is a project sponsored by a ECLAS which is Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science. It’s sponsored by Durham University, which is also and sponsored also by Templeton as part of the Scientists and Congregation arm of the project. So tell us how you came up with Faith Experiment, what it is and how it’s going.

Davinder: So essentially what we wanted to do with the faith experiment was do accessible apologetics. So the topics we cover on particularly groundbreaking and the sort of the general points of contention that a lot of Christians will be familiar with. So what about the dinosaurs, evolution? What’s the soul? Topics like that. But what we try and do is we make it accessible for anyone, regardless of their scientific background. So whether they’ve studied at any point at school or, you know, beyond. So a lot of our workshops are very interactive and we sort of pitch them sort of at youth, upwards. We generally set the scene first and sort of teach the topic we’re about to discuss. So in the case of our session on evolution, we talk a little bit about – in fact we play a game on what evolution is. We do a natural selection game and sort of play it out and see what happens and we use that then – once that knowledge is there for our audience to then talk a little further about the science, faith question that surrounds it. And yes, so we ended up with seven interactive workshops on different topics. Also, what we found as well is that there’s a way to kind of bring our experience, our profession into it. So we spend a bit of time just sort of talking about how through the lens of our profession we might see these questions as well. And ultimately what we want to do is two things. Firstly, for Christians to kind of affirm them and educate them, because basically, no matter what your scientific background, a lot of the time you’re going to be facing questions like this about, you know, science and faith. So it’s nice to be able to have an answer to them and for skeptics as well, just to perhaps open hearts and minds to show that those barriers aren’t there, to show that one can be a scientist and a person of faith.

Matthew: It started out as just something that we were asked to do in our church just to bring a science based service. Before we knew it, we had seven of them and we were just doing it in our church. And then, yeah, we were really fortunate to get some funding from the Regional Baptist Association, HEBA, which is the Heart of England Baptist Association, and also as you’ve mentioned, we got some funding from ECLAS, which is basically allowing us now to try and take the site into the wider church for others who might find it helpful to try and explore these issues in a really kind of fun, interactive, accessible way. And like I say, we are covering the ground of which, you know, there are many really brilliant books and lectures covering these areas, but we wanted to try and bring a lens more for someone that might not have much scientific background themselves. And also we wanted to try always we started to bring in some of our own kind of health care science experience to try and ground some of these questions in ways that people might not have thought of.

So, for instance, you know, when we’re talking about evolution, you know, we are now familiar with the idea of COVID variants and this kind of thing, so we can start to use that knowledge from health care that a lot of people have started to develop because of the COVID pandemic. And then see how that applies to these questions, which are importance to quite a lot of people or are a barrier to faith in a lot of ways.

Gillian:  And how’s it going? How’s the rollout going? What kind of feedback are you getting from people who’ve been part of the course?

Davinder” Yeah. So when we are looking for churches to host its ongoing so if anyone science thinks that this could be of interest to them, do get in touch. The people that we’ve managed to work with already, we’ve had some really good feedback haven’t we.

Matthew: Some some really encouraging things, I think. At an event we did near Birmingham recently, I was chatting to a man afterwards who it was…it was great. What I really loved about what he told me. He said it reignited his passion for science. Because as a young man, he was very interested in science and everything it could tell us about the world. But as he started to be presented with challenges in his faith, and all of it,  kind of have to put science to one side or, you know, he was concerned about if I, if I study too much science, is it going to undermine my faith and am I going to start to have kind of doubts that might take me away from my faith. We were really encourage that, you know, he said, it reignited that passion for science, but also that, you know, he’d been looking for fairly simple ways that he could put these concepts across for four decades, of his life. So that that was really encouraging conversation.

Davinder: And a couple of people who’ve had… there’s one lady I’ve talked to where she’s just said, I hated science at school. And and so she kind of got through what she had to do at school and, you know, just carried on with her life. And she said the program helped her like science. Well, it kind of gave her a bit more of an interest in science and this lady was a Christian, so it was nice to kind of see things that way that actually she felt more positive about science.

And I know that was another one I’d spoken to where she’d always claimed that she wasn’t particularly academic, but that she’d managed. She felt sort of really buoyed by the fact that she managed to grasp concepts and take something away from the workshops.

Matthew: Yeah, and I think we have a really, really good bit of encouragement from someone who is themselves a scientist, they are a professor, who kind of encouraged us by saying that they felt that we kind of we had taken the science faith discussion kind of out of Oxbridge lecture theaters where it’s been happening for a very long time, and we’ve put it into local churches, which makes it much more accessible to a lot of people who might not, you know, might not be able to go to a lecture essentially, but might be interested in a kind of interactive workshop taking place in their local church.

Gillian: I love the stories. I love the stories come out for because these are these are what I think really matters, because it’s not like you’re helping people – let them connect science this week and maybe connect to geography, history, or french or whatever next. When you’re getting people to connect their faith to science, you’re helping them connect to the sphere of human knowledge that best articulates our knowledge of the world that God made.

And when people when that relationship has been broken, whether it’s through poor teaching at school or some kind of self limiting, I wonder the extent to which people are actually isolated from themselves as well, if they’re not able to, if they’re fearful of engaging with science, if they’re worried about it, then actually what you’re doing is helping people to engage with the world as part of a healing journey I would say. That that’s where I would put on it, that probably I do that because my job is always to spot where the healing is happening. But just listen to your story, listen to your personal stories, listening to what you’re doing through the faith, Faith in Science Project is deeply healing work for people that encounter you. Do you do you feel or see like that?

Does anything ever you know, when you’re leading, what’s the atmosphere like? Is there a moment where you can feel people going, you know, ‘ping’ I get it or I’ve moved on or I thought this was just going to be, you know, having to learn equations and it’s not is something deeper? Are you having those kind of emotional experiences on the course, too?

Davinder: I think. I think so. I think we did we did it in a day, well, sort of half the day quite recently where we just invited people in the local area to come in and, you know, sit through a couple of the workshops. And I think straightaway you could see that because one of the first questions we ask is just what are your problems, you know, with science and faith coming together? We get that conversation to happen straightaway. And I think getting that to happen early doors was really good for that really, wasn’t it? Because I think people who hadn’t really met one another, because they are coming from different places, and were able to have fairly deep conversations with one another about, you know, things like, well, yeah, what about things like vaccines and suffering, you know, they’re able to put it out there. Where I see the healing personally, and I wouldn’t say we’re the only people that do this, by the way, but there’s lots of other really fantastic projects that do this as well as and it’s just creating that safe space to have a discussion. I often wonder about whether might be scared to bring up certain questions in the church setting. They might think they’re being a bad Christian in asking it, or perhaps they think it’s a stupid question and what we would love to do and love to continue to do along with others is just create a safe space to kind of be like, well, actually what all your questions, I think in particular with young people, it’s really important. We know that it is something like three or four people who’ve been brought up in the faith will lose their faith upon going to University. And I think if there’s anything we can do before, any of us, to to help really provide that those foundations to their faith, I think we should be doing it. And I think that would be a real healing work if it could be done, wouldn’t it?

Matthew: Yeah.

Gillian: I love your description there of creating spaces for people to ask questions, because that’s I think that’s what it’s all about. All aspects of church and theology and faith should be that, we should be unafraid of any questions as because people have them anyway. And, and, and it’s it’s a weak religion or a theological position that can’t deal with these kind of things.

And and people are being able to feel safe allows them to be more open to what’s going on as they see you. And I think just you as individuals and as a couple and taking your health care staff as well into these conversations is is really, really important because there are lots of courses out there and books you can buy on the science and religion dialogue. But to be standing up there as scientists of faith is itself. I mean, I’m sure you say great stuff. You almost don’t have to say anything because like you, you’re doing it in yourselves, aren’t you? You’re and then and that is a great kind of…because in some ways, I wonder if you could even think of science itself as a, as a healing occupation.

It’s a endeavor to understand the world around us. And we’ve been broken from the Creator, God, through the, through the fall – right. And science is a way to investigate the world around us. Again, I’m going to quote him again because he’s in my mind a lot in the moment. Professor Tom McLeish. If you go to the ECLAS website, I did it just before we came on to do this interview. This quotation comes up straightaway, this is it, ‘when we do science, says Tom, we participate in the healing work of the Creator’. So the activity of investigating the world we live in helps us to heal from our brokenness with God, which suddenly makes it huge, doesn’t it, as well, this, this common task, we have to understand the world around us and help us to be reconciled with ourselves and with God.

Gillian: So we’re coming to the end of it. I’m so grateful for your time. I’m so grateful for you sharing your personal stories. I’m sitting here thanking God for your work. I pray that the Faith and Science project gets to as many people as possible, we’ll certainly share in our networks as well. I thank God for both of your witnesses and the work you’re involved in, both your day job and your and your other bits and bobs that you’re involved in.

This season on the podcast, our topic is Together We Flourish and I wonder if you can leave behind as we finish this podcast, maybe some top, a top tip, top tip each maybe. I don’t know. You can do them together. I don’t know. We’ve never had a couple before. How somebody listening today, how might, how could they flourish a bit more in their faith and in their life?

Matthew: I think something that happened, something that I’ve come across quite a lot recently, is that people have mentioned it to me on courses we’ve been on have been on and our pastor has preached on this quite a lot recently. It’s about how it’s within our faith. I think it’s it’s okay to doubt sometimes that, you know, if you look at the Bible, there are plenty of people who doubted that times. And I think by having these questions around science, which I think people are worried, it will make them doubt that actually when you go there and you explore it and you ask those questions, your faith can deepen as a result of that. And because, you know, as you mentioned, when we do science, we understand God better because we’re studying his creation and learning more about what’s there and the wonderful levels and intricacy that there are. So I think that, yeah, I’d say that what I’d say is that it’s okay to doubt and it’s okay to question because when we explore those things, we learn more and we grow, we become better able to then help others who might also be struggling with the same kind of doubts around for us, particularly around science. But there are plenty of other areas.

Davinder: Mine follows on quite well from yours. The Scripture tells us to love God with all our heart, but it also tells us to love God with all our mind. And so yeah, I would say to anyone that to just follow the questions that they have, whatever field they’re in, whether it be science or otherwise, to find, you know, a good friend, you know, they can they can talk through those questions and explore or find resources that will help them with that question, to not be scared of the scary questions.

Gillian: I love. I love. Yeah, they both meld together, but both beautifully articulated. One of our courses we run at the Guild is the every day healing course and we’re helping people learn about how they can be a healer in the world today. And one of the final sessions is on discernment and we point people to the value of their own curiosity.

So often we look back on our own spiritual journeys. What we’ve done with our lives is started with curiosity in an area I think you just both in your tips of flourishing, backed up being, not being afraid to be curious, ask the questions. So thank you, Matt. Thank you, Davinder, so much for giving us your time on the GoHealth podcast.

Davinda and Matthew: Thank you for having us.

Gillian: So that was my conversation with Davinder and Matthew. Thank you so much for listening. What did you think? And we’d love to know what you thought of the podcast. Of course, this podcast is freely available to all. It’s our gift to the world, but we like to pick up the conversation over in the GoHealth community. 

If the themes of today’s conversation of resonated with you why not share it with somebody, somebody who you think would enjoy the episode. Perhaps that scientist, you know, who’s on the edge of faith or that teenager who’s exploring how to think about the world they’re growing up in. And please do remember to rate and subscribe. Why not share it on your social media streams? We want as many people as possible to experience these conversations and connect into our vision to help flourishing in the world.

Because together we flourish.