Dr. Darren Craig
Professor of Physics
Words: Margaret McKenzie ’18
Photos: Greg Halvorsen Schreck
Dr. Darren Craig’s journey to Wheaton started with an either/or dilemma.
As a young high school senior preparing to go to college, he was wrestling with whether to be a pastor or to go into the sciences.
“I felt called to do ministry in some way, and the main way to do that as a high-schooler was to be a pastor,” he said.
He remembered a conversation with his then-pastor, who helped him arrive at a both/and solution: “He gave me some wise counsel. He told me that God needs ministers in physics too. And from early on I was thinking about how to do that, and while I was still an undergraduate I really felt like God was calling me to be a professor at a Christian college someday.”
If you ask him about one of the things he loves about his experience at Wheaton, it’s that at Wheaton he can more easily be his “whole self.” Especially in the sciences, people can feel pressure to compartmentalize their faith. Not so at Wheaton, where faculty must write a paper on the integration of faith and learning as part of the process for earning tenure.
Dr. Craig also mentors student researchers at Wheaton every summer and helps them think through questions that enable them to integrate their faith with what they’re learning. Last summer, Dr. Craig and a student read through a book together that explored the question of whether “getting into science leads people toward a secular worldview and away from faith.” The false faith-science dichotomy comes up with students every semester, according to Dr. Craig. Although it is a complex issue, he said (echoing passages in the Psalms) he has found through his study of science that “the reliable patterns you see in nature are a testimony to God’s faithfulness.”
It is professors like Dr. Craig who help coach emergent Christian scientists to work out such questions in their own lives as they look forward to careers as multi-faceted, Christ-centered people.
