Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, such as Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Birthmark, all have an underlying meaning and demonstrate a similar recurring theme. Hawthorne uses his stories to clarify his beliefs about the competition between nature, religion, and science in everyday life. In all three of his stories he rejects the concept of science coming before religion or nature. Hawthorne clearly thought that if nature or religion were tampered with through the use of science, it could only end badly, but more specifically in death. In each of his stories there is a scientific experiment that challenges both nature and religion and ends in a harmful way. Nathaniel Hawthorne's beliefs conclude that God and nature are ultimately more powerful than science. In Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates an imaginary experiment that resists the intentions of both God and nature. Dr. Heidegger brings together some old acquaintances who seem dissatisfied with their lives and all wish to be young again. They also hope that the wisdom they have accumulated over the years will allow them not to make the same mistakes that led to their unhappiness. Since they were so desperate, they joined an unpromising experiment, which turned out to be an illusion. Once the old friends began to hallucinate in their youth, they began to behave as they would have done ten years earlier. In addition to forgetting all their insight, as the narrator explains, "The fresh luster of the soul, so soon lost, and without which the succeeding scenes of the world had been but a gallery of faded pictures, threw once more the its enchantment over all perspectives" (6). God clearly did not intend to give the experiment subjects a second chance and painfully strips them of their youth once again: “The delirium he had created had become effervescent. YES! they were old again. With a trembling impulse, which still showed her a woman, the widow clasped her gaunt hands before her face, and wished the coffin lid were on it, for she could no longer be beautiful” (8). The fatal outcome of this story was the hope that the elders once had in science. Therefore demonstrative science is incapable of challenging the power of God. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Birthmark, he uses imperfect beauty to confirm that if God's creations are interfered with the product is harmful. A scientist, Alymer is married to a beautiful woman named Georgiana whose only flaw is a birthmark on her left cheek.