In some sense you could say all of engineering is about design.
Engineering is based on the idea that we have a goal of something we want to accomplish
and then we find ways to do that and so engineering is explicitly a design paradigm and so you
might think that that wouldn't work too well with biology if you think it's unplanned and
blind and so on yet they're finding that actually a lot of the engineering paradigms work extremely
well so essentially they're getting to the point where they're saying let's adopt the
fiction of assuming that this is designed by a master engineer and then think like an
engineer of how to reverse engineer this and they're finding that actually it leads to quantitative
predictions for good biology you know for social reasons basically yeah I think that well
I guess I would say two things one is just inertia that that is the prevailing you know paradigm
is the blind watchmaker you know the secular atheist paradigm people don't want to question
but I guess I would also say as I talked about in my talk there's some people who have a genuine
fear that if you allow God in the language at all if you even open the crack in the door will just
return to medieval superstition and that you know so they will talk about people being anti-science by
bringing in God and I think there are some people genuinely fear that will be you know going back to
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
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
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
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
and say science critiques other science so you have one scientist who would say you know I critique your scientific results
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I've had good conversations they're like well that seems like a reasonable model
uh and uh you know huh that's an interesting catch-22 uh I'll have to think about that one you know so
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
and part of it is just because it isn't my main area of activity
yeah it's interesting so I um became a Christian at the end of high school
and at that time I would have been uh very comfortable with theistic evolution
uh and uh read things and had no sort of reason not to be a theistic evolutionist
um I went to undergrad at Cornell and actually while I was there
took a course in biophysics uh audited a course by a um I believe he was a conservative Jewish professor
um and uh he just walked us through all of the amazing design of life
and you know there was no sort of theological language and yet there was just sort of the
awestruck tones of how the fine-tuning of tunneling rates and things like that had to be just right
or life would be impossible I remember him talking about the respiration the fact that we can breathe
air and depends on exponentially sensitive tunneling rates uh so quantum tunneling is an exponentially
sensitive process uh so if you go a little bit too low it's completely shut off uh and you don't
rest have any respiration a little bit too high and you burn up like a torch uh and it's got to be
just exactly right and of course fine-tuning which we now see all over the place in biology
that's you know right at that critical point and so that really got me thinking but uh I remember
reading in graduate school a bunch of books that were coming out uh not by Christians uh I remember
one by a person named Louise Young who is a popular science writer talking about the design of nature and
so on but the thing that probably was the tipping point for me was um I believe I was um either just
about to graduate or I had already graduated and was over in Germany but I read a Scientific American
article and it was assessing all the different origin of life theories this is like uh 90
1990 I believe was uh when this came out and it basically looked at one or the other and discarded
each saying well this has been disproven you know the eerie experiments and all these things you know
we thought this was the way and that you know had been a very honest look then at the end of the
article they're saying well what's left you know all these have been discredited and they say well
the uh really the only viable theory that's left is that aliens from outer space you know brought
life down and I just about threw it across the room and I'm like you know what I am no longer
embarrassed of anything that I believe you know if that's the best that they can do that space aliens
came down then you know uh I'm pretty open to lots of alternatives because that one is crackpot you
know and yet it's being presented you know and since then you know people talk Richard Dawkins embracing
this and so on there are serious people saying that the problem is so difficult it must have been
aliens from outer space that brought it down and I'm like if that's your if the best you can do
then it's just like giving up you know yeah I would I would basically say teach evolution and teach the
critiques of it uh and it's funny because um many people will say well it's a religious critique and
that should go in the religion class and so on and uh that may be also something you want to do in
in a religious sociology class or something but I would say um there is a myth of science that is
out there that people would say unless you have a viable alternative deterministic scientific program
to replace one with and then then you have no valid critique and this is absolutely not the way
science works a lot of times in science somebody proposes a theory and they say this is the explanation
for this and somebody simply shoots it down and says that won't work uh I don't have a rival theory
I don't have anything to replace it with but I know that one's wrong it happens to me all the time
you know uh it's not my job to tell you what the replacement of your theory is you're telling me a
theory and I'm telling you it won't work uh and so um uh you know the idea that you know people would
say there is no critique of evolution other than religion that's simply not true there's a lot of
scientific critique so I'd be very comfortable with saying teach a theory of evolution so people
know what it is uh and then teach scientific critiques of it uh in some sense it leaves
you know a question unanswered which is well what is the alternative um I'm okay with invoking miracles
at certain points but I don't think that I would teach those in the science class you know I would
you know leave that to the religion class but I would say teaching the science class that you know
our explanations simply break down at this point or other uh and saying you know maybe in the distant
future or the near future somebody will come up with some deterministic way to explain that but at
the moment we don't have any and and be happy with that well the website is christianscientific.org
and we have two levels of membership so to be a full member you have to actually be a scientist
and you have to actually be a Christian and subscribe to a statement of faith
um but anybody who wants to can also just sign up uh to pay the dues and get the newsletters and go to
the meetings and so on uh and so uh yeah we definitely encourage anybody interested in these issues to
to go to our website sign up and to come to our meetings if they're near where they live yeah so
I have several scientific books um which would be boring to most people um although I have a textbook in
electronics which uh some people might find accessible um but I have a one book on it's really a
theological book it's called a biblical case for an old earth and somewhat along the lines of what
we heard this morning um but it uh has one chapter on science but in uh in my opinion the
arguments that young earth creationists are primarily making are theological ones they're saying
if if old earth creation is true that means animals died before adam and eve lived and a lot
of other sort of theological uh philosophical objections and so the book is primarily one big bible study