Testimony: A Jewish Physicist’s Conversion Story

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By Robert Kurland

I grew up as a secular Jew, despite having several rabbis as great-grandparents. In the great wisdom of early adolescence, I refused to be Bar-Mitzvahed, believing it to be a sham ceremony in a world with so much misery and injustice—misery and injustice ignored by those fur-coated ladies parading in Temple.

Nevertheless, I had a belief of sorts in a Creator. My teenage passion was astronomy. Visiting the local planetarium and constructing (not well) a six-inch reflecting telescope made me mindful of the truth expressed in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” One summer when I worked in the Yosemite forest service, I remember lying beneath one of the big trees, filled with awe at the Creator’s work here on earth.

My wife is Catholic, and we married in the Catholic Church, but I kept my distance from the Church, attending only baptisms and functions at my children’s Catholic school. At one of these, my oldest daughter’s baptism, I was embarrassed to be asked to serve as an altar server for the priest. My protestations that I wasn’t Catholic were of no avail.

Now, into each life some rain must fall, and fall it did in mine. Without going into detail and violating confidences, I’ll say that in my 60s I became a member of a Twelve Step group: “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m a (fill in the blank).” A guiding principle of such groups is the presence of a Higher Power (uppercase obligatory), who will help to break addictive chains (alcohol, drugs, food, persons). I was disposed to believe in the presence of such a Higher Power, but I came to realize that the phrase was doublespeak, Orwellian “sheer cloudy vagueness,” a euphemism for God. I began to search for a more satisfying way to think about the deity (at that time in lowercase).

Fortunately, at this point the Holy Spirit intervened, prompting me to read Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morison, a pseudonym for Albert Henry Ross. Ross was a British writer who originally set out to disprove the Resurrection, but who, on evaluating the Biblical accounts, came to believe. I won’t recount the evidence found in the articles on my website, but it seemed to me that an impartial jury (not composed of evangelical atheists) considering the evidence that the Resurrection was “made up” would give a verdict of “not guilty”—i.e., the arguments that the Biblical accounts of the Resurrection were true.

What struck me, even more, moving from Who Moved the Stone? to the New Testament, was that this bunch of uneducated yahoos—fishermen, tax collectors, women—had managed to out-talk the scholars of Judaism and thereby to spread the Christian faith through the Roman world. Surely they must have been inspired by encounters with the risen Jesus and the inner voice of the Holy Spirit.

It also occurred to me that, if one does believe in the Gospel account of the Resurrection, then one should also believe other incidents described there, in particular, the words of Jesus giving the keys of the Kingdom to Peter, thus founding the Catholic Church. Accordingly, the Christian religion to which I would convert should be Roman Catholic. This choice also eliminated a certain amount of domestic controversy.

I must emphasize that this whole process was one of rational decision-making—no visions, no voices—whence “Top Down to Jesus.” I envy those who have had visions of our Lord and heard his voice. I have heard firsthand accounts of such from some of my friends, but this was not my good fortune.

Of course, conversion is an ongoing process—study, service, prayer, adoration, retreats, all the tools and fertilizer to make the fig tree of faith bear ever more fruit. To recount this continuing process fully would take a chapter, not a short essay, but I’ll add these brief comments.

First, as a scientist, I struggled to believe in miracles. Fr. Mc’s answer to questions on certain dogmas during my catechesis helped: “If you believe in one miracle, the Resurrection, why are you having problems with others?” and “If you believe in the possibility, even if you have questions, that is enough.” As I looked at the evidence for contemporary miracles, particularly that reported by Dr. Alexis Carrell at Lourdes, and read what C. S. Lewis and Ralph McInerny had to say about the reality of miracles, my scientific skepticism waned.

Second, those few non-“Top Down” but “In the Heart” moments when I felt the presence of the Deity (although not well defined, not as an image or as a voice) have been evoked by music: Gregorian chant during a retreat at St. Vincent Archabbey, certain hymns and liturgical music, and (very, very infrequently) at quiet times in the early morning during adoration or other prayer, when the melody of some favorite hymn would come to mind.

Now, I claim that this belief in Jesus and the doctrine of the Catholic Church, this faith, is, in certain respects, akin to and also different from my belief (faith) in science. To begin with, let me assert that by no means can science explain everything; that is to say, “scientism” is a false doctrine.

The books of Keith Ward, the writings of Fr. Stanley Jaki (particularly The Limits of a Limitless Science), and most recently an essay by the eminent biologist Austin Hughes on “The Folly of Scientism” effectively demolish the positions of evangelical atheists such as Dawkins, Hawking, Kraus, and Carroll, who believe that science is the only answer. They ignore all that science can’t explain, the “why” questions. For example, they believe that since we can show by functional MRI where the brain is active when we pray or contemplate, we fully understand how and what the mind is doing in prayer or mystical experience. Wrong!

Most people put the same faith in what science tells them as the Christian faithful do in the dogmas of the Church. How many people have done Galileo’s inclined-plane experiment to verify laws of motion, as I did in the physics lab at Caltech, and so forth? The essence of the scientific method is that theoretical predictions can be verified by repeated measurements, and this, in turn, implies that those things and realities that cannot be quantified and realized by an experiment or measurement cannot be dealt with scientifically. And, even then, science is limited to setting up idealized experiments, situations isolated from surroundings in which the hypothesized experiment may not always be possible.

In desperation to avoid the act of creation that implies the Deity, theoretical physicists are putting their faith in multiverse theories—“M-theories” with infinite landscapes. These theories are most unlikely to be verified experimentally (i.e., capable of being falsified), exercises in mathematical metaphysics even more removed from one’s experience than that supposedly posited by Medieval theologians regarding how many angels could stand on the point of a pin. (This is actually a reasonable question: “How many immaterial entities can be contained in a point?”)

Indeed, it is clear that there are questions that cannot readily be framed in the lucid framework of physical science. These include the butterfly wings beating in China that produce the tornado in Oklahoma; the organization of life, springing from disorder, as shown by the Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine; mathematical unknowability, which is surprising and possibly not in everyone’s everyday experience.

To sum up, let me assert that religious faith can be attained by a variety of roads—by a vision, by a voice from above, or by rational “Top Down” endeavor. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, “some are born with faith, some achieve faith, and some have faith thrust upon them.” And the faith we have in Jesus Christ is as well founded, in terms of empirical evidence and inner knowledge, as the faith we physicists have in what science tells us about the world.

Robert Kurland—convert, blogger, teacher, musician—describes himself as a “cranky, old retired physicist trying to show that there is no contradiction between what science tells us about the world and our Catholic faith.” He serves as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion and lector, and volunteers at a federal prison and hospital.