"When I became a follower of Jesus, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, quite a few of my friends said or implied that I was committing intellectual suicide.
35 years later, it doesn't feel like suicide."
Ian Hutchinson is a Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and the author of Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles? (IVP, 2018). I had the pleasure of working with him extensively when I was directing content at The Veritas Forum. In some ways, he is his fellow countryman Richard Dawkins' antithesis. Hutchinson is a Cambridge grad while Dawkins hales from Oxford. Both went on to careers in science at world-class universities. Both speak and write on questions of science and faith. But where Dawkins turned to atheism in his youth, Hutchinson turned to Jesus.
Hutchinson came to Christ when he was a student, through the witness of some very clever friends. He's never looked back. Instead, he's used the gifts God gave him to rise to the top of his academic field of plasma physics, and to speak for Christ in the secular university and beyond.
Love connects morality and science
One of Ian's most compelling insights is that Christianity offers us connective tissue between what we believe about the universe and what we believe about morality. Atheists like Dawkins believe in a universe that has "precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." And yet they believe that humans should not act on this basis, but rather that they should treat each other as equals, and care for the weak, poor, and marginalized. Their view of the universe is radically divorced from their understanding of how humans ought to live.
But Christianity offers the coherence atheism lacks. Hutchinson explains it like this:
"The fundamental assumption in the intellectual west today, is that there is no reality beyond what natural science discovers, and there is no authority or good higher than the freedom of the individual. Both science and individual freedom are good. But followers of Jesus like me have a different view. We believe that both the deepest reality, and the highest moral meaning, good, and authority, are to be found in loving relationship."
Humans are more than their physical parts
As well as denying the moral fabric of the universe itself, many atheist and agnostic intellectuals today reduce human beings to what can be analysed by science. As fellow MIT professor and popular science writer Alan Lightman puts it,
"Our consciousness and our self-awareness create an illusion that we are made out of some special substance, that we have some kind of special ego-power, some “I-ness,” some unique existence. But in fact, we are nothing but bones, tissues, gelatinous membranes, neurons, electrical impulses and chemicals"
But Hutchinson points out the fallacy here. Yes, we are bones, tissues, and gelatinous membranes, but that does not exclude the other things we are. Describing himself, he says,
"I am an assembly of electrons and quarks interacting though quantum chromodynamics and the electroweak forces; I am a heterogeneous mixture of chemical elements... I am a system of biochemical processes guided by genetic codes; but I am also a vast and astoundingly complex organism of cooperating cells; I am a mammal, with hair and warm blood; I am a person, husband, lover, father; and I am a sinner saved by grace."
Where some who write on science and faith are content to advocate for theism, Hutchinson is unmistakably Christian.
Yes, scientists can believe in the Resurrection
The week before Easter 2016, I asked Hutchinson to write an article under the title, "Can a scientist believe in the resurrection? Three hypotheses." His piece became extremely widely read, partly because it makes clear that science does not exclude the possibility of miracles. "To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple," he explains.
"Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”... is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal."
In a longer treatment of miracles in his book, Hutchinson argues that miracles are neither excluded by science (as atheists tend to believe) not the rare moments when God steps in, as Christians sometimes assume. Rather, the God who made the universe "continuously holds the universe in the palm of his hand" (cf. Hebrews 1:3). If God were to "stop paying attention to every part of the universe, it would instantly cease to exist." So, a miracle is not God intervening in the natural order of things, but rather "an extraordinary act of God," by which He, "upholds a part of the universe in a manner different from the normal."
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was God upholding the universe in a whole new way. It was God shattering the universal truth that death always has the last word. Jesus today is "the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25).
"I came to faith in Jesus when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University," Hutchinson recalls, "and was baptized in the chapel of Kings College on my 20th birthday. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are as compelling to me now as then."
Let's pray for more science professors like Ian Hutchinson: more men and women who hold fast to Jesus as they explore His world. Let's pray for more students to come to Christ (like Hutchinson) in college. And let's give ourselves today to the One who is the resurrection and the life.
It's not intellectual suicide. It's the smartest thing we could possibly do.
