Professor Ivy Kaufman is originally from Hattiesburg, Mississippi and has been in the Upstate area since 1984 when she went to Clemson’s graduate program. She has been teaching Physics at Southern Wesleyan since fall 2007. I meet with professor Kaufman at the beginning of March 2020 before the COVID-19 outbreak across America. We talked about all sorts of things relating back to Christianity and her walk with Jesus. Noted below are a few key points throughout our conversation.

ME: What attached you to Southern Wesleyan?

KAUFMAN: Well, Dr. Sinnamon’s Persistence.

(laughter)

KAUFMAN: It was flattering to be asked to come and teach. I was really pleased to be able to come to a place where my faith was not going to be an obstacle. My faith wasn’t going to be something where I would have to think, yeah, I can expect that reaction when I say “Praise the Lord” or if I say “I’ll pray for you.” That happened to be one of the biggest things that attracted me here.

ME: What got you interested in Physics?

KAUFMAN: My mother, many years ago back in the dark ages, she bought the Time-Life Library of Books, which was a subscription that every month they would send you a book and charge you. It was an automatic thing. The first one that I really ever paid attention to was entitled The Universe. And I absolutely fell in love with the pictures in there. We’re talking 1965-1966 so the vast majority of pictures were from big telescopes, but they were amazing. They were absolutely beautiful. The beauty of it just captivated me. It didn’t have anything to do with God because I didn’t accept Jesus as my savior until ninth grade. 

I don’t remember when my love for science started, but I do remember being in second grade, and we would get taken to the library. They had all kinds of books, but I always gravitated towards the science books. I remember one little girl ask, “Don’t you ever read fairy tales?” I would say, “I want this one. I don’t understand your question.” So, science was an early thing for me.

ME: I understand. I remember being a kid, and all I wanted to read were the animal fact books. Other children would ask, “Why don’t you read fiction books?” And I would go, “But I would like to know about these sharks.”

(laughter)

ME: You look at physics and you don’t think that is predominantly female. How has that effected your education if any?

KAUFMAN: Well, no one ever discouraged me. When I was a junior in high school, we had an opportunity to participate in a program called springboard. I knew for a long time before then that I wanted to do astronomy. I was in the group of high preforming students that they said could participate. My parents said, cool, we could do that. It simply allowed you to spend the summer between your junior and senior year taking some college classes to give you an introduction to college classes. And so, since astronomy was what I was interested in, I was sent directly to the department chair of physics. The department chair kind of took me under his wing and was thrilled to have me there. He never said, “You know, you’re going to be the only girl. There isn’t going to be that many girls around here.” He welcomed me aboard. 

No one ever said this is a man’s field. It is contrary to what people think today. Where I was from, that wasn’t what people talked about. It wasn’t only women can do home ec or only guys can go into the hard sciences. It was never ever mentioned, so it was never a hindrance.

I had to work as hard as everyone else. No one ever said, give her a break she’s female. As far as I know, I was graded on performance. I was not given the expression that I was filling a quota slot. 

ME: That’s great. So, moving on to your Christian walk. You said you didn’t get saved until ninth grade, what was the change?

KAUFMAN: Somewhere around sixth grade we had moved and lived in Huntsville, Alabama or one year. My sixth-grade teacher that year was a widow, and she had been a missionary to Belgium. We were in a public school and to this day I am horribly ashamed at the way we acted toward her because all you had to do to distract her was ask her about her missionary work in Belgium. We were six graders. We were simple and had no understanding. We just thought, “Man, she sure goes on about Belgium,” but she had good reason to. She and her husband did good work over there. 

She invited us to a revival with one of the lesser known televangelists. I don’t remember why I wanted to go, I just did. When they gave the invitation, I felt I ought to go. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just let it ride. We moved back to Hattiesburg the following school year. Ninth grade came around and I feel like it is the most amazing miracle. We were in a public school and they bring in an evangelist. He gave the invitation, and had everyone put their heads on our knees, and said if you wanted to accept Jesus or said that prayer raise your hand. Now everyone with their hands up look around because you’re not the only one. At that point was when I got saved. 

The next year or so I was like, I’m saved, I can worship God anywhere, I don’t need to go to church. Yeah, you can, but that’s not what the Bible teaches. “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.” But I wasn’t getting taught. Finally, my grandmother got me to go to church with her. It was a little Southern Baptist Church, and at that point I was baptized. It wasn’t a ‘pow, here I am’; it was a more gradual process. I continued to go to church throughout undergraduate and then at Clemson during my graduate program. It’s amazing we think we know so much, and we know so very little. The fact that we don’t realize that we know so little is scary.

The Lord had a lot to teach me, and I met my husband at Clemson. Have the Lord not lead me up here I would have not met my husband, and my faith have been strengthened and deepened since then. The Lord hasn’t given me a choice in it thankfully or I would have chosen the easy way like the rest of us. He has been teaching me and continues to teach me to depend on Him. It took a long time, I’m sometimes a little slow but He has been patient and has taught me so much. He has made His love abundantly clear that I can’t deny it. The opportunity to work somewhere where I don’t have to conceal my faith and consider before having to say something about my Lord is beyond description how wonderful it is.

ME: That’s an amazing story. Can you tell me about how faith, physics, and astronomy relate to each other since a lot of people look at science and say science disproves Christianity?

KAUFMAN: You have to ask yourself, we have natural laws. Those are highly structured statements, and they seem to indicate a great degree of structure in nature. The inescapable question is where did that structure come from? If evolution in right, I don’t believe it is for the record, then random chance processes just happen to generate everything. Did you ever play pick-up-sticks as a child?

Me: Yes

KAUFMAN: How many times did you throw those stick in the air and they landed and formed the Eiffel tower? Not once. Where does that structure come from? That much deliberate design requires a great creator. All of science has these laws, these rules, these structure that all comes together in the presence of an omniscience creator. There is no other explanation you do not get that from random chance processes. I don’t care how many monkeys you put on a typewriter; they are not going to turn out a novel. It’s never going to happen. Random chance doesn’t do that, and physics knows that. One of the laws of thermal dynamics is that all things tend to disorder. If you clean a room and shut it up for two months and you go in there, what are you going to find?

Me: Dust

KAUFMAN: Dust, cobwebs. Where did it come from? The room was cleaned. It had become disordered. It’s inedivble. And personally, I think it’s the result of the fall of man at the garden. This is what happens, the world has been corrupted. You can’t avoid making that connection. People try really hard to avoid that connection, but they are deceiving themselves. It’s there, you can’t ignore it. So as far as I’m concerned, the Bible says creation points to God. In Romans, it talks about the invisible things of God from the beginning of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made. Even His eternal power and Godhead so they are without excuse. It’s there. Is it enough of a revelation to save your soul? No that takes a more specific revelation, but you can’t stand there, and say well I didn’t see an evidence of a God. It’s there, you can’t deny it, the Bible says so, God says so. I can’t divorce any of them from each other because God made them. He created those laws. That is design, we can’t make those things.  

ME: Thank you so much! I really appreciated this conversation.