Campground Credentials | Faculty Commons

Sam Matteson, Physics
University of North Texas

“What kind of woodpecker is that, Doc?”

The woman at Rocky Mountain National Park asked me this as I picked up fuel for our evening campfire. “You’re a doctor — you would know,” she added, alluding to the title that she had learned about in our brief conversation minutes before.

I was caught flat-footed at her implication that my credentials as a physicist and university professor somehow also made me an obvious expert in ornithology. Then I was inspired and replied with an impish grin, “I believe the guide book calls it a pileated woodpecker.”

For decades I have carried this incident in my mind. While not everyone that I have met since then has been as impressed with my intellectual prowess as my campground inquirer or as am I (if I must be honest), it is a fact that as professors we do occupy a position of authority in the eyes of many people.

Great Knowledge Does Not Guarantee Great Wisdom

I confess that such deference comforts my insecure heart and tastes like a sweet reward for all the hard work in the lab and years of study in the library, but I still shake my head at my prideful excesses and lapses of judgment. A doctorate in physics does not automatically qualify me to make expert pronouncements about metaphysics any more than do credentials as a psychologist a biochemist make, nor do years spent as a historian necessarily prepare one to give advice on diet, nutrition and health promotion. Great knowledge does not guarantee great wisdom, nor does intense study assure insight.

“I should make a note of that,” I tell myself, since I am so prone to forgetting humility, to reading my own “press releases” and to admiring my CV. I feel often too sure of my opinions on topics where humble silence is more apropos; my ignorance, however, is never an impediment to my opinion.

Nevertheless, I realize that my successes in my discipline are assets that I should not overlook or squander. My position is a platform that affords me an opportunity to interpret the results of my discipline to others in the context of the Gospel.

The Irrefutable Evidence Of A Transformed Life

I see now that I can genially confront the assumptions of my colleagues in the academy and thoughtfully offer the alternative of the Jesus-hypothesis as a viable “standpoint” to execute my scholarship. I can point to the relevance and reliability of a documented history attested to by the church. I can also present the irrefutable evidence of a life transformed: my life.

I can use my training in the life of the mind to “go to school again” in disciplines not my own, in philosophy, in theology, in history, for example. Then I will have earned the right to speak without stuttering or the pretension of the arrogant but ignorant; as Paul admonished Timothy: “Earnestly study to show yourself approved to God, a workman unashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”(2 Tim 2:15 Literal Translation ed. Green 1985)

Whenever I recall my campground encounter I resolve anew to study earnestly. Then I can comment of the plumage I see in the forest and thus honor God without shame.