1 Aug 2021

Dr. Pan Conrad: when science meets religion

From Sunday Morning, 10:08 am on 1 August 2021

Reverend Pamela 'Pan' Conrad is a NASA scientist and for her, the scientific and spiritual worlds have always been intertwined.

Her full-time job is as a priest at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Maryland, Virginia, but she has worked as a member of the tactical operations team for NASA's Mars rover mission.

Rev. Pamela 'Pan' Conrad - Rector of an Episcopal church in Maryland and a scientist focussed on Mars.

Rev. Pamela 'Pan' Conrad - Rector of an Episcopal church in Maryland and a scientist focussed on Mars. Photo: Supplied

Although she was only ordained in 2017, Conrad told Sunday Morning she has always had an interest in the Church as well as nature.

“The diversity of it just really speaks to my soul. I think that as a child, the opportunities to explore are limited but the craving is always there. So becoming a scientist is a good way to explore a lot of the planet and in fact I am so fortunate because I’ve seen a lot of the planet.

“So the thought of being a priest is sort of a natural consequence of evolving from an appreciation of creation, to thinking about what are my responsibilities as a human being.”

She once also said her faith in God and science are braided together like strands of a DNA molecule.

“I think that you cannot separate out the parts of one’s own self and the ability to look at empirical data, and to look with the wisdom of one’s heart provides a broad perspective that if one tries to separate out the two different ways of knowing, we end up maybe more shallow as people.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry and members of his delegation hike towards the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station during a visit to Antarctica on November 11, 2016.

Near McMurdo Station, Antarctica.  Photo: AFP / Mark Ralston

One of the turning points in her life came when she was at McMurdo Station, looking across the expanse of Antarctica.

“The wind was just howling past my ears, and I felt the entire character of my being shift from a sense of anxiety to a sense of absolute peace and it was such an inexplicable experience,” she says.

“It was something that stayed with me, until the next time I went to the ice to see if it could be duplicated, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments.”

Conrad says she had an epiphany of sorts that cast aside pettiness and she saw the world as it could be.

“I got a view of the intransigence of the things and that with comparison to eternity, the Earth is around for a little bit of time.

“The idea that we might be wasting our time on pettiness was what so drove me to think about how I could do a better connection between creation all around us and the relationships between people.”

Having also worked with a lab that helped bring James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep to life, she witnessed another wonder of natural world.

“In 90 days, we built and tested an instrument that could withstand the high pressures at the bottom of the Pacific and it was an amazing opportunity to see the robustness of life under conditions that would crush a human being.

“It opened my eyes to not just how organisms survive extreme environments but to understand viscerally that extreme is in the eyes of the beholder, in that life down at the very bottom of the Pacific is really in its native habitat and they would find our environment pretty extreme.”

This NASA photo released June 7, 2018 shows a low-angle self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called "Buckskin" on lower Mount Sharp.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover in 2018. Photo: AFP / NASA

Previously she worked on NASA’s Curiosity mission as well, and she says some may characterise her as a ‘curiosity’ too, but she hopes that that will change.

“That just tells me we need to do better at integrating different parts of ourselves as humans and the fact that it’s a curiosity makes me a little bit sad, because there’s so much we’re willing to offer as humans if we’re willing to dig deep and use all the parts of ourselves.”

The Bible

Asked if the Bible stood up to scrutiny, she says it is a mistake to see the Bible as an historical or scientific document, but rather it is a living one.

“It contains all the tools necessary for salvation, it’s because the Bible is an endless will of inspiration for theological reflection.

“That being said, what we know about the cosmos and the cosmos-genesis, that is the creation of all the materials therein, is very different now.

“I think what is so interesting to me, about not only the Bible, but also about the evolution of our spiritual heritage and I do mean the evolution of our heritage to where we are now, is that we keep learning new things that are not necessarily incompatible.

“It’s when we miscast the Bible as a document of literal, historical significance or as a document of scientific explanation that we get in trouble.”

She says it was just as medieval rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki had put it, that Genesis loses its holiness if it is degraded to the level of a paper that could be amended.

“The perspective that one has as a person of faith and as a person of science is to take all of the input of knowledge that we can get, put it all together and see what new understanding emerges, because it’s a system and systems have emerging properties and that is what makes them alive.”

Big Bang and the 'here-after'

She says it’s a miracle that there is a vast amount of diversity in creations, from a limited set of chemicals that emerged during the Big Bang.

“We can call the formation of the universe whatever we want, but if God created it, everything exists in God, that is not incompatible with the view of cosmology or even the concept of multiverses.”

But Conrad says for her, it’s chilling to see the highest order of symmetry is when it is all disordered.

“The beauty in trying to come up with a proof or disproof for the existence of God, is that the best person to do that is a scientist, because the really good scientists are supposed to have such open minds that we’re willing to entertain new models when our previous models were wrong.”

As for the hereafter, she says she views more of as a ‘here-eternity’ instead.

“I believe we are living in a universe that resides within God. There’s nowhere we can go where we’re not part of that system, I believe that when people refer to God’s kingdom, what we’re really referring to is what could be here.

“Will my soul keep going? Yes I believe that. Will my thoughts keep going? That’s a big mystery ... will I be sitting on a cloud playing a harp? I don’t think so.

“I’m interested much more in how we treat one another and what we can do while we’re here than what happens when we die.”

*Pamela Conrad is an astrobiologist and mineralogist with the Planetary Environments Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and previously she worked on the Curiosity mission as well. She also has two music degrees.