Trinity
and the Cosmos: An Interview with Planetary Geologist Kirby Runyon
by NICK TABOR
What exactly does a planetary geologist
Was there ever a period where you felt like
do?
science and your faith were in tension?
I study the landscapes and rock formations on other planets, moons, and asteroids throughout the solar system, mostly using images that come back from robotic spacecraft. A good chunk of what I've worked on is studying the effects of windblown sand—on Mars, on Saturn’s largest moon, and on Pluto. It creates these beautifully carved formations. I also study the effects of impact cratering, so I'm doing a big project on the moon right now.
Yeah, I was raised in an evangelical Methodist home. I accepted faith in Christ around age ten or eleven, and I've grown in my faith since then. I ultimately landed in Anglicanism, which, for me, was a good balance of modern and ancient.
Yeah. It was mostly in my growingup years, because my parents taught me young-earth creationism. I would read NASA press releases, or kids’ books on science, that would talk about galaxies being billions of years old, or billions of light years away, meaning that it took light billions of years to get to Earth from those galaxies. I would always mentally edit that—Well, it must be something less than 6,000 years, because that's how old the universe is. Around age 12, I discovered a ministry called Reasons to Believe, which was headed up by a Christian astrophysicist. He had come to faith in Christ in his late teens, and he saw harmony between what we know in modern astrophysics, including the whole billions-of-years-old thing, and the Bible. He didn't get hung up on a very Western, scientific reading of Genesis. That really set me free to accept much of modern science. But as of graduate school, I still did not accept biological evolution. I still thought that that was in tension with Christian faith. It was largely through another ministry started up by Francis Collins, the current director of the National Institutes of Health. He's a solid Christian. I also had to be a teaching assistant for a class called Evolution and Extinction, which got me grappling with the theory of evolution. For the first time, I really paid
jacob's well
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What inspired you to get into this kind of work?
I just always loved space, at least since I was three years old. The twelve astronauts who walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 have always fascinated me. I’m also interested in things like the Hubble Space Telescope that can peer out into the distant, distant universe, and radio telescopes that can see quasars over 10 billion light years away. I don't do any of that professionally—I just enjoy hearing about it. Were you raised in a Christian home?
attention to the scientific evidence for it. At the same time, I was reading the Bible, and I really didn't see any contradictions or incompatibilities. If evolution is true, then it’s simply the mechanism God chose to create life. I believe that evolution—and, in fact, all known scientific processes—are simply nature's way of being obedient to God's creative will. On some level, the universe evolves in response to God's wooing love. I’ve never heard it expressed that way.
Well, look, at the heart of the Christian message is God's love: how God loves Himself among the three Persons of the Trinity, and how that love explodes out into the angelic realm, and also into the cosmos and into our lives. What have been your most profound experiences as a geologist?
There are two that come to mind. For one, last November, I was very blessed to spend some time in northwest Argentina, in the plateau of the Andes mountains. It’s high-altitude desert with almost no vegetation. It’s a volcanic landscape. As ash from a volcano gets deposited, all these little rock fragments basically weld themselves together. Volcanic rock has lots of little bubbles that get frozen in place as the lava cools. And then at this plateau in Argentina, those formations had subsequently been sandblasted to heck—so the landscape is very similar to huge swaths of Mars.
