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White Horse Inn
Equipped: Defending Religion from Scientific Skepticism
00:43:54
Is faith opposed to science? Michael Horton, Justin Holcomb, Walter Strickland, and Bob Hiller seek to dispel the false dichotomy between Christianity and scientific inquiry, affirming that while science helps us understand the natural world, it...
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- [00:00]
A
Introducing Tell Me a Story, a brand new podcast for children and families. Each episode brings scripture to life with immersive storytelling, followed by a short devotional to spark meaningful conversations. Let there be light.
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B
The serpent. He tricked me.
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C
It is I, Joseph. I am the brother you sold to the traitors.
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A
In a world filled with distractions and declining biblical literacy, our children need stories that anchor them in truth. Tell Me a Story weaves the rich narratives of God's promises shown in His Word and the world, equipping parents for discipleship and helping families reflect on the greatest story ever told. Episode one is available now wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [01:02]
B
The object of the physical sciences is secondary causes, nature, how things happen, not why things happen. It isn't the purpose of science. It's beyond its province to be able to adjudicate questions of theology, just as it is beyond theology to adjudicate questions about how that science answers. So they're not in conflict unless we put them in conflict, which we have often done, applying the riches of the Reformation to the modern church.
- [01:57]
C
This is White Horse Sin, a weekly roundtable discussion about theology and culture. The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. So begins King David. In his breathtaking 19th Psalm, David lays out for us the ordering of days and seasons by the will of God in beautiful, poetic form, and then speaks of the life ordered by God's Word. As you read through that psalm, David's observation of the creation's order drove him to to exalt the word of God. We have been given two books to read when it comes to God's work. The Book of Scripture, which makes us wise unto salvation, and the Book of Nature, or perhaps we might want to call it the Book of Creation, which allows us to observe and delight in what God has created. Yet we live in a time when faith and science are presented as opposites. Some more aggressive atheists present science as having demonstrated there is no need for God and then subsequently have attempted to show how religion is backwards and harmful to society. On the flip side, there are many Christians who treat the Scriptures as a sort of scientific textbook and call into question any scientific discoveries that might be made. But science and faith aren't really opposed to each other at all. In our hymnal we have a hymn called Earth and All Stars, where I think we kind of get it right when we sing this line. Classrooms, labs, loud boiling test tubes, sing to the Lord a new song. All of creation is at work together to give glory to God, and we discover many wonderful things about God's creation as we do the work of science. So this week at Whitehorse, we are continuing our series we're calling Equipped. And we'll discuss how we can speak of faith and science in a more constructive and biblical way without compromising our faith. And to have this fun conversation, I am here today with Michael Horton, Walter Strickland and Justin Holcomb. And my name is Bob Hiller. Gentlemen, get into it. Right off the bat here is theology opposed to science.
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A
Can we talk about the test tube hymn?
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B
Dude.
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A
So any hymn about test tubes, that.
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C
Freaked me out a little bit, I've got to say. Not a huge fan of that hymn.
- [04:19]
A
But what the hymn does for a podcast, I'll use it.
- [04:23]
C
Exactly right. No, I literally thought to myself, I don't like this hymn, but I'm going to use it in the podcast. So what the hymn does, it's, it's the, it's kind of a cheesy hymn, but it goes through all kinds of aspects of life, including like, like sports fans at baseball games or something like this. It's the weirdest hymn, but I think it applies because it's acknowledging that in all of these vocations we have as we take part in God's good creation, all of this work we're doing sings praise to God, it sings to the Lord a new song. So I know why they included it, but every time we sing it, my wife makes fun of me. So here we are.
- [05:04]
A
So you asked if there's a conflict between science and theology. And since the so called Enlightenment, which historically was there, but they made it, it was autonomous human reason type of moment, anti Christian polemicists have leaned towards science to deliver their challenge against the faith once and all delivered to the saints. And so in popular culture and in kind of scholarly circles, the spirit of Voltaire lives on, reassuring Christians saying science applies to one realm of knowledge and religion applies to another. And as long as you don't think that your religion knowledge is actually true in like a scientific sense, you're good to go. And so it kind of feels, you know, bifurcates these. And don't treat scripture like we just talked about in the first episode as trustworthy and like philosophical and scientific matters. And then you actually, you have A.D. white wrote a book called the History of the Warfare of Science and Theology which takes that same type of approach that says like, hey Christians, you have the epistemic right to believe whatever you want. That's fine just as long as you don't Read it in a straightforward manner. And so this claim that there's this challenge between the two. So I'm going to go with a scientist, a pretty well known scientist who. His name is Albert Einstein. Is that how you say it? Albert Einstein. Is that right, guys?
- [06:31]
C
I think so.
- [06:31]
A
Okay, Einstein is Albert. And so his point is that science is an exploration of God's revelation and creation, much like you got us started with Bob, and that there should be no conflict between science in Christian faith. Rather, they should complement one another. And he says science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. In truth, a legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist.
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D
You know, as we're, as we're talking. I've not really put this to these two together before, but there seems to be a parallel between the general and special revelation conversation. They're bearing witness, but in two different ways.
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C
Yes.
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D
So we also have the parallel between science that explains what is. But then we have theology that gives meaning to what is. And so there seems like there's kind of two different sort of things going on there, but they're not in conflict, they're just giving two different messages.
- [07:31]
A
And yeah, it's kind of like the way we talk about crucifixion, like Jesus died. That's a historical statement. Jesus died for your sins is history and some theology.
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C
Right, right, right.
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B
Owen Gangrich, esteemed astrophysicist, in fact, in charge of the program at Harvard. He has written a number of books on the relationship of faith and science. And one of the points that he made that was really interesting is science is law like it looks for laws. It looks for things that are just this is the way they are. It looks for theories. It doesn't handle historical questions very well. And the Bible is mainly historical questions. And so he said it's not that they contradict each other, it's that most of the time they're talking about something completely different.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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B
And I think that's such a really good point for us to bear in.
- [08:31]
C
Mind whenever we have this conversation. I always think of our dear sainted friend, Dr. Rod Rosenblatt. And he was convinced that if you could get somebody in the hard sciences, he thought hard sciences were actually of great benefit to the apologetic task. And he was convinced that we needed to put more pastors in their undergrad, needed to go through training in biology or get degrees in some of the hard sciences so they could start dealing with some of these questions a little bit better. Because he believed that if you started to take that kind of hard scientific thinking into the realm of, of New Testament studies and in history, you can start asking the right kind of questions and you're going to start recognizing that our faith is not a blind leap. And we're not just kind of. You can always picture Rod doing his liver shiver dance. Yeah, or like this blind leap where you cover your eyes and just leap into nothing. But rather, faith is founded on verifiable fact. And so he, he always saw these things. At least we're talking in terms of history and science, these things working together and alongside of each other and, and being of benefit to each other. I think it was, I think it was Rod who said that he had become a theist in college when he was studying like the eye of a pig or something like this. And he's like, you can't just look at this thing. I don't care if it was him or not, but you can't just look at this thing and say, oh yeah, blind chance that just happened. Like, there's got to be somebody designing this thing. So these things actually do work together.
- [09:59]
A
Very importantly, philosophically, I want to dive into kind of the, a little bit of the deep end on this is that you can't really have a conflict between science and theology in the sense that science requires Christian theology and a theistic worldview for science to even work. There's a history of science, philosophy of science, scholar called Thomas Kuhn, who wrote a book called the Structure of Scientific Revolution. He looked through scientific revolutions, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others, and just talked about how science works. And that science is more than just data collecting. And that in the philosophy of science and in the history of science, every scientific theory expresses a worldview. And philosophical preconceptions determine where facts are sought, how experiments are designed, and what kind of conclusions are drawn from them and considered valid. And so when science is simply defined as observing the facts, there's some necessary preconditions of science that are undermined and then science is rendered useless. And this is what David Hume and Bertrand Russell, two people who aren't big fans of religion, calling out this kind of simplistic, hey, science is just empiricism. Like they were criticizing simplistic empiricism that was making assumptions that what they know is actually true because you're making so many assumptions. And Alvin Planiga in his book where the Conflict really Lies, subtitled Science, Religion and Naturalism, makes this point in a more accessible way than reading Thomas Kuhn. And JP Moreland makes this point in Christianity and the Nature of science. It's on pages 108 to 133. He just goes through and says there's lots of elements from a theistic worldview that are borrowed and assumed by scientists that they have no business claiming because there's no proof for it.
- [12:06]
B
They just like reason and evidence and.
- [12:09]
A
The use of language, the use of reason, the laws of life, the uniformity of nature. And this is where Hume and Bertrand Russell both go, why are you assuming that nature is uniform? Just because the past is always the future will be like the past. You're just assuming that you don't. On what evidence do you have? And so he goes through at a really. And you need lots of things for science and history to work, but he goes through with science and he says these nine things. I'm just going to give you the list of the nine. And you know, I can say maybe a sentence or two after them, but beyond that, I am not a philosopher of science. But he says it's the uniformity of nature, induction, ontological, third, ontological epistemological realism, fourth, fourth, mathematical realism fifth, methodological, epistemic and ethical values sixth, the reliability of the human mind and sensory faculties, seven ontological and conceptual categories eight, the usefulness, adequacy of human language to describe nature and nine, the existence of singularities, ultimate boundary conditions and brute givens. The point is a scientist, a philosopher of science is going through and saying science uses all of these tools. Where do they get them from? Oh, a worldview that they're using science as a club to beat down, but they're borrowing. And that's one of the best arguments. Interesting is, hey, science simplistic science, not, not just science in general, this is not anti science, but this kind of logical positivism that whatever I can see and verify that I can do, I guess that's true. And as if that's just describing reality. Whatever that type of view of science is doing is borrowing from a very worldview that is trying to critique. So to sit in the lap of a worldview that you're slapping is not really the most.
- [13:59]
B
Historically too. Almost all of the major scientists throughout history were priests or theologians. You have somebody like Robert Boyle, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, who was a Presbyterian, had.
- [14:16]
A
Strong.
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B
Christian convictions, he supported missions, he accepted the honorary chairmanship of the East India Company so that he could use it for missionary purposes. He funded the translation of the Bible in other languages. And he was the founder of modern chemistry. He said God made the eyeball and he Explained the eyeball. You're talking about Rod with the eyeball of a pig, Bob. He explains the eyeball and its intricacies and that it's its own little world. And he said, and you know what it was made for? To see God's handiwork. So he established the Boyle Lectures to defend Christianity against atheism, Islam and Christian heresies, and to defend the resurrection, centrally, to defend the resurrection of Christ. But he's a pioneer of modern science. And he also wrote against those who believed that nature itself bristled with souls and spirits and vital forces, semi divine things. He said, no, there's God and everything else. He said, you don't have intermediate semi divine beings. You have God and you have the world, and then you have providence and you have redemption and so forth. But he said, I'm a priest of nature. Many of these people who went into science, even in the Enlightenment period, either were ordained or were working towards ordination before they went into the sciences. So historically, people can't make the claim that theology. There's an inherent, inherent antithesis of faith and science that's been driven by faith.
- [16:34]
D
And Mike, you're mentioning this pathway of scientists, Christians who are going into the sciences now. What we're seeing is that there's scientists who are now, because of their sort of scientific assumptions, they're sort of backing into some things that are consistent with the Christian faith while they're not becoming Christian always. But even as we're talking about a biologist, if you're going to insist upon the consistency of people are made in a certain way, that means something and it ought to remain that way. I mean, even as we're in our conversations before we started recording, we're talking about a biologist who was then beginning to be attacked by some contemporary ideologues who are trying to assert that, you know, we can change our genders and so forth. But some of these scientists are now sort of rubbing shoulders with Christians in some ways. They're not. I mean, not that they're following Christ necessarily, but they're saying that, hey, there's something going on here. That they are then in concert with some of the conversations that we're trying to have about the fixedness of God's.
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A
Design to go back to history just a little bit, a few other names. And I'm not claiming that all these people would sign on to the Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, but they're not rabidly naturalistic. Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal. Mike talked about Robert Boyle, Florence Nightingale. I mean, you can Just go through, if you just go through the history of science time and time again, a founder of a major realization or school of thought. They had a sense that they were living in God's world and expected to find something not God having patterns. And it was because of their faith that it drove them to do this science. That's the big picture of conflict. It's the foundation, philosophically and historically of this whole endeavor.
- [18:33]
B
Yeah. John Gray, a brilliant atheist I love reading, he says that it used to be that people went into science precisely to get closer to God. And now people assume that the more scientific you are, the further you are from God. Here's someone too, who's not a Christian at all. He kind of represents, I think, a lot of scientists who are interested in sort of the irrational and mystical when it comes to religion, which is like C.S. lewis's scientist magician, sort of schizophrenic on one hand, spiritualist on the other hand a naturalist. But this is Ray Kurzweil. He's very interesting. He is the main expert, the leading expert on AI. He says in one of his books, according to Darwin's theory, biological evolution would not select for species that ponder their existence, worship someone or something above them, or exhibit empathy, compassion and other moral qualities that would inhibit the survival of the fittest. Simply in terms of mathematical probability, life should not exist, much less intelligent life. Yet here you are. It's a miracle, is it not? He says the likelihood of all this fine tuning happening by chance is like the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard. This year marks 1700 years after the Council of Nicaea, and the mystery of the Trinity remains at the heart of the Christian faith. Recovering Orthodoxy in our modern context is vital to the unity of the Church worldwide. Which is why I'm so excited that we here at sola, in partnership with credo, are hosting a special two day conference on the Trinity. Please join US in Washington D.C. this may as we bring together leading Trinitarian theologians for keynote messages and interactive breakouts centered around the Nicene Creed. Just go to solamedia.org trinityconference that's sola media.org.
- [21:23]
C
Do you guys think that there's a sense in which science has become a new dogmatism? So it's almost as if scientists have become the new priests and we're kind of just supposed to listen to them blindly. And so when you question the science, you're actually questioning accepted orthodoxy in our society. Whereas Is, isn't science supposed to be more of a method? And I'm happy to be corrected in what I'm getting wrong here, but isn't science supposed to be more of just a method of. Of thinking like the scientific method is to. This is how we're going to process our understanding of the stars or how we're going to process our understanding of the way grass grows. But now it's kind of become leading scientists, say, dot, dot, dot, and we're all supposed to just kind of buy into it. And believe me, we know something about dogmatism. We do come from conservative Christian backgrounds. We know the danger of what happens when dogmatism becomes almost just demanded as opposed to engaged. I don't know how to ask this question, but how are we as Christians to engage with science as a sort of orthodoxy? Does that question makes sense?
- [22:31]
D
Yeah. So this one I'll do. I'll give you a way not to engage it, which is how I've seen it, and then I'll rely on Justin and Mike to sort of tell us what to do. So what I've seen people do, because the scientist has become the new sort of priest or the authority. Christians have said, well, you know, faith is certainty, not, you know, without any evidence.
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C
Yeah.
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D
Which is kind of this misreading of Hebrews chapter 11, verse one that says 100%. Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. And so they take that Hebrews 11:1, and they warp it to say, well, you know what? We don't even need that stuff. And so that's definitely not the way to go. And so now, Justin, Mike.
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B
Correct.
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A
Yeah, there's a reason which is it's not just faith without reason, but it's also. We're not calling for people to say, well, you should have faith only if you can, you know, if you can determine that you think it's worthy of your having faith. So we're saying it's faith that makes sense and it has a relationship with reason. There's reasons for believing it. And so part of this is a faith and reason conversation taking place. And it's going back to what I said. We believe in order to know. Credo un telegome. This is Augustine and this is Anselm. We believe in order to know. And so the separation. One is the extreme separation, which is fideism. And it usually has like a. Well, I believe this doesn't matter what's outside there, it's not a good look. And then the other is Giving so much authority to science, reason that it can only be something that you. That's good for you, but not good for. It's not reality.
- [24:20]
C
Right.
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B
We have to recognize two things. Number one, that everybody believes. So faith is not something that is unique to Christians. Everybody has faith in something or someone, and that includes scientists. Scientists have faith that the world is intelligible in the first place, that they can trust the laws of nature, that they can test things in the lab. And all of these things that they take, they haven't proved themselves, but they take for granted in order to do what they do.
- [25:06]
D
Our capital every day.
- [25:08]
B
Exactly. And all of the great scientists, when they made breakthroughs, believed in something that their colleagues thought was crazy. And they kept pushing through, not because they had evidence, but because they were really convinced that this is true. And the more they tested it, the more. Then finally, colleagues came around and in some of these cases, at least, overturned a whole paradigm, the sort of thing that Thomas Kuhn talks about. The same thing happens in church history, with theology in the church. So it's not that different. What's different is the second thing. What's different is that, again, we have different objects and therefore, methods. The object of the physical sciences is secondary causes, nature, how things happen, not why things happen. It isn't the purpose of science. It's beyond its province to be able to adjudicate questions of theology, just as it is beyond theology to adjudicate questions about how that science answers. So they're not in conflict unless we put them in conflict, which we have often done.
- [26:46]
C
This is part of the problem. So with, like, a Dawkins move, who says, we've done the study. We've got all the science, therefore we've proven there's no need for God. And. And it's a category mistake.
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B
It is.
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C
Right. Because he's not saying we've discovered how the world can work because we know how molecular biology works. I don't know exactly what Dawkins does, but we've seen how things can work. Therefore we have no need for someone to design it. Well, that. Yeah, that doesn't make. That'd be like me saying I figured out how a car works, which would never happen, but let's just pretend I figured out how a car works, therefore there's no need for Ford. Right. Like, there's. It doesn't make any sense.
- [27:24]
A
This is from CS Lewis, and I think it was his essay, the Seeing Eye. The first Russian cosmonaut came back, you know, first man into space. And the official Doctrine of the Soviet Union was atheism. And so he came back and said, hey, I went up to space and didn't see God. And literally said, you know, I looked and looked, but I didn't see God. And you're like, wow, is he.
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B
If he, if he had seen God, we would say he's having a hallucination.
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C
That's right.
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B
Because there's, there's absolutely no way that, you know, he is invisible. He dwells in, in majestic light. No eye has seen him. He completely transcends this world. If he looked out his window and he saw God, we would be absolutely sure he didn't see God. It would just need a little more oxygen in that capsule or eat something like blood sugar.
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A
CS Lewis replies and says, quote, the Russians report that they have not found God in outer space. Looking for God or heaven by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.
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C
Right? Yeah.
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A
Making that point of like you're using the tool for the wrong thing to look in the wrong place. Again, I don't want to go too philosophical on this, but I think it's important. I think it's good that I went through a list of things for the philosophy for science to work. The laws of science. There's also an assumption of ethical values. Like scientists should report truthfully on what they think. Their study says there's an ethical assumption being made there. That's one. But my other favorite one are the laws of logic, is that everyone's using the laws of logic. And then you turn to a naturalist and say, okay, we all agree. We think laws of logic are great. Are these laws material? And they go, of course not. They're immaterial. Okay, are these laws of logic localized? Like, is there a law of logic here in the east coast versus the west coast, or in the Southern hemisphere versus the Northern hemisphere? No, these are universal. Okay, good. Are they changing? Is it like a few hundred years ago? The laws of logic were one way and then they shifted? No, no, no. These are unchanging. And when did they start? When did these laws of logic start? They didn't start. They've always been. It's just the way it is. Okay, so there's this realm where laws of logic that are immaterial, universal, unchanging, any eternal or non created are in your worldview. Where is that? Because you're a naturalist. There is no outside of whatever is. There's a box of reality and there's nothing Outside, there's no immaterial realm whatsoever. So that's them borrowing again something as simple as the laws of logic. Like, I'm great. That people are using laws of logic. That's a revelation to you that there's this place where immaterial, unchanging, universal things, immaterial things exist, which I think is the mind of God, which you don't believe in. But at a very fundamental level, the laws of science, ethical values, and the laws of logic are assumed, but there's no reason for them to be assumed by many worldviews that have no reason to believe in them. There's no evidence for those things, given their presupposition.
- [31:07]
C
Justin. But if I'm the naturalist, isn't my response, and I don't think it's a satisfying response. But isn't the response. Well, those are just. That's just the way the mind worked, and we survived best thinking that way. Therefore.
- [31:20]
A
But then you have no reason to even trust your brain because right. In a naturalistic worldview, the brain is just a bag of electrochemical juice and some electricity. And so why should I count on what's in your brain and my brain first corresponding to reality?
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C
How is there any correspondence even at all?
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A
There's no mind. It's just a brain. How do you. How do you trust that your brain's not just like your. Your gallbladder doing something with some liquid in your body, that it actually corresponds to reality? There's no reason if there's only brain but no mind. Yeah, because all you have is a brain, not a mind. And how do we know that it corresponds to reality? There's. There's other questions on the. The legitimacy of. Of given a naturalist's presuppositions and assumptions that. Why you should even trust the reliability of the brain at a philosophical level. You take a clip out and they go, oh, Christians don't believe you can use your brain. You're like, that's not what we're saying. We're famous at a way deeper level than if you think that's what we're saying, then go back and listen again. This is. Yeah, this is philosophy, not. Not clipping out a little excerpt.
- [32:26]
B
Regardless of whether you believe in evolution or not, there's a great argument, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, and it comes from Haldane, who was a scientist and the son of a great Calvinist evangelist. He wrote this really tremendous argument. And C.S. lewis has the best summary of the argument in Mere Christianity. I won't go through the argument but the bottom line is, if evolution were simply by natural selection, nature would not select for thought and ethics and logic and reason. Because the survival of the fittest means what you want the most are animals that respond quickly to stimuli. They're not going to sit around and have a conference about it. They're going to flee the lion or they're going to. This is the survival of the fittest. All of these things that are rational and logical and ethical slow us down.
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A
Punta Pity. Evil is not a good defense mechanism.
- [33:50]
B
No, it's not. And, you know, saying that you can't enslave people, and they come back and say, what are you talking about? It's of great economic value. It slows things down.
- [34:07]
D
Yeah. As far as slowing things down, I mean, if we take into consideration humanity's desire for beauty, you know, our production of music, our desire to see dance that's wholesome and good, and our production of anything that is like, of paintings, of sculpture, that's. That's not the cultivation of things that perpetuate survival, but these are the things that really. I mean, like, there's always a place in society for the pursuit of beauty, but those are the very things that, you know, that should be eliminated in this.
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C
What is the survival rate of Baptists who encourage the beauty of dance? That's my question. I.
- [34:48]
D
It's not. It's not very well. So if you got. If you got a place for me, you got a place for me over there.
- [34:54]
A
Walter?
- [34:55]
B
We do. Welcome. Welcome. The door is open.
- [34:58]
D
Door is wide open. By drink, Justin, you mean a good coffee.
- [35:03]
A
Good coffee, grape juice, little purple drink.
- [35:08]
D
Welch's.
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A
There you go.
- [35:11]
C
One more question here, and then we can kind of wrap up. But I do think we've done a lot of looking at sort of the logical inconsistencies with science trying to pit itself against religion. But Mike said something very important a few minutes ago that's probably worth spending a couple minutes on, and that's this. Science deals in the how, Theology deals more in the why. And I think in the Church, we've got to be very careful that we don't start to get too close to the how in the things that we do. Like, as if there's, like, a particularly Christian way to do science that's unique among the sciences. Where does the Church go wrong when it deals in the sciences? Maybe that's a way of asking.
- [35:57]
B
Well, if we go back to the Galileo controversy, it's really interesting because. Let me back up and give a little bit of background on Calvin's doctrine of accommodation was actually Augustine's doctrine of commendation. So it's not like Calvin invented it, but it's often called Calvin's doctrine of accommodation. It's that God speaks baby talk to us. He loves us so much that if he just revealed himself in all of his majesty, he would incinerate us. So he clothes himself in humility, and he comes down like the baby in the manger. And he now he says in Genesis, for example, where you have the greater light and lesser light and so forth, don't do astronomy there. Oh, Saturn is a greater light. Calvin says this is written for people when they look at the night sky in the ancient world. This is not made for, he says it was not the Holy Spirit's intention, through Moses, to teach astronomy. And that doesn't mean that they conflict. It means that they are different. A literary text of a historical nature is very different from a scientific fact. It's narrating these facts that actually happened. But its purpose is narrative. Science isn't. Narrative science doesn't tell you a story. Science doesn't. It's not the goal of science to discover meaning. We learn so much from science, but if we want more than it can deliver, we're going to be very disappointed. So we have to realize, I think, that when Galileo was being attacked, he invoked this idea of accommodation. And he said, I believe in the inerrant word of God. The Scriptures are absolutely without error in all that they teach. But he says, you aren't. And so we have interpretations of Scripture and we have interpretations of science. Just remember that there is no conflict between creation and redemption, no conflict between the Creator and the redeemer, no conflict between general revelation and special revelation. But there are contradictions between interpretations of both. So I think we have to be humble about this and say, you know, I'm not sure. I don't know. But recognize that science is not asking, does God exist? And why is there something rather than nothing? Science doesn't ask those questions, but they're important questions. They need to be asked, but they're not scientific questions. I think we have to be careful not to say the only important questions are scientific questions or expect science to answer all of our questions.
- [39:26]
D
So the way I would say this, the Scripture is most responsive to tell us what something is for, not really how it happened in the sense that. Not how the flood happened, but what it was for. Not how the virgin birth occurred and all of its intricate details, but really what it was meant to accomplish. And so that's kind of a way that I would sort of try my best to sort of engage that God.
- [39:50]
A
Created everything out of nothing, not necessarily the timeline or the exact means that is created out of nothing is the key.
- [39:58]
B
The closest discipline to theology is history, not science. Science is like a cousin. History is a sister. Science does not accommodate. There is no accommodation in science. What's there is there. It's on the surface of things. You just need the right instruments to be able to see it, measure it, weigh it so forth. The incarnation isn't like that. You can't weigh the incarnation, you can't measure it. So if you reduce everything to scientific questions, you're going to miss a lot. That's really important.
- [40:42]
A
And that's why the virgin birth? You're like, well, how many virgin births are there? 1. I mean, because it's so unique. And either historically it happened or it didn't happen. But science goes, well, any other birth has not been by virgin birth. So therefore it doesn't make sense to interpret this one as a virgin birth. Now how many people have died and come back to live forever? 1. These are unique things, historical things, but unique things. And science properly would say that doesn't sound normal. It's not. That's what science is saying, it's not normal. That's the whole point about it being unique historical event.
- [41:18]
C
But isn't that CS Lewis's whole argument about miracles against the scientists? Like, well, miracles, they just can't happen. We can't observe them. And Lewis says, well, that's why they're, they're called miracles. That's how they are.
- [41:30]
B
And see, science, you can say, look, for instance, science predicts that entropy is our future, that, that everything's going to burn down, it's going to slow down, it's going to collapse into itself. The big bang has finished doing its job and now it's going to go the other direction. Well, okay, science isn't wrong. They're telling us based on evidence, based on math and all sorts of gifts God has given them. This is what is going to happen. But God, But God, who is rich in mercy, is going to intervene. And we only know that from revelation.
- [42:23]
C
God has given us guys creation as a gift and he has ordered and designed nature to work for the benefit of his beloved creatures. This is why we can speak of scientific pursuits and discoveries as God pleasing vocations. So that like with a kid opening a present on Christmas, it is a pleasing thing to our Father when we observe, study and delight in the gift of his creation. But More importantly, the reception of these gifts, the study of the creation should drive us to thank and praise the Father of Heavenly Lights, from whom come all good gifts. God is the Author of creation. Therefore, science is simply the study of God's Book of Nature and delighting in that story.
- [43:08]
B
This year marks 1700 years after the Council of Nicaea, and the mystery of the Trinity remains at the heart of the Christian faith. Recovering Orthodoxy in our modern context is vital to the unity of the Church worldwide. Which is why I'm so excited that we here at sola, in partnership with credo, are hosting a special two day conference on the Trinity. Please join US in Washington, D.C. this may as we bring together leading Trinitarian theologians for keynote messages and interactive breakouts centered around the Nicene Creed. Just go to solamia.org trinityconference that's solomedia.org.