Studio – John Dickson:

Hey Siri, what is life?

SIRI

I Kant answer that.  Haha.

Studio – John Dickson

That’s Kant, K-A-N-T, the great modernist philosopher Immanuel Kant.  Hey Siri, what is life?

SIRI

That’s easy.  It’s a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general.

Studio – John Dickson

Yeah, but what is it?  Hey Siri, what is life?

SIRI

It’s nothing, Nietzsche Couldn’t teach you.

Studio – John Dickson

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?

SIRI

Evolution is changing the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Want to hear more?

Studio – John Dickson

Nah, we’re good.  That seemed a little easier for her.  We humans 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 Louis, a leading theoretical physicist and professor at Oxford University, is one of them.

Ard Louis:
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 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.

Studio – John Dickson

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 Dickson and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

Studio – John Dickson

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? 

John Dickson:
So I have an unfair question to ask you.  What is life?

Ard Louis:
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 the 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.

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
Life is full of amazing things that we just like to understand.  So there are little motors in your cell that can spin at 100,000 rpm.  They can stop in a quarter of a turn.  They’re absolutely amazing.  We’d like to understand how does that work?  Because if we understand that, maybe we could copy it and do it ourselves.  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 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.

Studio – John Dickson

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.  Ard Louie offers a similar analogy about Lego, but he says you can’t take these analogies too far.

Ard Louis:
The shaking of the Lego is 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?

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
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 that I don’t believe 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 what?  that’s just a bunch of stamp collecting really.  and then actually I came across when I was in Cambridge Simon Conway Morris’s work on convergence and then found lots of other people working on this which suggests the same thing evolves multiple times from different starting points.  and then I thought wow there is a rule.  okay there’s no way you could.

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
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 in our cells, but from molecular systems all the way through to, in fact, behavior, we find convergence.  And, to my way of thinking, this suggests, in fact, that the number of viable solutions is surprisingly small.

Studio – John Dickson

In another interview that Morris did with Ard Louie himself, Morris emphasised 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.

Ard Louis:
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 the 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.

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
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 that if you make 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 inserts that whole space.  That space is hyper-astronomically 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?  Now, 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 currently trying to use concepts from computer science to try to understand why life keeps finding the same solutions in a space that’s so big that it seems uncertainly big.

Studio – John Dickson

This quest to discover a rational explanation for the existence of life may seem like it stems from Aard’s belief in God but actually he says the whole of science itself is deeply rooted in Christianity.  Find out why.  after the break.  We’re back talking with Aard Louie who’s telling me that historically science has Christian roots.

Ard Louis:
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.

Studio – John Dickson

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 and 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, 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.

Ard Louis:
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 our 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 fooling ourselves is what created the idea of doing science collectively, which is very much how science works now.  You know, 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.  Because again, it has deeply Christian roots.

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
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 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 is 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.

Studio – John Dickson

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.  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.

Ard Louis:
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 ought to 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 being.

Studio – John Dickson

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 would 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, but everything about the house points to the architect.  It would make no sense to run through each room of the house and  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.

Ard Louis:
Christians believe without God the universe doesn’t, it’s not like the universe would grind to 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’s pink unicorn.  Those are complete misunderstandings of what God is.  God isn’t something out there.

Studio – John Dickson

Hey ARD LOUIS, who was Bertrand Russell?

Ard Louis:
But Trent Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.  Shall I continue?

Studio – John Dickson

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.

Ard Louis:
Wrong.  I think it’s the other way around.  There are two options, either there is a God or there is no God.  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.  There’s other 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 things.  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.

Studio – John Dickson

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 art is right that sometimes Christians get this wrong.

Ard Louis:
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, or you’re a scientist, it’s not uncommon for someone to say, is it not amazing that we don’t understand how birds migrate or something that they think is very amazing.  Or how the eye came to see.  Or something.  I think, well, it is amazing, but I don’t see why that glorifies God.  I think maybe when they will understand it, and then that shouldn’t make us glorify God more.

John Dickson:
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.

Ard Louis:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot more sense, so it resonates a lot better with that starting point.

Studio – John Dickson

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 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, by wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations.  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, 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 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 eudaimo.  What the Bible calls blessed.  Participating in the rationale of the world in the very mind of the Macon.  You can press play now.  This podcast is called Undeceptions.  What would you say is the biggest myth about science-religion discussions?  and how would you answer that myth?

Ard Louis:
Well, the biggest myth is the conflict myth.  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 balance 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 science does.  So what do you do?  You measure how smart people are or how much economic output they produce or some other and along some other vector.  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 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, et cetera.  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 kinds 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.

Studio – John Dickson

Hey ARD LOUIS, what is the value of life?  The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality.  Would you like to hear more?  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.  Ardlui 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, Ard says.

Ard Louis:
Science is one of the parts of the world that actually increases the likelihood of God being there.

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Studio – John Dickson

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