WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:12.000 In some sense you could say all of engineering is about design. 00:12.000 --> 00:16.400 Engineering is based on the idea that we have a goal of something we want to accomplish 00:16.400 --> 00:27.720 and then we find ways to do that and so engineering is explicitly a design paradigm and so you 00:27.720 --> 00:31.700 might think that that wouldn't work too well with biology if you think it's unplanned and 00:31.700 --> 00:36.800 blind and so on yet they're finding that actually a lot of the engineering paradigms work extremely 00:36.800 --> 00:42.240 well so essentially they're getting to the point where they're saying let's adopt the 00:42.240 --> 00:47.880 fiction of assuming that this is designed by a master engineer and then think like an 00:47.880 --> 00:54.900 engineer of how to reverse engineer this and they're finding that actually it leads to quantitative 00:54.900 --> 01:03.140 predictions for good biology you know for social reasons basically yeah I think that well 01:03.140 --> 01:07.920 I guess I would say two things one is just inertia that that is the prevailing you know paradigm 01:07.920 --> 01:13.660 is the blind watchmaker you know the secular atheist paradigm people don't want to question 01:13.660 --> 01:18.660 but I guess I would also say as I talked about in my talk there's some people who have a genuine 01:18.660 --> 01:25.140 fear that if you allow God in the language at all if you even open the crack in the door will just 01:25.140 --> 01:31.300 return to medieval superstition and that you know so they will talk about people being anti-science by 01:31.300 --> 01:36.420 bringing in God and I think there are some people genuinely fear that will be you know going back to 01:36.420 --> 01:46.660 burning witches and you know and seeing poor tents and goose on trails and so on you know because you know that has been done right you know that's what science grew out of that superstitious background 01:46.660 --> 01:56.660 and as I talked about in my talk it was Christians who threw that out it wasn't secular atheists it was it was reformed Christians who said we need to get rid of superstition 01:56.660 --> 02:16.640 and be sensible about the way we think about things so it the high value on truth and not just believing everything you hear was a very much a Christian instinct that you know drove both the reformation and the scientific revolution but I would say that you know so some people like the 02:16.640 --> 02:46.640 like I said would be just reactionary against changing the paradigm but I think other people rightly or wrongly fear that you know letting Christianity or theism in the door will just take us right back to the dark ages and that's kind of they believe that you can sort of think of there's two domains okay science and religion I don't believe they're not overlapping I think that they have a lot of overlap but let's treat them separately for the moment 02:46.640 --> 02:53.640 and say science critiques other science so you have one scientist who would say you know I critique your scientific results 02:53.640 --> 03:16.620 in the same way within the religious sphere religious people critique other religions and even within Christianity you have schools of thought of theology that critique each other and say well you're just doing it wrong and here's the argument and so on people generally tend to be comfortable with those kind of internal critiques but if you believe there's one world it's a unified world and we're in the job pursuit of 03:16.620 --> 03:46.620 truth then I think we need to allow for cross disciplinary critiques so to speak and people tend to be very uncomfortable with one or the other of these so on the one hand I would say allowing your science to critique your religion and to adjust your biblical interpretation based on scientific results such as we heard about this morning with old earth creationism that makes some people very very uncomfortable 03:46.620 --> 04:16.620 and actually happy happy to say whatever the science says we're just going to adopt that and we'll adjust our religion to accommodate it conversely I would say allowing religion to critique science and so to say well I believe there's a single Adam and Eve on the basis of my religious texts makes other people very uncomfortable and makes young earth creationists very happy and actually what I'm arguing for 04:16.620 --> 04:26.620 that comes along that does force you to say well maybe I've been misinterpreting these scriptures and sometimes a very good religious argument comes along to say maybe I've been misinterpreting the scientific data 04:26.620 --> 04:43.620 sometimes you just left with tension of saying well I can't really resolve you know who has the upper hand here but I would say all four types of critiques sort of an internal critique within science internal within religion and each critiquing the other should be part of what we do if we're seeking truth 04:43.620 --> 05:13.600 certainly in terms of truth certainly in terms of me being a believer it's very collegial I've never had somebody at least you know to my face attack me for being a Christian maybe people say things behind my back but it hasn't hindered my science at all and actually I've had a lot of great conversations with people over a beer at a conference and so on talking about beliefs and most scientists that I've talked with are somewhere on the religious spectrum whether being a deist sort of Einstein's you know 05:13.600 --> 05:24.600 absentee God versus people who believe in God that don't go to church and the whole spectrum so at a personal level I you know I haven't really seen that to be a problem 05:24.600 --> 05:42.600 yeah I mean I think that in some sense it hasn't been as critical issue for me because it's not my day job so to speak you know so I've you know published a couple things on on numerical biology 05:42.600 --> 05:51.740 and um you know some people say well you know I don't really buy that but on the other hand when I've sat down and talked with people in biophysics and laid out like what I did 05:51.740 --> 05:54.960 I've had good conversations they're like well that seems like a reasonable model 05:54.960 --> 06:00.860 uh and uh you know huh that's an interesting catch-22 uh I'll have to think about that one you know so 06:00.860 --> 06:09.760 honestly um you never know how the winds politically may change but uh to this date I haven't felt a huge amount of pushback 06:09.760 --> 06:13.240 and part of it is just because it isn't my main area of activity 06:13.240 --> 06:17.360 yeah it's interesting so I um became a Christian at the end of high school 06:17.360 --> 06:21.640 and at that time I would have been uh very comfortable with theistic evolution 06:21.640 --> 06:27.020 uh and uh read things and had no sort of reason not to be a theistic evolutionist 06:27.020 --> 06:31.940 um I went to undergrad at Cornell and actually while I was there 06:31.940 --> 06:42.420 took a course in biophysics uh audited a course by a um I believe he was a conservative Jewish professor 06:42.420 --> 06:48.480 um and uh he just walked us through all of the amazing design of life 06:48.480 --> 06:52.880 and you know there was no sort of theological language and yet there was just sort of the 06:52.880 --> 06:58.420 awestruck tones of how the fine-tuning of tunneling rates and things like that had to be just right 06:58.420 --> 07:03.680 or life would be impossible I remember him talking about the respiration the fact that we can breathe 07:03.680 --> 07:11.440 air and depends on exponentially sensitive tunneling rates uh so quantum tunneling is an exponentially 07:11.440 --> 07:17.180 sensitive process uh so if you go a little bit too low it's completely shut off uh and you don't 07:17.180 --> 07:22.240 rest have any respiration a little bit too high and you burn up like a torch uh and it's got to be 07:22.240 --> 07:26.560 just exactly right and of course fine-tuning which we now see all over the place in biology 07:26.560 --> 07:32.420 that's you know right at that critical point and so that really got me thinking but uh I remember 07:32.420 --> 07:37.740 reading in graduate school a bunch of books that were coming out uh not by Christians uh I remember 07:37.740 --> 07:43.100 one by a person named Louise Young who is a popular science writer talking about the design of nature and 07:43.100 --> 07:51.120 so on but the thing that probably was the tipping point for me was um I believe I was um either just 07:51.120 --> 07:55.480 about to graduate or I had already graduated and was over in Germany but I read a Scientific American 07:55.480 --> 08:01.220 article and it was assessing all the different origin of life theories this is like uh 90 08:01.220 --> 08:07.700 1990 I believe was uh when this came out and it basically looked at one or the other and discarded 08:07.700 --> 08:12.260 each saying well this has been disproven you know the eerie experiments and all these things you know 08:12.260 --> 08:16.420 we thought this was the way and that you know had been a very honest look then at the end of the 08:16.420 --> 08:21.260 article they're saying well what's left you know all these have been discredited and they say well 08:21.260 --> 08:26.200 the uh really the only viable theory that's left is that aliens from outer space you know brought 08:26.200 --> 08:31.040 life down and I just about threw it across the room and I'm like you know what I am no longer 08:31.040 --> 08:37.660 embarrassed of anything that I believe you know if that's the best that they can do that space aliens 08:37.660 --> 08:43.900 came down then you know uh I'm pretty open to lots of alternatives because that one is crackpot you 08:43.900 --> 08:47.900 know and yet it's being presented you know and since then you know people talk Richard Dawkins embracing 08:47.900 --> 08:52.420 this and so on there are serious people saying that the problem is so difficult it must have been 08:52.420 --> 08:56.320 aliens from outer space that brought it down and I'm like if that's your if the best you can do 08:56.320 --> 09:01.660 then it's just like giving up you know yeah I would I would basically say teach evolution and teach the 09:01.660 --> 09:07.480 critiques of it uh and it's funny because um many people will say well it's a religious critique and 09:07.480 --> 09:12.100 that should go in the religion class and so on and uh that may be also something you want to do in 09:12.100 --> 09:20.340 in a religious sociology class or something but I would say um there is a myth of science that is 09:20.340 --> 09:27.700 out there that people would say unless you have a viable alternative deterministic scientific program 09:27.700 --> 09:33.380 to replace one with and then then you have no valid critique and this is absolutely not the way 09:33.380 --> 09:38.900 science works a lot of times in science somebody proposes a theory and they say this is the explanation 09:38.900 --> 09:44.260 for this and somebody simply shoots it down and says that won't work uh I don't have a rival theory 09:44.260 --> 09:49.220 I don't have anything to replace it with but I know that one's wrong it happens to me all the time 09:49.220 --> 09:53.940 you know uh it's not my job to tell you what the replacement of your theory is you're telling me a 09:53.940 --> 10:02.020 theory and I'm telling you it won't work uh and so um uh you know the idea that you know people would 10:02.020 --> 10:07.060 say there is no critique of evolution other than religion that's simply not true there's a lot of 10:07.060 --> 10:11.140 scientific critique so I'd be very comfortable with saying teach a theory of evolution so people 10:11.140 --> 10:17.060 know what it is uh and then teach scientific critiques of it uh in some sense it leaves 10:18.340 --> 10:24.980 you know a question unanswered which is well what is the alternative um I'm okay with invoking miracles 10:24.980 --> 10:29.300 at certain points but I don't think that I would teach those in the science class you know I would 10:29.300 --> 10:35.220 you know leave that to the religion class but I would say teaching the science class that you know 10:35.220 --> 10:41.700 our explanations simply break down at this point or other uh and saying you know maybe in the distant 10:41.700 --> 10:46.100 future or the near future somebody will come up with some deterministic way to explain that but at 10:46.100 --> 10:51.220 the moment we don't have any and and be happy with that well the website is christianscientific.org 10:52.100 --> 10:58.420 and we have two levels of membership so to be a full member you have to actually be a scientist 10:58.420 --> 11:01.700 and you have to actually be a Christian and subscribe to a statement of faith 11:01.700 --> 11:08.020 um but anybody who wants to can also just sign up uh to pay the dues and get the newsletters and go to 11:08.020 --> 11:13.780 the meetings and so on uh and so uh yeah we definitely encourage anybody interested in these issues to 11:13.780 --> 11:18.580 to go to our website sign up and to come to our meetings if they're near where they live yeah so 11:18.580 --> 11:24.420 I have several scientific books um which would be boring to most people um although I have a textbook in 11:24.420 --> 11:30.180 electronics which uh some people might find accessible um but I have a one book on it's really a 11:30.180 --> 11:35.060 theological book it's called a biblical case for an old earth and somewhat along the lines of what 11:35.060 --> 11:43.060 we heard this morning um but it uh has one chapter on science but in uh in my opinion the 11:43.700 --> 11:47.780 arguments that young earth creationists are primarily making are theological ones they're saying 11:48.420 --> 11:53.380 if if old earth creation is true that means animals died before adam and eve lived and a lot 11:53.380 --> 12:12.340 of other sort of theological uh philosophical objections and so the book is primarily one big bible study