Latest / Crosswalk Talk: Celebrity Christian Interviews / The Warfare Between Science and God Was Always a Myth

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The Warfare Between Science and God Was Always a Myth · Crosswalk Talk: Celebrity Christian Interviews

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  Speaker 1: Life audio, Doctor Richards, think they're joining me. Yeah, great
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  Speaker 1: to be with you, Doctor j. Richards, philosopher. He's a
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  Speaker 1: senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, vice president at the
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  Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation as well. He's part of the name Moly
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  Speaker 1: That Story of Everything that examines the scientific evidence for
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  Speaker 1: Designer behind the Universe, The Story of Everything Dot film
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  Speaker 1: is the website. I really enjoyed this film, doctor Richards.
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  Speaker 1: I think it's going to really impact a lot of people.
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  Speaker 1: You know, for years, doctor Richards, many people believe science
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  Speaker 1: would eventually explain God away. Do you think the scientific
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  Speaker 1: evidence has moved in the opposite direction?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely. I mean, this whole
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  Speaker 2: myth about the warfare between science and religion, and science
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  Speaker 2: and Christianity in particular, it was always a myth. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: if you look at the actual founders of basically all
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  Speaker 2: the sub disciplines of modern science, every one of them,
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  Speaker 2: with almost no exceptions, was either a conventional or a
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  Speaker 2: devout Christian, whether you're talking about Copernicus or Galileo which
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  Speaker 2: everyone hears about, or Kepler or even Newton, maybe not
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  Speaker 2: fully orthodox, but a very serious Christian and believer in God.
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  Speaker 2: This idea that science and Christianity were somehow intrinsically at odds.
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  Speaker 2: It doesn't match this history of science, and then in
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  Speaker 2: the nineteenth century, this popular myth, this warfare emerged. That's
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  Speaker 2: why most people if the only thing they know about
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  Speaker 2: Galileo is it didn't get in trouble with the pope
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  Speaker 2: or something, they don't start have the details. But there's
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  Speaker 2: always been the question even if the institution of science
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  Speaker 2: had been hostile to faith, and I think sometimes big
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  Speaker 2: science in the twentieth century is it doesn't follow the
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  Speaker 2: evidence that natural science uncovers point away from faith. And
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  Speaker 2: that's really the point of the film is to say, look,
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  Speaker 2: if we look at these key discoveries, certainly mostly from
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  Speaker 2: the twentieth century, every one of them points away from
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  Speaker 2: a materialistic idea of the universe and toward the purposeful
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  Speaker 2: universe and theism that is the existence of God.
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  Speaker 1: Tell me how you got involved in the film, because
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  Speaker 1: it includes quite a few well known thinkers of our society,
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  Speaker 1: And how did you get involved?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, there are quite a lot of well known thinkers.
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  Speaker 2: And then I was in there. How did this happen?
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  Speaker 2: I had the same question, seriously, though, it's because more
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  Speaker 2: than anything, I wrote a book called The Privileged Planet
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  Speaker 2: with the Stanmergherrara Gonzalees that had written a number of books,
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  Speaker 2: and it will say, kind of in the intelligent design space,
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  Speaker 2: either just kind of clearing away the bad philosophical assumptions
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  Speaker 2: that keep us from looking at the evidence, or in
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  Speaker 2: the case of the book, The Privileged Planet, was actually
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  Speaker 2: discussing and developing an argument based on a new class
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  Speaker 2: of evidence from the things that we're learning about the
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  Speaker 2: things that need to go right in a planetary environment
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  Speaker 2: in order to get a habitable universe. I had been
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  Speaker 2: interested in this stuff, friends, honestly, since I was in
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  Speaker 2: graduate school. Met a guy named William Densky who was
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  Speaker 2: a kind of key player of the intelligent design movement,
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  Speaker 2: and just sort of blessed enough to be there the
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  Speaker 2: origins of this whole debate. And then I'm sort of
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  Speaker 2: one of the movement philosophers, I suppose, and so Steve
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  Speaker 2: Meyer and I Steve another sort of the person you
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  Speaker 2: probably see more than anyone. The film ended up kind
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  Speaker 2: of providing the argumentative glue that connected a lot of
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  Speaker 2: the different types of evidence with features with practicing scientists
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  Speaker 2: and so that you know, once the thing was cut
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  Speaker 2: and finished, it turns out, you know, I ended up
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  Speaker 2: playing a role of this sort of transition character and
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  Speaker 2: making connections between these, say, the origin of the universe
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  Speaker 2: and the origin of life.
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  Speaker 1: I love the film because it doesn't have a narrator.
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  Speaker 1: It just it's just it's very fast paced. It goes
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  Speaker 1: in depth, but it's also accessible I think by the
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  Speaker 1: average person.
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  Speaker 2: Let me mention something because I'm glad you noticed that.
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  Speaker 2: Most people don't realize that. But if you're producing a documentary,
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  Speaker 2: that's a flex to be able to have a documentary
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  Speaker 2: that has zero off camera narration and that the entire
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  Speaker 2: script from the guests who are you know, interviewed extemporaneously.
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  Speaker 2: And this is a fairly long future length ninety something
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  Speaker 2: minutes long or one hundred minutes long. And so you're
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  Speaker 2: exactly right, And you know, I handed to the producers
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  Speaker 2: to be able to cobble together all of our interviews
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  Speaker 2: in a way that let's coherent.
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  Speaker 1: What is your goal for it then? For this film? Obviously,
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  Speaker 1: this film is not a Christian apologetics film, right, it
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  Speaker 1: is sort of an apologetics film for the existence of
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  Speaker 1: an intelligent designer, what is your goal for the film?
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  Speaker 2: It's really that I mean, and I'm on the record.
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  Speaker 2: It looks me up on the internet, we'll see I'm
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  Speaker 2: on the record as a critic of materialism and atheism.
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  Speaker 2: But I also don't want to try to squeeze evidence
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  Speaker 2: and say that it says more than it does. And
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  Speaker 2: so as a Christian, I'm not going to tell anybody
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  Speaker 2: they're going to discover that I see in Creed if
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  Speaker 2: they study astronomy closely enough. On the other hand, many
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  Speaker 2: of us the film think that if you look at
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  Speaker 2: the evidence of nature objectively and openly and say, I
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  Speaker 2: just want to follow the evidence where it leads, that
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  Speaker 2: it points beyond the materialistic worldview. The universe points beyond
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  Speaker 2: itself certainly gives solid evidence a purpose and design, and
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  Speaker 2: I think with a few little philosophical assumptions you can
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  Speaker 2: make a good argument for the existence of a creator
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  Speaker 2: of God from the evidence of science. So that's sort
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  Speaker 2: of as far as the film goes, because for many
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  Speaker 2: of us that we think, well, that's about as far
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  Speaker 2: as the general evidence from nature will get you.
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  Speaker 1: Do you have a go to you argument for the
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  Speaker 1: existence of God? If you're sitting by someone on a
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  Speaker 1: plane and they discover what you do, yeah, and go ahead.
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  Speaker 2: It's a great question because first I trying to say, okay,
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  Speaker 2: is this going to go well or not? Or do
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  Speaker 2: I need to change the subject? Right? But I mean
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  Speaker 2: in some ways depends on where they are. So for
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  Speaker 2: some people, if if they're sort of a scientific question,
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  Speaker 2: and I say, look, the most fundamental question that anybody
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  Speaker 2: could ask is what is the fundamental reality? What is
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  Speaker 2: that thing that explains everything else that exists. It can't
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  Speaker 2: be something that came into existence sometime in the past,
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  Speaker 2: because then it didn' always exist. And so let's you
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  Speaker 2: just want that thing to have created itself from nothing
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  Speaker 2: not existing. If something comes into existence in the past,
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  Speaker 2: something else muster brought it into existence. So the fundamental thing,
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  Speaker 2: it's got to be something that has always existed that,
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  Speaker 2: as philosophers say, exist necessarily. Well, in the nineteenth century,
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  Speaker 2: many people skeptics and atheists, materialists, they could say, well,
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  Speaker 2: I just assumed that the universe has always existed, so
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  Speaker 2: it doesn't need an explanation for itself. In the twentieth
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  Speaker 2: century we discovered that's not true. That the evidence has
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  Speaker 2: the universe has an age. All the evidence we have
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  Speaker 2: is that the universe came into existence in the finite path,
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  Speaker 2: and it had these very special characteristics even from the
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  Speaker 2: very beginning, to allow it to develop in the way
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  Speaker 2: that we have. And so if you're just comparing the
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  Speaker 2: kind of materialistic story with the question of whether God exists, well,
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  Speaker 2: the materialistic stories from out of the running and so
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  Speaker 2: right off the bat at least you'd say theism the
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  Speaker 2: existence of a transcendent creator has a leg up. Now,
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  Speaker 2: if they're not really interested in the scientific questions, you
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  Speaker 2: want to go to question, I say, okay, look, you
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  Speaker 2: know as well as anyone that it is wrong, always
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  Speaker 2: in everywhere to torture a small child for the fun
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  Speaker 2: of it. You know that that is What kind of
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  Speaker 2: claim is that? Is that a claim from chemistry? Is
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  Speaker 2: that something you discover by looking at a microscope? No,
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  Speaker 2: it's a moral truth. In fact, you know that more
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  Speaker 2: firmly and more certainly than you know anything. Now, in
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  Speaker 2: what kind of universe do moral truths make sense? In
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  Speaker 2: other words, I'm not trying to say therefore God, I'm saying,
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  Speaker 2: if there are moral truths that you know, and if
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  Speaker 2: you look within yourself, you know that you know in
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  Speaker 2: which picture of the universe does that make sense. One
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  Speaker 2: in which there is a personal, transcendent, holy good God
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  Speaker 2: or a picture in which there's nothing but just atoms
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  Speaker 2: colliding with atoms, in which case that moral truths that
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  Speaker 2: just seems weird. It doesn't seem like it fits nicely
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  Speaker 2: in a materialistic universe. That's not a proof. But again,
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  Speaker 2: if you just sort of compare the real, live alternatates
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  Speaker 2: people have in their minds, I think there's this countless
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  Speaker 2: piece of evidence that point in the direction of theism.
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  Speaker 1: Do you think a lot of these arguments that we're using,
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  Speaker 1: not only as Christians today but also that are using
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  Speaker 1: this movie, do you think these are arguments that acquiet
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  Speaker 1: and other great things that the past had and we're
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  Speaker 1: just now building all those And it seems like the
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  Speaker 1: more science we discover, the more we realize that it
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  Speaker 1: all points to God.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, of course there's the perennial, so called
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  Speaker 2: teleological argument for God's existence. It's one of Thomas Aquinas's
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  Speaker 2: five ways. Of course, he didn't argue for it from
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  Speaker 2: the existence of the bacteria flagellum or the DNA or
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  Speaker 2: you know, the red shift of the galaxies or something,
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  Speaker 2: but didn't have access to the evidence, but the basic idea.
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  Speaker 2: As really the sort of classical Christian thinkers, they tended
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  Speaker 2: to talk about design in terms of what we'll say indirectedness, Like,
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  Speaker 2: in other words, things move as if they have a
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  Speaker 2: purpose towards some particular end in the universe, including things
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  Speaker 2: that we know aren't intentional. So of course we have intentions, right,
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  Speaker 2: and we sort of have purposes. But even a bacterium
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  Speaker 2: or a plant which will move in the place that
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  Speaker 2: it needs to to get food, and say Thomas says,
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  Speaker 2: insofar as those things move as if they were intelligent,
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  Speaker 2: even though themselves are not, intelligence, that points to fundamental
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  Speaker 2: intelligence that could order all things, and that is the
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  Speaker 2: thing by which everyone refers to as God. In the
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  Speaker 2: sort of modern context, people tend to make these design
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  Speaker 2: arguments in terms of kind of the arrangements of parts
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  Speaker 2: and systems which need to go together in order to
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  Speaker 2: perform a function, whether you're talking about a watch, or
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  Speaker 2: you're talking about the eye or the bacterial flagellum. Things
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  Speaker 2: that don't work for they don't fulfill their purpose until
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  Speaker 2: all the parts are put together at the beginning. Well,
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  Speaker 2: that's the kind of thing that intelligent agents do that
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  Speaker 2: is not the kind of thing that say that Darwinian
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  Speaker 2: mechanism can do, which has to always just select for
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  Speaker 2: one little survival advantage at a time. And so, yes,
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  Speaker 2: the design arguments as old as Western civilization, you can
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  Speaker 2: see it in Plato. But new design arguments sort of
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  Speaker 2: focus on these new classes of evidence and tend to
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  Speaker 2: point out things that maybe wouldn't have occurred to someone,
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  Speaker 2: say in the first or the twelfth century.
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  Speaker 1: Let me see one more question. No, I don't want
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  Speaker 1: to teuse your curveball, and if you don't answer this,
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  Speaker 1: that's fine, philosopher. And you also have a lot of
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  Speaker 1: interest in science, and there's a currently debate about if
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  Speaker 1: we're the only intelligent life in the universe, right, do
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  Speaker 1: you have any thoughts on that in terms of whether
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  Speaker 1: there is and whether within Christian fault there could be.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the latter question is actually fairly easy.
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  Speaker 2: I think Christians could absolutely accommodate life or intelligent life
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  Speaker 2: in places, say, other than Earth. And by intelligent life
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  Speaker 2: I means or you know, chemical life with bodies as
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  Speaker 2: opposed to intelligences like angels. There's nothing really in scripture
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  Speaker 2: one way or the other about that. But the topic
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  Speaker 2: as a kind of question of philosophy theology has been
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  Speaker 2: raised really kind of from the beginning of Christian theology,
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  Speaker 2: and the general agreement has been it's like, well, God
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  Speaker 2: created the universe. If that's what he wants to do,
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  Speaker 2: he can do it. So let's go out and look.
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  Speaker 2: A lot of people will claim, well, you know, discovery
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  Speaker 2: of life somewhere else would just completely demolish traditional religion
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  Speaker 2: in Christianity. I don't see that, and most of the
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  Speaker 2: historical Christian thinkers have said to us, really not true.
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  Speaker 2: Now there's this other question, do I think that's true? Right?
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  Speaker 2: And so to me, I'm sort of agnostic on the
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  Speaker 2: question that we do have a very large universe. It
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  Speaker 2: does not follow though, that just because we have a
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  Speaker 2: big universe with maybe billions or trillions of planets, that
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  Speaker 2: life occupies those. Because the stuff we talked about in
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  Speaker 2: the Privileged Planet is that a lot of stuff has
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  Speaker 2: to go right in the planetary scale in order to
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  Speaker 2: have an environment where life can prosper. It turns out
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  Speaker 2: really kind of a narrow set of conditions in terms
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  Speaker 2: of location and properties and temperature in order for any
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  Speaker 2: kind of life to exist. So life could exist, and
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  Speaker 2: I can think of evidence that would persuade me that
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  Speaker 2: life exists elsewhere. But at the moment, by far, the
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  Speaker 2: most earthlike planet that we have ever discovered is Mars,
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  Speaker 2: and Mars is utterly lifeless. So if you just think
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  Speaker 2: about Venus and Mars, which are on either side of
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  Speaker 2: us in our orbits around the Sun, both very much
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  Speaker 2: like the Earth, idiot lifeless, that kind of tells you
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  Speaker 2: how narrow the range is that a planet needs in
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  Speaker 2: order to be able to host life.
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  Speaker 1: It's mostly philosophical. What I've always just thought of this
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  Speaker 1: issue as that God created a massive universe simply to
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  Speaker 1: show how massive and awesome he is, and that's it.
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  Speaker 2: That's it, that could be it, and that could be
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  Speaker 2: it right now.
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  Speaker 1: It has his reasons, Yeah, we don't know. Final question
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  Speaker 1: for you, what do you want the audiences to take
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  Speaker 1: away as they watch this in their living rooms.
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  Speaker 2: I want audiences to take away the sense that, Okay,
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  Speaker 2: these kind of silly nineteenth century just so stories that
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  Speaker 2: materialists have fed us in the culture and maybe in
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  Speaker 2: our classrooms just don't hold up to scrutiny, and that
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  Speaker 2: the evidence of Nature of the Book of Nature. Just
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  Speaker 2: like a book with an author, the Book of Nature
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  Speaker 2: points beyond itself to its author.
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  Speaker 3: If you enjoy today's interview, please make sure to describe
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  Speaker 3: and share the episode with a friend. A big thanks
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  Speaker 3: to the team at life Audio for their partnership with
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  Speaker 3: us on the podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com,
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: you will find dozens of other faith centered podcasts and
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  Speaker 3: their new work.
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  Speaker 1: See you next time.