https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VuwfO5Rv3JY
You know, I think for a lot of my life, and certainly when I was younger, I really bought the doctrine that there was an unbridgeable gap between the scientific way of looking at the world and the Christian way of looking at the world, let’s say. And that that split, the apparent split between science and religion was a consequence of an incommensurate dichotomy of worldviews, you know? And that the church had been opposed to scientific progress, at least in part because the scientific viewpoint existed in contradiction to Christian doctrine. But then, especially in recent years, in the last 10 years, I’ve started to understand that that was something like a French enlightenment slash rationalist propaganda campaign and that there’s a different, that the relationship between science and Christianity is much closer than I had imagined. I caught on to this a little bit by reading Jung, but that just as the universities developed out of the monastic tradition, the notion that the natural world was intelligible to the inquiring logos, that it had an intrinsic logic that studying it would be beneficial to man, first of all, that it would be comprehensible and beneficial, and that that was actually kind of moral obligation, that all struck me as axiomatic statements of faith that were predicated on the Christian tradition that were the preconditions for the emergence of science. And I’ve tried to take that idea apart over the last three or four years to see if I can find any flaws in it, but I think the evidence that the universities emerged out of the monastic tradition, instead of emerging contrary to that, that’s absolutely incontrovertible on every grounds you could possibly imagine. And the notion that you need to believe in the intelligibility of the world, the capability of the human logos, and the beneficial consequence of acquiring knowledge, you have to believe in all that to even get the scientific enterprise going. I also think that’s incontrovertible and that those are axioms of faith. And so I don’t know if those views are in accordance with your views or what you think about that. So I’d like to hear what you think about that. This is extremely interesting to me because I never saw the tension between Christianity and science because very early on as a teenager, I was introduced to the writings of a scientist who was a Christian, who drew my attention to something Alfred North Whitehead wrote. And it was really put in much simpler language by C.S. Lewis when he wrote, “‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law giver.‘” And so very early on, and I was fascinated by the idea that actually modern science is a legacy of the biblical worldview. And therefore it’s no accident that the pioneers, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, and so on, were believers in God. And as you pointed out, it underpins the tradition that lies behind the great universities of the world, that the doctrine of creation was actually the belief, the underlying presupposition that allowed people to do science. So I’ve come over my life to the conclusion that science and the biblical worldview sit very comfortably together, but it’s science and atheism that do not sit comfortably together, which I know is quite a controversial statement, but at least it gets discussion going. I just completed a couple of documentaries with the Daily Wear Plus crew, and one of them was in Athens and two were in Jerusalem. And we were trying to puzzle out the relationship between Greek thought and Judeo-Christian thought, most particularly the strange happenstance that the Greek idea of an intrinsic logos in the world seemed to dovetail with the Judeo-Christian idea of, you might say, of the word incarnate in the human psyche. And it seemed to me, and obviously to other observers, that there was an affinity between the Greek idea that the cosmos had an intrinsic comprehensibility and the idea that the proper orientation for human beings ethically would be one of honest communication and investigation. And those two things snapped on top of each other. And it made me think of something that I actually learned from Richard Dawkins. And I think this is a deep idea. Dawkins wrote a very influential essay where he claimed that any organism that can function in an environment has to be a microcosm of that environment. So for example, if you were an alien biologist and you were presented with a terrestrial bird and you took the bird apart, you could infer from the bird’s structure the gravitational pull of the earth, the density of the atmosphere, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the electromagnetic frequency that the sunlight was, what would you say, at what electromagnetic frequencies the sun’s light was most amenable to vision, et cetera. You could derive a model of the environment from the physiology of the organism. Now, I know that there were medieval ideas that were deep in Christianity, that the human soul was a microcosm of the cosmos, right? That it reflected the structure of reality itself. And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of how the world might be best conceptualized. So there’s a mix of ideas here. And if an organism has to be a microcosm of the cosmos in order to function, and we are a microcosm in that regard, and we are a personality that runs on a narrative, which we seem to be, then in what way is it reasonable to claim that the cosmos itself is best conceptualized as something that could be entered into relationship with personality to personality, and that that’s not the most fundamental reflection of reality? I mean, it seems to me that that’s where Dawkins’ thought eventually points if his proclamation that an organism has to be a microcosm, an accurate microcosm in order to survive is accurate. So now that dovetails with the idea that the logos as a personality, so that would be the Judeo-Christian concept, can investigate the logos of the universe and that those things dovetail. So now I know that’s a complicated mishmash of ideas, but I’m interested in your thoughts on that. Well, I think there’s a lot in that actually. And I recall listening to you give a very interesting lecture on Genesis 1. And when you came to the statement that human beings are made in the image of God, you paused and you pointed out that this was the cornerstone of our civilization. And I agree with that entirely. I think that what Dawkins is saying actually points in the exact opposite direction to what his worldview is, which is atheism, of course. In other words, that we can read off from creation something about the idea of a creator. And as you say, it dovetails perfectly. Let me put this another way. I’m a mathematician by background and a linguist. I love language and mathematics is a very sophisticated language, but I love natural languages as well. And it seems to me that where this fits together best is first in the fact that we can do science in the sense that there is a rational intelligibility to the universe, which is the foundation of modern science and is a legacy of the biblical worldview. So that the mathematical describability, Einstein talked about, he couldn’t imagine any genuine scientists without faith in that. It’s the axiom for doing science is to believe the universe is intelligible. But if you ask for the rationale behind that, why do we believe the universe is intelligible? It bears the imprint of a creator. And I see that at the level of mathematics in its capacity to, at least in part, give us a handle on what’s out there. And also in biology, where we have at the heart of every living cell, the longest word we’ve ever found, the genetic code. And all of that leads me to formulate it as follows, that we live in a word-based universe. And that’s the key of the Logos for me. Okay, and so what do you mean in that case? So what do you mean specifically that we live in a word-based universe? What does that mean for you on the broader conceptual landscape? Well, it means that this universe is not simply a product of natural unguided forces. It is a product of a rational creator, an intelligent creator, and I believe even more than that, a personal creator. Now, how I get there is only in part from a response to the universe as I find it, the point you made about each organism being a microcosm of its environment. It’s also, it seems to me that there are two sources, two major sources of knowledge. There is, first of all, observing the universe, science, et cetera. Then there are the humanities. But there’s also the concept of revelation in which I believe. In other words, it’s not simply the human quest for the creator, it’s the creator revealing himself. So for me, the anchor point in the end is that the Logos became human and we beheld his glory. In other words, we can see exactly what this means in terms of what we can understand. That is the human being in which God encoded himself in Christ. Those are big ideas, of course. They’re very deep ideas they need unpacking. But that’s essentially where I’m coming from. Okay, so, all right. So let me elaborate in two directions with regards to that. So the first is that, so one of the axioms of faith that’s necessary before you embark on the scientific endeavor as an individual or as a culture, which might explain why science emerged in the Judeo-Christian context and no other place, is that the universe is intrinsically intelligible. But there’s another axiom too, which is that the honest investigation of that intelligibility will be good. And so there is this insistence in Genesis when God casts order out of chaos and creates the world, after each day of creation, he states explicitly, and it was good. And when he creates man, I believe he says that it is very good. And so, and the reason for that is that not only is there an order, but that the order is in its deepest sense beneficial and positive. And the thing is, is that it’s easy and even rational, it might be easy and even rational to take the Frankenstein monster view of the investigation of the world and to say, well, even if the cosmos is intelligible, that doesn’t mean that our investigation into it is intrinsically good or that it would bear good fruit. Now you have to believe that the truth will set you free in order to be a scientist, because if you believed that the truth had no bearing on human flourishing, let’s say, then the whole enterprise would be pointless. And if you believe that the investigation of the complexities of material reality would lead us astray, then you’d say that that should be taboo and forbidden, but that isn’t what we decided. We decided that the revealed order would be good. And then I’ll add one other thing to that, which I think is also axiomatic, which is part of the Logos idea in its deepest sense is that we are required to explore, investigate, and communicate about everything as deeply as possible. So the idea, you have this idea in Job that is quite well developed, that no matter what God and the devil throw at you, you’re called upon to maintain your equilibrium and your faith in the intrinsic goodness of being. And then that’s expanded in the gospels because the trials of Christ are the most extreme trials that can be imagined. And I mean that literally, that’s partly why the story has such potency, right? It’s the worst possible sequence of events that could happen to the least possibly deserving person. And that’s injunction to accept all of the terrible catastrophes of life full on in this supposition that doing so is the manner in which life most abundant could reveal itself. And if you’re a scientist, and the real scientists are like this, and I think Dawkins in this way is a real scientist, is that you’re actually committed to the truth, right? You put that above all else. And you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t believe that the logos of commitment establishes the order that is good. And I don’t think you do that without an intrinsic belief that it’s something like human beings are made in the image of God. I can’t see any escape from that rationale. Nor can I. And it’s interesting that when I did my debate with Dawkins at the Oxford Natural History Museum at the press conference afterwards, we were asked, was there anything that we agreed on? And there was one thing, and that is that truth exists. And this is a crucial thing. It depends that we are committed to the pursuit of truth. Otherwise, as you say, science has absolutely no point. I happen to believe that truth, of course, is not simply propositional truth, but ultimately truth as a person. And that is the very deep claim. I am the way, the truth, and the life. And it’s interesting there that Jesus wasn’t merely saying, I say true things. This goes much deeper. I am the truth. And if we set up a sequence of questions about anything, what is the truth about the atom? Well, you can split it into elementary particles. What is the truth about those? I believe this claim is so big that it’s actually saying that at the end of the backwards sequence of questions, Jesus Christ will say, I am the truth. And of course, that resonates with what you were studying in Exodus. So interestingly, I am is the fundamental proposition about the nature of God. Right, right. So that’s an existential proposition that has to do with that. So Thomas, well, okay. So when Thomas Kuhn wrote his theory of scientific revolution, I can’t remember the name of the book exactly at the moment, or the structure of scientific revolutions. Now, Kuhn did something that other philosophers of science did in the 20th century. He laid out the case for science being a coherent set of explicit stateable propositions. And that’s generally what people think of as science. But that’s not accurate nor sufficient by any stretch of the imagination. So I’ll give you an example of this and we can expand on that. So my graduate supervisor, Robert Peale, was a real scientist. And what that meant was that he conducted himself in a certain way. It wasn’t a matter of the things he believed explicitly. It was a matter of the way that he conducted himself, let’s say as a laboratory researcher. Okay, so, and that conduct was oriented around a variety of ethical propositions. So he was very generous with his ideas. And what that meant was he had a lot of ideas because he would share them with his graduate students, for example, and the undergraduates. And they would respond positively. And that would reinforce the mechanism within him that generated ideas. And then ideas would flow forth more abundantly. And so that was part of the scientific ethos, to be generous with ideas. And then the next part of that was if he published his scientific research papers, he was generous in the credit he gave to his graduate student collaborators. Generally listing them as the first author and putting himself in the final place, which is a convention among genuine scientists. And so he played fair on the reputational front. And then- I had a supervisor like that. I had a supervisor like that at Cambridge. Yeah, well, it’s a great good fort. You can’t become a successful scientist. It’s very difficult to become a successful scientist without someone like that to apprentice with. Yep. Okay, so then on the statistical analysis front. So, you know, people who know anything about statistics think that you take a spreadsheet of numbers and dump it into a meat grinder and crank the handle and out comes truth. And that is 100% false. Because when you’re doing statistical analysis, it’s a form of critical thinking and exploration. And you’re making ethical decisions at every choice point. So you have to figure out which data points constitute outliers because maybe there was a measurement error, for example, while you were sampling that particular behavior. And you have to tilt the statistical investigation to some degree against the outcome that you’re hoping for to make sure that you don’t fool yourself. And it’s saturated with ethical decisions. And then that all has to be nested within the presumption. First of all, the presumption that you should not ever publish false data just to move your career forward. You know, and you might say, well, why the hell not? And also that you are required on ethical grounds to let go of your tyrannical presuppositions if the data reveals that what you’re clinging to for your own psychological reasons is wrong. And all of that’s an attitude of ethical conduct and not a set of explicit stateable propositions. Yeah, that’s hugely important. Richard Feynman, the physicist, the Nobel Prize winner, used to say you must bend backwards to criticize yourself because you are the easiest person to fool. And I’m very interested in this ethical dimension because this is over and beyond the propositions and the methodology of science. I think it was Einstein who said, you may talk about the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics. So this is another layer in looking at the universe. It’s rationally intelligible, but it’s also a moral universe. And ethical presuppositions and decisions infect all of our lives and they do affect the scientific endeavor. It’s not just dispassionate observation and making conclusions and theories. There’s a huge ethical dimension, which raises deep questions as to what the reference point is. Who said so? What are the norms behind that ethical decision-making process?