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That's Kant, K-A-N-T, the great modernist philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Yeah, but what is it?
It's nothing, Nietzsche. Couldn't teach you. Actually, I disagree. He couldn't teach you much about life. I admit, I use Siri a lot in my life. What's the weather? What's the snow like at Perisher? What's the time? Tell Buff I'm going to be late and so on. But Siri, artificially intelligent though she is, isn't programmed to confront philosophical inquiries. Let's try this one, though.
Hey Siri, what is evolution? Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Want to hear more? Nah, we're good.
That seemed a little easier for her. We humans, just like Siri, continue to make this metaphysical distinction. Religion is about faith. Science is about reason. One is mystical and can't be explained. The other can. But what happens when science crosses over into trying to answer the fundamental questions like, what is life?
The question has ramifications far beyond the reaches of science, and some Christians are on the front lines trying to answer it. Ard Louie, a leading theoretical physicist and professor at Oxford University, is one of them. So I'm a theoretical physicist, which means I try to write down equations that describe the natural world, and I'm mainly interested in theories that describe life. So living parts of life, I try to use ideas from physics to describe how life works,
self-assembles, makes itself, how it evolves, how things move, all kinds of amazing things that we see in our living tissues that I'd like to understand from the principles of basic physics. We're halfway through our first season of Undeceptions, and I didn't say I was going to make it easy for us all. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Today on the podcast, we're thinking about life. What is it? How did we move from inanimate to animate? Is it entirely random? Or does life have some sort of order from the chaos? And amongst all those things, we're going to undeceive ourselves about this myth. The more we discover about life from a scientific perspective, the less we need God. That isn't true.
But first things first, what is this thing we call life anyway? So I have an unfair question to ask you. What is life? Well, so this is a very difficult question. To first order, life is something we think which replicates, so it can make copies of itself, and has metabolism, so it can take energy from this environment.
So for example a virus for that reason can replicate but needs something else besides itself to take energy. In fact the virus needs your cells to replicate so we don't think viruses are alive but a single bacterial cell is alive. So that's the kind of standard definition of life. You've got something that can copy itself and take energy from the environment. How you get there is a very very difficult and complicated question to which we don't know the answer.
As well as his role at Oxford, Ard is really involved in talking about how his Christian faith interacts with his scientific principles. In 2016, he made a BBC Horizon documentary series with atheist filmmaker David Malone called Why Are We Here? It's
Beautiful. You must go and see it. They ask the big questions about meaning and ethics and about God and materialism and so on. Just as interesting is Ard's appearance in Morgan Freeman's documentary, The Story of God. This is where Freeman, you know, the guy who actually played God in Bruce Almighty with Jim Carrey,
dug into topics like the afterlife, miracles and the problem of evil, despite Freeman's personal belief that God is just a human invention. In the episode called Proof of God, Freeman asks Ard, physicists discovered the God particle, so do we still need God?
And Ard was able to get across a really positive message about the harmony that can exist between science and belief in God. Amongst all that activity and more, he's a really good chef. Ard is serious in his quest to have a coherent system that makes sense of the world. It's what he gets out of bed for.
every day.
The really fascinating thing about these beautiful structures like that motor is if I were to show you one that you could hold in your hands, you'd assume it was made in a factory. So something very complicated put together. But these motors or these little walkers and things you have inside your cells, they self-assemble. That is to say, all the components are made in the cell. They float around in the cell buffeted by thermal motion. And they come together and stick in this exact perfect shape like a little motor.
So that's amazing. It's a bit like taking Lego blocks, putting them in a box with a little bit of glue, shaking the box, and then out comes a fully formed train. If you or I took Lego blocks, put some glue on it, shook it, we would just get junk because there's an infinite number of larger incorrect configurations compared to one correct configuration. So how does this thing find this one correct configuration given that there's all these incorrect ones? That's a very fascinating question that we'd love to understand.
Nature clearly does it, so it's solvable, but it's not that clear, obviously. Not clear yet how that works. And so if we could figure out the rules that nature uses to make things, that would be super interesting.
So, nature has rules? A popular myth is that evolution is completely random. Perhaps you've heard of the "Tornado in the Junkyard" story. This is a description made famous by the astronomer Fred Hoyle in his 1983 book, The Intelligent Universe.
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, he writes, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage, a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there, so small as to be negligible? Even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole universe.
Well, plenty of Christians, particularly those who believe in creationism, have jumped onto this description over the years as a kind of catch-cry against evolutionary theory. Art Louis offers a similar analogy about Lego, but he says you can't take these analogies too far. The shaking of the Lego was really something about what happens in real time, so how something that takes individual components, different proteins, they float around, they make this well-defined shape, and it's really interesting to understand that.
The other question is, how do you design something that achieves this amazing feat by an evolutionary process? And it's not true that evolution can search every possible configuration because there's hyper astronomically many more configurations than evolution can search. So one of the really deep and interesting questions is how does evolution find these particular kinds of solutions that do this amazing stuff like life or
So Ard believes in a form of theistic evolution. It's basically the idea that all of the facts pointing toward evolution are real, but that some grand mind, a rationality at the heart of matter, is directing all things. There are some links in the show notes. I believe this has been done by evolutionary processes, but I don't think we understand as well as we need to how it found these amazing outcomes.
That's not to say I don't believe it. It did so, and I think there are rules behind it. I just don't know what those rules are. So I'm currently working a lot on the evolution of things that self-assemble. So how do you evolve interactions between particles so that when they come together, they form this really nice shape instead of a bunch of junk? I used to not be interested in evolution at all as a physicist because it was kind of popularized
as a kind of one damn thing after another with no rules. And then what, that's just a bunch of stamp collecting really.
And then actually I came across, when I was in Cambridge, Simon Conway Morris' work on convergence and then found lots of other people working on this, which suggested the same thing evolves multiple times from different starting points. And then I thought, wow, there is a rule. Simon Conway Morris is an evolutionary paleobiologist from Cambridge University. He wrote an amazing book called Life's Solution, Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.
My good friend Simon Smart over at the Centre for Public Christianity interviewed Simon Conway-Morris about evolution, the place of humans in the universe and more specifically his famous idea of convergence. No biologist thinks evolution is absolutely random. Of course there's some beginning constraints, not everything is possible.
On the other hand, what persuades me is that the ubiquity of convergence... By convergence, what I mean is to take a classic example, take the eye of ourselves, take the eye of an octopus. They're practically indistinguishable. If you look closely, you can see that each one has an evolutionary footprint.
But so similar are they, although we know the common ancestor which lived in the Cambrian about 500 million years ago did not possess such an eye, that this is a striking example of the same solution emerging effectively independently.
So convergence, I think, has been underestimated in the past. All biologists know about convergence, but what has struck me very forcibly is not only classic examples, like the camera eye of the octopus and ourselves, but from molecular systems all the way through to, in fact, behaviour, we find convergence.
And to my way of thinking, this suggests in fact that the number of viable solutions is surprisingly small. In another interview that Morris did with Ard-Louis himself, Morris emphasized his belief that evolution doesn't know where it's going, basically agreeing with Richard Dawkins, who said the world was made by a blind watchmaker. But, he says, he doesn't rule out that evolution is, as it were, predisposed to life.
There's no way you could find this thing more than once if it was just completely randomly searching in a random space. There's some kind of structure to the space. You can do a little back-of-envelope calculation of how many different possibilities there are for even something as simple as a biomolecule. So you needed that kind of theological understanding to start engaging what we now call science.
We're going to be talking a lot about proteins in the next bit. Don't worry if you don't quite understand it, nor do I. I just smiled sweetly as Ard kept on talking on. But I do know that proteins are all different sizes. A protein is essentially a chain of amino acids, whatever they are, that come in different lengths. And Ard mentions these lengths. Apparently, it's really significant.
Just to give you an example, proteins are made of an alphabet of 20 different letters that are connected together. So you take 20 letters and pick one at random at every point. So you've got 20 for the first one, 20 for the second one, 20 to the third, so it's 20 times 20 times 20 times 20. Turns out if you take every one of length 58, which is really short, and you made every possible length 58 protein, it would weigh more than the mass of the observable universe.
So that space is huge. So it's not like evolution searched that whole space. That space is hyperastronomically big. The mean length of proteins in your body is like in the 400s. So if you just, those spaces are so big, if you had every protein of the mean length in your body, it'd be something like 10 to the 500 times the mass of the universe. So it's just unsearchably big. So how do you find things in this unsearchably big space?
It's a really interesting question. Now, clearly evolution has done so because we see the evidence of it all around us. But the question is, how can that be found? I've written on that topic. I think it's a really interesting question. This is really what I spend a lot of my time working on at the moment. And I'm using these currently trying to use concepts from computer science to try to understand why life works.
keeps finding the same solutions in a space that's so big that it seems uncertainly big. This quest to discover a rational explanation for the existence of life may seem like it stems from Ard's belief in God, but actually he says the whole of science itself is deeply rooted in Christianity. Find out why after the break.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into a financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash AnglicanAid.
Undeceptions and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions. We're back talking with Ard Louis, who's telling me that historically, science has Christian roots. Modern science has deep Christian roots. It comes from a Christian theological understanding of a world that's
loved and sustained by God. Therefore, you might expect there to be repeatable, regular rules that you could discover. That's what motivated the first scientists. And we may now just assume that's true as a kind of brute fact, but it's not obvious that it would be that way.
The Reformation coincides with the birth of modern science and there's a lot of scholarship trying to work out what the connection might be. Now of course the Reformation was this sort of 16th century attempt to go back to the Bible and reform the practices of the church and a lot of those Protestant denominations came out of it. You know, the Anglicans, the Lutherans and the Baptists and so on. Now what on earth does that have to do with the scientific revolution?
There's a very famous scholar, Peter Harrison, who's an Australian, but he was also a professor at Oxford University for a while, who's written major texts on this that are taken very seriously around the world. One of his books outlines the way a new belief in the fallenness of human beings, including our minds, is.
led to a new practice in science where we felt we had to experiment to test our various theories about the universe. We couldn't just intuit, we couldn't just rationalize about the world. We had to test, and that's the birth of experimental science.
He also argues that the Protestant devotion to the book, to the Bible, a kind of going back to the facts in the Bible, coincided with and may have influenced a going back to the book of the universe to actually check the facts in the pages of nature.
The Royal Society, the world's oldest independent scientific academy, had Christians as some of its founding members, including Robert Boyle, often known as the father of chemistry. And that's where Ard takes us next. Boyle and others started thinking about what we might now call modern science. They were also heavily influenced, interestingly, by the Reformation and a re-understanding of the doctrine of the fallenness.
And so the idea that you could sit in an armchair and understand the world without actually going out and testing it, without putting it in front of other people to see, have I done something wrong?
That really, the idea that maybe our minds are capable of fooling ourselves is what created the idea of doing science collectively, which is very much how science works now. I write something down. I've just told you some ideas about evolution. I put that in the literature. Maybe I'm wrong. Then somebody will say, you forgot something here. And then, you know, after. And that's how it worked. And it's super helpful because I always know that I need my community to look at my work. That, again, has deeply Christian roots. Assume that you could just sit down
This is a real break from ancient Greek science. This is a little bit nerdy, but in ancient Greece, they seriously thought that there was a rationality in our heads, of course, but there was also a rationality, what they called a logos, in the physical world itself. They could see the laws of nature, and they thought that that logos was the same logos sitting in our heads. Therefore, all you need to do as a good scientist is observe stuff,
and then use your logos to work out the logos in the universe, your rationality to work out the rationality in the universe. They didn't really come up with the idea of testing their theories, and that's what happened in the 14th and 15th centuries, giving birth to the scientific revolution of the 16th century. This new doubt about our rational capacity. Humans were fallen, even in their minds, now.
We have to test our own rationality. I think there's a culture in science, which is a culture of skepticism, which is antithetical to Christian faith. And so if you take that skepticism and try to apply it to all parts of life, including relational parts of life, then that does have a conflict with faith. The bigger difficulty in the relationship between science and faith is a kind of
on attitude of skepticism. And this is really good in science. So if you come to me and you say, I've discovered this new virus in my lab, then the right approach for me is to be skeptical and say, well, give me evidence for this. And my default option is to not believe you until I see evidence for this.
And that works really well in science. But that doesn't necessarily work really well in life. So if my wife comes to me and says, I love you, if I say to her, well, I'm skeptical about that until I see overwhelming evidence that this is true, then in fact there's lots of evidence I won't ever see because of my stance. If instead I take a stance of openness and say, I do believe that you love me, I love her back, then I will see lots of evidence of that love. It doesn't mean I'm just being...
foolish about it but the point is that skeptical approach which i don't believe something until you give evidence for it is a very strange way to live our lives and there are many important questions in life that don't really
work in that way. One of Ard's critiques of his own industry as a scientist is the way scientists tend to take their practice of science with its emphasis on having to prove things before you believe them. And they take this into the rest of life and demand proof for everything, which if you think about it would actually mean we could know very little stuff about
We hardly can prove anything outside of maths and empirical experiments. But this raises the question of whether you can test for God. And that's where our conversation goes. When we think about God, I think it's what happens a lot in the discussions that people have or assumptions people have is that
we also take the same approach we do in science, which is we should assume there is no God. And unless we find evidence to the contrary, the default assumption is no God. The point I want to get at is the minute you start saying, well, I don't believe in God unless I find evidence to the contrary, that doesn't work for the Christian God or the kind of general God of theism because God is not some object out there, a human like ourselves, but bigger and smarter. God is the source of all beings.
Philosophically, this means God isn't part of creation. He's external to it.
By definition, the ultimate source of time and space can't be part of time and space. God isn't like the fairies at the bottom of the garden or Zeus or Thor or Santa Claus. These are all objects within the universe. If they exist, you should be able to find them with the right instruments.
But when Christians say God, they don't mean a super-duper object somewhere in the universe. They mean the source of everything.
It'd be a mistake to think of God as a kind of magical wardrobe hidden in the house of creation and if we search hard enough with the right instruments we'll find him. Perhaps hiding in the DNA code or waving back at us from Mars. No, God is more like the architect of the house itself. You don't find the architect in the house. Everything about the house points to the architect.
It would make no sense to run through each room of the house and declare that you can't find the architect, all the while missing the more profound fact that you're in a house with rooms, doors and hallways in the first place. All of which point to the architect. Christians believe without God, the universe doesn't, it's not like the universe would grind into a halt, it would stop existing.
So there's something much bigger than just something that you can poke at. So the classic, you know, Russell's argument about, well, you know, I can be sceptical about a teapot floating around or Dawkins' pink unicorn. Those are complete misunderstandings of what God is. God isn't something out there. Hey Siri, who was Bertrand Russell?
Maybe later.
Bertrand Russell was a famous philosopher and mathematician in England. He said that religious claims were like him asserting that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars.
and expecting people to believe him solely because his assertion couldn't be proven wrong. The modern version of this is what Ard refers to as Richard Dawkins' pink invisible unicorn idea. You can't prove the unicorn exists, or indeed that it is pink, because it's invisible. I think that is wrong. I think it's the other way around. There are two options, either there is a god or there is no gods.
a priori one or the other should be equally likely what you then do is you say let's assume there is a god and then let's look at the world and ask ourselves does this make more sense to the world and so if there is a god then it's not so surprising that you've got for example regular laws that govern the way the universe works it's not surprising that this universe is full of beauty um
There's a whole number of things of that nature that are not that surprising. If you assume there is no God, so by that I mean really there's just the laws of physics and that's it, then you have a lot of
You could have that those laws of physics are regular, but that's an assumption you've got to add on. You could have that those lead to a beautiful universe, but that's something you have to add on. It could be chaotic, it could be in many different ways. And so it makes less sense of the natural world. When you do science, you see how beautiful and intricate the world is. If you're a Christian believer, it strengthens your faith. It's something that leads to worship.
I think God gives a deeply intellectually satisfying explanation of a lot of aspects of our world in a way that not believing in God does not. I think not believing in God causes all kinds of intellectual problems. And so I find it intellectually much more satisfying to believe in God.
It's very common to hear people say that the more we discover about the physical world from science, the less we need God. So we discover how things work and God is pushed to the edges of our knowledge. This is often called the God of the gaps. It's the gaps in our knowledge
that God lives in. And some Christians have even adopted this, though most certainly don't. The whole thing is upside down or back to front. Christians have always said that it's because we know that stuff works. We can detect the rationality in the universe that there must be a God. It's not the gaps in our knowledge that tell us there is a God. It's the fact
that there is profound knowledge of the workings of the universe that screams out there must be a mind behind it all.
It's a little bit like this: imagine a mechanic, an expert mechanic of Volkswagen, who is there one day when you bring your Golf to him and he says, "You know what? I can demonstrate that Volkswagen doesn't actually exist." And you might say, "Well, how can you possibly demonstrate this?" "Oh, it's because I can explain to you how every part of your Golf works."
So? Well, because I can explain how every bit of the mechanics of the golf works, we don't need a manufacturer. I've explained it. You would be right to think, uh-uh, that doesn't make sense. The fact that everything works, the fact that you can explain how everything works, tells me there is some mind behind this object. That's the mainstream Christian view. But Ard is right that sometimes Christians get this wrong. Christians have done the same thing.
They assume that God is only there in the bits that we don't understand, as if by understanding something about the universe we have lessened God. But that's just a misunderstanding of classical theism, because in classical theism God sustains the world. The laws of nature that we study are studying the regular ways that God sustains the world. And so we learn more about God by discovering the laws of nature.
And this kind of God of the gaps idea that God is only there in the gaps is just a theologically poor way of thinking about how God interacts with the world. And many theologians have pointed this out to people, but Christians do this very often. So when I meet lay Christians and they say, oh, you're a scientist, it's not uncommon for someone to say, is it not amazing that some...
we don't yet understand how birds migrate or something that they think is very amazing. Or how the eye came to see. Or something. And I think, well, it is amazing, but I don't see where that glorifies God. I think maybe when they will understand it, and then that should make us glorify God more. But you're more saying the fact that there are maths behind all that, a rationality behind it all, is best interpreted as a rationality in the Creator. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that makes a lot more sense. So it resonates a lot better with that starting point. Hey, press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, observed that we are happiness-seeking creatures. His word for this was eudaimo, a synonym for blessed, by the way. It literally means well-being.
Aristotle, who wasn't religious in the conventional sense, said that because we are rational animals, not just walking stomachs or sex organs, we can never find true happiness in mere pleasure. A rational creature can only be happy, he said, when it feels connected to the rationale of the universe.
Now, the fascinating thing is that this is basically the finding of the last 40 years of positive psychology research. But Aristotle found it 2,300 years earlier. And the reason I'm telling you this, in case you're wondering, is that the Bible says something similar, but even earlier than Aristotle.
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible teaches that the truly happy person, the blessed one, is the one who knows the rationale of creation and lives by it. This is what the Bible calls wisdom.
It's an idea we find in Jesus, of course, but he's drawing on the much older traditions of the Old Testament. The Old Testament lays out this deep logical connection between knowing reality in the world and living by that reality and so being genuinely blessed.
Proverbs chapter 8, which predates Aristotle, offers a kind of ode to wisdom. Wisdom in this poem is personified as a woman. In fact, she's portrayed, metaphorically speaking, as God's wife. And she gives this little speech throughout Proverbs 8 in which she describes two things about herself. She is the founding logic of creation, she says, and she's the founder of the world.
She's the basis for ethical living. And these two things come together as the path for blessing. Here's producer Kayleigh reading Proverbs 8. My fruit is better than fine gold. What I, wisdom, yield surpasses choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice. I was there when the Lord set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep.
When he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep. When he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command. And when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side. Now then, my children, listen to me. Blessed are those who keep my ways.
On the one hand, wisdom is described here as God's assistant in creating the world. And there are plenty of other passages that say the same thing. Like Proverbs 3.19 says, And you find statements like that in lots of places.
Like the physicists today, the ancient Israelites and Aristotle could tell there was some kind of rationality built into the fabric of the physical world. But on the other hand, they also said that wisdom, this genius or rationality in creation, is also about how human beings as creatures live in God's world. It's also, in other words, about ethics.
And so wisdom in this poem says, you must listen to me and keep my ways. Now here is one of the Bible's most overlooked themes. God's wisdom is his genius built into the fabric of the world and expressed in his commands for life.
Obeying God's wisdom, his commands, is participating in reality. Christians don't just obey arbitrary moral commands. They're following the wisdom built into reality. Think of it a little bit like this. Imagine that IKEA product that you may have brought home and built up yourself. The wisdom of IKEA is present in the product itself itself.
And it's also present in the instructions that come along with the IKEA product. Now, following those instructions isn't an arbitrary duty. It's actually participating in the wisdom of IKEA, the wisdom of the maker. Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount reflects this same idea. It's about blessing through God's wisdom.
The very final lines of the Sermon on the Mount say that everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on the rock.
The Sermon on the Mount, in other words, is like a foundation for the ethical life. Not in the arbitrary sense that God's going to reward you for obeying him, but in the deeper sense that this is God's wisdom, God's genius. The genius that's built into the fabric of the world but now expressed in these instructions for life. Jesus doesn't promise happiness in the sense of pleasure. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount warns against chasing pleasure.
But Jesus does promise happiness in the highest sense, what positive psychologists call a sense of meaning, what Aristotle called eudaimonia, what the Bible calls blessed. Participating in the rationale of the world in the very mind of the maker. You can press play now.
This podcast is called Undeceptions. Yes. What would you say is the biggest myth about science, religion discussions? And how would you answer that myth? Well, the biggest myth is the conflict myth. The myth that there is, that the primary interaction between science and religion is one of conflict. And that,
what we've seen is as science advances religion is retreating and i think that's just a complete misunderstanding of the world in fact i think it's a dangerous one because i can think of many important questions in life that science can't answer and no conceivable advance of science could answer here's a very simple example what's the value of a human well that's a super important question we hope the listeners will believe that humans have intrinsic value
They've got human rights. They've got some values not linked to something external. The minute you try using science, then you're going to try to measure that value because what science does. So what do you do? You measure how smart people are or how much economic output they produce or some other vector.
And every time you do that, you'll start stratifying people by that particular quality. And so you don't do that. Science doesn't tell you why human beings have value. It's something we believe is nevertheless true. So Christians would ground the value of human beings in the fact that humans are loved and created by God. People that are not Christians have other arguments, perhaps, for why humans have intrinsic value. But the minute you try to use science to measure it,
you're cutting that down in a very dangerous way. That's not because science is not powerful. Science is, I think, the most amazing... I think science is the most amazing thing that humans have ever discovered. The scientific method is absolutely incredibly powerful. So I love science. I think it's great. People should do more science. Governments should fund more science, etc. But to think that it's going to answer all of our questions is just a misunderstanding of what it does. And so...
The danger of this conflict myth is that it starts to weed out of our lives these kind of philosophical, theological, other ways of thinking rationally about the world, which are super, super important. And so I think that, you know, many moral questions, many aesthetic questions, science can maybe help us understand the questions better, but it can't answer them by definition. That's not what science is there for. We have to use other means of understanding them. Hey Siri, what is the value of life?
Definitely not.
The famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back, and that is bound to be the case, then God is being pushed back with them and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.
Ard-Louis genuinely believes that as Christians we don't have to try and prove that God exists in some empirical scientific way. That goes against the very notion of God as the source of creation, not an object in creation. But he does believe that the more science discovers about life, the more we will naturally find a rational universe that points to the rationality of the mind behind it all.
We don't believe in a flying teapot or an invisible pink unicorn. Quite the opposite, Art says. Science is one of the parts of the world that actually increases the likelihood of God being there. Hey, if you've got questions about this or other episodes, I'd love to hear them, and in a future episode, I'll try and answer them. Leave your question as a voicemail by calling 02 9870 5678. 02 9870 5678.
Or head to undeceptions.com. While you're there, check out everything related to this podcast and sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode. Next week, we're going to try to answer the question, can we really trust the Gospels? See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon. It's produced by the rational Kaylee Payne and it's directed by the invisible Mark Hadley. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Bella Ann Sanchez. I love your editing. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything related to this episode.