Faith and science
There is a whole body of literature on the topic of faith and science (and a good example is the work of C.S. Lewis, even if it is a rather unorthodox specimen). Here’s another one, unorthodox in not attempting apologetics, but merely relaying a testimony in the sphere of science.
I was working towards a paper deadline last week together with a colleague and students. Work had already been going on for months to turn a very successful thesis project into a condensed conference paper, and we all - students and supervisors - had invested considerably into the writeup and additional experiments - evenings, weekends, even a week of precious holidays for some. Then, three days before the deadline, while doing a last sanity check experiment, we discovered anomalies in our experimental setup: some things couldn’t be reproduced the way we described them in the paper. Non-reproducible research is a no-go, and consciously reporting wrong results is scientific misconduct. We pushed very hard on Friday and Saturday, but with no conclusive result on Sunday and - even worse - no clue what or where the bug or inherent problem might lie, a decision had to be taken.
I wanted to have this paper. I admired the story of it, but no longer could show that it is actually true (even doubted if I ever could in the past). So I did something uncommon: I submitted this planned publication back to god: “It is not in my might to bring this result about, and I don’t want to promote myself or our lab by all means. If this is ever going to work, it is not because of me enforcing it here”. Releasing problems into good hands is very peace-bringing.
Sunday evening came, now more relaxed, when suddenly and unexpectedly an email arrived that the deadline of the conference had been extended by a couple of days. The next days, one of the students could reproduce the experiments again (it was an anomaly in the data loading that resulted in an unintended random ordering of inputs); against our worst assumptions, this didn’t pose a fundamental problem in the argument of the paper; correct experiments actually looked very good and could be done quickly. Today (May 24, 2018) we submitted the final paper.
Let’s wait for the reviewers’ feedback. If this submission becomes a publication, it is due to a good god with a faible for science. I had absolutely no natural hope left for it. Thank you, Jesus.
Update (June 22, 2018): The paper got accepted!