MIRACULOUS PHYSICS

Studio – John Dickson:

I’m walking down Albany Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts in America, and I’m surrounded by what looks like factories and an industrial center, almost a nuclear plant, big white buildings with white domes and chimneys blowing interesting things into the air. I’m not in an industrial center. I’m actually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions for science. And I’m trying to track down… That’s not it, that’s the… Some laboratory. I’m trying to track down the nuclear science department because I’m here to interview the professor of nuclear science, Ian Hutchinson. 

There are lots of smart people in the world but not too many of them make breakthrough discoveries about the nature of, you know, energy. 

Ian: I study the physics of very hot ionized gases and the main purpose that has driven humankind to study this in great depth is the possibility of bringing down to earth’s scale, terrestrial scale, the energy source of the sun and stars, which is fusion energy. 

Studio – John Dickson:

Ian has authored more than 160 journal articles on plasma phenomena and nuclear fusion. As a wannabe academic, that is for me a depressingly large number. Ian has contributed significantly to our world’s understanding of fusion.  

John Dickson:
I’m early and I’m happy to go away and come back, but lovely to meet you. So sorry my hands are so freezing, but it is minus two out there. 

Studio – John Dickson:

Ian wrote the standard monograph on measuring plasmas. It’s called Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. He literally wrote the book on plasmas, and I’m pretty sure that means something more than my plasma TV. He’s a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the Institute of Physics, and of the American Scientific Affiliation. And he believes in miracles, healing, resurrection, all of it. 

I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

In the New York Times bestseller, The Reason for God, Tim Keller singles out science as a reason many people refuse to even start the investigation about the Bible’s view of reality. Since most religious people believe in a miraculous element, Keller points out, and we all know science has disproved miracles, there can’t be much in religion worth exploring. Maybe a few ethical insights here and there, but even then. And the other best-selling books by atheists like Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others have made much of this claim that miracles make religion a non-starter for anyone who wants to be a rational citizen of our scientific world. Well, Professor Ian Hutchinson reckons that’s one-dimensional nonsense. And it all began with his bedside reading at Cambridge University. 

John Dickson:
By your bedside, as you’re studying physics and mathematics at that wonderful institution famous for mathematics and physics, is Plato, Milton, Jean-Paul Sartre and so on, these are not exactly physics, so you were quite a ponderous student then? 

 

IAN:
Well I hope not, but although I became excited about science and was determined to master it and become a scientist, I also meant to become an intellectual. I didn’t give up my interest in the humanities and other academic pursuits and philosophy and culture generally were very interesting and important to me. And so that’s one of the reasons why I read more broadly. I don’t want to put myself forward as sort of some grand polymath, but I just think those other aspects of human knowledge are very important. 

JOHN:
Well, once upon a time, every scientist or natural historian was well versed in the classics and history and philosophy and so on. 

 

IAN:
Typically, they were people like James Clerk Maxwell, for example, had three years of education at Edinburgh University, mostly in philosophy and other things, as well as science, before he actually came to Cambridge as an undergraduate. So yes, he had a terrific background. But there were other scientists who didn’t. Michael Faraday, for example, had practically no formal education past age 13, but he gained his knowledge mostly from books. So those contrasts exist. It’s not the case that all scientists were widely educated, but some certainly were, and the ones who had that formal education had a very broad formal education. 

 

JOHN:
How did you move from being an atheist at Cambridge to a serious follower of Jesus Christ? 

 

IAN:
Well, I had some knowledge of Christianity and of the Bible from my high school experience, which was in a nominally Christian school. But I didn’t take Christianity seriously until I went up to Cambridge. And my two closest friends, actually it turned out, were Christians themselves. And I suppose what made me take Christianity seriously was that these were the first people I’d met who had kind of an intellectual excellence and insight that was sort of really serious, and they didn’t find their Christian faith to be at odds with being at Cambridge studying mathematics, physics, engineering, and so forth. So that was probably the most important influence on me. What brought me eventually to take the step of becoming a Christian was that they invited me to a series of lectures given by Michael Green, who at the time was a very well-known speaker in Great Britain, a preacher and lecturer. And much to their surprise, I said yes, and I went. And I think what came across to me in those lectures as novel were two ideas. One was that the evidence for the truth of Christianity is very serious and needs to be thought about carefully. And secondly, that Christianity in the end isn’t simply some intellectual assent to a set of ideas but that it’s a personal relationship with God made possible through the cross and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

 

Studio – John Dickson:

Personal relationship with God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It sounds like the stuff of a preacher, not the professor of nuclear science at the world’s top-rated university for science. But the important thing to spot is that for all his love and reverence for science, Ian holds that scientific knowledge of the world is just one part of what it means to know the world. 

IAN:
I do think that science has some very serious characteristics which mean that it is able to produce consensus amongst its practitioners in a way that is very often not the case in other disciplines. So in that sense, you might think of that as being in a certain sense better knowledge or better established knowledge. But I think that’s because, basically, science has chosen to answer the easy questions. This may seem surprising to people who find mathematics and science generally bewildering, but there is a sense in which science has chosen to answer questions about those aspects of the world. That are reproducible and that are capable of being described in very clear ways by measurement and mathematics and various other aspects. And those two things, reproducibility and clarity, are characteristic of science in general. But there are lots and lots of things in our lives and in the world that are not describable in those terms, that do not possess that reproducibility or that clarity. And those are, if you like, the difficult questions as opposed to the easy questions. And I think that it’s a big mistake to think that science is all the real knowledge there is. That’s what I call scientism. Because these other topics, and these are topics like history and literature and language and philosophy and sociology and economics and so on and so on, these are all extremely important topics too and need to be paid attention to. And I’m very comfortable with the idea that theology is tackling the hard questions, not the easy questions. 

 

Studio – John Dickson:

Some would push back and say theology isn’t even a subject. How would you respond? Let me interrupt myself. I have in mind here a well-known line from Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion. He wrote, I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology is a subject at all. Back to Ian. 

IAN:
Well, I think that’s just ignorant. People don’t understand what theology is if they say that. They may take the view that they’re not interested in it, but I think dismissing it as not a subject is simply laziness. They argue that because you can’t establish the existence of God through science, therefore we should dismiss it as being a non-question. But that’s just scientism. That goes back to what we were just talking about. They’re dismissing the hard questions because those hard questions can’t be solved by addressing the easy questions. But of course not.

Studio – John Dickson:

Scientism is a relatively new word in English, only a couple hundred years. It refers to the belief, which is also relatively new, that only knowledge obtained from scientific research is valid knowledge and that scientific methodologies can be applied to all the other disciplines like philosophy, social sciences, history, and so on. The earliest use, by the way, of the word scientism comes from a Presbyterian publication. It goes back to 1871. Let me quote: If in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts, any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality, and religion are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured.

It was soon picked up by philosophers of science, not just Presbyterians. So, for example, in 1956, Ernst Hutton’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Science writes, “This belief in the omnipotence of science is making a mockery of science, for this scientism represents the same superstitious attitude which in previous times ascribed such power to a supernatural agency. In other words, scientism is a kind of religion.” Ouch. 

Anyway, one argument in favor of the omnipotence of a scientific outlook is the evidence that smart, educated people tend to be less religious. In 2005, the European Union’s Directorate of General Research released a report that found there was a positive correlation between belief in God and leaving school early. A 2007 survey of American faculty showed that professors at the more elite institutions were more irreligious than their colleagues at community colleges. And according to a 2015 Global Gallup survey, the most religious people in society possess lower levels of education. But it is true that belief in God is less frequent amongst professors from elite institutions. The more elite, the less likely people are to believe. Surely that’s an indication that the smartest people in the land are not persuaded by any of this mumbo-jumbo. 

IAN:
Well, of course, that’s the story that skeptics would like to tell. I think it is a true statement that religious believers, theists, are less well represented in elite institutions. But it’s pure speculation that that’s got to do with how smart they are. It may have more to do with where they put their priorities, that they work extremely hard with enormous focus on their disciplines and they don’t have time for other things. And actually, in America at any rate, it’s not the case that Christianity or theism is all that poorly represented in universities as a whole. Nationwide in America, something like in the ballpark of 50% of university professors say that they believe in God. They may not be Christians, but they certainly are open to the possibility of theism. So I think too much is made of this smart people don’t believe in religion argument. 

JOHN:
I’ve read several surveys that indicate, speaking about professors and belief, that in, say, biological sciences, there’s less belief in God. But the more you go up to the, am I allowed to call them higher sciences, physics and mathematics and so on, the belief in God increases. 

IAN:
I have never actually seen serious statistics to show that. I certainly think that physicists, for example, are well represented amongst Christian believers. There are plenty of them. But at a place like MIT, I have colleagues who are Christians, who are, for example, the head of the chemistry department at MIT is a Christian. The former head of biological engineering is a committed Christian. And so Christians are very well represented on the faculty at MIT, particularly in leadership roles. 

Studio – John Dickson:

Ian’s throwaway observations actually check out. A study published in the journal Sociology of Religion concludes that in the US the majority of professors, even at elite universities, are religious. Another found that, worldwide, the religious actually tend to have higher education levels than the irreligious. And to cap it all off, a statistical analysis of Nobel Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000 reveals that more than 85% of Nobel laureates were Christians or Jews, as opposed to 10.5% who identified as atheists, agnostics, or free thinkers. There’s another famous study in the journal intelligence that found that the cohorts in society with the highest IQ scores are not atheists but Anglicans and Jews. But i’ll leave that for another day cuz that would make a very fun episode on its own. 

JOHN:
You write, and I quote, “I am impressed with several general features of modern physics and cosmology that are consonant with the universe being the creation of an intelligent and personal God.” For example? 

IAN:
Well, I think the thing that I’m referring to there is what is sometimes referred to as fine-tuning. So fine-tuning is the idea that if the laws of nature were even a tiny bit different from the way that they are, that we’ve discovered them to be, then the world would be entirely different and might well not be able to support complexity or life or intelligence. I think that’s actually a view which is shared by skeptics as well as by theists and Christian believers in the sciences. I think most physicists would acknowledge this. And that, to me, gives a question to answer, and that is, why are the laws of nature the way they are? And one answer is to say that they are the way they are because God or the designer designed them that way. A different answer is given by those who remain skeptics. And that answer is, well, there are lots of possibilities, and if we weren’t in a universe that has these particular characteristics, we wouldn’t be here. That’s the so-called anthropic argument. I find that philosophically unsatisfying. I don’t think it’s actually answering the question. I think the example that is often given is that if you were in front of a firing squad and the countdown took place and all of the rifles went off and you stood there yet and found that you were not injured and you’re still alive, there might be some question about why that was. And you would be unsatisfied with the answer that if they’d actually hit you, you wouldn’t have been there to experience it. 

Studio – John Dickson:

This might be the point to explain three different approaches to the whole science and God thing. Creationism, intelligent design, and classical theism. In a sense, any believer in God is a creationist. If you think there’s any kind of intended creation rather than some big accident, you’re a creationist in the broad sense. But here creationism refers to those who take a concrete view of the Bible, of Genesis in particular. They believe that God created the world in six days about 6,000 years ago, in precisely the way that Genesis 1 describes. 

Intelligent design is usually distinguished from creationism in that many who adopt this approach, just called ID, tend not to think that Genesis is a concrete description of the origin of the world. In fact, some of the proponents aren’t even Christian or Jewish. Their central idea is that science has proven itself incapable of explaining certain irreducibly complex mechanisms in nature, the human eye, for example. And so those mechanisms demand that we posit some kind of intelligent input into the system. That’s intelligent design. 

Classical theism is different again. It’s not interested in any particular example of complexity or any particular mechanism that needs a designer. Classical theism stands back and looks at the whole show of nature and observes that everything operates according to rational principles, which you can talk about using elegant mathematical formulas. Rationality is built into the activity of the tiniest particle. And the furthest reaches of the cosmos. Everything, not just this or that particular complex thing, everything points us to a rational mind behind nature. Ian Hutchinson is neither a creationist nor an advocate of intelligent design, but he is certainly a classical theist. But he believes in more than just the vague god who is the deep rationality behind science. He actually holds to a personal God, to miracles, and all the rest of it. We’ll discover why after the break.

BREAK

Studio – John Dickson:

 I have certainly seen multiple answers to prayer that can, to my mind, only be explained by God’s action in my life and in the life of others. But I think I can only claim to have experienced one observable miracle witnessed by two other people who weren’t Christians. I’ve never told that story in public. And I’m sorry I’m not going to be doing it here either. Some of you will think that I’m a little bit loopy if I give you the details and I have my nerdy Anglican image to maintain. Suffice it to say, I wish I could go back to that moment with a camera and film what happened all of a sudden in front of the three of us with a genuine beneficial effect. I’m probably going to regret even telling you that. Ian has no problem making room for miracles in his scientific world. 

IAN:
So what is a miracle? I take the view that a miracle is an extraordinary act of God. In the New Testament, miracles are referred to by different names. They can be signs, they can be wonders, they can be mighty works. And of course the word miracle doesn’t appear in the Bible because it’s an English word, not a Greek word. But the fact of analyzing those things that we regard as being miraculous in the New Testament leads me to that definition that a miracle is an extraordinary act of God. The reason why I phrase it in that way is that Christians believe that God sustains the universe by his word of power. And so there is a sense in which God is always acting to sustain the world. But a miracle is an event in which God may sustain the world in a unique, maybe even different way from the way he normally is. So as a scientist, when I’m finding out about the laws of nature, I’m finding out about the way that God normally in the normal course of things is upholding the world. And he does that in an incredibly consistent and natural way. And that’s what we’re discovering when we’re discovering natural sciences. But I don’t think God is forbidden from sustaining the world in an extraordinary way for his own purposes if he wishes to. And so while I think that science shows that usually, in fact almost all of the time, the universe obeys the laws of science as we’ve formulated them over the centuries of modern science. I don’t think that science has proved that absolutely 100% of the time those laws are followed and they have to be followed. I don’t think we can establish that on the basis of science because science depends upon reproducibility and miracles, for example, are inherently unreproducible. 

JOHN:
The famous Scottish atheist philosopher David Hume famously said that we shouldn’t believe any testimony about a miracle unless the falsehood of that testimony is even more unlikely than the thing that is meant to be miraculous. You’re not so sure about that. 

IAN:
David Hume’s arguments about probability are handicapped by the fact that he didn’t understand probability terribly well. In my book, I go through a little bit of an analysis of Hume’s probability arguments. But the short answer is that Hume believes that there is essentially consistent evidence. He believes that there’s evidence of completely universal laws that are never broken. But in order to make that case, he had to simply ignore the fact that there are claims all the time of miracles taking place. So he was essentially making an assumption about human experience that rendered miracles infinitesimally probable or incredibly improbable, if you like. And that was the basis of his probability argument. He also had other arguments. For example, he defined miracles as basically violations of universal laws. And since he believed universal laws were universal, he was effectively defining miracle as something that can’t happen. And then he concluded that it cannot happen. Well, that seems to be begging the question. 

JOHN:
Should we be suspicious though about the fact that miracles seem to be more common in ignorant times and less common in our learned times? 

IAN:
Well, I certainly take the view that not all miracle claims are true. And so it’s certainly the case that in earlier times when we were less familiar with the laws of nature or in underdeveloped or undeveloped countries where there’s very little education and so on and so forth, miracle claims may be more widespread. But that just simply means that we didn’t have our critical apparatus perhaps as finely tuned. But it’s still the case in the modern world that millions of people each year are claiming to have experienced miracles. So there is no uniform human experience that rules out miracles. Going back though, I do think that from a Christian perspective, the fact that we read in the New Testament that surrounding the life of Jesus Christ, there were lots of miraculous healings and other events shouldn’t be a surprise to us, because if we believe that God has entered the world in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, it would be perhaps surprising if there weren’t uniquely significant events that surround that entry. And I think also similarly when Christianity is entering new societies, for example in missionary work, I think that it’s not unreasonable to suppose there might be a reason why more miracles happen in those situations than in others. 

Studio – John Dickson:

And oddly enough, science may be broadening our understanding of the possibility of miracles.

‘Into The Spider-Verse’ film clip

Studio – John Dickson:

Films like Into the Spider-Verse, Avengers Endgame, Interstellar and loads of others, my director Mark Hadley loves, build their entire plot lines around various aspects of quantum physics and have become so popular they’ve spawned an entire genre of futuristic storytelling called quantum fiction. Apparently. Whether science fiction is your bag or not, these blockbusters have helped to feed our imaginations about what might be possible in a scientific world. Where once the world was a series of solvable equations, now we’re, well, some of us, a little more open to the weird and wonderful in the world. 

JOHN:
You suggest that quantum physics opens up more space for the scientists to think about the miraculous. How so? 

IAN:
Well, in the 19th century, when. Classical physics ruled, science was reaching the point where it seemed as though the laws of nature could be expressed by deterministic equations and that the universe was entirely deterministic in the sense that you could solve the equations of motion or the equations of science and starting with initial conditions and project forward in time and therefore the future was entirely determined by the past or the present. And in that deterministic view of the universe, I think there are serious questions about, first of all, how God could act in that situation, but also, actually, you know, whether there’s any sense in which humans can act, because after all, aren’t we just, you know, clockwork following the laws of nature? That was the situation towards the end of the 1800s. But in the 20th century, we discovered that the universe is not in fact governed by these deterministic equations. The equations of quantum mechanics are still classical equations which you can solve, but we know now that they don’t entirely describe the way the universe works. In other words, there is implicit uncertainty in the outcome of various events, sequences of events, which is often referred to as being Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and that the universe therefore has built in uncertainty, that it cannot be described by these classical deterministic equations. I think that is an interesting fact. It sets aside arguments that puzzle people in the 19th century, how could there be a God acting in the world, for example, if it follows universal laws? The answer is it opens up space both for God to act, but also for us as agents ourselves to take seriously the idea of free will. 

JOHN:
I was really intrigued by something you said in your book, that the laws of nature are less like mathematical principles and more like the laws of a king. How so? And how does that help us with our thinking about miracles? 

IAN:
First of all, when we think about the laws of nature, it’s worth recognizing that historically when people first started talking about laws of nature, you know, sort of in the 17th century, in the scientific revolution, they had in mind those laws being rather similar to the laws of a society. The laws, if you like, in those days of a king. And I think that analogy was very important actually to the development of science. And one should bear it in mind. Of course, we regard the laws of science now somewhat differently. We tend to think of them as being abstract principles as opposed to the dictates of a law giver. But it’s still the case, I think, if you approach this question from a theistic or a Christian viewpoint, Christians take the view that the laws of nature are in a sense what God decided to make of his creation. And so when we’re investigating those laws, they are actually the laws of a law giver. Well now, on the issue of miracles, if the laws are more like human laws, or at least somewhat like human laws, the laws of society, we know that those laws can be violated, okay? A good king, for example, who might have the ability to lay down the law, will do so in a way which is consistent. And I think when we approach the universe, we find it is amazingly consistent, so the laws of nature are amazingly consistent. But that doesn’t mean that the king doesn’t have the right to do something different or the ability very often to do something different. It’s just that if he is a good king, he won’t routinely do this. He will do something different from the normal course of nature, only in extreme circumstances when there’s a very important, different situation to be taken account of. And this addresses part of this understanding of miracles. 

JOHN:
But is believing in a miracle as grand as the resurrection of a crucified Galilean of an entirely different order? Is this where the scientific self and the religious self have to separate? 

IAN:
I don’t think there’s a separation in intellect. I don’t think that there are scientific proofs of the resurrection of Jesus. But I also don’t think that there are scientific proofs of Julius Caesar being assassinated by his fellow senators in the ides of March 44 B.C. I do think there are good intellectual reasons to believe in Julius Caesar’s assassination. And I think there are also very good intellectual reasons, they’re mostly historical reasons, to believe in the resurrection. So I don’t think there’s an issue of intellect, but I think there is a difference in science. It’s obviously not the way we find out about most things in history. And so we shouldn’t expect necessarily there to be scientific proofs of the resurrection. There couldn’t be because we’re talking about a unique historical event. But I do think there is very strong evidence and I find that evidence quite persuasive. It’s not a knockdown proof but I think it’s quite persuasive. Humans have different senses and when we’re thinking about the way we approach intellectual questions. We use lots of different types of approach to those. And the analogy is that they are like our different senses. And so science is one way of trying to understand the world. History is another way of trying to understand the world. Sociology is another way of trying to understand the world. And all of those different senses are important. If we are to include questions of spirituality, Christians and other religious believers over the centuries have argued that there is a way of understanding the world which goes beyond the visible things around us and is drawn upon spiritual experience. In Christianity, the fundamentals of the faith rest on historical events, probably more so than almost any other religion. But in the end, also, Christians say, that evidence is backed up by personal experience, religious experience. And certainly while I think there are lots and lots of different reasons to believe in God, the two types of reasons that I find most persuasive are the historical evidence surrounding the person of Christ and my own personal religious experience. 

Five Minute Jesus

 Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five minute Jesus for you. The philosophical, scientific, and historical rationale for an openness to miracles, and the miracles of Jesus in particular, I think are pretty strong. I mean, if you don’t believe in God, of course, no amount of evidence is going to convince you that a miracle can take place. But if like most people in Australia and the US and around the world, you do think there’s a mind behind the laws of nature, that’s what the laws of nature point to, then you at least can be open to the possibility that those laws are God’s laws and he can work in and through them to do things that are surprising to us, a miracle. Curiously, virtually every historian working on the history of Jesus, regardless of faith or skepticism, agrees that Jesus did things everyone at the time thought were miracles. The evidence is overwhelming on the historical front. But there’s an aspect of the Jesus story and of the healings in particular that is often overlooked. It’s not really philosophy or history. It’s to do with the meaning of the healings according to the Gospels. And we have pretty good evidence of what Jesus’ own perspective was on the miracles of Jesus. I mean, on the one hand, of course, Jesus healings are acts of compassion and authority, and there are many texts in the Gospels that make those two points. But Jesus gave his miracles a more theological interpretation, if that’s the right word to use. According to Jesus’ own words, his healings are a reversal of the curses of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. This may sound weird, but it’s a particularly important interpretation in the discussion of the life of Jesus. Before his death, John the Baptist learned about Jesus’ increasing fame and sent Jesus a question. Basically, are you the one? And so there’s this passage in Matthew 11 and Luke 7, which comes from their shared source, which scholars call Q. Don’t worry about the details. That goes like this. When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, are you the one who was to come or should we expect someone else? And Jesus replied in these choice words, “Go back and report to John what you see and hear. The blind receive sight. The lame walk. Those who have leprosy are cured. The deaf hear. The dead are raised. And good news is preached to the poor.”

Now, here’s the thing. Those words were clear in their meaning to those who first heard them, especially John the Baptist and his disciples, and the Gospel writers and readers. Many Jews in Jesus’ day believed they were living under the curses listed in the Old Covenant in Deuteronomy chapter 28. In that Old Testament book there’s this list of curses if Israel doesn’t follow the ways of God and it includes things like fever, skin disease, blindness, insanity and a number of unpleasant physical conditions including death. And Jews knew that they had disobeyed the Covenant and many believed they were living under those very curses. And by the time of Jesus there was great speculation, or hope might be a better word, that there would be a time when this judgment would be lifted. And the reason they thought that is because there was a biblical book written after Deuteronomy, but long before Jesus, called Isaiah. And in Isaiah there are all these promises about the lifting of the covenant curses and it all involves this sort of lifting of the diseases on Israel. So Isaiah 29 says, “In that day the deaf will hear and the darkness of the eyes of the blind will see.” Or in Isaiah 35, we read, “The eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, then the lame will leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.” Isaiah 61 has a similar list of things about the lifting of the curse. 

Now, here’s the thing. Jesus’ exact words back to John the Baptist in that passage in Matthew and Luke I just quoted, are brimming with significance. He answers John’s question with a precis of his own activity deliberately couched in the language of those Isaiah promises. To quote it again, go back and report to John what you hear and see. The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and good news is preached to the poor. Here’s the thing. Jesus’ powers, his signs, his miracles are not a party trick designed to enhance his reputation. Still less were they a model for contemporary faith healers. They were a specific message to ancient Israel. They signaled the end of the time of judgment and the beginning of renewal. 

Now I’m not saying that’s all that the healings of Jesus mean. There’s much more to his healings than that, and we’ll no doubt cover that in future episodes. But the thing I just want to underline for now is that, as with so much of Jesus’ life, things he said and did only make sense when we read those words and actions against the backdrop of the Old Testament and what ancient Jews were saying around the same time. This is not to say that the miracles of Jesus don’t have ongoing significance and a message about his compassion and the renewal of the whole world. They do, they do, they do. But first and foremost, they were a message to his own people, to ancient Israelites, conscious of being under God’s curse. The message was, the time of favor is now. The curses are being lifted. There’s an invitation to begin again.

You can press play now.

JOHN:
What would you say to one of my listeners who loves science, is not a Christian, and is just worried that taking little steps toward the Christian faith is going to be contrary to their love of science? 

IAN:
Well that’s certainly not been my experience. My scientific knowledge and my commitment and growth in Christian knowledge grew up together. I haven’t, over my rather long life now, experienced any kind of irreconcilable tension between those two. It’s certainly the case that in the Christian community there are people who believe things that I find contrary to the science that I know. There are imperfections in those communities. There are also imperfections on the scientific side. There are scientists who assert things about the ethics and so forth of science that I find unacceptable from my Christian perspective. So it’s not that there are no tensions between science and the Christian faith, but I find them not to be. Irreconcilable and I don’t think that science is put at risk by Christian belief. In fact, historically, the people who founded the scientific revolution and throughout the centuries since have contributed very strongly include predominantly people of the Christian faith. Clerics were very important in the 18th and 19th centuries because many of them were the amateur scientists of those days. And so while we have professional scientists these days, not the amateurs of those earlier times, if you look at history, it’s simply a fallacy to think that there is some kind of inherent warfare between science and faith. That’s simply a myth. It’s a myth that’s been adopted in a rather widespread way. So part of what I want to do is to explain both to Christians and to skeptics of all religions that that is indeed a myth and that we should take those relationships more seriously, and Christians should be more accepting of science, and those who are persuaded that science is very important should take Christianity more seriously. 

Undeceptions theme