Faith and Science

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Well, welcome to the Grow Tential podcast. My name is Chet. I'm filling in here and with me is Doc. Doc, how's it going? [00:00:10] Speaker B: Good. Beautiful day. [00:00:12] Speaker A: Yeah, we had an amazing service yesterday, unified service. [00:00:16] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:00:17] Speaker A: So we're filming this early July, which is a great time around here at Christchurch. But today we're going to talk about what I hope to be an interesting subject. You listeners will have to decide that, but we're going to talk about the relationship between faith and science. Now one of the reasons I like talking about this is because I know for people this can be a barrier to believing in God, to, you know, taking that step of really being open to the reality of God. But in your years of ministry, how have you seen that be maybe an obstacle or stumbling block for people? [00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So the church has sometimes made it more difficult than it needs to and often the university has made it more difficult than it needs to be. We are saved by believing in Jesus Christ. We're not saved by our belief about how much water there was in the flood or we're not saved by our belief in a blind man. Christ healed a blind man. So the problem has always arisen in my experience when we make secondary things primary, you know what I mean? I do believe there was a flood. I believe Christ healed the blind man, but I don't. Those are not saving faith issues. You can be saved, you can have a great relationship with Christ and be dead wrong on a lot of stuff. [00:02:07] Speaker A: And certainly the Lord will forgive a lot of wrong theology. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Yes he will. Thank God. [00:02:13] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. [00:02:14] Speaker B: So what has been your experience? [00:02:16] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, the thing that comes to mind when I, I remember being in 10th grade and I was, you know, very new to faith and a new christian and I just remember I had a biology class and we watched a video of reenactment of the Scopes monkey trial and then we had to like write a little paper about it. And my teacher then was very anti Christianity so I wrote a paper and he, you know, just basically critiqued it so much because I, you know, had reference to God in it, belief in God and, you know, almost kind of made me feel stupid. Yeah, in a sense. And I know other people have gone through things like that too. [00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah, you get marginalized. Yeah, but you know, that is poor teaching. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. [00:03:05] Speaker B: That's when. When you are humiliating a student and not lifting them up, that's. [00:03:12] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. And thankfully it didn't, you know, I just kind of laughed it off at that point. But yeah, I've known people who have said things like, you know, I'm a very scientific person or I'm a very logical person, and then they'll kind of go. And because of that, you know, the idea of God is hard for me, where when they say that, I'm like, well, that's really good, you know, because, like we say, christianity is a thinking religion. [00:03:40] Speaker B: It is a thinking religion, and it. [00:03:42] Speaker A: Is not in opposition to using your mind and logic, in fact, that will serve you well. [00:03:48] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. [00:03:50] Speaker A: And one of the things that I want to talk about today is how should we understand the relationship between faith and science? Barber has, Ian Barber is kind of a famous writer on these things, but he has these four categories. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about each of them. Conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. [00:04:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So we've both read the book. We both like the book. We think it's very insightful. So he's trying to create a context. So instead of just a vague, what is the debate between religion and science? He's trying to say, well, there is a context and there is a variety of relationships. And then he categorizes them in these four categories that I think are helpful. I think some are more helpful than others. Probably the best known one is conflict. That's the one everybody assumes. The science writer I've read the most is Stephen Jay Gould. And he believes in the independence model where he says, realm of expertise. There is a realm of expertise in theology, but it's not the realm of expertise in science. So he says, we do best when we run in our lanes. [00:05:29] Speaker A: And I think there's so much merit to that because science is great. Like, I am so thankful for air conditioning, you know, refrigerators. Like, these are. These are great things. But there are a lot of questions science can't answer. How to live a moral life, how to love your family. Well, kind of. Some of the most pressing questions. Do you seem a little bit outside that realm? [00:05:59] Speaker B: They absolutely are. And Paul understood this. I mean, the roman empire wasn't our kind of science, but was a very scientific culture with all their building and stuff. And Paul said that the world, by wisdom did not know goddess. The to know God takes something more than an experiment in a laboratory. [00:06:33] Speaker A: Now, one of the things that I know can catch people up, Doc, is that a lot of people will say, well, you know, the Bible is in contradiction to what we know today about science. And that, you know, the Bible is sort of this. It was written, it was influential because we don't know all the things we know today. Because of science. So therefore we don't need it anymore because science has answered so many of those things. So how should we understand the relationship between the scriptures and science? [00:07:07] Speaker B: So the Puritans had this idea of God, had two books. One is the Bible and the other is nature. Often I believe the problem has not been between the Bible and science. It's been between opinions about the Bible and opinions about science. So I know people who believe the world is only 6000 years old. And if you look at the book of nature, it clearly can't be 6000 years old. So the Bible doesn't say the earth is 6000 years old. That is some people's opinion about what the Bible says. Then, on the other hand, I know people who, when I visited Israel, the. The guide said the Bible doesn't help understand the history of the Middle east at all. So that's equally opinionated. You can dig and find stuff that the Bible says should be there. [00:08:28] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:08:29] Speaker B: So it feels to me like much of the conflict is about opinions. All right, now you get to the hard. I mean, hard theology and hard science. We both believe that the Bible wasn't written to explain the book of nature. We believe the Bible is written to tell us who God is and how he relates to humanity. We also believe the Bible is written in different literary styles. And the church has gotten trouble because they interpreted poetry as a historical narrative. And science has gotten in trouble because it elevates itself above being human. As if you have a PhD in astrophysics, you stop being a human being and you stop having opinions and. [00:09:37] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And reading the Bible as a science textbook is not doing justice to the Bible. Its purposes are primarily theological, and the writings are selective because they're trying to guide us towards an idea, an understanding. Yeah, absolutely. [00:10:01] Speaker B: It was written before there was a scientific vocabulary, right. I mean, the scientific vocabulary doesn't really start to, what, the late 16, early 17 hundreds. [00:10:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:10:11] Speaker B: There was no scientific vocabulary before that, right? [00:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah. And science was understood as natural theology or natural philosophy. Well, let's talk about that for a minute, because there is sometimes this sense of this great hostility between Christianity and science in the history of science and the idea that Christianity has been a regressive force on these things. And that always really bothers me because I really think if you look into the history, actually the opposite of that is true. We were talking earlier, but a book that I read recently is called the soul of Science by Nancy Pearcey. And she has this great analogy. She says that science was born within the soil of Christianity, that there's been a lot of ancient advanced cultures throughout history in different parts of the world, but only in the western world in the context of Christianity, did what we know of as modern science emerged. And she says it's because of Christianity. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:11:28] Speaker A: That. That made that soil fertile for this kind of development. [00:11:34] Speaker B: So let's take Galileo, for example, because he always gets thrown in our face. [00:11:40] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:11:41] Speaker B: They always throw Galileo in your face. I've read several biographies on Galileo, and it really turns out it wasn't a conflict between religion and science, it was a political conflict. It was pure italian politics. So there is a. Galileo was a good christian. He loved goddesse, he wasn't an atheist. And he got caught up in the politics of it all. Newton wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation. I mean, who writes a commentary on. [00:12:34] Speaker A: Revelation that is an audacious. [00:12:36] Speaker B: You have to be Isaac Newton. [00:12:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And actually, speaking of Newton, I love this quote from his principia where he has his. Newton's laws and his theory of gravity. But he says this book will be the safest protection against the attack of atheists. Nowhere more surely than from this quiver can one draw forth missiles against the band of godless men. So it just shows, you know, his. And Newton was a game changer. [00:13:08] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:13:08] Speaker A: I mean, he is the paradigm, the thinking that. I mean, he's easily the top three, maybe top contributor to modern science. But as you can see, his faith is what drove it. I mean, these were not in opposition. This was the catalyst to his work. And there's a lot of others, too, that we could talk about. [00:13:33] Speaker B: You saying that reminded me, I read a book, I'm not remembering the name of it, but it was dealing with science and religion and it dealt with the change in England from amateur. Many pastors in England, rectors or whatever they call them, they were amateur scientists. I mean, they were out there with telescopes, they were out there collecting stuff, they were out there calculating stuff. And so often they got hired at Cambridge and Oxford because they really were experts. And what they got, they called the conflict between religion and science was really a conflict of professionalism. Huxley wanted a different set of professionals in the university. And to do that, you had to get rid of the guys who were there. And the easiest way to do it was to say, hey, they're not scientists, they're theologians. So a great deal of that conflict wasn't religion and science at all. It was professionalism, the rise of the secular professional class. [00:14:58] Speaker A: And when you were bringing that up, that reminded me of, I can't remember who where exactly. I read this, too, but it was the idea that so many of these fundamental ways we understand the world are because of Christianity. Like, for example, in earlier times, when you're digging into the material world, that was sort of a lower class thing to do because you're working the ground, you're planting things, you're taking care. So being in nature was not this great thing that we think of it today, where it's like, oh, I want to go on a great hike, or something like that, because it was more tied to the lower class. But one of the things that Christianity did was show God is not nature opposed to nature, but he created it as a good thing. And when you study it, you're actually learning it can be worshipful. And so one of the authors was just kind of making that point, was that Christianity was one of the reasons why studying nature became something that was a worthwhile endeavor. And I think that's a point we take for granted today. [00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah, it's easy to have the biased of the present. [00:16:22] Speaker A: Right. [00:16:23] Speaker B: You know, like the people who came before us, they aren't as intelligent as. [00:16:29] Speaker A: We are chronological snobbery, I think Louis says. [00:16:32] Speaker B: I like that term. I also believe chat when you were talking about that. There has always been a connection between science and religion. I mean, all the way back to the pyramids. So the pyramids are scientific creations. I've watched shows, and we're still not sure how they built a great pyramid. Okay, okay. But it was a science. Okay, but it was a science serving religion because they believed it was a resurrection machine and it would get the pharaoh to the afterlife happy ever after. [00:17:19] Speaker A: With all his stuff. [00:17:21] Speaker B: With all his stuff. So, I mean, as far back as you go, there is this connection between science and religion. It really isn't until secularism triumphed in the university that religion became a second class citizen. [00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I can't remember where I read this, but they said that the whole idea of the conflict between science and religion was an Enlightenment invention. And so these enlightenment thinkers, I believe it was most of the french Enlightenment thinkers, they sort of revised the history of science, and in their revision, they portrayed science and religion as pitted against each other. But again, this was because they're trying to dismiss the. The authority and the credibility of, you know, religious thinking and religious writers and, you know, have human reason as the. The triumph of, you know, the crown jewel of everything. [00:18:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I've read that, too. So the French had a bunch of secular academics and they called them the encyclopedias. [00:18:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Have you read this? [00:18:35] Speaker A: Yes. Yep. [00:18:36] Speaker B: Okay. And you're absolutely right. The encyclopedias restructured everything, and they restructured it around this enlightenment concept that man is the center of all things. The proper study of man is man. And the encyclopedias, they restructured all of human understanding around this enlightenment concept. So basically, what you're doing is saying to God, you are subject to us. [00:19:11] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And I heard that doesn't go well. [00:19:14] Speaker B: That does not go well. That does not work well. [00:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't approve that strategy. But in our day today, we have great confidence in science, and we should. In a lot of ways, we should. [00:19:29] Speaker B: Yes. [00:19:30] Speaker A: And again, we are not anti science at all, and nor do I believe is Christianity in any way. But one of the things that I think happens a lot is that we say, you know, I hear what people say, things along these lines, like, well, that's just your opinion, but here's the science, you know, and it always rubs me a little bit of the wrong way, because it's not, I don't know that it quite operates that way. Let me. Let me read this another Ian Barber quote, and we can talk about a little bit, but this is sort of, I think, a prevailing mindset that we have in our culture. Science alone is objective, open minded, universal, cumulative and progressive. Okay. So, very high view of scientific understanding. Religious tradition, by contrast, are said to be subjective, closed minded, parochial, uncritical, and resistant to change. What are your thoughts on that? [00:20:35] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I can tell you a dozen examples where science was not open minded and it was not objective. I'll just pick one. Some years ago, there were a group of guys in a university here in America who said they had perfected cold fusion. And it hit all. It hit Time magazine. It was. This is the greatest thing since Einstein, and it turned out it was a fraud. So these guys were as hard science as you can get, but they were frauds. [00:21:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:24] Speaker B: And it's easy for, when I've been to the university, it's easy for the university to shame you if you're a Christian. But they forget they've got a long list of frauds in there, in their camp. There have been. We've just been through Covid, and now we're learning that a lot of what they said was science was really opinion. [00:21:57] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:57] Speaker B: Right. Okay. And I'm not picking on you whatever side you take, but it is coming out scientifically. A lot of what they said was not true. [00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:12] Speaker B: Another example, a certain person whose name I won't say at the beginning of. COVID said, it's scientifically proven. You don't need to wear a mask. Yeah, it won't help you. Well, then what was it, six months? And the very same guy changed his. Now science says you should wear a mask. Yeah, the very same guy. The very same issue. He changed his position, and it was all about politics. It wasn't open minded, it wasn't critical, it wasn't universal, it wasn't progressive. So they have a convenient way of tucking their mistakes and frauds into little closets and then shaming us with a scopes trial. [00:23:03] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And I've, well, we've both read Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolution. [00:23:12] Speaker B: Well, I kind of read, yeah, I. [00:23:13] Speaker A: Guess I did, too. Really? That is not an easy, that is a work of. Ah. And even if the parts I did read, I'm not sure I comprehend as much as I'd like. But, but Kuhn has this, and this was in the sixties, and Kuhn's within, he's a physicist and a historian of science, which is kind of a relatively new thing. But he talks about how scientific paradigms are. There's a lot of sociology behind him. We think it's like, oh, you just see the data and the data. We see it very objectively, and it just speaks clearly about this or that. And what Kuhn says is like, that's not really how it works, that paradigms are. There's a lot of sociology, there's a lot of concept, they're incredibly theory laden. And, and that, many times he uses this word incommensurability, to say that a lot of the changes over the history of science, you can't compare them to each other. We think about it as like this, brick by brick. We're building this huge foundation of knowledge. And Kuhn says it doesn't actually work like that because the paradigms are built on the cultural questions of their day. Again, he's not saying, he's nothing saying there isn't scientific progress, but it's not quite the way we tend to think about it. [00:24:37] Speaker B: Right. So when I went to school chat, you could see, you could see this evolutionary chart started with a monkey down here, and it ended up with a man up here, and it was just steady progress the whole way. Well, people don't, those charts aren't out there anymore because that's not, nobody believes that's the way it happened anymore. And I like Kuhn also, because he was the first one I ever read that said, I've heard religion is culturally conditioned many, many times. But Kuhn is the first one I ever read that said science is culturally conditioned, and it. It leveled the playing field for me. [00:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there's a lot of other. Again, you know, I'm using the word critiques here within the scientific community, but really, what they're doing is just pointing out the limitations. [00:25:41] Speaker B: Right. [00:25:42] Speaker A: And like you said, I like that, leveling the playing field a little bit. It's really easy to try, you know, for people to poke holes in religious thinking and things like that. And then it's like scientific thinking is bulletproof. Well, there's some things to consider and to think about. Another one that I liked reading recently was the quine doo him theory. But basically he just says, or they say that no theory is ever tested alone. In that when you do an experiment, when you go through the scientific method, there's multiple theories being tested, and so you can't. It's really hard to determine what theory is faulty and what theory is valid and distinguish between them. And he uses, one of the examples was, I think it was 1915 or 1917 when there was the eclipse. And Einstein's theory was being tested with starlight bending light. Bending light, yeah. And he said that in that experiment, there was a couple things that they had to do to make the math work. One is they did not account for the sun rotating, which it does. They also envisioned the sun as completely a sphere, which it isn't. They didn't account for any other gravitational forces other than the sun on light, which there are. And there's all these things within this calculation. And again, not to say that the overall result wasn't valid, but these are things that are happening all the time that you're not thinking about, no one's talking about. So this pure object, this view from nowhere, doesn't actually exist. [00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah, here's an example of that. When I was going to the university, I read Behe's book Darwin's black box, and basically the thesis of the book is an eye can't evolve because the organism can't survive. And then he goes to the eye is an easy thing. Then he goes, blood clotting. And the majority of his argument is about blood clotting. You can't evolve blood clotting. There's this chemical cascade, and, like, there's 28 reactions or something, and they all have to happen. They all have to happen in sequence or your blood doesn't clot or it won't quit clotting. And that can't evolve. That cascade cannot evolve because the creature won't live. So I read this book, and part of my degree that I was working on was I was working on the protestant church in America. But it also, because you get the conflict with the scopes trial and all this other stuff. So I was reading some history of science stuff, and I said to my professor, have you ever heard of this book? And he said, no. And I said, I told him the thesis. And you know what he said to me? He said, that kind of stuff will ruin your career. [00:29:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:02] Speaker B: He didn't. He wasn't even willing. [00:29:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:06] Speaker B: And the guy is a scientist. He's, he's a. He teaches at some university somewhere. [00:29:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:12] Speaker B: And the, and the professor said. Looked me right in the face and said, that's kind of stuff will ruin your career. [00:29:18] Speaker A: Yep. [00:29:18] Speaker B: That's totally sociological, right. It has nothing to do with science at all. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Yep, yep, absolutely. Was it in that book? Is that the bombardier beetle, too? That like, makes that, like, flame? Basically. But again, it's like, how, how can something like that evolve? [00:29:35] Speaker B: I don't think it is in. [00:29:36] Speaker A: Oh, okay. It reminded me of that. There's a lot of arguments around that. And anyway, so when we think about knowing God, should we expect that we can know God scientifically? Are we going to discover physicists are going to find something? [00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah. The God gene or. No, the Bible does say, doth not nature itself declare the handiwork of God? Okay. So it declares a creator who is a genius, but it doesn't declare what kind of person he is, what is his personhood. So as a Christian, I believe the only way to really know God is through Jesus Christ. I can know about God in nature. I have sensed the presence of God in nature. But nature is the expression of the creativity of God. But nature is not God. We're not pantheist. [00:30:58] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and I think when we think about, we know God by faith. And that's not a lesser way of knowing. No, it's a different way of knowing. [00:31:12] Speaker B: A very brilliant man. Augustine said, I believe so I can understand. [00:31:16] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:31:17] Speaker B: And guess what? Everybody believes so they can understand. Because if you don't believe, you don't. You don't do what you have to do to. [00:31:24] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. Yeah. And I think when we're, you know, the Bible affirms again that God is spirit, you know, and so he is different than the material world. But again, because we are people of faith does not mean we are not people who think, people who value science, these things. Again, they're not in opposition. And again, some of the greatest minds in human history have been passionate followers of Jesus Christ. [00:31:53] Speaker B: Well, in our lifetime, Collins deciphered a human genome, and he's a good practicing Christian. [00:32:01] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. So at the highest levels, you see that that conflict doesn't exist. [00:32:10] Speaker B: No, it doesn't. [00:32:11] Speaker A: And that there is this beautiful integration. And so I want to encourage you, if you're listening to this and there's questions rolling in your mind, don't dismiss the reality of God, but pursue those truths. Pursue those questions. All truth is God's truth. [00:32:29] Speaker B: Yes, it is. [00:32:31] Speaker A: And I'm reminded, like you opened with psalm 19. You know, we have, the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. And then he goes. Then the second half of the psalm is all about the reality of God and creation. [00:32:44] Speaker B: Yes. [00:32:44] Speaker A: And both of those, from the very beginning, they exist together. [00:32:47] Speaker B: Together. [00:32:48] Speaker A: And it's a good thing. Well, thank you, Doc, for your time. [00:32:51] Speaker B: Thank you, Chad. I enjoyed your company. [00:32:53] Speaker A: Yeah, same here. I hope this was helpful to you. If it was, make sure to share it. Send it to someone who this might resonate with, and we'll see you next time.