Larry P. Arn (0:00)

On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arn sits down with pastor, professor and author Kevin DeYoung for a one on one conversation.

Kevin DeYoung (0:13)

When Jesus is ascending, about to ascend in Acts Chapter one and the disciples ask him, is now now are you going to set up your kingdom? It's amazing they are still confused. They still are thinking, might this be an earthly kingdom? In John's gospel they want, they try to make him king by force. Some of his followers, they just can't get out of their head that when he talks about the kingdom, the only way they can conceive of power and true influence and might in the world is there's a king on a throne, in a palace, in a castle, in a temple somewhere.

Larry P. Arn (0:47)

Listen to this exclusive interview with Kevin DeYoung right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network and at podcast Hillsdale Edu. Also at Apple Podcasts Spotify and YouTube and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your device. That's podcast Hillsdale. Edu.

Scott Bertram (1:23)

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.

Larry P. Arn (1:41)

We continue a series of episodes from presentations delivered at Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence Seminars. The Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence and Outreach of The Hillsdale College K12 education office offers educators the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge and refine their skills in the classroom. These one day conferences are hosted during the academic year in cities across the nation and feature presentations by Hillsdale College faculty, K12 office staff and leaders in the Hillsdale Network of member schools. There is no cost to attend and attendees may earn professional development credits. Currently, the Hoagland center is hosting a series exploring the art of teaching a variety of subjects. To learn more about upcoming events, Visit our website k12 hillsdale.edu.

Chemistry Professor (Unnamed, possibly a Hillsdale College faculty member) (2:33)

My talk is titled in your program the Natural Sciences in a Classical Curriculum. But what I decided since that program was published between then and today that I wanted to try to narrow the focus a little bit of my talk. So what I'd actually like to call it if I got a do over is is Classical Connections to Chemistry. I want to narrow the focus a little bit to my own discipline of chemistry and think about what are some ways in which the science of chemistry bumps up against some of the central concerns of classical education and what I'd like to do is I'd like to do that by telling you about a course that I teach, a course that's offered at Hillsdale College. And actually, Eric mentioned it. It's a liberal arts capstone course for seniors. So one of the last things students take as part of the core curriculum at Hillsdale College is a capstone course. And so we could think of this as the climax of their studies within the core curriculum. Some of the things that we think are the most important things for them to know in their undergraduate education and what this class consists of is it consists of some lectures from the president of our college, his name is Larry Arne, and he talks to the whole senior class together about what it means to flourish as a human. He talks about the friendships that they formed. He talks about a lifelong love of learning that they can take from Hillsdale and kind of what the most important things that they've learned, including the kinds of people that they want to be for the rest of their lives. But he really organizes his lectures around what we call the four pillars of the foundation of Hillsdale College. The four pillars are learning, character, freedom, and faith. And so Dr. Arn talks to the students about those things, and then what the students do is they meet for some seminars in their own departmental groups or in their own groups with their fellow majors. And so I work with students who are majors in chemistry and biochemistry. And so we get together and we think about, they've studied a lot of chemistry and biochemistry by this point. But we think about, okay, you've studied all of this core curriculum of liberal arts education. You have a major in chemistry or biochemistry. Let's spend some time considering the ways in which those things might interact with each other. They might connect to each other in some way. And so the way I organize it to try to kind of hit on these four pillars of learning, character, freedom, and faith. We talk about the connection between chemistry and liberal arts education, liberal learning. We talk about the connection between chemistry and philosophy. We talk about the connection between chemistry and ethics. And then we talk about the relationship between chemistry and Christian faith. Now, some of these connections, I think, are. Chemistry has a unique character that informs this discussion. Some of these connections, though, you could broaden more out, broaden out to the natural sciences in general. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to just describe to you some of the things that we think about in this class with chemistry connecting to some of these different areas. Okay, so the first one is chemistry and liberal learning. And the connection here to Classical education is when we think about a classical liberal arts curriculum at the college. What we mean by classical education in the K12 context is basically that classical liberal arts context designed for in a K12 curriculum. So we can think of these classical liberal education and just classical education in K12 to be synonymous. So the first question is, okay, well, how does chemistry fit into some of the characteristics of classical liberal education? And we've heard some talk about these things already today in the previous talks. I mean, what are some of the most important characteristics of a classical approach to education? One of the things that's been touched on already is thinking about knowledge for its own sake and putting this in contrast to this utilitarian kind of a view where we get knowledge in order to be able to use it in some way, be that economic or precursor to economic development of technologies. We think of classical liberal education as being a universal or a general education. And we can contrast this with a specialized education where you really hone in on becoming an expert in a narrow area. That's not the idea of a classical liberal education. A liberal education is a broad or a general universal education. Okay, so we can think about. All right, what does chemistry bring to bear on this? Well, we know for a fact that chemistry is very useful. After all, some 70% of people that get their PhD in chemistry go off to work in industrial positions. So huge industrial application side of chemistry. But I think when we really get at centrally what is chemistry all about? Chemistry is about giving us the ability to see the molecular details, or, sorry, the details of the material world at the molecular level and understand what are the possible transformations that matter can undergo. And so in other words, chemistry gives us insight into a fundamental understanding about what the world is like. What about the attitudes that are cultivated by or appropriate for the liberal arts? When we think about, like, what are some of the attitudes that you would really think of when you think about liberal arts approach to education? Maybe think about an innate curiosity that's already been mentioned today. Human desire to strive towards knowing and towards understanding. A pleasure in learning words like wonder or awe. Aristotle said to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures. Plato talked about an intellectual eros, like a passionate love for learning, a drive to know all the things that are worth knowing. And so we think about what has chemistry to do with that? Well, when we take a look at the natural world, this inspires awe in people. It doesn't take much work to convince them of that. But for the chemist, this sense of wonder and awe is enhanced by the Ability to see beyond just the appearances and look at what is happening at this very small scale, the molecular level. What about the purposes of the liberal arts? We talked about the characteristics of liberal education, attitudes cultivated by the liberal arts. What about the purposes of the liberal arts? Well, in addition to trying to get a grasp on what is true and what is real, I think another really important purpose for liberal arts education, here's one description of it by Mortimer Adler. Adler was instrumental in developing or resuscitating great books programs, and as part of this, an effort to save classical education in the 20th century. And he describes the liberal arts as being intended to develop the faculties of the human mind. John Henry Newman wrote of a philosophic habit of mind as the goal of education. And so there's a goal here about studying things that bring about human excellence and human flourishing. So what have the sciences to do with this? Adler wrote, quote, in the liberal arts tradition, scientific disciplines such as mathematics and physics are considered equally liberal, that is equally able to develop the powers of the mind. And he makes reference to the medieval quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, conceived of as a sort of mathematics. And he wrote, quote, it taught the arts of observation, calculation and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspects of things. And nowadays, of course, we would add many more sciences, natural and social. And so when we think about the natural sciences, we've been talking a lot about the natural sciences in the context of the modern world. But I think at their heart, the natural sciences are our best attempt to understand what the physical world is like. And so there's no question in my mind about whether or not physics and chemistry and biology belong as part of the liberal arts. These are an excellent context in which to develop the faculties of the human mind. And they're an indispensable part of getting at what is real in this universe that we find ourselves in. We've also heard the phrase multiple times today about the liberal arts seeking what is good than what is true and what is beautiful. And so I also like to ask the students, what does chemistry have to do with this idea of beauty? What's the connection between chemistry and beauty? We could think about this in a few different ways. One way is we could think about the beauty of chemical artifacts, like when students take a look at molecules, which, by the way, do the students take a look at molecules? No, but they look at representations of molecules. Right. And we've. There's been quite a bit of discussion today about, like, are we seeing reality directly or are we Looking at models and looking at things mediated through theories and so forth. But students look at representations of molecules. They notice symmetry, they notice complexity. Maybe they look at representations of viruses or other complex structures, and there can be a recognition of beauty there. Proteins. Maybe not only the complexity of the structure, but also thinking about the function of this complex structure also at the macroscopic scale. Think about all of the color that we see around us, right? The chemical explanation for those colors. So there's lots of beauty in chemistry, but it's not only artifacts. We can also think about, is there any beauty in the process of a chemistry experiment? And what would that even mean? It's a different way of thinking about beauty. But think about the. It's been mentioned several times today, the way in which, when we really look at, for example, the history of science, that science is such a human endeavor. It's not a detached rote method that people go through without caring anything about what they're doing. In fact, it's a very human activity. And when we look at experiments in history, we see qualities like invention or elegance of experimental design. Perseverance. I think that video mentioned a student learning perseverance. Well, you can learn perseverance from scientists. Imagination, ingenuity, simplicity, things like this one experiment that. And the other piece is that I think chemistry pushes the boundaries of what we even mean by experiment. So, for example, one experiment that's often cited as a beautiful project is the total synthesis of vitamin B12 by Robert Woodward and his collaborators, both at Harvard and ETH Zurich. So this is a synthesis where they built a natural product. It's a fairly large symmetrical, has some interesting symmetries, organic molecule, but it's a natural product, so it occurs naturally. But they were able to build this molecule from scratch using a whole series of reactions called a total synthesis. This project, this experiment, so to say, took about 10 years. Involved over 100 PhD students and postdocs. This was a brute force kind of. But also being able through all these steps, like a chess game, it had beauty, kind of like a chess game. Being able to see where this project is going to finally get to this final result. But a very challenging kind of a project, and I think something that inspires awe in terms of what the chemist can do. Taking this toolbox of the elements in the periodic table and making some somewhat sophisticated. There's much more sophisticated examples, but somewhat sophisticated molecule that's produced in nature. So that could be an example of beauty that's different than what we might think of as beauty in a physics Experiment, which could tend to be a much more of a singular measurement. Now, one question that we wonder about is in terms of our sense of beauty, does scientific analysis ever detract from our sense of beauty? So people are naturally attracted to nature. And we think when we look at things like the Grand Canyon, red leaves in the fall, ice forming on the surface of a, of a lake, the night sky, basically everybody thinks these kinds of things are beautiful. And so does scientific analysis detract from that sense of beauty? I like to suggest to the students that in fact, a scientific understanding of what's really going on physically at the microscopic level only deepens our understanding. We're doing. It doesn't even have to be the microscopic level. Like if you think about looking out at the night sky, I like to think about people in the ancient past. They've looked at the same constellations, for example, that we look at the same planets. But think about the, because of Hubble and the James Webb telescope and other things, how much more appreciation do we have for knowing the vastness of what we're looking at? That kind of thing couldn't be known without scientific analysis. Then maybe similar ideas with what's going on in leaves. Why does ice float on the surface of water? Things like this. And so an analogy that we sometimes use is thinking about music. So can music be enjoyed without analysis? Of course it does. Most people, that is how most people enjoy it, the beauty of music, right? But think about the music major who loves music and they understand the theory behind it, and they understand when they listen to a piece of music, they understand what's going on. Now maybe there could be times when they overanalyze things, the scientists could do the same thing. But I think the sense should be that this deeper understanding and this analysis that science gives us makes what could be a sort of a two dimensional world deeper, almost a three dimensional world, and enhances our enjoyment of nature. Now, when we think about the ways in which chemistry connects to liberal education, I think there's another one that's really important. And it goes to this discussion of our modern world. And it's kind of a roundabout way in which chemistry influences liberal education. And that is that one of the ingredients that's necessary to be able to carefully consider deep questions has been called leisure. So following Pieper's book the Basis of Culture. So leisure, meaning the space from the kind of pressing everyday needs for survival to be able to think about deep questions. So in the past, who is free to consider the kinds of questions that we Think about, as part of the liberal arts, only the people that were able to step away from the pressing needs of survival. But actually, science has given us all kinds of ways to meet our kind of pressing needs for survival, such that now maybe not anyone, but many more people can create space in their lives for leisure. That is time to carefully consider deep questions. And this is really important for students to think about. High school students are often quite busy, but they still, they have fewer responsibilities than adults. Right? And this is certainly true of college students. College students have a lot of space in their lives. And another concept that's associated with leisure is like a festival. I have a colleague who talks about college as a four year festival of learning because it's this separation from just regular daily real life in certain ways to be able to set apart time to really learn. And so science has given us free time. And then the question for us is, what do we do with it? And that's the question for our students too. Do you take advantage of this leisure that science has given you in order to learn, or is it spent just scrolling, scrolling on the phone and watching videos or whatever? Okay, so chemistry and leisure. But also I think it is worth thinking about, are there ways in which chemistry or natural sciences more generally are an awkward fit within the liberal arts project? So let me suggest a couple. One is that the liberal arts are not mainly about research. They're not about finding new facts. They're about this general education, about what is known. On the other hand, science is, tends to be research focused and it tends to be specialized. Remember I said liberal arts are quite general. Well, science tends to be specialized. And so there can be a sense in which it seems to be in tension with the liberal arts. On the other hand, I think that we could say that about any academic discipline, you can be very specialized or you can understand the kind of broad picture that that discipline gives you and its connections with other, other disciplines. We've also talked today quite a bit about looking forward to new ideas and new progress versus looking back at received wisdom from the past and intellectual tradition passed down to us from the past. And it feels like science maybe is an awkward fit because science is always looking forward and you never know what science is going to be in the future. And the question of whether the facts of science are ever settled. And all these things that we've been talking about today make it seem like science is an effort to get rid of the past and press on towards the future. But I would like to suggest, I'd like to Add to this discussion we've been having by suggesting that I think that you can make a connection between the kinds of questions that science is answering and things that people have always wondered about. This is not exclusively modern kinds of questions. Okay, so when chemistry, and with the help of physics, finally gets a handle on what atoms are like, what is this an answer to? This? This is an answer to a question that has been asked since at least pre Socratic times, right? Is there matter that could be indivisible when we try to get a handle on what the nature of light is or what this phenomenon of magnetism is like? These are old questions that people have wondered about for a long time. And so I don't think that chemistry or science in general is really that awkward of a fit within a liberal arts, a classical liberal arts tradition, because I think it's a connection to a long tradition of trying to understand what physical reality is like. And the fact of the matter is, the reason that we don't mainly read about science among the Greek philosophers is that getting at what physical reality is actually like has been a very challenging problem. It's turned out to be a very challenging problem. And a lot of aspects of reality, as were already discussed, relativity, quantum mechanics, turn out to be very non intuitive. And they're just not something that someone could have guessed just by wondering in their thinking about it in their own mind. So it turns out that nature has held her secrets quite tightly and figuring out ways to let nature tell us what it's like have been really challenging. And of course it's an ongoing project, but I like to see it as part of a long tradition that is the liberal arts tradition. Okay, let's talk about chemistry and philosophy. There's also been a fair amount of talk today about the, the nature and philosophy of science. Mainly I just want to propose that inasmuch as philosophy of science has tried, and especially this was up through the first half of the 20th century, tried to give a, articulate, a precise method of doing science. We all teach the scientific method in our classes, but in as much as it tries to articulate a kind of precise logic for discovery, I would argue that chemistry is often a kind of an awkward fit in that logic and doesn't always follow the rules of the scientific method. Now, chemistry is by far the largest discipline of any of the natural sciences in terms of publications. But per year, almost as many papers published in chemistry as the other sciences combined each year. And so I think that when we're thinking about what science is actually like, it's important that we consider chemistry. I think there's been a tendency in the philosophy of science to mistake theoretical physics for all of the natural sciences. But actually, they each have their own flavor and their own character. And what I think the unique character of chemistry is that it has this artificial, creative character to it. In some senses, chemistry is close to art because the chemist is trying to create something new. Chemist makes new molecules. And so when you're trying to make a new molecule, how does this fit into the scientific method? It's not about hypothesis testing and trying to falsify conjectures. It's almost like a kind of a narrative of trying to produce something, trying to produce something new. And also, what this means is that chemistry changes the world. When the astronomer looks out at the sky, they can make all kinds of measurements, but they don't have any. They're not actually changing the world in the way a chemist is. When a chemist makes a new molecule, now we have something new that might not exist in nature. And so this is changing the world. And so oftentimes, actually, chemists are very pragmatic. They just do whatever they need to do to push a project forward. When they're trying to synthesize a new molecule, for example, they're often not thinking about just following the steps of the scientific method. Sometimes this is called a pragmatist pluralism of methods. There's lots of different things you can do in different contexts. Chemistry is subtle, it's approximate. It requires skill and intuition and practice to do. And so I think that actually chemistry can help us. And this has already been discussed a little bit, this thinking about the subtlety of science. I think chemistry can help us in thinking about that, and it can help close a perceived gap where you have, on the one side, the scientific method, which gives us. Which has a precise method that can kind of generate automatically objective knowledge about the world. And then on the other side, you have personal, subjective truth or opinion of, say, the humanities. But actually, they're not as far apart as we might always think. Sometimes in physics, you'll hear about the ultimate goal of trying to arrive at a theory of everything. But actually, when a chemist produces a new molecule, then they produce more undetermined properties, that is possible knowledge. All these ways you could characterize the molecule, what kind of reactions could it undergo? What properties does it have? You produce more possible knowledge than you do determined properties or actual knowledge. And so as the chemist works, then the idea is actually they're creating questions faster than they're creating Answers. And so the goal of chemistry is nothing like a theory of everything. In fact, it's a presumably never ending project of being able to put the atoms of the periodic table together in increasingly new ways and make new substances. Okay, there's already been some talk about reductionism. When students study chemistry for a long time and they get into biochemistry, then it necessarily leads them to these questions that have already been raised today in our sessions. Can the human person in principle be understood in terms of the underlying chemical reactions? And over the last, what, 75 years or so, as we've understood more and more and more about the chemical structures and reactions that underlie the processes of life, it raises the question of, is biology merely elaborate chemistry? And so could we in principle understand all of biology in terms of chemistry? But there's no reason to stop at chemistry, right? So when we have quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger equation giving us a description of the way in which particles like electrons behave, then it raises the question, can chemistry be fundamentally described or comprehensively described in terms of physics? So the idea of reductionism is there's just this idea of breaking things down into more fundamental parts, and that's a mode of analysis that allows you to understand them. And if you take reductionism, and science has often been tempted by this, take reductionism as your kind of highest mode of analysis or even your best way of understanding things, then you always tend to try to understand things in terms of more fundamental parts. But we might ask the question, why should we stop at physics? What if physics can be reduced to whatever the mathematical equations are that make up physics? But I think that what we see, and this has been pointed out so far today, is that when we reduce things, it is a powerful mode of analysis. I'm not trying to. I don't think we should think that reductionism is bad. It's been really great for understanding things in terms of the more fundamental parts, but when we do that, we're always losing something. And so this idea that the human with all of their thoughts and desires can be explained in terms of sociology, which in the end is just psychology. And psychology could be accounted for completely by biology, which could be accounted for by chemistry, which could be accounted for by physics. At each of those steps that you take, though, you're losing very important things. And so again, I think when scientists try to have reductionism as the best or only way of thinking about things, this has the effect of alienating the humanities, for example, that tell us very important things about what is real and what is true. And they're not reducible to biology, for example. But even in chemistry, there are many very useful ideas we use in chemistry, but that are just simply not part of the, they're not part of the vocabulary and they're not part of the conceptual space of physics. And so it seems clear to me that chemistry is not reducible to physics. In any case, that's never the direction that it goes. I could hand somebody the Schrodinger equation, and there isn't anyone who can produce chemistry out of it. Whether or not that could be done in principle, maybe it's a little bit of a challenging question, but I have serious doubts. Okay, so that was philosophy. We also talk about chemistry and ethics. Now. I already mentioned that chemistry changes the world. And so in this way there's a really important sense in which chemistry is not an ethically neutral enterprise. And so we think about what responsibility do chemists have for thinking about the uses of their creations. When you're a PhD student, you have very narrow expertise and you're just in the lab trying to make a project work, trying to produce a new molecule. So what is the responsibility of someone like that for thinking through what will be the effects of bringing this molecule into the world? Well, those are complicated questions. And many times if you're able to do it, then it can be done right. Somebody else will do it if you decide not to. But the fact is that science has great power. You can think about producing poisonous compounds, think about producing narcotics, for example chlorofluorocarbons in the past with ending up damaging the ozone layer. If we stray into physics, then we could just say nuclear, nuclear fission, for example. Extremely powerful kinds of things. And so just thinking through, like to what extent should the scientist be concerned with ethical or environmental implications or consequences of their curiosity driven research? Not that we would hold them completely responsible for what someone else might do with a compound that they couldn't have foreseen, but, but just being scientists that think about things beyond the research lab in which we work at. And actually this is why I think that the best context in which to study science actually is as part of a liberal arts education. Because I think that someone with very narrow but very high level technical expertise that doesn't really know anything else, this presents a lot of danger in terms of question. And we face this mistake in America all the time where we think that scientific experts are the best suited people to tell us what we ought to do with the science that we develop. And in many cases they're actually the worst suited people because they have a narrow expertise, but they don't. Maybe they haven't thought a lot about character, virtue, moral philosophy, ethics, the kinds of things that are part of the classical education. One of the contexts that we talk about in terms of the connection between chemistry and ethics is a lot of the students are biochemistry majors. And biochemistry and molecular biology have progressed to the point where we can now make intentional edits in the genomes of this can be done in targeted human cells, or it can be done in human embryos. And when you make edit to the genome of a human embryo, then that will change the makeup of the entire individual as it develops. And actually those genetic changes will be passed on to the progeny as well. And so this could be a very powerful technique with some therapeutic applications. And actually the context for, for this could be therapeutic use in medicine, but it could also be, it's a very powerful technique. It's called CRISPR technology. And it's a very powerful technique just in basic research. Also, it's a technique that can be used to change the genetic makeup of agricultural crops for food, to make them more nutritious or things like that, and also for gene drives to rapidly make a genetic change go through a population. People have thought about and I think tried in some places doing this with mosquitoes, for example, to try to eradicate malaria. But these are all quite ethically fraught areas. And so some of the ethical concerns that we talk about are what is the status of this sort of moral status of embryos in terms of this kind of research with editing their genomes or just practicing on them to try to get it down. Unintended effects. You know, we talk about how would you design a phenotype? Just, it's a very complicated relationship between changing specific genes and certain characteristics that an individual will show as they develop. We talk about therapeutic versus enhancement type applications and we talk about eugenics. Let me just read a couple of quotes. The first one is from Gilbert Millender, bioethicist. He says, quote, if we are genuinely baffled about how to best describe the moral status of that human subject, who is the unimplanted embryo, we should not go forward in a way that peculiarly combines metaphysical beware bewilderment with practical certitude by approving even limited use for experimental purposes. Francis Collins, who was the director of the Human Genome Project, said the application of germline manipulation would change our view of the value of human life. If genomes are being altered to suit parents preferences, do children become more like commodities than precious gifts. And then my last quote is from George Church, who is a Harvard geneticist who was part of the development of this technology. He said, I don't see why eliminating a disability or giving a kid blue eyes or adding 15 IQ points is truly a threat to public health or morality. And so we talk about they're going to be the generation that has to decide how are we going to utilize this kind of technology and do we want a future in which you can imagine these various dystopian scenarios. The Olympians we watch on tv, for example, are all people who have had some kind of specific genetic manipulations to make edits to make them able to do the things that they do. Even this idea of eliminating a disability raises questions of who decides which disabilities need to be eliminated? Who. Things like this. Okay, just real quick then. The last one we talk about is chemistry and Christian faith. And this could be more broadly phrased just in terms of the relationship between the natural sciences and religion. And we talk about what are some ways in which people have thought about religion and science as interacting with each other. And one is this paradigm of conflict. The idea that the way it has typically gone is you have this forward thinking progress of science being held back, counteracted and opposed by religious authority, that is the church. I think the paradigmatic example of this is Galileo and his heliocentric model of the solar system. But when we look at the details of that story, it's more about, or it's at least as much about authority who has authority to interpret scripture as it is about competing scientific interpretations of the data. I think in much more recent times where we really see this conflict picture is in someone mentioned Sam Harris earlier. So the so called new atheists of the early 2000something to 2010ish, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens trying to push this conflict idea, the idea that the knowledge of science and religion are fundamentally opposed. And then also we see the same kind of thing by some Christians who see the things that they read in the Bible as being opposed to certain scientific theories. So only one can be, can be correct. Another way this is sometimes thought about is a model called independence. And so that's the idea that science is over here looking at facts about the natural world. Religion is over here looking at human purposes and meaning and value. And those two spheres don't interact at all. And so science and religion couldn't conflict even in principle. And the third one we talk about is dialogue and this is the idea that science and religion are different, but they have things to say to each other and they inform each other in some ways. So I thought I would give a quote. We heard a quote from John Polkinghorne earlier. So Polkinghorne is a particle physicist turned Anglican priest and really good thinker on the relationship between religious faith and natural science. And he's a good example of this dialogue, kind of a model. So here's a quote from him. He says, the intellectual strategy of science is neither an undue credulity nor a perpetual skepticism. No progress would be made if one questioned everything all the time. In fact, scientists find it as hard as anyone else to revise long held beliefs when occasionally this is called for. The understanding we gain is never beyond a peradventure. And often some aspects of what's going on are puzzling or even totally inexplicable. We do the best we can. And a general scientific theory is broadly persuasive because it provides the best explanation of a great swath of physical experience. The cumulative fruitfulness of science encourages me to believe that this is an effective intellectual strategy to pursue. I wish to engage in a similar strategy with regard to the unseen reality of God. God's existence makes sense of many aspects of our knowledge and experience. And one more brief quote from Polkinghorne, he says, I believe that science and religion are intellectual cousins under the skin. Both are searching for motivated belief. Neither can claim absolutely certain knowledge, for each must base its conclusions on an interplay between interpretation and experience. In consequence, both must be open to the possibility of correction. Neither deals simply with pure fact or with mere opinion. They are both part of the great human endeavor to understand. And so the idea here is that, and so somebody like Richard Dawkins would say that religious faith is believing things for which you have zeal, zero evidence, because if you had any evidence, you wouldn't refer to it as faith. And then science is based on evidence and so it could be believed. And what Polkinghorne is saying is they're not as far apart as you might think and they can coexist. And they're both part of the great human endeavor to understand. They both involve motivated belief. Okay, yeah, I just need to let me just skip one last point on that. As we've talked a little bit about the connection between science and materialistic philosophies, I would like to propose that science is a consciously self limiting enterprise that is at its best, science does not set out to give a comprehensive account of reality. And when scientists write books saying that science can give a comprehensive account of reality, that's fine. That's their prerogative. But they're acting as philosophers when they do this, and they're making philosophical claims that cannot be tested using science. What science does is it uses something that we call methodological naturalism. That is, science assumes in its explanations naturalistic explanations, but it never says those are the only explanation for any phenomenon. It just says that there are some questions that are well suited to being addressed by science, and the only explanations that are scientific are naturalistic explanations. But that's not to say that naturalism or materialism is some sort of universal. Just to say that within the methods of science, that's how they operate. Okay, so in this course, then, the students are reminded that chemistry is an indispensable part of the human project to seek truth, and it connects to deep philosophical, ethical, and religious questions. And so I believe that because of that, we can and we should pursue chemistry within a classical liberal arts educational context. Thank you.