The Chemists

Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

Media – The Muppets

Studio – John Dickson:

That was, of course, the beloved chemists of The Muppets Bunsen and Beaker, creating havoc in their lab (if you didn’t pick it up, the fireproof paper … didn’t work). Of course, Bunsen and Beaker aren’t the most famous TV chemists ever – that title probably goes to Breaking Bad’s Walter White, portrayed disturbingly well by Bryan Cranston – but that show freaked me out — Buff and I got to episode 3 or 4 (whatever one had the bathtub scene!!!!) , so we’ve opted for The Muppets instead. We love science here at Undeceptions, and if you’ve listened to our science-themed episodes in the past, you’ll know that my kind of scientist is the medieval polymath, writing epic books that combine a love of theology and the natural world.

But … that’s not how most people see them! 

The popular view is usually closer to Bunsen and Beaker – people in white coats (with maybe crazy haircuts) blowing stuff up in a lab. In other words, they imagine the stereotypical chemist. Another trope we’ve spent loads of podcast hours debunking is the idea that modern scientists are all atheists. Unfortunately, some of the most well-known chemists in the world today do indeed believe science leaves no room for God. Former Oxford Professor of Chemistry and renowned atheist Peter Atkins had this to say in his 1995 book The Second Law.

“We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.” 

Well, as it turns out, nearly half of Peter’s discipline disagrees!

Of all the sciences, Chemistry appears to be the one with the highest number of theists. A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Centre found that 41 per cent of chemists believed in God, by far the highest percentage of any scientific field. Granted, that survey was a while ago now, but 2009 was the height of new atheism – a time when scientists were tripping over themselves to declare there was no God. Chemists appear to be the outliers …. but why? What makes these lab-coat-wearing nerds so … theistic? Well, I’ve found two brilliant, top-tier chemists to help us understand more.

I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
Well, Peter, thank you so much, um, for, for joining me. Can you first tell me about the University of Halle in Wittenberg?

Peter Imming:
20 years ago, I joined faculty in the University of Martin Luther University, actually, or if you forgive me saying it with a German accent, a heavy German accent, Martin Luther Universität, Halle Wittenberg.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Professor Doctor rerum naturalium habilitatus Peter Imming. Basically, that title is the gold medal of scientific credentials in Germany. Peter’s the Head of the Department of Pharmaceutical/Medicinal Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacy at – as you just heard – Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in Germany! Peter is an expert in drug chemistry, and his work has taken him around the world, with stints in Ethiopia, South Korea, and China, to name a few. He’s a Christian chemist, but despite working at a university named after one of history’s great Christian communicators, he’s firmly in the minority among his colleagues when it comes to his religious belief!

John Dickson:
Some of my listeners might here the words “Martin Luther” and think, is this a religious university? Surely!

Peter Imming:
No, not at all. Not at all, I’m afraid. Martin Luther was faculty 500 something years ago.

John Dickson:
Yes, it is a 500 year old university

Peter Imming:
It is, it is, yeah, that is true. But no, we are a total estate university. We don’t have a lot of private universities in Germany. Perhaps four or five in all Germany. So it’s a state university, secular university, but we do have a faculty of theology.

John Dickson:
Which is probably the most secular of all the faculties. You don’t have to comment.

Peter Imming:
I have some friends in the theology faculty that I can relate very nicely to, since I’m a Christian. I’m a scientist, I’m a Christian, so yeah, it’s good to have that faculty.

Studio – John Dickson:

Yes, many theology faculties, especially in Europe, are very secular. One doesn’t need to be a theist to be a professor of theology. These are not like US seminaries or British and Aussie Theological Colleges. 

John Dickson:
What is the thread of your own specialty? You’ve told us broadly. But what, what are you particularly interested in?

Peter Imming:
I’m particularly interested in killing bacteria, to be more specific, mycobacteria. Um, the best known mycobacterium is the causative agent of tuberculosis, consumption, which, according to statistics, kills 2,000 people per day. Worldwide. Every day. So it’s still a big health issue worldwide, particularly in areas where there is also, where HIV is rampant or other infections. So we try to find chemicals, you might say, that are toxic to microbacteria, but not toxic to human cells.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Are we making advances? Are you making advances?

Peter Imming:
Only, only in big teams. Drug discovery is not anything one person or even one group can do. So we enjoy collaborations with teams in the United States, in Canada, of course in Germany. So we do the chemistry and some of the microbiological essaying. Whereas these teams do biochemistry and the like  We don’t go clinic.  Don’t go into a clinic, that’s actually a totally different business.

John Dickson:
What drew you into science in the first place? Were you all just a, always a mathematical nerd? And so it was obvious or some other reason?

Peter Imming: Definitely not a mathematical nerd. I did well at mathematics at school. But chemistry is not mathematics. Chemistry is more like a language actually. I tell my students. You are now going to learn the language, the language of organic chemistry. So what drew me in it was that chemistry is fun. I had very good high school chemistry teachers. I read a lot of books. I liked to do experiments. Um, one of them actually was not good for, for the kitchen and my parents home. But we all survived, don’t worry. Obviously, I survived, but also all the rest of the family. So I always wanted to become a teacher of science, particularly chemistry. And then pharmacy was even more attractive because it’s, it’s about very active substances that can kill or heal.

John Dickson: So it’s chemistry on chemistry.

Peter Imming: Yes, absolutely. Drugs are chemicals. Yeah. Whether they’re from nature or made by man.

Studio – John Dickson:

Peter is part of what you might call “Big Pharma”! It’s worth touching on this briefly because there’s been a lot said recently (including by Christians) about the “deep state” nature of big pharma. In fact, the fastest-growing search term on the website Bible Gateway in 2022 was “sorcery,” likely due to suspicions surrounding pharmaceutical companies. Jonathan Peterson, content manager of Bible Gateway, wrote about it at the time, saying: 

“The increase in “sorceries” is related to heightened interest in the Greek word “pharmakeia”, which, according to the Mounce Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament, means ‘employment of drugs for any purpose; sorcery, magic, (or) enchantment.’”.

Some Christian preachers latched onto this and began claiming that vaccines were forbidden by scripture, because they’re ‘sorcery’! Honestly, I’m so embarrassed by some of my fellow believers! “Big Pharma” is actually full of people like Peter, working tirelessly to improve life for everyone, and they have recently made some significant advancements. Tuberculosis, which Peter just mentioned, is the world’s leading infectious disease killer. It’s a very hard disease to treat, and around 1.2 million people die of it annually. However, thanks to people like Peter, we’ve made huge improvements in treating it, particularly in the past decade. In fact, a 2023 New York Times article (link in the show notes) claimed that “ending Tuberculosis is within reach”. An extract from the National Library of Medicine, also  published in 2023, says this:

Reading

“Tuberculosis is a global health challenge and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In the last decade, the TB treatment landscape has dramatically changed. After long years of stagnation, new compounds entered the market … and phase III (3) clinical trials have shown promising results towards shortening the duration of treatment for both drug-susceptible and drug-resistant TB.”

Studio – John Dickson:

This is the kind of work being done by “Big Pharma”, and Peter is in the thick of it all.

John Dickson:
You’re a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. The pharmaceutical industry is controversial today for some. Uh, either the pharmaceutical industry is the hero that saved the day through COVID or it’s the great conspiratorial villain that just stole our money and kept us under control. If we can leave aside the politics of it, for you as a scientist in this, what is the overriding goal of pharmaceutical chemistry?

Peter Imming:
To find drugs that help with medical issues and to find diagnostic agents that help with differential diagnosis to perhaps quickly, like as in countries with a less sophisticated health system as in other countries, so that people can quickly find out why do I have a cough? Do I have tuberculosis? Do I have just some irritation of the lungs? Do I have an allergy? There are so many possibilities. So it’s improved medical diagnosis, and then of course with drugs proper to, to help with health issues. And if you, if you, if we just go back 200, or let’s say 150 years, we have in richer countries, I have to say, or in, in richer areas of the world, we have people that can do medicine, doctors, pharmacists, and so on. And we have drugs and operation theaters.  If we didn’t have that, we would be worse off health-wise. So I think, I think we, we have a treasure trove of drugs which did not exist 200 years ago. And we, we should be thankful for that. But when I teach pharmaceutical chemistry and, and in my university, I tell my students that we, first of all, should be thankful for what we have. 

Studio – John Dickson:

Compared to even a century ago, people are so much more likely to survive a hospital stay today, thanks to the work of chemists like Peter. Life expectancy has skyrocketed over the past century. A cool article published by Our World In Data goes deeper into this. For example:

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021, this had more than doubled to 71 years.

Of course, many humans throughout the centuries reached their 70s and 80s. Once you passed childhood, you had every expectation to live into old age. But so many infants died young that it brought the statistical ‘life expectancy’ down to, as I say, 32. Saving those kids and shepherding them to adulthood is thanks in significant part to ‘chemistry’ and its application to medicine. God bless the chemists. Peter also talked to me about the problem of pain, something he’s been thinking about a lot recently. It’s a topic we’ve hit big time in previous episodes – please check out ep 67, ‘On Suffering’ – but if you want to hear Peter’s thoughts on this difficult topic, you need to be a Plus subscriber. You can sign up online (check the show notes on our website for the link) to hear that part of the interview. For PLUSSERS – here’s Peter on pain. For the rest of us – here’s a break.

Break 1

Reading 

Around 1669, Hamburg resident Hennig Brandt believed he might have discovered the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, which could turn lead into gold and open up the secrets of the cosmos. An ex-soldier with experience in making glass, Brandt began with old urine and boiled it up and heated the residue until glowing vapours – white phosphorus reacting with oxygen – filled his glassware. Within a few years, Brandt sold his secret and soon phosphorous was well enough known that the secretive alchemist Isaac Newton could begin a recipe for it with the instructions, “Take of urine one barrel.

From urine to art – another transformation –the moment of discovery was immortalized in the eighteenth century in a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, and recorded again … by William Pether in 1775 as “The Discovery of Phosphorous.” In this work, the alchemist kneels in awe before the glowing wonder in his alchemical laboratory. Many years later, in 1943, in another transformation, Brandt’s city burned when thousands of pounds of phosphorus fell in the form of bombs.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s from an article published by The UNESCO Courier, titled ‘Chemistry: How It All Started’. The history of chemistry is basically the story of scientists working to uncover the secrets of nature. The William Wright painting mentioned in the article captures this hunt for “hidden knowledge” brilliantly.  It depicts the scientist Brandt kneeling and gazing in wonder at his glowing experiment (the phosphorus), while his assistant watches transfixed from the shadows. We’ve put a link in the show notes. I love it. It’s fun to imagine those first chemists working deep into the night with different elements and making incredible, and often dangerous, discoveries. But, of course, Brandt wasn’t really a chemist. He was an alchemist, the mysterious precursor to chemistry. Alchemy was, among other things, focused on the purification of metals. They were trying to turn lead or copper into silver or gold. And things got weird. They would create potions like the Elixir of Immortality, which would extend life, or a panacea — a remedy that could cure any disease. It’s from alchemy that we derive the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone (essentially a super-rock capable of both transforming things into gold and extending life). The oldest known book on alchemy was written in the 4th century AD by Zosimos of Panopolis, a Greek from Egypt. Alchemy, for Zosimos, wasn’t just about metals and elixirs—it was a deeply spiritual pursuit. Among his more unusual beliefs was the idea that alchemy was first taught to women who became wives of the fallen angels—a strange interpretation of the story in Genesis 6. Why bring up ancient alchemy? Because it eventually evolved—over centuries—into modern chemistry during the scientific revolution of the 16th to 18th centuries. And while chemistry today is grounded in experiment and reason rather than mysticism, it still operates at the edge of what we know about the natural world. And it was while working at those edges that my next guest experienced an unexpected shift—not just scientifically, but spiritually: from confident atheism to full-blown Christian faith.

John Dickson:
Sy, thank you so much, uh, for joining us. Um, you are a biochemist, so I think you’re gonna, we have to stop and say what on earth is a biochemist?

Sy Gate:
Well, I guess the best way to put it is that I started out as a chemistry major in college, and so I learned a lot about chemistry, especially organic chemistry. But then I, I really liked the study of life. I really liked the science of biology and, uh, I, but not that much because some of biology, just a lot of memorization of the names of organs and things like that so … but I love chemistry, so I found out that there’s a field called biochemistry, which is all about the chemistry of life. And that’s what I decided to do, and I’m very happy I did because it’s a wonderful field. Any students listening who are wondering what to do in science, I would highly recommend biochemistry.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Sy Garte. He’s semi-retired now, but during his career Sy was a tenured professor at New York University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the division director at the Center for Scientific Review of the National Institutes of Health, and interim vice president for research at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Sy has also published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, three scientific monographs, and several books. Man-O-man that’s a productive scholar! His latest book is Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God (it’s out in August 2025, so if you’re listening in the future, go and get it!) We’re actually going to feature Sy on a future episode – perhaps next season – that’s going to focus on the revolution going on quietly amongst top-tier evolutionary scientists. Forget the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins. The evidence is building – and Dawkins himself is beginning to realise it – that ‘blind’ and ‘random’ are not the right words for evolution. Scientists, including Dawkins’ own revered mentor Denis Nobel are starting to talk about patterns, agency, and even ‘intention’ in the evolutionary process. Anyway, we’re going to be really careful with that episode to bring you the cutting-edge research into evolutionary theory. This is not that episode, but I did ask Sy about his provocative book title. 

John Dickson:
Now you have a new book, uh, coming out, uh, real soon, I believe. Um, beyond evolution, um, how are chemistry and evolutionary science related?

Sy Garte:
Well, evolutionary science is much more related to straight biology. Many people consider evolution to be the central theory of biological science. It in fact, if you major, if you wanna major in biology at many universities, most universities these days in the US, your choices are often molecular biology, which is the stuff that I know, biochemistry, or what’s called evolutionary biology, which includes everything that used to be straight biology – plants, animals, ecology, all that stuff is now labeled under evolutionary biology. And, you know, I’m not sure that’s appropriate, but, uh, that’s how it is. So, uh, evolution is really a, a central thing in, in biological science. However, uh, and this is one of the good things about being a biochemist, a biochemist can go into any field of biology they want to because there’s always chemistry involved. So, because biology is based on chemistry, life is a, is a, is a branch of chemistry in a way. Uh, so yeah, I, I got into, I got interested in evolution, not immediately, but over a lot of time, and I’ve been more interested in it even after I retired as an actvie research scientist.

John Dickson:
Tell us about the chemistry. What are the interesting things they’re discovering about chemistry that that’s driving evolution?

Sy Garte:
Okay. That’s a great question. And there’s a whole chapter in the book devoted to this, uh, not so much the chemi, but a particular part of the chemistry. Here’s the thing. If you’re talking about evolution, okay, you, you take it for granted that evolution means that over time, meaning many generations, you get changes in what we call the allele frequencies, which is just saying we get changes in the genes. Which occurs by mutation. We’ll get into mutation a a little bit later, but it occurs by mutation and then natural selection comes in and you know, the ones who lived do the best survive. Okay? But The key thing there is that this takes place over generations. So what does that mean? That means that each generation gives rise to a new generation, which is the same, more or less, with slight differences as the earlier one. In other words, all of life self-replicates – all of life from the simplest bacteria to us and everybody in between makes a very accurate copy of itself. That’s critical for evolution because if that didn’t happen, you couldn’t have evolution. You need that first. And here’s the thing, nothing, and I make this claim and I back it up in the book. Nothing outside of life does that. Nothing. Crystals don’t do it. They can, they can make copies more or less, but they’re very inaccurate. Nothing else does it. And so the question is how does that happen? And we know how it happens. We it and, and how it happens. That’s where the chemistry comes in, is unbelievably complex. And I decided to take a risk and I made one chapter where I actually tried to describe how that happens, but in very accessible terms, I hope. I have more detail in an appendix, but that’s only for the nerds who really want to go into it.

Studio – John Dickson:

Sy is about to show his age, get very retro in this next part – but it’s super cool. He’s about to mention punch cards – these were basically big sheets of paper – that people used back in the seventies to feed info into computers the information the computer was meant to do something with. In my draft script notes, I’m looking at here, Researcher Al has the cheek to ask if I myself ever used a punch card. No, Al. The answer is NO! Al has put a picture of a punch card in the show notes on our website, so you have a better idea of what Sy is talking about. It’s been lovely having Al for the last couple of years on the Undeceptions staff.

Sy Garte:
The chemistry is incredible. Here’s, I will just give you a, a, an analogy that I use Imagine and, and if people who are my age old enough might remember that way back in the early days of computers there used to be tapes and punch cards that you would hand fit into a machine and that would give instructions to the machine and tell it what to do. In every cell, there are little, uh, machines called ribosomes, and they are football-shaped objects that have a slot that goes right through them. There’s a tape that goes into that slot. The tape is called Messenger RNA, which is a copy of the genes. And when that tape goes into that slot, a series of incredibly complicated and complex reactions occur where the tape is literally read by several other chemicals, enzymes, various kinds of RNA transfer, RNA amino acids are attached. The amino acids get stuck to each other. It is just unbelievable. There is no human machinery that comes close, human made machinery that comes close to this. It, it, it’s just remarkable and it’s all chemistry and we know how it works. We have no clue how that began because it couldn’t have evolved because you need that to get evolution. So it didn’t occur through biological evolution. So we don’t, now there are some theories. I know Ard Louie has some theories, uh uh, Nick La Lots of people have theories of how you could have ended up with not only the machinery, not only the slot and the tape, and all the stuff that goes inside the ribosome, but also the instruction manual. 

Studio – John Dickson:

Woohoo! Shout out to Ard Louis, a multi-time Undeceptions guest, featured in episodes 6, ‘Rational Universe’, and 88, ‘Beautiful Science’. Link in the show notes. We are definitely getting him back for the evolution episode, because he’s at the forefront of the maths of the patterns in mutations. Back to Sy. 

Sy Garte:
When you want to, you know, tell a machine what to do, somebody has to write down, you know, tell it to raise this arm and then bring it down or whatever, and that has to be translated into the dots and all that. But there’s an instruction manual, which we also have in life to do this and that’s the genetic code. Where did that come from again? Uh, we know how it works. We know what the code is, we don’t know how it arose. And there are theories, again, I’m not saying it’s impossible, uh, but among those theories is that this was part of the creation of life. And that’s not a bad theory, but unfortunately, you know, we cannot, and this is true for all science and faith issues. We cannot use science to probe the mind of God or the way God works. We can look at, we can look at the creation and we can make conclusions, but we need science to understand. So my, my view, which I state in this book quite clearly, is that there is probably going to be an answer, a scientific as there has always been. To this amazingly difficult issue, which is also related to the origin of life of course.

Studio – John Dickson:

I love this. Sy doesn’t have a ‘God of the gaps’ approach to his work or his theology. ‘God of the gaps’ essentially means proclaiming that God is the answer to every scientific mystery we don’t have an answer for yet. God fills the “gap” in our knowledge. But if you take that approach, then when you fill in a gap with a scientific explanation, you’re erasing God. Sy’s view is way more satisfying, and incidentally WAY more in line with what the greatest theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Pannenberg and what they’ve said about God. The answer is probably out there, because, like anything that has been created, we can analyse it and find out how it works. In fact, we should expect to find answers to scientific mysteries, and how evolution actually began is one of those big mysteries. But when we find out, it won’t be a gap that pushes God out. It will undoubtedly be further evidence of the rationality imprinted into all of nature. And every bit of rationality in the creation points to the mind of the Creator. No God of the gaps. Another question is the ins and outs of how cells work—and that’s a theme Peter is working on.

John Dickson:
You’re at the forefront of the question of life. Uh, because before there were cells, there was chemistry. I mean, I know cells are chemistry as well. But before there were these animated, self replicating things, there’s just chemistry going on. So can you just give us an overview of why the origin of cells is still a riddle for science.

Peter Imming:
Because we don’t know how it should have come about. No matter which worldview a person has, unless people step out on a limb, um, they will admit we have no idea how the chemicals that are needed for building a cell have come about by themselves naturally, so to speak. We wouldn’t even know how to build a cell, how to start building a cell, even if you’d give me all the components, or a chemist that is more able than I in this field, because I’m a medicinal chemist, not a origin of life chemist. Still, we have no idea how this could have come about, and how we could even repeat it. Humans are quite creative, so we’ve done a lot of things, we’ve built a lot of things. But I think it was Craig Venter, famous DNA sequence, um, chemist, geneticist, molecular biologist, who said that it’s not that hard to build DNA chemically, but the big problem is that cells are more complicated in their inner structure than the most complicated building you can imagine. So they’re very well structured. All the parts have to really work together. Everything has to be exactly where it should be, otherwise the cells don’t work. So how can we build this and make it functional, as in the cells, the cell will replicate, it will, um, produce and consume energy, and all the things which we think are typical of life. So, it’s a big riddle. Because we know it’s, uh, important if we want to understand how life came about on the Earth. But we have no clue. If you read in the newspapers that people have a clue, they’re heavily exaggerating. Believe me.

John Dickson:
So then what are the most important current approaches to understanding the origin of cells?

Peter Imming:
Of course we analyze cells. I think we know a lot about what cells need to be functional. To, like I said, replicate and everything, and there’s one key word, replication. DNA, proteins, RNA, some components of the cell, and the cell as a whole has to replicate. If a cell does not replicate, it’s either dormant, bacterial cells are sometimes dormant, or it’s dead. So, we need to find out how this replicator was formed. It’s a molecule called RNA. Most people bet on RNA being first. So one of the big scenarios, people call that sometimes scenarios, talks about how could a first replicator come about, a self replicating molecule, that must have formed itself. But we don’t have a clue how that could have come about.

Studio – John Dickson:

In 2013, The Guardian actually put this question – ‘How did life begin?’ – at number 2 in a listicle (an actual word) titled ‘The 20 Big Questions in Science’.

(Number 1, by the way, was ‘What is the Universe made of?’)

Here’s what they said.

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Four billion years ago, something started stirring in the primordial soup. A few simple chemicals got together and made biology – the first molecules capable of replicating themselves appeared. We humans are linked by evolution to those early biological molecules. But how did the basic chemicals present on early Earth spontaneously arrange themselves into something resembling life? How did we get DNA? What did the first cells look like? More than half a century after the chemist Stanley Miller proposed his “primordial soup” theory, we still can’t agree about what happened. Some say life began in hot pools near volcanoes, others that it was kick-started by meteorites hitting the sea.

Peter Imming:
And the other scenario is metabolism first. So how did this energy consuming, energy producing molecule metabolite, as in small molecule processes, how could they have been formed? And again, we don’t have a clue. People sometimes find bits and odds, but they don’t, they don’t add up to how they could have happened consecutively. And the third, if you can bear with me for a minute, the third big scenario is We won’t understand unless we can build it ourselves. I think it was Richard Feynman, famous physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, he wrote on his blackboard, this could have been his last words, “I only understand what I can create”. That’s, he was an atheist, at least a self-professed atheist. And that is driving people to try and build cells in order to understand, ‘Okay, this is how they could have formed’. But then, of course, I would say from a Christian standpoint of view, this is creation. 

John Dickson:
Yes, I mean –

Peter Imming: It’s engineering. 

John Dickson:
If you need a human to create a cell, you haven’t got rid of a creator, have you?

Peter Imming:
It’s an engineer’s work. Of course, we will never know. I mean, all people admit that, Christians, non Christians alike. We will never know how it happened in the first place. Perhaps we can find a way how it it can happen, but we still don’t know,

John Dickson:
Was that the way?

Peter Imming:
Was that the way?

John Dickson:
How does all this origin of cells business connect to biological evolution?

Peter Imming:
It precedes biological evolution according to naturalist scenarios. So most people would say, I think all people would say, first we have to somehow find a way to, how, how cells could have come about. And then the cells as replicating, um, entities that are perhaps able to mutate DNA wise, RNA, protein-wise, that they can then change. And if you can create a selection, you can select from the selection. So, cells are supposed to be what we need to understand before the evolutionary process can begin. Some people actually call this origin of life business ‘chemical evolution’. Some people avoid the term. I’m not talking about religious people also. Some people avoid the term ‘chemical evolution’ because all the typical features of organisms that allow them to adapt, evolve, that are not yet there.

John Dickson:
Because replication of cells is the very core of evolution, isn’t it?

Peter Imming:
Absolutely, yeah. And selection, of course, and genetic drift and all that.

John Dickson:
I see. So how does a naturalistic approach to how life came about differ from your way of thinking about it as a Christian who is also a scientist?

Peter Imming:
The biggest difference is that I, um, think we have discovered that cells will form if there was a plan and a purpose. So life is characterized, I think everybody would agree on that, living organisms are characterized by purpose. There is a purpose. When I read purely chemical papers, fairly rarely in those papers people would write that this and that chemical mechanism happens so that something … there is no purpose, other than the purpose of the person that did the work. But if I read biochemical papers, physiological papers that talk about the chemistry …. automatically, there is language like, ‘this is not just “because”, but “for”’, there is a purpose, there is some function. And that is what naturalistic thinking tries to get rid of. Plan, design, as some people say, purpose, and that is the biggest difference. Of course, as, as Christian scientists, we also want to investigate in this. Sometimes we get people telling us, Oh, you don’t even want to know how it came about. You just say, let’s just, this was God. That’s not true. We’re also interested in how can this happen? But we think we’re on the wrong path if we categorically exclude the possibility of plan and purpose in how it came about and also why it came about, but that’s an altogether different question.

John Dickson:
We might in the podcast do a little breakout on the way Aquinas talked about intention. It seems to be built into the very fabric of the universe. Not the kind of, not the kind of intelligent design of modern years. But his, his view was, was I think quite compelling. That everywhere you look it seems that things are for other things. 

Five Minute Jesus

Let’s press pause – I’ve got a Five Minute Jesus for you. One of the key differences between the ancient Pagan way of thinking of, say, the Egyptians or Babylonians, and the Hebrew or biblical worldview is on this question of the orderliness of nature. Pagan creation narratives tended to stress the random, haphazard nature of the physical world. The classic … that all scholars talk about … is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, read out loud to the population every Babylonian New Year’s Day in Babylon. It says physical world is an after-thought, fashioned out of wreckage of a war of gods. Tiamat & Apsu—the mum and dad of the gods—go to war against their kids for making too much noise. But mum and dad ended up losing to the young warrior god, Marduk, who fashions the universe out of the bits and pieces of the carnage. The story embodies the common pagan idea that creation is ‘haphazard’ & ‘tainted’: matter is ‘alien’ stuff—accidental, unpredictable, possessed.

If that was your perspective, and you read Genesis 1, you’d be immediately struck by all ways Genesis stresses the beauty, orderliness, and goodness of physical creation. Pagans thought of creation as a kind of ‘war’; but Genesis sees it as a ballet: calm, patterned, graceful. Each creative scene in Gen 1 has 4-fold pattern:

(1) commences with a simple command,
(2) tells of the fulfillment of the command,
(3) includes an elaboration of the command, and
(4) concludes with the day formula, “there was evening, there was morning.” 

The first paragraph sets up the pattern for the rest of the show:

[1. Command] And God said, “Let there be light,” and [2. Fulfillment] there was light. [3. Elaboration] God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” [4. Day formula] And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:3–5)

And on it goes through the chapter like a carefully choreographed dance …

There’s a theological point being made here: the universe is not accidental; it’s the work of an orderly mind.  Then there’s the way the days correspond to each other like a canvas to a painting: days 1, 2, 3 are the canvas, days 4, 5, 6 are the painting. It’s hard to picture, so we’ll put an image in the show notes. But basically, day 1 is the canvas to day 4’s painting, Day 2 is the canvas to Day 5’s painting, and day 3 is the canvas to Day 6’s painting. So, On Day 1 ‘light’ itself is created; on Day 4 the actual ‘lights’ of the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ are put in place. On Day 2 the ‘vault’ of the sky is created along with its counterpoint, the waters of the sea; and on Day 5 the sky is filled with birds and sea is filled with fish. On Day 3 the ‘land’ and ‘plants’ are created; on Day 6 animals and humans are created to walk on the land and enjoy the produce. This deliberately leaves Day 7 hanging, as a day of rest, to reflect on the newly filled canvas of creation.

Then there’s the very interesting comment repeated through the Genesis creation account that God made things “according to their kinds” and, what’s more, that God put certain creative powers in things so that they too could produce things according to their kinds. So, in Gen 1:11 we read:

“Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: [so the land becomes a co-creator with God] seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds …

The point begin made is that the genius of the Creator is imprinted into physical reality, into nature, so that acts with certain aims to produce certain outcomes that reflect God’s intention. There are tons of other ways Genesis makes this point, but the basic idea is that the creation isn’t accidental. It’s ordered and rational and is a functioning whole that acts according to certain rational principles.

It’s a remarkable departure from ancient pagan thinking. It’s true that the best Greek philosophers came to roughly the same conclusion centuries later. Aristotle, for example, (900 years after Moses) said the Forms of things exist within the things themselves. So he would say something like “the form of the oak tree is in the acorn. The form of the adult human is already in the foetus”. And so on. And so nature operates in orderly fashion, following the direction, we might say the equations, that are built into matter itself. All things act according to organizing principle inherent in them, which Aristotle called the logos. Behind the logos, he insisted in Metaphysics Book 12 is the MIND, Unmoved Mover,the final cause of all motion and purpose. God!!

What the Jews had been saying for centuries … the Greeks declared by logical deduction. Nature operates according to the principles of rational genius, and the genius behind it all is the Mind of God. This is why John’s Gospel is so happy to employ the Greek philosophical word logos. I talked about this more in an Undeceptions single recently – can’t remember what it’s called – but the basic point is, John says:

“In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God …”

And then he shocks us with:

“The logos became flesh and dwelt among us!”

In other words, the rational Genius of the creator – the same genius imprinted in creation – actually became a human being, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the logos. Jesus is the genius of creation. John wasn’t alone. Paul says something similar:

“In Jesus all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … all things have been created through him and for him … and in him all things hold together.”

It’s right to think of Jesus as a first-century Galilean Jew, a historical figure we can investigate with the rules of historical enquiry. But from the beginning, from our earliest documents, Christians were saying much, much more about him. They were saying He is the genius by and through which creation came into being … and, what’s more, He is the ongoing principle that holds them all together in every moment. This is why the first modern scientists all saw their work as a kind of worship. Because when they understood the mathematics of planetary motion or the chemistry by which certain things happen, they are glimpsing the logos, who had a historical name, Jesus. You can press play now.

Media – The Periodic Table

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s the start of an amazing video by the TED-Ed YouTube channel on the genius of the periodic table of elements. Talk of the table might bring back some high school trauma for some – Researcher Al says it does for him – but not for me … because I ignored it at every turn. The table is one of the most important human innovations ever, and absolutely on par with other great feats of engineering.Its creator was the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev [MEND-EL-EVE], who in 1869 began categorising the known properties of elements (basically, what distinguishes one element from another) into different groups.

He wasn’t the first person to categorise elements. But Dmitri discovered that when he arranged the elements in an order based on their atomic weight, patterns emerged around which types of elements tended to slot next to one another. By discovering these patterns, he was able to sort the elements into the table we have today and leave gaps for undiscovered elements. When he did his work there’s was only 63 known elements  – now we have 118. Element 101, discovered in 1955, is named after him – Mendelevium – making Mendeleev one of only fifteen scientists to be honoured with an elemental namesake. The interesting thing about this is that, although we credit Mendeleev with the creation of the period table, he in fact only created an orderly depiction of the order that is actually there in Nature. If we call him ‘genius’ for creating the table, we have to acknowledge that physical reality itself is genius (or perhaps bears the imprint of genius). The elements all work together, and all have a place. Mendeleev’s mother actually famously urged her son in his scientific pursuits in the words, “patiently search for divine and scientific truth.”

It’s an idea you find in other foundational scientists … like Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the empirical method of experimentation in the 17th century. He famously thought of himself as a priest of God serving in the temple of creation. This wasn’t just a metaphor. He really thought his science was a form of worship of the Mind behind creation. We’ve spoken about all this before in multiple episodes: check out episode 19 ‘Scientific Theology’ with Alister McGrath … episode 9 ‘Dominus Illuminatio’ with Sarah Irving-Stonbraker, episode 74 ‘Medieval Science’ with Seb Falk, and Episode 78 ‘Scientific Imagination’ with Tom McLeish. 

Mendeleev himself noted that:  

“It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man-social and political-and to the entire universe as a whole.”

Both Peter and Sy have spent their entire working lives working with “causes that govern this order” – but unlike some of their colleagues, they’ve gone a step further, and have come to place their trust in the creator behind it all. I asked them why more of their colleagues haven’t followed suit – I mean, they can all see the rational genius built into creation, right?  

John Dickson:
Chemistry, like physics, points to fundamental laws. Rationality. You said at the start of the interview, language. Why do many scientifically minded people just leave it there? Without asking how is there rationality behind everything? And what does it mean?

Peter Imming:
People are different. So I can’t give just one answer that will fit, fit all sizes. With some people, I think they, they’re not the type of person that typically thinks deeply about things. Perhaps sometimes, of course, I don’t know. But judging from myself, which is perhaps better, very often I just take things for granted, whether they be good or bad, and I think that’s how we need to lead most of our lives, otherwise we would become depressive or manic or something. But for some people, um, not to ask for the origins of rationality is that, um, perhaps they think we can’t find out. This is asking too, too far. If we want to answer that question, basically, perhaps they think we will just find another set of rules. And then we can again ask where, where do those laws come from that were formative for the laws as we see them now? So what perhaps can help us in this situation, people that think we, we can’t find out, or I don’t want to think about it … I always hope that, um, bringing across that we think there is a person behind all this. A loving person, a caring person, a person that really knows and has good purposes. This trust. I find that becoming a Christian had so much to do with trust. Trusting in God, trusting in the future, trusting in what I don’t understand, what I understand somehow makes sense. So this step of trusting rather than doubting or shying away from deep questions, I hope that is helpful for people.

Studio – John Dickson:

There’s something Kierkegaardian in all of this; being ok with uncertainty, and taking a “dancer’s leap” into faith. Check out episode 103, ‘Blind Faith,’ for more about Kierkegaard and why sometimes stepping out without all the answers is actually more rational. Back to Peter.

John Dickson:
Have you ever found that your science hindered your thinking about a creator?

Peter Imming:
Actually, it didn’t, even before I became a Christian. I became a Christian at the age of 25. That is when I had finished Most of my, all of my undergraduate studies, so I was a chemist, diploma as we call that in, in Germany, and I was a pharmacist, with a full professional license, but I always found it completely, I didn’t have enough faith, and this is not rhetoric, to believe that this earth and the complexity and, in, uh, macroscopic and microscopic, um, Things that we can investigate. I just couldn’t make myself believe that this all came about by itself with no plan, no purpose, nobody overseeing it. So I didn’t have a problem with that.

John Dickson:
You say you became a Christian at 25. What, what drew you toward Christian belief as opposed to simply theism?

Peter Imming:
I didn’t know about theism. I didn’t even know the word existed. So maybe I thought about it, but more knowledgeably. I wanted to know if the New Testament, particularly the gospels when I read them, is that actually what was written when it was written centuries ago? Or was it fabricated later? Mm-hmm . And I convinced myself by historical – reading historical stuff. I’m reading what is actually true. What was, what was written. So the next question is, does this relate to me? I mean, it’s nice for Jesus to have been resurrected, but what does it have to do with me? And that is something which I can’t explain well. Because something, I acknowledge that God was right and I was not. I would describe that as my conversion. And suddenly I was able to speak to God and discover what somehow I knew because I was brought up in West Germany so we had religious education and we knew a lot of things. Suddenly I discovered that I could speak to God and sometimes people call that prayer but I don’t mean prayer as in asking God for something but speaking to God and discovering Him in the process. That was strange, very nice and convinced me actually that something had been going on. 

John Dickson:
So do you find your faith, satisfies you as a science? As a scientist? Like, um because you see rationality at the chemical level every day of your life.

Peter Imming:
Well, not every day. You don’t know what chemicals can do very strange things, John.

John Dickson:
But they’ll always be explainable by mathematics, I assume.

Peter Imming:
By chemistry.

John Dickson:
Okay. But do you find your Christian faith satisfies that curiosity over the edge of what science can tell you?

Peter Imming:
It gives me a basis that I can trust in, But I don’t expect to find God by doing chemistry as a person. For that, I need the Bible. Science doesn’t tell us … science tells me there must be a plan. That’s my conviction. Set aside everything I believe about Jesus and the Bible. But I do need the Bible to, to know. Okay. Who is that god? Does he have ill or bad purposes? Is he interested in me or not at all? The epicureans believed in gods but they thought the gods are interesting as they’re not stupid enough to be interested in the in those lowly human, lowly earthlings. So yeah, it gives me a framework for life and for work as a scientist. And a personal relationship. Personal relationship subjectiveness is how we live our lives. I have to be objective as a scientist, but my life as a human being is very subjective, meaning interaction, trust, and the negative, negative aspects of all of this.

Studio – John Dickson:

As I said when introducing him, Sy also moved to a deep Christian conviction late in life, having initially been a staunch atheist. He found himself dissatisfied with having only scientific answers. Chemistry was great … but it wasn’t quite enough. It was almost as if science pointed beyond itself to things science isn’t designed or equipped to answer. If you’re a PLUS subscriber, you’re about to hear the details of Sy’s move to Jesus Christ. For everyone else, though, I closed my interview by asking Sy to offer a word to listeners who might feel that science does hold all the answers.

John Dickson:
Um, so I guess the last question I wanna ask you, is what would you say to my slightly sceptical listener who’s pretty scientifically informed for whom that science, uh, perspective is a bit of an inhibitor to, to faith? What, what advice have you have you got for them, you know, little steps in the right direction sort of thing.

Sy Garte:
Well, I would say two major things. First, if you look at the science carefully, and of course I’m not talking about, I’m not talking about what young Earth, creationists or other people say. If you look, if you look at, you know, people like Francis Collins, uh, are Louis. Many, many other, uh, Christians who happen to be scientists, and you look at our science, it’s pretty good. I mean, you know, uh, we do real science in a scientific way and, and, uh, there’s nothing in science that actually contradicts Christian belief. Nothing. Yes, it doesn’t correspond to the Bible, but if you look at the Bible in the right way, or what I consider to be the right way, and everybody has a different definition of that, but I read the Bible and I, I see, uh, confirmation of my views, my of my scientific views. I just was talking about self-replication being the critical part of biology. Well, what does it say in Genesis? “They were made after their kind“, the words after their kind is repeated 15 times in Genesis. What does that mean after their kind, that means they self replicated the way they, you know, the way so that a sheep only give birth to sheep. I mean, I, I had a, a debate with, uh, Kent Hogan once, where he kept telling me that sheep only give birth to sheep. And I said, yeah, you’re right. That’s part of evolution. That has to be, he didn’t, he thought I was saying that, you know, a sheep gave birth to a goat or a monkey gave birth to a human. No, that doesn’t happen. So the science is fine. There’s no nothing in science that goes against the idea of believing in God and a creator. And there are things in science that do point to it. The fact, the fine tuning of the physical constants, the fact that we are here, the fact that. There’s a creation there. There, there was an origin of the universe, and we don’t know how that could have been. There are lots of things that are certainly consistent with a biblical Christian view of reality, but if that doesn’t convince you, then you go back to the experiential and the experiential is one of the big arguments that I hear, oh, you know, this guy had a you know, a fantasy or a dream or whatever, but you know, that never happened with me. And I, that’s, that’s not good evidence. First of all, it is good evidence. If it happens to you, it’s great evidence because believe me, if it happens to you, it’s, it’s real. Okay? But why don’t you have it? Why has that never happened to you? And here’s my answer to that. It has, it happened to me. Several times while I was in the middle of my extreme atheist base. And what I did was I ignored it. I didn’t see it. I mean, I have some details that I, it is too long to go into the details, but I know now that at least four or five times in my younger life, the first time when I was 16, I had an amazing, uh, experiential … this first one, I actually believed that the resurrection was real for about three minutes, and then I said to myself, it was in a movie. I said to myself, no, that’s just the trick of the, the emotional trick. It’s not real. But I had that experience and I denied it, and I rejected it. The other thing that happens is you, you’re about to have an experience or you have an experience and you don’t see it. You’re doing something else. Because God doesn’t yell at you. The Bible says he spoke in a small still voice. He’s not in the earthquake. He’s not in the hurricane. He’s, he’s in the small voice that you hear barely often the distance. I just a very quick story. One time I was driving my car, I was lost. Uh, it was raining, it was dark. I was in a strange place. I was in a horrible mood. I was yelling at myself and I just finally, I had to stop and I realized I had the radio on. I hadn’t realized it. I even had the radio on. I was so preoccupied and I listened, and the music was beautiful, something I had never heard before, and it dawned on me, oh, that’s what happens in life. You’re so busy dealing with so many things, you don’t see that child across the street smiling at you. You don’t realize that that person who looks like a beggar is actually giving money to somebody else. There are, God appears in so many ways that you don’t notice ’cause you’re too busy not noticing or you’re too busy doing something else. So what I say is if you’re really interested in seeing whether or not God might be real, try concentrating. And what we, the way we concentrate is through prayer. I know that sounds crazy ’cause I, I found I had a hard time praying the first time, not just the first time for years. ’cause I didn’t know what it meant. It all it means is close your eyes and just say something. To God. Even if you don’t think there’s anyone listening, just say something. You can say thank you. You can say please. You can say, I don’t believe in you, but you know, here’s what I think. You can say anything you want and that, and leave it alone, and then pay attention to things that you don’t expect because God’s presence is all over the place and you can’t predict where it will be. I have one story that’s in my, my second book. Science and faith and harmony where I heard the voice of God from two dolphins. And if you want to know more, you have to read that story.