Trinity and the Cosmos : An Interview with Planetary Geologist Kirby Runyon

by NICK TABOR

What exactly does a planetary geologist do?

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.

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?

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.

Was there ever a period where you felt like science and your faith were in tension?

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 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.

God the Creator of the Earth Heures de Louis de Laval, Ms Lat.920, f°2r Illumination on parchment, c. 1480-1485 Bibliothèque Nationale de France

I went there to study this with some other geologists. We had to drive off-road for hours to get to our site. I emerged every morning from my tent and looked out across the desolate landscape of no plants, no trees, just rocks and sand, with the sun coming up, completely surrounded by mountains. I kept thinking about how gorgeous it was, and always feeling, Wow, I can't believe I'm here. If it weren’t for the color of the sky, you couldn't tell that I wasn't on Mars.

Dr. Kirby Runyon, inside the rotunda of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy at John Hopkins University

Another experience that really stuck in my mind was in 2015, when NASA's New Horizon spacecraft flew past Pluto. I got to see some of the first high-resolution pictures that really zoomed in on small areas of the planet. I was sitting in, essentially, the geology mission control center, at my home institution in Maryland, looking at these images that were being beamed back from the spacecraft three billion miles away.

One picture had already arrived of a vast glacial plane. Everyone was clustered around a computer monitor examining it. Meanwhile, I was downloading the next image. It showed mountains 10,000 feet tall, as if the Rocky Mountains were on Pluto—but they were made of ice. My jaw dropped. I announced to the room, "Hey guys, there are mountains on Pluto." No one seemed to hear me, so I said it again. Finally, someone turned and said, "Hey, look at Kirby's computer! There’s mountains on Pluto!" As far as I know, I was the first to discover those.

Pluto High-resolution MVIC view of Pluto in enhanced color, illustrating variations in surface composition.

How has your scientific work informed your faith?

Romans 1:20 says, "What may be known about God, namely the eternal power and divine nature, has been revealed through what has been made." God's revelation is in nature. We get a taste of His omnipotence and love by doing science. There's practically a theological injunction in Romans 1 to do science, to look at the natural world.

In the book of Job, in the Psalms, and in many other places throughout the Bible, God appeals to people's knowledge of the natural world to show them something about Him. God took Abram outside and said, "Count the stars if you can; so shall your offspring be." Genesis 1:31 reads, "God saw all that He had made, and indeed it was exceedingly good." And most of what God has made, in the physical realm, is not on planet Earth—most of it is out in space.

We should all be moved to worship the triune God through what has been made, and to be motivated to go into fields of science, any field of science, partly just to revel in the beauty.

Flammarion Engraving First published in L'atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire, Paris, Flammarion, 1888 Burin wood engraving

Flammarion Engraving First published in L'atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire, Paris, Flammarion, 1888 Burin wood engraving

Sounds like it puts you in a worshipful state.

Totally, yeah. Recently, I feel like the Holy Spirit has revealed to me that, as much of a space geek as I am, He's even more of one. God and I are both space geeks. We both geek out about this stuff. That's one way that I can connect to the heart of the Father.

Do any of your colleagues think it’s silly and outmoded to believe in God?

Probably some of my colleagues do think religion is silly or outmoded. One mindset is that if you have discovered an explanation for a scientific phenomenon, whether it’s the age of the earth or how life develops, or gravity, or whatever, you have just put God out of a job.

The god of the gaps.

Yeah, and the god of the gaps is really horrible theology, but both atheists and Christians believe it. Young-earth creationists and atheists agree that if you can find an actual explanation, then you don't have God. As a result, you end up with young-earth creationists denying well-established scientific principles for the sake of preserving God's role in the universe.

Kirby Runyon is a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and is active at Church of the Resurrection in Lutherville, Maryland.