While studying biology at Michigan Tech, Sarah Kostick planned to follow a career path in medicine. During her studies, she realized she’s terrible with people, she said.
“My bedside manner would have been horrible and not a gift of mercy to the people that I encountered,” Kostick told “Practicing Catholic” co-hosts Leah Heselton and Father Tom Margevicius for an episode that debuts at 7 p.m. Feb. 13 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. “So, I thought, ‘Plants, they don’t talk, they don’t move. It’s great!’”
Kostick got her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota in applied plant science. She earned her Ph.D. in apple genetics at Washington State University. Sometimes faith doesn’t impact her work as much as she’d like, Kostick said.
“But if I’m living a fully integrated life, I’m called to holiness in every aspect of my life,” Kostick said. “Science is really about the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of truth always should go to God. When I’m out in the field and I’m actually paying attention and I’m looking at these apple trees, there’s just a sense of ‘How does this very complex system work and what does it point towards?’ It points towards a creator.”
The complexity in the world around Kostick points simply toward the Lord. Reflecting on Adam and Eve’s fall by eating from the tree of knowledge, commonly depicted as an apple, Kostick said that the pursuit of knowledge devoid or separate from God is the pursuit of pride.
“When it’s separated from the pursuit of the Lord, it’s really not healthy and I become God in and of myself or I play something else in place of the Lord,” Kostick said. “But when I’m humble and I’m really receiving what the world around me has to offer and really what the Creator has to offer, it constantly should point me back to him.”
In encountering people who separate science from faith, Kostick said she tries to understand where they’re coming from.
“Really, when someone says, ‘I believe in science and not this fiction of a potential creator,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I want to see evidence and I want to see proof for everything,’” Kostick said. “What they misunderstand is that science is only in what we can see and what we can observe. We can understand the world around us and what we can see, measure and observe, but we cannot understand outside of that. When we think about how the world around us works, it always points towards something else. There’s always a deeper step that we can (take). As a scientist, I (say) I can understand this, but it brings up more questions than I can understand. I’m always going deeper, but where does it point towards? It has to have an origin.”
Though Kostick can’t prove the existence of God, she said science doesn’t disprove God’s existence either.
To hear more from Kostick about the intersection of faith and science, listen to this episode of “Practicing Catholic,” which repeats at 1 p.m. Feb. 14 and 2 p.m. Feb. 15.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also features Pat and Ken Millea, co-founders of the Martin Center for Integration, who share their journey in making Lent transformative.
Listen to interviews after they have aired at practicingcatholicshow.com or choose a streaming platform at Spotify for Podcasters.
