Trust and Science: Forming Habits of Head, Heart, and Hands

I was recently invited to give a talk at what I call my spiritual alma mater, the Newman Centre of McGill University. This is a rough transcript of that talk, minus small ad-libs. I mention work from Notre Dame and with my colleagues, but I hope it is clear that these are my opinions alone.

Introduction: life as a Catholic and a (neuro)scientist?
Thank you for having me here tonight. It’s so exciting to be back, but also a bit nervewracking. About ten years ago, I was one of you in the audience listening to these kinds of talks, so I hope I can live up to that hype.

I’d like to start by quoting a scene from the movie Nacho Libre, the scene where Ignacio is talking to his tag partner Steven about his concern about his ‘salvation and stuff’, and why Steven has not been baptized. Steven’s reply is about how he never got around to it, but then he says, “I don’t know why you always have to be judging me, because I only believe in science.” What does it mean to ‘believe in science’? You’ve probably seen those signs on lawns or posted on social media, the signs that say something like ‘In this household we believe science is real’ or ‘Trust the science’, that was a common phrase during the early days of COVID. And while those signs don’t say what Steven says, which is “I only believe in science”, there is the implication that the only is meant in those signs as well - only science is real. Not the quack pastor, not the horse tranquilizer, not the TikTokers, but science.

I think this raises a fundamental tension that many scientists of faith feel, myself included, which is the inclination or pressure to compartmentalize the worlds in which the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ matter. In other words, the ‘scientist’ me and the ‘Catholic’ me. And as Catholics, I think we know better: rather than ‘either/or’, we are ‘both/and’. Jesus is both fully God and fully Man. Fides et ratio - faith and reason. Learning that St. John Paul II wrote precisely about this brought peace to my heart as an undergraduate who was learning about the brain and nervous system in a fairly reductionist manner.

When I came to McGill to study, I didn’t originally set out to study neuroscience. But a combination of stubbornness and the encouragement of a friend to apply for the program led me to explorations of the nervous system. It was invigorating; if you didn’t know, McGill is a place with a lot of notable history in terms of neuroscientists and advancements in neuroscience, a point I see more clearly now that I am on the teaching side of things. In the course of my study, though, there was a mindset that we were here studying the underpinnings of the human experience - in other words, the sense that we were here to discover how we construct all of our experiences, and getting that down to the very chemicals that pass from one neuron to the next. Spoiler alert - we’re not there yet. Implicit (and very thinly veiled by some) was the assumption that the immaterial soul and religious discourse were not useful in explaining our experience of life, now that we can study the nervous system. For me, as someone growing both in her content and skills knowledge as a student of neuroscience while also taking seriously her faith independently for the first time in her life, this was a conundrum.

And I largely lived these two spheres of my life separately, although I desperately wanted to see the unity in them. It’s taken a long time to do that. But I don’t think it’s something that you’d see immediately in the nature of the work that I do, or even in the conversations I have. I continued through grad school in a similar secular setting (although at a Jewish hospital, funnily enough), and though I started getting involved with the likes of the faith and science group at the Newman Center in Toronto, joining the Society for Catholic Scientists, and reading books about the intersection of these two things, it didn’t ever really spill over into my ‘day job’. You’d think that it would be easier now that I work at Notre Dame, but it really isn’t, because you’ve got a bunch of people who were trained in environments like mine, and even if they concur with my viewpoint, we all went through years of education where we were evaluated on the merits of our application of the scientific method.

So what do I hope to accomplish in this talk, after these anecdotes? Well, I don’t think anything I talk about today is going to be particularly innovative. I think these are ideas that have long existed for which I cannot claim any credit, and this is simply an attempt to touch on them all together. I’m also not here to give you a series of things to do to smash the two worlds together, like ‘pray this prayer’ or ‘talk about Jesus this way’ or ‘talk about the brain this way’. While those are perfectly fine actions to take, I don’t think they resolve a more fundamental question, which is the way in which we receive and think about information as it pertains to living our lives. In other words, I believe there is an attitude first and foremost that disposes us to be receptive of both faith and science, and recognizing this opens up another possibility of reconciling these perspectives together. And the recognition of this motivates for me a key point with regards to how we go about the work of education (so education will pop up at the end, I promise).

Decisions to trust in both faith and science derive from the personal encounters we have with both things.
What do we really mean when we say ‘trust the science?’ I would argue that the point is ‘trust the scientists’. Invitations (or imperatives, to some) to ‘trust in God’ or to ‘trust in science’ come from people who present them to us, and the degree to which we ascribe value to said actions is based on the degree to which we think that person is trustworthy themselves. Just as the faith tradition is made alive to us by the people who witness it to us, so science is made alive by the witnesses present in it.

I was recently discussing Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense with some friends, and the point was raised that Giussani speaks of tradition as “one of the elements crucial to our involvement with our entire existence”. We are invited to go through a critical engagement with tradition, so that we are neither fossilized by the way it was presented to us or are driven to reject it altogether, but to develop it (not unlike a sentiment that Newman holds). However, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ tradition that is separate from the people through whom we engage with tradition. I’ll use a couple of examples:

One of my most influential teachers was my high school biology teacher, Mr. Jamieson. I had the good fortune of having Mr. J for three years, and so I got to know him quite well. We were on a two-day system in my high school, so rather than only having biology for half the year, I had my teachers throughout the whole year. So I got a lot of Mr. J. And what struck me about learning about biology from Mr. J wasn’t just the cool activities like animal dissections or drosophila manipulations, but it was seeing how much he cared about biology, how much he cared about us, and how much he wanted us to care about biology. And his care for me convinced me that I too should care about biology, and the scientific method more broadly. So I did! And for sure, not all of my high school or university teachers had the same charisma or personal relationship he had with me, but it was the trust he had cultivated that convinced me of the value of science, even if that itself has evolved over time.

Another example: when I first came to McGill, I was a mildly catechized young person who didn’t know what ‘Vatican II’ was, didn’t know feast days, and didn’t know the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. I was motivated by my mom telling me about the Newman Center, and the insistence to myself that I’d stubbornly go to Mass every Sunday. I had some inkling that it mattered, even if I didn’t know exactly what that was. But as I continued to come and quietly leave, I also started getting invited to events - Fireside Chats, Soup and Bagels, and other things that were both fun and intellectually stimulating. And it was other Newmanites’ care for me that convinced me that I too should care about God and his Church. Through the friends I made here, I learned how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, read Sacred Scripture prayerfully, and I gradually saw the place of an authentic faith life in the wholeness of my life. And again, not every faith community I’ve been a part of has been the same as it was for me here - a point on which I consistently reflected during my time at Newman Toronto! - but it was the trust that my friends had cultivated that convinced me of the value of the faith tradition in my life.

To hammer home the ways in which I see these similarities, let’s take this point of a developing tradition in both science and faith. When I was young, I thought of science as an impartial, objective method of accruing knowledge, which I think is the way many people think of it. Years of being in this sphere have shown how it is better characterized as a process of trial-and-error, recursion, and consensus - things that develop, and require the interjection of human decision-making to do so. Michael Polanyi’s discussion of how standards of statistical significance developed in his book Personal Knowledge is a great example. If you are a scientist, you may be familiar with the concept of something being ‘statistically significant’ at a p < .05 threshold, but less familiar with the conferencing around making that decision be a standard for the scientific community. I believe (and here’s where the theologians can jump in and correct me!) this shows strong parallels with the ways in which Church doctrine develops: animated by the Holy Spirit, the Church’s magisterium gathers to make important decisions on how we as Church ought to navigate the difficult topics of the day. We trust in the work of the Holy Spirit present where we are gathered, but this is still communicated through the words and actions of people, the same way that Scripture was written by human hands that are animated by the Spirit. In short, people matter for how we grow in both science and faith.

This is not to say that my trust in science or faith hasn’t gone unchallenged, far from it. My time in undergrad was marked by 1) continued revelations about clerical sex abuse, 2) the replication crisis that began in psychology (my eventual disciplinary home department) that has spread throughout the scientific community, and 3) attempts to explain away the religious experience by reducing it to patterns of brain activity. But I would say that rather than disavowing the enterprise altogether, it was the trust that people had fostered that allowed me to stay in front of these situations and watch them change and develop. While the Church continues to struggle with the ramifications of clerical abuse, I witnessed the response of the Church to be a more transparent and compassionate Body. While the scientific community continues to struggle with those who falsify data, I witnessed the development of the open science movement. And I would say that the recognition that, as a colleague of mine once put it, “when you peek under the hood of science, you might freak out because you see humans making decisions” - this has made me not only more cognizant of the way we rely on other people in our attempts to take into account the entirety of reality, but also the limits to elevating science as unassailable truths. For the scientific enterprise to be successful, we must rely on the results of others’ work. Even the generation of brain scans while people are ‘having a religious experience’ is predicated on sufficient knowledge to interpret what the images mean, injecting a human element into a supposedly unbiased context.

So in the end, it strikes me that the way we learn about science is exactly the same way we learn about the faith, and both have an element of being infused with humanity and all the brokenness that this comes with. Why should I trust science any more than I trust faith, if that is the case? Much of this relies on the agents who pass these on to us. A person who suffers at the hands of a clergy member is less likely to trust in the God and the Church who this person is said to stand in for, and a person who is sucked into an endless diet of supplements that are supposed to help them is less likely to trust in scientists and the scientific process that is supposed to present a cure. In both cases there is simultaneously the reality of broken humanity in these bad agents, as well as a weakened frame of evidence for the underlying value - in the case of the Church, the reality of the Holy Spirit present in the body of Christ, and in the case of the scientific community, the reality of a long but self-correcting process that eventually discovers and confirms our knowledge of the world.

So why bring them together? I think we have much to learn about one from the other.
Recognizing the integrity of personal knowledge in both assertions of faith and science has helped me be a more consistent person in all spheres of my life. This doesn’t mean you have to go and inject religious acts into everything you do, or even think like that at every moment - I teach about cognition, and we don’t have enough mental capacity to divide our attention like that. But we can become better at asking questions, designing experiments, conducting research, and communicating science to others if we routinely come back to the larger questions of what we have the privilege to discover and for whom we do this, questions that the scientific method won’t tell you the answer to.

Realizing the boundary conditions of the scientific method then makes me more critical in reading interpretations of findings and careful in my own conclusions. The scientific method necessarily reduces complex phenomena into measurable bits so that we can control variables and come to more concrete conclusions about the mechanisms of things. Let’s take beauty as an example - I have taught a course that involves reading literature in the discipline of neuroaesthetics, or studying the neural correlates of aesthetic appreciation. Methods vary from comparing brain activity of people looking at ‘beautiful’ art to ‘ugly’ art, to asking them the degree to which they feel ‘moved’. And often we see a pattern that involves more brain activity in certain brain areas in one condition versus another. But to collapse the experience into ‘this area of my brain is responsible for the feeling of beauty I have’ flattens not only the concept of beauty, but also the complex factors that go into experiencing beauty, as well as the limitations of ascribing causality on the patterns of neural activity, even if it’s common (and admittedly tempting) shorthand. How could we hope to capture one of the transcendentals in such a shallow way? In these cases, faith reminds me that science is designed to test hypotheses in a particular way and in a particular scope.

And at the same time, the things I discover about the brain and mind continue to astound me in how we are created and how we experience God in the everyday. Did you know that we have complex neural connections that are activated when we remember something, and that those patterns are related to when we first experienced something? We have these experiences inscribed on us, and that’s kind of cool and radical when you think about it. When we have an experience of God, when something in our world cues us in to God’s presence in our lives, when we have a memory of God, that memory is a reconstruction based on not only one specific moment, but many moments we have had with God - not just memories, but also expectations based on things we’ve learned both before and after the memories themselves. Thus, our relationship with other people, as well as with God, are based on the collective of our experiences and change over time, with this reflected in neural activity as well. It’s these kinds of reflections, grounded in my scientific knowledge, from which I derive a lot of awe about the complexity of the human experience.

Importantly, there are ethical implications with the way that both scientific and faith knowledge are used. Our faith presents us with a moral imperative to denounce the use and development of certain technologies. More broadly, the consequences of an unethical approach to both the transmission of science and faith have been on display for the world to see. The various acts that have been wildly discriminatory and done ‘in the name of science’, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study that left Black men untreated for a disease, have made a poor name for science, perhaps even more so among communities that have been historically marginalized. On a more subtle level, I would argue that the mode and method of communicating science also has an ethics to it, in that we need to make clear for the public what exactly goes into scientific consensus-building, and avoid obfuscating the public with technical language when sharing scientific findings. The fallout regarding science policy on COVID-19 at various levels - how it is transmitted, levels of risk, vaccinations - accelerated a mistrust in science that was already festering. Thus, forming meaningful relationships with communities and individuals, involving people in the science-making process, is critical to not only showing that the scientific endeavor still has value in the world, but also demonstrating just what science is with a face and a name that a person can trust.

In much the same way, this follows many standard methods of evangelization that people talk about in Catholic circles. It does not make sense to start by providing the answer of Jesus Christ to a question that is not being asked, or try to break open a door that has been locked. In the same way in which how we communicate science matters, how we communicate faith also matters - if we are the way in which Christ and the Church become known to our friends, to our colleagues, to our children, then how we make clear these truths matters for the way that tradition becomes alive for them. And when we realize this, the responsibility becomes more clear to us that we ought to live our lives in an integral, consistent way, carrying this across all spheres of our lives. And I would argue that this internal consistency of how science and faith not only speak to each other, but also raise each other up in our daily lives and rely on a foundation of interpersonal trust, is the task of a meaningful education.

Modeling that ‘the mind must not be educated at the expense of the heart’ in our curriculum
Science and the scientific method is a way of knowing that we are entrusted with. We must take the process of building up that trust in it seriously by being accessible and responsible agents, recognizing that science alone does not tell us how we ought to act. Thus, educating is not just an act of transmission of knowledge, or even critical thinking, but of witnessing to a deep beauty in the world and building habits of service to the common good. It involves the development of an integral human, a person who can hold an internal consistency in their work and life. As Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, said, “The mind must not be educated at the expense of the heart.” And in a recent address from Pope Francis to the leadership of the University of Notre Dame, he adds to what Blessed Moreau remarks: “Indeed, as Blessed Basil Moreau said, ‘Christian education is the art of helping young people to completeness.’ And not only with the head, but with three languages: the head, the heart and the hands. This is the secret of education: that we think what we feel and do, we feel what we think and do, and that we do what we feel and think. Always remember, this is the crux of the matter.”

For me, this includes being trustworthy agents in the scientific process and being careful consumers of scientific knowledge. In our curriculum at Notre Dame, and particularly with the Neuroscience and Behavior program, we are trying to be more intentional about building not just the knowledge about the nervous system and human behaviour, but also the skills to use and transmit this knowledge beyond the walls of academia, and a sense of responsibility for ethical engagement with the larger community. This is not an easy task, even for us - perhaps especially for us, in a place where the formation of the heart is valued alongside that of the mind, but these things do not necessarily occupy the same spaces in our students’ lives. We must be intentional about making space for the meeting and co-formation of mind and heart in accord.

It’s striking that the neural circuitry that underlies learning skilled actions and habits is a distinct one from the circuitry that recalls facts and semantic knowledge, and it is not a given that knowledge of something is going to translate into the doing of something. In fact, there are many cases of the reverse: clinical patients who become unable to recall information, but are perfectly capable of demonstrating that they can do a skilled action that shows that they learned something. So if the ethics of responsible conduct and communication of scientific and faith knowledge are important to us, then it is not enough for that to be semantic knowledge, if we want the impact of this work to be felt in the everyday deeds of individuals. We want this attitude to permeate beyond just an intellectual exercise, and into a method that is applied in every sphere of life.

This has taken the form of intentionally scaffolding activities that encourage scientific communication early in our curriculum, and building these into student-community partnerships in upper-level courses. The goal is to not leave the practice of knowledge translation to when students are the ‘experts’, but to have them learn and build the habit of speaking plainly to non-scientists right from the beginning, so that they are prepared to serve the world and build trust with their communities. In this way, not only are the students building such skills of communication and application, they are also building relationships with community members, ones in which they are the forefront of the trust-forging enterprise with local stakeholders.

I’ll share an example from my classroom. I teach an upper-level seminar course on auditory cognitive neuroscience, stuff about how the brain processes sound. It is mostly a course in which students read some pretty dense papers and try to puzzle out the technical knowledge of the discipline. But one group project we do is to partner up with a local organization and communicate some of what we learn in class back to them. In the Fall 2022 semester, this took the form of interviewing older adults with hearing loss from a local continuing education initiative, learning about their struggles with community life while slowly losing their hearing. Students then went back and reported on one potential community investment to improve quality of life, citing class and additional research to explain the potential benefits. Not only were the older adults impressed with the suggestions for improvement, they engaged with the students to ask them questions, and they also provided suggestions for future community projects, including a campus restaurant that partnered with us on this same project in Fall 2023.

When I asked students at the end of the semester to share their takeaways from the course, almost every student reported on how they derived so much growth from the experience of applying class knowledge to a name and a face. They learned not only about the research but about its implications for lives, ways of communicating it simply, and developed a sense of empathy. A couple of students have discussed their experiences with grandparents who have trouble communicating because they are hard of hearing, and they come away from this feeling more empathetic and knowing now how to better facilitate a conversation with them. Sure, I’d want them to come away with an appreciation for the predictive coding framework and how the brain is able to integrate auditory and visual information, but it’s the realization that these things have direct implications for keeping a conversation straightforward and showing your mouth that make these concepts come to life.

We are fortunate that many of our students are motivated by the desire to do good in the world, regardless of their creed or religious affiliation, but we do not always provide them a framework through which they understand and apply what they learn to tangible problems. And if we do not form the habit of seeing how the research we read can be disseminated and used for the good of those around us, we will default to what we are used to doing as students: seeing these things as ‘cool facts’, or potentially worse, cramming and then forgetting them after an exam. I see this as my way of encouraging not only scientific development, but also of doing works of mercy, and how these things need not operate dissociated spheres in our lives. Put another way, this is the tradition of (neuro)science that we wish to transmit to this generation of students, that makes them trustworthy agents in the world.

Conclusion: life as Vanessa, a Catholic neuroscientist
In the end, the day-to-day living of the so-called dichotomy between ‘scientist’ and ‘person of faith’ is an individual experience. Some people start their day with a prayer to see the wonder of the world in their daily work. Some people caution against using causal language that steps outside of what the scientific method can say with confidence. Some people connect their field of study to their faith by recognizing the way in which it reflects many material contributors to the spiritual life. But ultimately the method you employ is one that develops from the traditions you are brought into.

To reiterate something I said near the beginning, I don’t think that anything I’ve brought up here is particularly novel or innovative - I’ve simply wrapped up everything I’ve experienced through the lens of the traditions I’ve been given. The specifics of how we make this alive in our own personal circumstances are going to look different. But I hope that, through the narrative of this talk, I’ve managed to communicate a bit of what makes this hold so much weight in my own life, and how I strive for that internal consistency of building trust. Although we have lots of images of personal prayer and the lone scientist at the lab bench, the reality is that those are smaller pieces of a much larger interpersonal whole, and recognizing this can help us to trust the science and trust the faith. Thank you.