 Is this working? Yep. There. Can everyone hear me okay? Welcome to a new way to look at science through the light of faith. This is my favorite talk to give. I am very, very passionate about this subject. I hope when you leave here too, not only will you love chemistry, but you will be equipped to lead people to Christ through chemistry. Let's start with the prayer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Lord God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen. Saint Albert the Great, pray for us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Thank you. To get into this talk, I have to give you a little bit of my background, and we're all big on testimony here, but I was already doing that anyway because when I wrote Particles of Faith, the editor said, you have to put yourself into it. There's enough apologetics book on faith and science. You've got to put yourself into it. But the reason is because the way I came to this issue wasn't the normal way, I guess. Chemistry really did lead me to Christ. You've got to understand, I think, where I came to this point to understand what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is pretty simple though. The point is to give you a tool to use when you're evangelizing, because I want to totally, like I said in the blurb, turn this faith and science conflict myth on its head, and it's not hard to do. I'm just going to give you permission to do it. So as the story goes, when I was a little girl, I loved science. I don't know what life is like, not being in awe of nature. When my mom told me that God made everything, I was like, that's really cool. God made me, he made the big round sun, God made the trees, I understood all of that and it fueled my love for science and it's really that simple. That God made everything and that's why we should love to go learn about it. When I got to high school, I really liked photosynthesis and biology and chemistry, and I remember thinking about all that stuff happening when I looked at the trees. About that time, I grew up in the Baptist tradition as a Baptist in the Bible Belt down in Texas. I had a lot of questions and the Baptists don't have a lot of answers. Like dancing is sinful. We have to get you a prom dress or don't drink beer, but then they did. So I didn't understand and I really got confused whenever I started hearing people say, we're the only ones going to heaven, because that actually happened in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up in Texas. The Methodists would say we're the only ones going to heaven and the Baptists would say it, and I figured out that everybody can't be right, and I concluded that none of them were right. So when I got to college, really and truly, I left behind my religion on purpose. I'm done with it the same year, 1991 that REM released that song, losing my religion. That was my theme song, and I walked away from it, and I just said because at that point, it didn't seem like anything to me except a choice. You can get up on Sunday morning and go to church if you want to, because that's how it is in Protestantism. There's no obligation to go to Mass. You could go or not go. I chose to not go. I was done with the yellow casseroles at the potlucks and all that. It wasn't my thing anymore. So I went to college and this is the danger for young people. If they have questions, it really does seem like science has all the answers, because science has a lot of answers. In the last not even 100 years of all humanity, science has exploded, and there is more knowledge today about the atom than ever there was before, and there is this rise of scientism and this belief among people that science has all the answers because it has so many answers. But here's the thing I learned. I've lived that life. I'm a very logical person. I will follow the logic to its end. I'm not afraid because I was, believe it or not, looking for truth. But if you live a life where the only thing that exists are atoms and molecules, there is really no morality. There is no love. There is none of those things, and you're utterly incapable of dealing with things like that when they pop into your mind so that you set them aside. You really do. Reductionism, materialism, it really is dangerous. It really is dark. It really is a dead end. Well, I realized in my 30s that it was a dead end. I made it through graduate school and chemistry. I got my PhD in chemistry studying photosynthesis. I was trying to replicate photosynthesis because for some reason I wanted to save the world, and they were talking about climate change back in the 90s just like they do now. And I wanted to do something more than chase people around the library, scolding them for throwing away paper and aluminum cans, and stop using hairspray because I thought the aerosol was bad. I wanted to do something, and I went to Penn State to work with Thomas E. Malook, who's now the department chair there in the chemistry department now, because I wanted to do something good with my life. I wanted to study photosynthesis, to capture energy from the sun and use it because that would be an alternative energy source. I got a job at DuPont. In my 30s, I realized this all was going nowhere. And so I told my husband that we were having a child and I said, I want to know the truth. I want to know the full truth. Science can't answer the biggest questions in my life. And that took courage, honestly, because it was very hard to admit. And my husband said, I know this place. So he was born Catholic, raised Catholic. He was born in Cuba. His sister's name is Maria. He's Jose Joseph Mary. And he took me to the Catholic Church. And I opened the catechism and the first thing I read was that children are gifts, not highly complex composite systems of atoms and molecules doing their thing. Which I actually said at my thesis dissertation for the two kids I already had before I met him. I actually thought of them that way and it will wreck your ability to parent when you think that of your kids. So he led me back to the church. I led him back. We went to RCIA together. And I had four daughters in five years and we had a son later. And during those years, to do that, I left my job at DuPont. And when you're a woman and you subscribe to the atheist, feminist mentality, leaving a job you worked your whole life to get with a PhD, it's the end. And I got, I caught it from people. They're like, you worked your whole life to get here and now you're throwing it all away because you're gonna stay home. But I did it because it was clear to me that the best product I'd ever made was not in the laboratory. It was the children that I had and more were coming along. And so I left that behind and stayed home. And I turned our kitchen into my laboratory with some equipment that all matched and read. And I had my lab coat and my husband said to me, Stacey, you might find something else that you're interested in. So I was like, they were my living analytical machines. I would serve them up food every night. How do y'all like this? How do you like this? Every meal was like an experiment. And it was chemistry, but it only went so far. And he said, you might find things you like. And I then enrolled in an online program for a master's degree in dogmatic theology. Why dogmatic theology? Because I said when I started studying it, when I started studying what the church teaches, I said, I know this. I know what y'all are doing here. I know what St. Thomas Aquinas is doing when he defines his words and makes distinctions. It's like X and X prime. He's using words like variables and the logic is so tight in Catholic teaching that you almost could write equations with it. This equals that because the words mean things. And I loved dogmatic theology because instead of in science where we take what we observe in the natural world and make theories to explain it and derive equations based on observation, in faith and theology, we take what's revealed by God and we reason forth. That's what theology is. And so I understood that kind of thinking. The first book I ever read in my theology studies was by Father Stanley Yocchi. Does anybody know who he is? Some of you do, yeah. Father Stanley Yocchi was a priest and a theologian and a philosopher and a historian. He was a lot of things, but in a physicist, he spent his life writing books about the history of science. And the first book I read was about how science was born of Christianity. And it blew my mind. His book is titled Savior of Science. My first book is titled Science Was Born of Christianity. And I surveyed all of his work as he matured in his ideas and his research over his lifetime and I distilled it down to a 200 page book because I want college students to know the story and I teach it at Seton Hall where he was a distinguished professor. But I'll go more into what he actually taught later, but that changed everything. I, again, changed everything. So many little things along the way changed the way I looked at things. And I understood then that my love for science had been a search for truth, a search for God. And that when I started learning philosophy and theology, it was like the first time I took off in an airplane and you know the house that you grew up in and you're used to it and you know it because that's what you did and you limited your vision to that part of the world, that part of reality. That was science for me, loved it. But when I learned about theology and philosophy, I understood more of reality. And it was like being in the airplane looking down and going, oh, I see how it all fits together now. So through all of that, we had, so I have seven children now, two of them were grown, four of them are girls that were born in five years and they'll all be teenagers in 2020. I just love saying that because I'm trying to get ready for it. And then there's JJ, our youngest. His name is Jose Jacinto after his grandfather, his great grandfather. And so we call him JJ because Texas, I can speak a little Spanish, but I don't pronounce it so well. So we just say JJ. But in the years that I was writing Particles of Faith, so that is the next book I wrote. And I was trying to figure out in this day of Twitter, you know, what is the tagline for everything I think that sums up everything I think about this faith and science thing? Because it had become clear to me that not everybody thinks that science and faith go together so well. And it was always about evangelization for me. I wanted to help the young people understand you don't need to leave your faith to become a scientist or to like science. And I did a lot, we lived in the Adirondack, in Adirondack Foothills in upstate New York in a little village called Barnabeld. And I did a lot of walking with my dog, my German shepherd and a side named Benny because I wanted, after Pope Benedict, I wanted my own German shepherd. But I walk with my dog a lot. And it's a female because that's all that was left in the litter, but that's my German shepherd. And she and I walk a lot. And I would think about what I'm trying to say and then most of my writing was that way in my head. And then I would go write it down. When I got Particles of Faith in the Mail, I found it in the mailbox at night because we would walk in the night when it was dark. I found the book in the mailbox and Benny was the first one to see it with me. But in those years, trying to write that book, it took a few years. And trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to say because it comes easy now, but it was hard for me to get there. I was thinking a lot and I was also teaching online classes for Colby Academy and that's out in Napa, California. I was teaching online because home with kids. And JJ was at the time four when I was doing this figuring. And he would sit in my lap when I was teaching online chemistry classes to Catholic students all over the country and talking about how everything's made of atoms. And he said one day, he put it together and he asked his sister Lucy. He's like, wait a minute. Is my arm made of atoms? And I'm like, yes JJ, yes. Everything is made of atoms. Your arm is made of atoms that make up the molecules that make up your skin and all the bone and everything underneath it. But fundamentally, it's atoms that bond together to make up these things. Is the wall made of atoms? Yes JJ, it's made of atoms. It's hard because there's a different kind of bonding there and it's got that physical property because of what the electrons are doing that hold the atoms together. Is the air made of atoms? Yes JJ, the air is made of atoms. A lot of diatomic molecules that are bumbling around the universe and God only knows literally where those molecules and atoms have been in the universe. But we're like breathe in, now breathe out. You just change the course of a great number of atoms and you never know where they'll go. It would blow his mind. And I looked up on YouTube to find a little video to teach him about atoms, don't do this. Catholic kids need to be taught the truth. I found a video with a little blue cartoon guy with a face and mouth and little arms and legs dancing around singing the Adam song and it totally freaked JJ out. My arm's made of those things. Like no, no, that truth JJ is and we talked about protons and neutrons and electrons and it blew his mind. And that truth, atoms are not little blue dancing things. You don't need to use gimmicks, just teach them the truth. But he was, yeah, this went on for months. JJ stopped throwing the ball in the living room against the wall. I'm just smashing Adam's mom. And the best one was when he ran past me one day and he pushed me down, pushed me out of the way. Move, I've got to go pee atoms. And he got it though, he understood. And one night I made him spaghetti and meatballs, his favorite dinner, I don't know why I remember that. And it was just JJ and me there. And I said, because I've learned to let your kids pray alone sometimes so you can hear the words because Lucy, his sister prayed, lead us not into the station forever. She prayed that one day. But so JJ, I want you to say the prayer for your meal. And by yourself. And so he did it. He said in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. He said, bless us, O Lord, and these thy, and he looked up at me, and these thy atoms which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, amen. And so JJ, came up with that line. And I thought about it. I'm like, that is it. Out of the mouth of this four year old little boy who gets it. When we sit down at the table, this'll sound a little funny, but think about the dialogues with atheists and all the people who are popular in the science, talking about science, and there is no God. We don't sit down at the table and say, hmm, that lasagna looks really ordered. I think that's proof of God. If we don't look at the Brussels Sprouts and say, suffering, there can be no God. And we don't pick through it all. What do we do? We look at everything in front of us and we say, thank you God. We look at it all in its totality and we say thank you God for these gifts. And that's what JJ did. JJ looked at everything and said, these thyatoms. And I really wanted my book to be titled these thyatoms and they changed the title to Particles of Faith and I was so upset because that wasn't the title. It was supposed to be these thyatoms. It took me like a week to realize particles rhymes with articles and that it was pretty cool title. But that was what JJ said. And it led me to that line I was thinking about. And this is the one thing you've got to remember from this talk. And you know this already. I'm not telling any of you anything you don't know. But it works when you tell this to people. Science is the study of the handy work of God. Any atheists will agree that physical science, biology, chemistry and physics, quantum mechanics, all that stuff, it's the study of nature. Okay, it's not anything but that. It's the study of nature. What is nature? Nature is creation. What is creation? God's handy work. Science is the study of creation, you could also say. That's what science is doing. We look at this universe. It's all throughout scripture. The prayers we pray, it's everywhere in Christianity. We look at the universe and say thank you God for this universe. Thank you for creating everything. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. All things visible and invisible. We say thank you God for creating all of this. And then if you wanna do science, you roll your sleeves up and you figure out how it works. But you're always studying God's handy work. It's that simple. It's always studying God's handy work. I've told this to students, high school students that I taught at Colby Academy. I've told it to high school students, college students. When you tell them that, they get it. That when you are breaking pencils because those physics equations for linear motion are so difficult to derive. Or when you get to Hamiltonian operators and all of that and quantum mechanics later. Or when you're trying to balance chemical equations because you can't create atoms out of nothing and you have to have the same number of atoms on the reactant and product side. And it's hard. It's all because God created such an ordered world. You're breaking your pencils and crying about your physics homework because God is so ordered, created the world so ordered. And when you become a scientist and you learn something new, you discover something new in the world, new in science. And then to get a PhD, you have to do something new. You have just pushed back the veil a little bit more. You have discovered something about the way God created the world that nobody else has discovered before. And that is cool. Science becomes a way to know God better so we can love God better and serve Him better. And when you just tell young people that, they are inoculated from the confusions that atheists pile on them. When atheists try to say there had to be no spark in the beginning, no, no. They realize that guy is saying it wrong because we're not talking about it that way. We're talking about God created everything out of nothing in the beginning and science is just studying what he did. Science can't get you to the beginning because there's no matter there if there's nothing. So it really does reorient and it's simple but it's also profound because guided by this, seeing science in the light of faith, like I also say a lot, it changes the way you look at it but it keeps you from making errors when you get into the more complex arguments about neuroscience and the mind and body and especially with evolution. And I do a lot of talks with evolution and with intelligent design and with creationism and with atheists and I always go back to this simple part. I am looking at all of science as the study of the handiwork of God. It gives you a certain amount of humility and the book is dedicated to JJ. When JJ was old enough to prepare for First Communion, did anybody recognize this book? Here's the cool thing about not using little blue singing things to teach about atoms. When we got to First Communion preparation and I sat down, this is the very first page of the Baltimore Catechism booklet to prepare you for First Communion. I forgot, St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism, First Communion. This is the first page. So here's JJ, who made you? God made me. God made me out of and I looked at him and he said, atoms. Because of that, we had a very sophisticated for a four year old, if I say so myself, Aristotelian, Thomistic discussion on the distinction between creation out of nothing and secondary causes. It works. God made me out of atoms. Yes JJ, who made the atoms? God made the atoms out of nothing. So it's both. We're not talking about atoms just appearing out of nowhere and acting randomly or appearing randomly. God made those atoms. But the beautiful part of our faith that kids learned from the very beginning, he made me because he loves me. He gave me to my mother and father. They take care of me. They take God's place. I belong to God because he made me. And then you get into science. Did God make all things? Yes, earth and sky, sun, moon, stars, night, day, rain, snow, hills, mountains. That's all physical science. Oceans, rivers, trees and flowers. It's when I say physical science, I mean chemistry, biology or physics. You can understand those things all on those levels of atoms. You can get all the way down to what are the atoms doing that make up the earth and the sky and the sun, hydrogen burning helium and the stars. And you can get into all of that but that orientation is there from the very beginning. And I really would like to see us when we teach Catholic children start to talk this way even at that early age because I do think it will protect them when they get older from being confused. It will give them a confidence. The other thing that I wanna add here, and this takes, okay, the science was born of Christianity thing. I wanna stick it in right here on this slide. This is a whole talk into itself, it's a whole book into itself and my book is a summary of Father Stanley Yockey's lifetime work. So I really understand that it's hard to give the two minute version of this but I want you to know what I mean when I say science was born of Christianity. It's provocative. Atheists have told me they spewed coffee all over their computer screen when they read it. When I published that book, Richard Dawkins tweeted about it not favorably because he thought it was absurd but I can defend it because of Father Yockey's research. I can defend it but it takes time to explain what it means but I just wanna give you the short version of it so know that there's more. Christianity, the way that God revealed to us that he is incarnational and triune. So we start with monotheism but incarnational and triune. There is no other religion that has that understanding, that true understanding of the one God. And I teach a class at Seton Hall called Theology of Science as I teach this how to look at the correct theology of science and it's often misunderstood and I've spent years clarifying it to people so I know where the hangups are but the premise goes like this. No other religion had that understanding of God the creator who was triune and incarnational and it's true all the ancient religions had held some form of pantheism. Now pantheism means that God is in the universe that God is the universe so the universe is emanating from God and there's a number of different ways to explain it but it basically means nature worship and there are subtleties in the differences but I put this here just so I would, some of these are hard to remember but just to give you an example of what I'm talking about the Hindus held the doctrine of the Atman. This was the Indian expression for the cosmic person or the cosmic powers, the primeval self that bred and be thought himself and that's where all of nature comes from and it's in their Upanishad text you read them talking about this endless cycle of birth and decays, his mouth, nostrils, eyes and ears became fire, winds, lights and the heavens. There's different creation myths. The Egyptian pantheism was expressed as animism so just trying to tie this to something you've heard before. The Egyptians worship spirits who govern the natural world. They thought living and nonliving things had souls that could detach from their bodies and take on other forms like animals and that's where you get the anthropomorphic animals such as Hathar, the star bespangled heaven cow, the queen of the underworld, Renanit, the celestial cobra nurse who suckled the pharaohs, the jackal god Anubis who conducted the souls of the dead to the field of celestial offerings. So in this case, nature worship went all the way to animal worship. The Chinese pantheism manifested as Taoism, Moism and Confucianism and even scholars who studied Chinese history have said China had no science because those religions taught the human to turn in on himself and to try to unite your soul with the cosmic soul. It was a form of pantheism. The Greeks believed in an internally cycling cosmos, different explanations for it but the Greeks did have some language, I mean I'm saying the Greeks which is huge, I can't get into all the different time periods and thoughts but it was also pantheism, the great year, the eternally cycling cosmos and this idea that even when they held that there was God, a creator, it was an emanation. It was the world was emanating from God, part of God, still pantheism. They did not believe, none of them, that there was an absolute beginning in time. That was revealed by God in scripture and they did believe that nature is creation. They held it as God and there's a huge difference between deifying nature and respecting nature as good stewards because it's God's creation. That is an infinite difference. Christianity with its understanding of, among all the other richnesses of the revelation of the Trinity and the incarnation, the tie into science was in that mindset of Christians, understanding that nature is God's creation and that God is triune, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. The Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity became man, became incarnate and what do they call him in John? He is the word, rationality and that because of the Holy Trinity, that God created, it means all of that created and so it only makes sense that a triune incarnational God would also create an ordered universe. So that was pervasively throughout Christianity, unbroken thread all the way back to Genesis one one in the beginning God created and then John says in the beginning, in the beginning the word was God and the word was with God. The order and so under that mindset contrasted to the mindset of an eternally cycling cosmos, Father Jacqui's thesis says is that Christ had to come for us to cement that world view of creation with the beginning in time and only understanding psychologically that the world is an ordered creation that gave the first breaths to modern science and he shows it with historical research in the writing of the scholars. Modern science is usually said to have been born in the 16th or 17th century, Isaac Newton, Galileo, but they were building up on scholars in the Catholic church who were saying how did God create the world? How does it work? That's where the mathematicianization of nature came from and so the thesis is on a hard level that only Christianity could have given birth to modern science on a softer level. Science did rise in the medieval universities in the Christian West, that's a fact and it could very well be because they had the right mental outlook on creation. Other cultures had science so I know that gets into the Greeks had science and they had scientific things but they didn't have modern science as an enterprise and self-sustaining discipline unto itself and that's the difference. So I can get into more of that but I tell this to students, I asked someone who looks at how, who works on writing standardized tests at the national level and I said how do you get this message out to change in the whole country? And he said, well, you could start with Catholic high schools, start with small Catholic universities so I taught at Colby Academy and Particles of Faith is gonna be a student textbook for Catholic high schools coming out this fall. I just saw it the day before I came here, thank you. It's blue, the first one's purple, the student edition is blue. I got a Templeton grant from the John Templeton Foundation to teach this to seminarians at a small Catholic college. My friend said then you need to go to a bigger Catholic university, I teach theology of science at Seton Hall and it's getting traction but it takes time to teach it but I want our Catholic young people and our Catholic adults to know this is our heritage. Modern science is our heritage and there's, if nothing else, there is all kinds of good sense and rationality in saying that science is the study of the handy work of God. If you don't wanna get into the history of science that's enough and it fits with everything that we think about science now. I tell this to atheists and I'm comfortable talking to atheists and agnostics, I talked with Marcelo Gleiser, the one who won the Templeton Prize who's an agnostic. We had a lovely conversation and I'm fine just saying this is my worldview and he doesn't agree because he doesn't, he needs to see evidence for God, empirical evidence and I tell him well I see empirical evidence everywhere I look but even atheists who are the most, the harshest atheist, I hate to break it to them but for them to do science, they have to have the Catholic worldview because if the world were indeed a big organism with its own volition, you couldn't do the scientific method and so you have to accept as an article of faith that nature is created and ordered or you can't even do science. They just sort of skip past that and go on but hold them to that. In science books, kids also in every educational institution learn that laws are what we observe, theories are what we explain, models are what we imagine but this fits with Catholic teaching and it's a very fundamental thing about science. It also keeps us humble. Scientific laws are defined, look in a high school textbook anywhere, this is what kids are being taught and it's the truth. Laws are what we define as observation. When they drop a ball and it falls to the ground with a certain acceleration due to gravity, that is observed. There's no explanation for it, it's just an observation. When we find fossils, those are observations. There's all kinds of stuff that we observe and we're never done observing. Scientists have good job security because there's all kinds of things that we still don't know. We observe. When we talk about theories, we're talking about our explanations of what we observed. So a theory never becomes a law. It's not like our theories become so certain that we elevate them to laws because they're fundamentally two different things. And so if you understand that, the word theory, especially like an evolution, it's just our best explanation today and I can tell you, studied the history of the atom. 50 years ago our theories were very different. It wasn't that long ago we thought atoms looked like plum pudding. The raisins and the bread pudding stuff. Now we know that they have quantum mechanically defined orbitals in spaces where they're most likely to be found drastically different understanding of the fundamental particles of nature. And that's just in the last 90, 100 years. So scientific theories are always changing as more data comes along. We don't know what the theories are gonna be 10 years from now even. And if you read scientific literature, the theories for evolution change all the time. They're not complete. And so in our humility as humans trying to observe things and trying to explain what we see, theories are never finished. So just don't make too much about them, okay? You're free to study them. Kids are free to study them, learn what they say, try to understand them. But they're just theories. Models are things that we use to imagine, okay? There is currently the quantum mechanical model of the atom. And you've seen it, it looks like a little planetary, it looks like a little solar system. That's not really what atoms look like any more than they look like little blue balls with mouths and eyes and legs and arms. They don't really look like that. It is our imagination. We have to have some kind of scaffolding to think on. We have to be able to imagine that they look a certain way so we can tweak our theories based on our observations. So that's what you do when you're a scientist. That's what you work on. Okay, now, this is where I turn you into chemistry lovers. You have to use your imagination because scientists have to. I have people say, how can you believe in God? You've never seen him. I say, well, I believe atoms exist and I've never seen one of those either because you can't see them. You have to use your imagination, okay? So just trust me here. You will love it when I'm done. Above all of your heads, I had the black shirts install a box. Okay, it's there. You have to imagine it. Picture it. Okay, now I want you to reach up in that box. I got a present for you. I want you to open the lid. Go ahead. Open the box. I brought you a pair of chemistry glasses. Take them out and put them on. Everybody got them on? Okay. You will always see the world different from this point forth with your chemistry glasses. And I want you to keep them. Okay, hang on to them. I've handed out thousands of these. Good. Now, with your chemistry glasses on, I want you to follow me down into the atomic realm. God's handiwork. I want you to follow me down, okay? Scientists use scientific notation because it's hard to imagine things so small, but let me help you. This is what science teachers do and I'm good at this. Imagine a sugar cube. I know we don't use them a lot, but you've all seen sugar cubes before. Imagine a sugar cube with your chemistry glasses on. Now, cut it in half. Got it? Got half. Now, cut it into a billion pieces. That half is about two grams. I'm taking you down. Cut it into a billion pieces. Can you imagine that? You cannot. It's really hard to imagine, but it gives you an understanding of how small we're talking about. Your half a sugar cube is in a billion pieces. Take one of those billion pieces. Cut it into a billion more pieces. Take one of those billions of a billionths of a half of a sugar cube and now cut it into a million pieces. You are now down at the size of an atom. Look at your arm. Quantum mechanics is happening everywhere. You are now down into the size realm of the atomic world. Now, with your little atom that is a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a half a sugar cube, keep your glasses on. I want you to picture that particle, the size of beaver stadium at Penn State that holds 110,000 people. In the center of this football stadium, I want you to imagine a glass marble. That is the nucleus. All the mass in the atom is concentrated in the nucleus. Save that of the electrons. This blew JJ's mind. The protons and neutrons are in the nucleus. Again, this has been observed. There's ways that we know this. I have a T-shirt that says, protons have mass. I didn't even know they were Catholic. That's my favorite T-shirt. But the proton is in this little glass marble in the center of beaver stadium. Beaver stadium is our atom. The proton is, the mass is 1.6726219 times 10 to the negative 24th grams. And it does have some mass. And they know from experiments with momentum. That's the proton. Now we don't know why, but the proton is charged positive. The nucleus also has neutrons. A neutron is basically a proton and an electron together, which is why it's neutral. So the neutron is just a little bit more massive than the proton. How much more massive? It's the mass of an electron more. If you add up the mass of an electron and a proton, you get the mass of a neutron. And they're almost the same number. The digits vary out in the like fifth or sixth place. Or third or fourth place, sorry. An electron is almost 2,000 times smaller than the proton. That's in the marble of our beaver stadium. That's a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a half a surcube. The electron has the same magnitude of charge, but opposite, so it's negative. The proton is positive. Why do they have the same magnitude of charge? We don't know. We just observed it. The electron is about 2,000 times smaller. It's one over 1846, 1,846 times smaller than the proton. And scientists have calculated that given all the physical parameters, if the electron were just one over 500 times smaller than the proton, the atom would not hang together. The electron out here whizzing around in all that free space. This is why they say atoms are mostly empty space. The electron whizzing around out here in all this empty space around the positively charged nucleus would be too massive to sustain its orbit. And what would it do? If that had happened back in the early universe, we would not be here today defending the faith. No atoms would have formed. So those atoms that make up your body and that you're breathing in right now and all that, they are held in existence that precisely. Not only that, the atoms themselves are remarkable. Anybody ever seen the periodic table? The best theory we have, the best cosmological theory we have today is the Big Bang Theory, which by the way was not developed by an atheist. Was developed by anybody know? Yes, a Belgian Catholic priest named Father George LeMitte. He proposed the Big Bang Theory. And the way we understand it today, I'm careful to say that. I don't say we know this for sure. I say the way that we explain it today according to current, the accepted scientific theories. About four million years after the Big Bang, stars started to form. Now what is a star? Those things you look up in the heavens at night with your chemistry glasses on now. When you look up at the stars, the stars are burning, somebody said it, they're burning hydrogen. Most of a star's lifetime is spent burning hydrogen. What does that mean though? It means nuclear fusion. It's a, what's the word? Stellar nuclear fusion. Fusion means that the nucleus fuses. Just what it says. Science is very straightforward with the words. So here's what's happening in short form. There's a little more to it, but hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. It has one proton in the nucleus. In most of a star's lifetime, hydrogen and another hydrogen, and the nucleus fuses, and so now there's two protons in the nucleus. That is the element helium. So when we talk about different elements, we talk about different numbers of protons in that nucleus, beaver stadium. We're talking about different numbers of protons. The identity of an atom, what element it is, is named by the number of protons. So hydrogen and hydrogen make helium. That's the second element on the periodic table. Helium happens to be stable. It's what we call a noble gas on the right side, and it's very stable, which means in the star it hangs around for a while. And so helium hits another hydrogen, and it makes lithium, third element. Hydrogen and hydrogen also fuse and make beryllium, fourth element. Helium, because it's stable, because it's stable because of its electrons moving around it, they're really happy and they stay there. Helium and beryllium fuse and make what element has six protons in the nucleus? Carbon. And then carbon's hanging around and helium's still over here. Helium fuses with carbon and makes oxygen. And I quote the AP chemistry textbook by Pearson has a page on stellar nuclear fusion. And it says, not all elements are created equally. I swear, I copied it. And probably now that I say it, they'll change it. But it says there is a curiously high abundance of the elements in the universe that were necessary for life on earth. Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And it's because of the electrons around the atoms. It's because of the structure of the atom. The stars have three phases, basically. There is the white dwarf, which is in the beginning part. That's where fusion continues to make all the elements on the periodic table up to iron. The red giant, it's expanding, getting denser, makes all the elements up to, no, that's when it makes all the elements up to iron. And then there's a supernova explosion when in the dying moments of the star's life, all the other elements up to uranium are formed. The elements beyond uranium are the man-made elements, and this is the only place in the universe, earth, where we keep smashing atoms together to make those fleeting, they don't stick around very long, those man-made elements. But the thing about the periodic table is there are no missing spots. Do you ever think about that? I call them God's Legos, which communicates with students very well. There are no missing spots. That is what I'm talking about when I say you wanna get down on your knees and weep for joy. Thank you, God. Because there are no missing spots, it's that ordered. And everything is made of atoms, and the way they bond has everything to do with the number of protons in the nucleus and how they get along with the electrons out here. Some of them don't wanna give up their electrons, some of them only wanna give up certain number of electrons, some of them change their mind. It's kind of like, well, let me just say I had a really hard time with relationships and bonding because of my materialist attitude as a chemist. The atoms don't have free will, and they pretty much do what they're supposed to do if you put them in the beaker together. So think about how that already with your chemistry glasses on changes the way you think of yourself and what you're doing right now. The story continues though. In the Big Bang, the stars formed. These things out here, those little spiral looking things are what? Just galaxies. As far as we can see in the observable universe, there are billions, 200 or more billions of galaxies. We live in one of them called the Milky Way. So now we're not looking at really small, now we're looking at really big. I'll come back. We live in the Milky Way, and our solar system, our sun, is one rather indistinct star among billions of other stars in the arm of a spiral of the galaxy Milky Way that's among billions of other galaxies. Sort of changes the way you look at your place in the universe compared to the way the ancients thought of it. And kids who hear this and are not grounded in their faith, they don't call it nihilism, but that's what it leads to, this idea of nothingness. My life has no meaning, how could it? But again, those elements on the periodic table, there's life on this planet, and we don't know why. I usually post this periodic table with wisdom 1121 at the bottom, and God, thou has made all things in measure, number, and weight as it goes with the periodic table. But just to show you, this is what I was talking about, and you can see what I mean, no missing spots, those elements for life are in a high abundance, hydrogen and helium are the most abundant. And we have them doing their thing. And then as the story goes, so usually we talk about in the Big Bang Theory, the universe, they think, their theory, several different observations point to the same rough age, so that gives your theory confidence, that the universe is about 14 to 15 billion years old. The Earth, we think, is about, the solar system came about because when the sun was spinning around, a bunch of elements that were being made were spun out into the solar nebulas, and as they cooled and condensed, they formed rocks, the planets, and they're stuck in their orbit around the sun. Our little Earth is the third rock out, right? And that's where we are. But it's almost scary to think that's where we are. And then if you use Google Maps, you can even zoom in to this room here, almost to the ceiling of the building. But I like to tie all that together because it leads into the next part. So just keeping your chemistry glasses on and thinking of it this way, this is a picture that's usually called the primordial soup. And I'm gonna duck behind the podium now to talk about evolution because it's a very sensitive subject. But you gotta understand that when scientists ask questions about how life arose on planet Earth, they are talking about atoms. They're saying what did the atoms do? And the theories, and I've looked in the AP in college biology secular textbooks, they also are very, very, very clear. We don't know how life arose on Earth. They cannot keep God out of it. They're just saying we don't know what happened at the atomic level when life forms arose over millions of years. But on the Earth, it seems like there was a period of about four million years where there was no life. And that's because we don't find fossils that fit in that time period. And there couldn't have been any oxygen. And so scientists have done experiments in the lab where they can replicate what they think would have been in the early atmosphere based on the minerals and the rocks that the Earth is made of, what would have been in the early atmosphere with sun shining on it and water present. And they can see that, you know, I've heard of this experiment where they zapped it with electricity. It's like lightning hitting the primordial soup and some molecules that are like we find in living things, the carbon-based life forms, they start to form. But they are far, far from making life like that. So it's a big, huge gap in our knowledge. But that's the question they're asking. And then something had to happen like photosynthesis. And this is where, let's check my time. This is where I kind of come back into the story too because photosynthesis was that thing I was trying to replicate. Just to give you an idea. So photosynthesis had to evolve somehow. And the story goes in the science textbooks. Over the eons, it evolved all of the, to produce all of the oxygen that is on the Earth. That oxygen you're breathing is coming from photosynthesis. But it is an amazing process at the atomic level. In the chloroplasts are these thylakoids and they have a membrane. And in that membrane with all of these bipolar, these not bipolar, but these molecules that have the water loving in and the water hating in, they form up like this. And they hold molecular structures that are large, these globule things you see there. They hold them in precisely the right position so that when light streams down from the sun, where this HV and this red dot are, they go into this complex photosystem and electrons are transferred around because the light kicks one off of the chlorophyll molecule and they generate the chemical energy to go into the Krebs cycle and produce biomass. So photosynthesis not only produces the oxygen that we breathe, it produces all of the molecules that make up your body. That's why when you eat an orange, you're eating energy captured from the sun for real. And these molecules, the carbon molecules go on to make all of the biomass. So back to my story a little bit. When I was doing state of the art research at the time in the 90s at Penn State University to simulate photosynthesis, I was not religious. I was a nun before we used that term. When nuns were, I was a nun before nuns were cool. And I just didn't care. I was not an atheist because it was clear to me they're just as religious as the religious fundamentalists. I was not atheist, I didn't talk about it. I didn't care, I didn't wanna look at it. But I was trying to do research that simulated, you see all these pathways up here. This is called electron transfer. And what it means, those electrons I told you about, if you hit them with enough energy from a photon and that's what's coming from the sun, the light, an electron can say I'm out of here. It can get that energy and jump off the molecule and be transferred to other molecules kind of like somebody would pass a hot potato down the line except that very precise amounts of energies are lost each time and put to work. It's a very precise system. We were trying to do in our lab one jump. In photosynthesis there are two electron disease scheme that has two electron transfer pathways. Each of them have between five and 10 jumps. We were just trying to get one electron to leave a molecule and jump. And I had these little 30 nanometer diameter silica balls that I made. I was really good at making them because I had to make them to do my experiments with and it was hard. But we made those balls and then we grew layers on it. We grew a layer of a polymer that had the electron to kick off when the light hit it and we had an inorganic layer that kept it in place kind of like that lipid bilayer was. And then we had another polymer that would accept the electron. And so I would grow my layers on these balls and I would go to the transmission electron microscope and look at them and we literally called it in our paper a modeled coating because you can't see the layers. We're just like, I hope they're there. And they should be there because we know something about how to make electrons do what they're supposed to do. And then I would go down in the basement of the lab and aim this cannon sized neodenium yag laser tuned to 532 nanometers at a little cuvette containing about five grams of my little balls with polymer stuff grown on them. The point is doing PhD research in chemistry is like grunt work. And I spent hours and hours and days and weeks and months growing these things, going down to the lab, making it. We got one electron to transfer. In nature, the photons of the light from the sun are transferred at 90% quantum yield, meaning 90% of the photons that hit the photosynthetic molecules cause an electron to be transferred and stay away, stay off the molecule and not come back. We were able to achieve 30%. Nature 90, 10 to 20 jumps. Us one jump, 30%. That was good enough to be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and then textbooks on photo-induced photochemistry were using that research in it. And it was considered wonderful, but it occurred to me, cause I said I like to be logical, it occurred to me that we were merely copying something else. And in those days, I had a moment where I was looking at my jumps. So we got that paper published and then my professor said, Stacey, the postdoc you're working with is gone. I want you to do two jumps now. And I'm like, okay, we can do two jumps and I'll publish a paper and graduate and then it'll be great. Well, I was in my third year of graduate school and I had not been able to do two jumps. And there was a day when I went after many months of trying and failing, trying and failing, I looked at a biochemistry textbook at this page and I started to have a meltdown because it occurred to me that I'm probably missing something here. And I didn't know how I was gonna do two jumps. And they said, you know, you can't graduate with your PhD in chemistry unless you do something that works. And you don't just get to hang around here for four years and then go. And so I was panicking because I was literally not going to graduate. If I couldn't make those electrons jump twice and stay put across two layers. And I had this moment, I guess it was grace, but after looking at my biochemistry textbook, I looked out my window in my lab at this 100 year old Ginkgo biloba tree that was right outside my third story desk lab. I looked out at that tree and I got so mad at that tree. Because I said, I know what you're doing. You was on every square millimeter of every one of those thousands and thousands of leaves flapping mindlessly in the wind out there. On every square millimeter, there is half a million or so of these chloroplast molecules. And in each one of them, there are these protein complexes oriented with the chlorophyll pigment antenna systems. And they're just absorbing all the light that streams down from the sun in a 10th of a nanosecond. And they're transferring them at these precisely spaced other molecules that are an angstrom scale away, precisely positioned just so far beyond my little nanoballs. And they're transferring electrons into this dual system of photosynthesis. In photosystem two, the electron is going off of the chlorophyll molecule to a bound plastoquinone to another plastoquinone to a pool of plastoquinone molecules before the resulting plastoquinol moves on to the cytochrome BF5 complex. And then the resulting plastocyanin reduces, moves on to another photo oxidized molecule in photosystem one. Meanwhile, water over here, where the electron was in the chlorophyll molecule, water is meeting that and it's ripping electrons off the water molecule producing the oxygen we breathe. And then in photosystem one over here through another transmembrane unit of ferrodoxin molecules, more electrons are getting transferred and they're going to make nicotinamide adenidinucleotide phosphate into NADP plus. And that's supplying the protons into the lumen of the thylakoid to synthesize adenosine triphosphate from adenosine diphosphate in a phosphate donor group. And that's just the light dependent reactions. NADPH, NADP plus and the ATP were going on into the dark reactions and they were taking the breath that I'm breathing out, the carbon dioxide. We breathe in oxygen, breathe out carbon dioxide and they're fixing carbon dioxide into the three carbon precursors for all the biomass. And I knew at that point that photosynthesis globally uses six times the energy of the entire human population. It uses some 100 kilojoules, no, 100 billion, no, quintillion, 10 to the 18th, quintillion kilojoules of energy and synthesizes some 100 billion tons of biomass. All the living things, plants, animals, us, everything starts from this process and it goes into the food chain. It's enormous. Go back to the atom with the nucleus, with the protons and neutrons and the electrons whizzing around and the periodic table from the elements that formed in the stars and came and made the earth in this sun star that we have in this arm of the galaxy. And here is photosynthesis going on. And I realized in that moment that I probably needed to let it go because I wasn't gonna be able to do it. And you might think that I got down on my knees there and converted and said, I believe in God. But this is the funny thing about conversion. I didn't want to. All I wanted to do was graduate. And so I remember that day, I cursed the tree with pre-Catholic language and I turned around and I tightened my ponytail and I picked up my little vial of world-saving nanotechnology composites that I grew on those nanoballs and I threw it in the trash can followed by my data and I never did it. I never did get two electrons to jump on my nanocomposites. But I did take those little balls and I learned how to squish them together and while everybody was trying to make these zeolite systems with three-dimensional, poor networks with inorganic structures and they couldn't do it in the size regime that they wanted to because they would collapse, I just squeezed my nanoballs together with a hydraulic press and then synthesized Bakelite polymer resin around them and then I dissolved them away with hydrofluoric acid and I made what is now patented as a nano bubble pack. Serious. And so that got published in Science Journal which is bigger than the Journal of the American Chemistry Society. DuPont offered me a job making lycra spandex and I got to travel the globe talking about it, spandex, the stuff in pantyhose and all that. And that was, I gave up trying to save the world. And I didn't convert for 15 more years until I started asking those bigger questions. But I never forgot that moment. This is the rest. With your chemistry glasses on, this is photosynthesis. When I said it makes up all the biomass on the planet, there's the chemistry. This is why I was getting so upset. Do you see what I'm talking about though? But think about this now. If you have heard, science is the study of the handiwork of God. That is amazing. And it ought to change the way you think about your existence right now. Because there are more chemical reactions going on for your heart to beat one more time than any scientist can write down on paper. It is unknown. They can look at certain things. Our existence is amazing, just our physical existence, not to mention that we're body and soul. And so when I talk about evolution, which I'm not gonna say much about, but I do not talk about evolution until I get this straight. When we talk about evolution, this is DNA. DNA, those little balls? They're atoms. Okay, and now the reason that it twists, that's because of the electrons and the atoms being friends the way they are with other atoms. It causes the twist, there's tension, there's a place things have to be. The pyrimidines and purines, they only bond a certain way because of the atoms that make them up and what the electrons are doing. It all comes down to the atoms and the electrons. That's why I'm a chemist, because biologists just memorize stuff and physicists just do things in the abstract or they're measuring the way that motion is at the macro scale. But a chemist has to use physics and a chemist truly understands what's underneath all the biology. It's called the central science for a reason. I'm not just trying to be arrogant about it. I was very careful. I was very careful about choosing chemistry. But this is underneath, and when we talk about evolution, all we're talking about is what genetic material is transferred from one generation to the next. There is, and I'm a mother and I have children and I know that in those moments when that first zygote is forming, there's all kinds of chemistry that goes on when the sperm and the egg meet and fuse and begin to make the zygote. There's all kinds of stuff that goes on as that baby grows. It's amazing when I held my child and thought about how that happened. But it all comes down to the electron and to the electrons in the atoms. And when we talk about evolution, scientists are just talking about how this DNA stuff changes from one generation to the next, okay? You gotta keep that straight because a lot of times we don't start that fundamental. We get all the way to talking about did man rise from atoms? Well, yeah, we're made of atoms. So it's reasonable to think that it's reasonable for scientists to ask the questions about how the atomic activity occurred when life first arose. And that's all they're talking about. They're not talking about anything more than that or they shouldn't, and if they do, call them on it. But this is the big beautiful reality. So when I was a materialist, not that I called myself that, but when I was limiting myself to that slide you saw before with all the chemical reactions, that's how I looked at life. It's hard to be a good mother when you're doing that because you don't understand the person. You don't understand the human person. When I became Catholic and I understood that we are made in the image and likeness of God with the power, the spiritual facilities of intellect and free will, because that is an echo that is like God, the Father who generated God the Son and active the intellect, the word. God the Father and God the Son together as one substance spirated the Holy Spirit in love and active the will. When I understand that's what it means, it changed the way I thought about me. It's like, oh, I'm responsible for my choices. I have to practice virtue and I had to learn all about the formulaic ways to practice virtue and practice it because it's hard. But I understood what it meant to be a person and that is missing today. And it's missing in so much of the dialogue because people deny the soul. You cannot reduce the human person to atoms and molecules. And so I've made my peace with the trees now. And when my husband moved us all up to the Adirondack foothills and I was Catholic and I was having all these children, I can't tell you how wonderful it was. I had the thought many times every day of my life is like Easter and Christmas all wrapped up into one because God is holding us in existence and every day is a gift and time is passing that we won't get by. By the way, time passes because what electrons do in the cesium-133 atom? A cesium-133 atom has electrons in their hyperfine state that jiggle 9,192,631,760 times and that's what we call a second. That's how we measure the second. It comes from atoms. But knowing things like that with my chemistry glasses on and you have yours now, you can do something as simple as see your daughter run down a path among trees and be reduced to tears. And my husband has found me outside. He comes out and gets me, honey, you're doing it again. I'm like, I know, but it's snowing. Because I've had moments when I would look up at the stars. Remember what I told you about the stars? And the light coming from the stars are from the electrons jumping around because when all that fusion happens and electrons get excited and then they relax, they give off a very precise wavelength of light. Everything you're looking at right now is because of electrons jumping around and giving off wavelengths of light. It's one of the reasons I wear black because I can't do color. This has all of the wavelengths of light being absorbed. We'll just leave it at that. But it's easier. It also blends in. But that is all the colors you're seeing. And when you think about all that stuff and you think about the light coming from the stars, I'm sure you've heard before, the stars may not even be there because they're so far away. Yeah, there's 200 billion or so of them in this spiral of this galaxy. It's massive. And then when you see snowflakes falling and they form all those intricate patterns because of the structure of the water molecule, those hexagons has to do with the electrons and the atoms. And you see all those patterns forming. I have literally cried because untold billions of snowflakes were falling all around me and melting before anybody could see them. But it is that heartbreaking. And so that's how you look at life. And that's what I mean by evangelizing through science. That when you start to teach kids this at a very early age and then you teach them, notice how I put physics, biology, and chemistry all together. High school kids these days want things to be legit. They want things to make sense. They want things to tie together. And even secular institutions, they're trying to do that where they tie it all together and they understand why you need to know about chemistry. If you're Catholic, you need to understand chemistry so you can understand God a little better in that way. Not everything, but that's how he made creation. But we start going through all of this and it changes the way kids think about earth and sky, sun, moon and stars. God made the night and day, the rain, snow. And it allows us to see science in the living context to which it belongs. If science is the study of the handy work of God, then we need to always see it anything we study in science. This was something from Frank Sheed. And he says, everything needs to be seen in its living context. If you see science, I have talked, science without faith is like eyeballs without a face. He says, if you see an eyeball on a plate because you like somebody's eyes and they give you their eyes on a plate like a reductionist would do, that's not the point. It's only beautiful in its living context. Science is only beautiful when you understand it in the context of God's creation. And I just wanna close by saying this view of creation is everywhere in the Bible, in the liturgy, in our prayers, in our hymns. Look for it. It's all praising God as creator of the universe. And Pope Francis, by stimulating wonder before the profound mystery of creation, faith broadens the horizons of reason to shed greater light on the world which discloses itself to scientific investigation. It's right there. Three last things. Science is the study of the handiwork of God. Pray the creed. I believe in God, the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth. And believe it. Start there when you talk about faith and science. On any discussion, if you don't start there, you'll go wrong. You'll take the first wrong step. Evangelizing confidence that God holds all things, all your atoms in existence. Thank you.