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Oct. 26, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:26
GOD AND SCIENCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep204
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Today I have an in-depth conversation coming up with a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, his name is Ian Hutchinson, on the compatibility of God and science.
The mind-numbing slogans of identity politics, I'm going to show you how they have exactly the same purpose as the mind-numbing slogans of the old Soviet era.
China is building a dangerous new weapon.
It's called a hypersonic nuclear weapon.
I'll spell out the implications.
And also, China has a new law that says that if the children do something wrong, punish the parents.
Hmm, this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We're surrounded today by the mind-numbing slogans of woke Welcome to my show.
And the slogans have a sort of artificial quality.
They bear no resemblance to reality.
They're not anchored in science.
They're not anchored, of course, in tradition or common usage.
They're just pushed on us in a sort of coordinated ideological way.
And I mentioned yesterday, but I'll mention again, a classic example of this is the statement that came out of the State Department.
Today on International Pronouns Day...
Who made this a day?
International Pronouns Day.
We share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.
So, the question I want to get at is, what is the psychology behind this?
Who are the people that do this?
And why? Now, interestingly, we can get some insight into this by looking at, believe it or not, the old Soviet Union.
And an important essay written by the poet and dissident Václav Havel.
He was a dissident in Czechoslovakia, which was part of the Soviet empire.
And he was a protester against the Soviet regime, helped to bring it down in his home country, became subsequently the prime minister of that country.
So just an important figure, both in the literary world and as a political activist.
Now, normally I wouldn't draw comparisons between the Soviet Union and America.
It would seem crazy to me in my earlier life to compare the practices and propaganda of a totalitarian society with America, a free society.
But we've got to admit, in all Canada, that America is no longer, fully speaking, a free society.
I'm not saying we're a totalitarian society, but we are moving in that direction.
We're seeing taken-for-granted freedoms erode and, in some cases, even collapse.
Now, Vaclav Havel, in a famous essay that he wrote in 1979, He talks about the power of the powerless.
Now, let's go through this essay briefly because you'll see its relevance to kind of woke propagandizing and the slogans of identity politics.
Baklav Havel begins by talking about a green grocer in the Soviet Union or in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia who puts up a sign in his store that says, workers of the world unite.
The old communist slogan.
And Vaclav Havel says, now, let's think about it.
What is this man actually trying to say?
Is he actually calling upon the workers of the world to unite?
Unite Iran what? How does he expect to communicate with them?
What is the shared agenda that they have?
So Václav Havel says his putting up of that slogan has nothing to do with any of that.
He's not trying to communicate with workers.
He's not even trying to express his real opinions on the subject.
So then we have a deeper question.
What is the point?
What is the psychological motive of putting up this slogan?
Now, Václav Havel says that this worker is, in a sense, a servant of the Soviet state.
He is a conformist.
He is somebody who goes along.
And he wants to make it clear that he goes along because he knows that there are consequences if he doesn't go along.
The state is, in a sense, exercising, even through the private sector, even through ordinary workers and storekeepers, a kind of sweeping surveillance over the whole society in And this guy wants to be, you may say, an obedient servant of this system.
Now, here's where Havel's point really takes off.
Havel says, let's say the greengrocer put up the following slogan.
I am a coward. I am afraid.
I don't want to go against the state.
And that's why I'm signaling my obedience to the state.
Havel says that would, in fact, be a true statement of the psychology of this greengrocer.
He goes, but the greengrocer would never put up that slogan.
Why? Because the greengrocer is a human being.
He has dignity. He has pride.
He doesn't want to seem like he is a worm.
He doesn't want to seem like he's a parasite.
He doesn't want to seem like he's cowering in fear.
So what does he do?
The point of putting up the workers of the world unite is essentially to camouflage your fear, your cowardice, and your obedience behind ideological cover.
So you're pretending as if, no, no, no, no, I'm not just a coward.
I am a subscriber to a noble ideology, rooted in Marx, that wants to bring together the workers of the world.
So Havel's point is that what this greengrocer is doing, in fact...
Is collaborating in a lie.
A lie that is actually known throughout the whole society.
No one believes that the workers of the world are uniting.
Not even the leaders of society believe it.
But the point of the whole exercise is to establish a regime of social conformity.
You could almost say that the regime is even stronger if they put out slogans that no one believes at all.
But nevertheless, everyone repeats, because that shows that they have real power.
That shows that they can make you say it, even if it makes absolutely no sense.
It's almost like making you say that 2 plus 2 is 5.
Because if they can get you to do that, it shows that you have no dignity.
You are completely under their thumb.
So, Havel's point is, how do we fight this?
How do we go against it?
He goes, most people don't want to go against it, because why?
Well, they don't want to be stigmatized.
They don't want to be ostracized.
See how familiar all of this is to our lives in America now?
Baklav Havel is talking about communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, which later became the Czech Republic.
So, Havel's point is there's only one solution.
We have to refuse to be part of the lie.
Even if in small ways you are a naysayer, you refuse to go along, you won't put up your pronouns, you won't submit to the reigning ideology, then it becomes increasingly obvious that the emperor has no clothes.
Then the authorities have to figure out, now what do we do?
We've got all these people who won't go along.
It's kind of like all the parents who aren't going along with critical race theory.
They're just refusing to submit.
And so the regime ratchets it up.
Let's turn the FBI on them.
Let's call meetings of all the intelligence agencies of government.
Can we classify them as domestic terrorists?
But the point is they have to escalate because ultimately, you may say, the peasants refuse to go along with the program.
And in this way, Havel says, we break the tottering structure of the regime.
And maybe one day in our regime...
Our woke industrial complex, if you will, will come tottering and collapsing down in the same manner as the old Soviet Union.
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There is another huge caravan on its way of migrants on its way from Mexico to the United States.
Evidently, this is a caravan that began in southern Mexico.
So on the Central American border, the border with Guatemala, that's where it started to gain steam.
And it's now traveling its way across Mexico To the northern border, headed for, of course, the United States.
And here's some images that we pulled from Actually, Spanish TV showing the caravan moving.
And you see the Mexican...
Well, you see people just pushing forward.
And there's some Mexican police trying to obstruct them with shields.
But as you can see, to no avail, the caravan just sort of breaks through.
And they're trekking their way on.
There's been some good reporting on this caravan.
It's about 2000 people strong.
And it's apparently very organized.
In other words, first of all, people can't just show up and join the caravan.
That's not allowed. In order to be in the caravan, you're given a personal code on your phone.
You have to go on a website and sign up.
So you can see here, this is an organized operation, and it's important to realize that it's organized by traffickers, it's organized by cartels, with the full knowledge and participation of the Biden administration.
I mean, this is the shocking truth of the matter.
The Biden people don't start the caravan, but they know all about it.
They know that they're the reason that these people are coming.
In fact, one of the sort of spokesmen for the caravan basically said, we're coming because Biden's invited us.
And a lot of the caravan guys have signs that show they have American flags, but they also have Biden's name on it.
So Biden is kind of their...
It's kind of like we're going to Biden's birthday party.
We're invited, all 2,000 of us.
There's cake on the other side.
So these people are pushing forward.
Now, let's put these numbers in perspective.
I mean, there have been 192...
Migrant encounters in the United States in September alone.
Wow. And this year, fiscal year 2021, 1.7 million.
So it is not an exaggeration to say that Biden is essentially destroying the country at the southern border.
He's destroying the idea that we are even a nation with a border.
And he's doing it flagrantly and openly and in collusion with the worst elements of Mexico.
Now, so on the one hand, the Biden people say, well, you know, this is the problem that is brought about by violence and it's brought about by criminality in all these other South and Central American countries and in Mexico.
But even though they say that, and that's of course to a degree true, I mean, Mexico is a very odd society.
On the one hand, it's a functional society.
It is a big trade partner of America.
In fact, a bigger trade partner of America than even China or Canada.
Mexico has in some ways a vibrant economy, but it's also a thoroughly lawless society.
In other countries, you might have pockets of lawlessness.
Here it's lawless in Rio de Janeiro.
There it's lawless in Seoul, South Korea.
And even in America, we have Obviously, crime sort of nodes in inner cities.
But in Mexico, it's everywhere.
In Mexico, there's open highway robbery.
In Mexico, the trains are blocked by criminals.
In Mexico, criminality, violence, the prospect of kidnapping, death, pervades the whole society.
So you've got this kind of, it's almost a failed state.
It's certainly a dysfunctional society.
But here's my point.
The Biden people are making it worse.
Why? Because they've essentially created a lucrative criminal enterprise that goes beyond drugs.
It's essentially human trafficking.
And the Biden people are encouraging, fortifying, in a sense, bankrolling.
And they've created this huge industry in human beings.
And it's occurring on a mass scale.
Biden, of course, seems to be in the kind of cranky octogenarian or septogenarian style that he's known for, you know, just kind of crabbly indifferent.
He was asked about it. He goes, you know, I've been down there.
I've been down to the border before.
He goes, I guess I should go down.
Kind of like an irritable, you know, old man who's basically asking, Haven't you checked this out?
Yeah, I guess I could check it out.
I once checked it out when I was 30.
But the truth of it is, Biden hasn't checked it out.
He's actually never, when he was a candidate in 2008, he apparently did a drive-by the border.
That is the sole evidence that anyone has of Biden ever having been to the border.
So he's invoking a drive-by Really, what, 13 years ago, as evidence that he really knows what's going on.
Maybe he'll go down and maybe he won't.
But he's sort of seen it, been there, done that.
So this is the kind of irritable guy that we have at the wheel.
We're in a very dangerous situation.
I think it's very clear to see on many different fronts.
But one of those fronts is a completely porous border that's being exploited, I would say, by gangsters on both sides.
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This might not always have been true, but it's certainly true of late, and it's true now.
I mentioned in the last segment the Absolute chaos on the southern border.
That's one way in which the country is being destroyed.
But another way in which the country is being put genuinely at risk Is the emboldening of our enemies who are in full throttle, building dangerous weapons to be used.
Let's be clear, against us.
So China, there were some news reports recently, has developed, has tested, a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon.
Now, when this news came out, Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about it, and she made the inane statement, we welcome the competition.
What? This is not, she's acting like it's some sort of a, you know, a ping pong tournament.
Yeah, the Chinese are really good.
We welcome the competition. We're talking here about the Chinese making advances in high tech that are nothing like anything we have.
In fact, serving this concept of a hypersonic weapon, one American scientist said, it defies the laws of physics.
And I'm sure if you said this to Anthony Blinken or Jen Psaki, these people who are morally vacuous would say, man, they destroy the laws of physics.
Well, you know what? In the area of woke pronouns, we're destroying the laws of biology.
Yeah, take that.
You want competition?
What gave you competition? This is how these people think.
They're such... I don't even know the right word for them.
Debbie's like, no, don't go there.
Stop. She knows what I'm about to cross the line.
Ha ha ha! Alright, let's talk a little bit about these hypersonic weapons.
They're basically missiles that travel faster than five times the speed of sound.
That's called Mach 5. So this is 3,800 miles an hour.
But the key to the hypersonic weapon isn't the speed.
It is the fact that normally when you launch an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile, you have two parts.
You have the missile, the sort of spine of the missile, the delivery mechanism, and then you have the warhead.
And so the missile travels, but then the warhead detaches from the missile and kind of zooms in on the target.
Now what the Chinese have basically done is created a three-part missile.
So you've got the kind of delivery spine, but you've also got what's called the HGV. The HGV is the hypersonic glide vehicle.
So here's the point. The point is as the missile shoots into the air, The HGV or the glide vehicle detaches from the missile.
It's still carrying the warheads, but now this is a kind of intelligent operated vehicle that can maneuver and that can move around and can move around at high speeds.
So the HGV is faster than an ICBM and And for this reason, it gives an entirely new capability.
We're talking, by the way, now about missiles that deliver nuclear warheads.
So the Chinese are serious about this.
They don't quite have the gross national product of the United States just yet, but they're deploying their resources and they're deploying their best minds into producing very dangerous weapons.
The only nations, by the way, that are working on these HGVs are China and Russia.
Only two. Fast missiles?
Yeah. China, North Korea, Russia, the United States.
But China is trying to go to a new level, go to such a level.
Let's just remember what's happened since the Cold War.
The United States used to have 10,000-12,000 nuclear warheads, and this was necessary to deter the Soviet Union.
But once the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S. policy has been, well, we don't really need that many warheads, that many missiles.
we should go down to the minimum number of missiles that can be used to deter an enemy.
And we need to have a shield so that if they fire some missiles at us, we can shoot them down.
So this actually all works when you are spending five times as much on defense as everybody else, when you have the best technology, when you have the best weaponry, then this kind of minimalist strategy makes sense.
But when the other side goes ahead of you in technology, when they're putting the same kind of dollars, or yen in this case, yen into it, as you are, then this kind of minimalist approach, it's kind of like saying, I'm gonna have the smallest army I possibly can.
Well, yeah, as long as it's still bigger than everybody else's army and can handle the situation.
But once the situation gets out of hand, we know, we just know how incompetent these Biden people are going to be if the situation does get out of hand.
So it's important for us not to get there.
And one way we don't get into that precarious situation is never, ever vote for Democrats.
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There's an interesting new law that is being proposed in China.
Very intriguing premise to it.
And the basic idea here is that if a child seriously violates the rules of a school, punish the parents.
Wow. Now, this legislation calls for parents to be punished if the child is under 16.
At first, you get a warning.
Second, you get a fine, which is basically 1,000 yen, about $150.
And third, you can be detained for up to five days.
So now, on the first glance, this appears to be just absolute madness.
But interestingly, historically, it's not so crazy.
Aristotle has a line somewhere where to the effect that, you know, if the child goes wrong, slap the parent.
And of course, Aristotle's point is that who is responsible for the moral education of the child if not the parent?
And if a child misbehaves, then the parent is at least partly to blame.
Now, this is harder to say in American society today because there's so many other influences on young people, peer pressures, The influence of the culture and so on.
So parents today, it seems to me, have a lesser influence perhaps than in earlier eras.
I know in India, I've seen, you know, slightly horrifying but also somewhat amusing scenes where a dad and a mom will take a child in to take an important test which will determine if they can get into a school or get into a college.
And literally, if the child comes on and goes, I failed, the parents come to blows.
They basically start punching each other.
Why? Because their idea is that, you know, you...
You didn't teach the child properly.
You didn't make him study enough.
And so the premise of what the Chinese are doing, the idea that parents bear a responsibility, I think is not out of line.
The other thing I want to say is that the Chinese at least know that it's really important that children at a young age develop the habits of frugality, industry, hard work, creativity, that they become good students, and they become functional in society.
So there's an active enterprise.
Now in this case, of course, it's the state.
So where the Chinese, I think, are going wrong is they are trying to have the state do what it is the parents' job to do.
And in some ways, the argument can be turned against them since the state controls so many aspects of Chinese life.
If the children go wrong, why don't you punish the state?
Isn't the state responsible for the children going wrong?
Why blame only the parents?
Are the parents the sole influence on these young people?
Doesn't the government have a lot to do with it in China?
I think the similar obliteration of the distinction between the state and society is to a lesser extent happening even here in America.
We see the state expanding.
We see the institutions of civic society and private culture submitting increasingly to pressures from the state.
So really, we're seeing the same kind of distortions occurring here.
I think the reason that children go wrong in our society is not so much because the parents are teaching them wrong, but because parental influence on children is diminishing.
Now, I'm not saying that we don't have a big mess in family life in many situations.
I'm not saying that we don't have children who are raised in situations where they don't get the kind of parental attention that they need.
That is also a problem.
So we, like the Chinese, have a problem with our young people.
I think they're going about it in the wrong way and trying to solve it.
And so regrettably are we.
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Wow.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Ian Hutchinson, who is a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. He's authored over 200 scientific journal articles.
He has books in his field.
But he's also a Christian, and he's published a book that came out a few years ago, Monopolizing Knowledge, but then a more recent one, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?
An MIT professor answers questions on God and science.
And this is what we want to talk about, the compatibility, if there is, between God and science.
Welcome, Ian. Thank you for joining the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Let me start by just asking you, in your own life, you have been now for the majority, I think, of your adult life a devout, a believing Christian.
You have also been a practical scientist who not only does science but teaches science in a very advanced field, plasma physics.
Have you found in your life some...
Did you ever feel that in your professional career?
Well, thanks, Dinesh.
It's great to be with you and chat with you again.
We've enjoyed some time before together.
I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University.
You can probably tell from my accent that I'm born and bred in Great Britain rather than in America, although I'm a citizen now of the U.S. And for me, Christianity was always something that I approached, not just emotionally or spiritually, but also intellectually.
I became a Christian in part because, to me, Christianity made sense.
And so my science and my intellect and my Christianity were always, in a certain sense, engaged.
And I knew something about Christianity before committing my life to Christ, but when I became a Christian and I began the Christian life.
I had much to learn and I developed very rapidly, both in my Christian life as an undergraduate student, but also, of course, in my professional life because I was studying physics and mathematics and so forth.
And so those two parts of my character kind of grew up together, my knowledge of God and of the Christian faith and my knowledge of science.
And I never really felt a very overwhelming tension or some kind of incompatibility between them.
Of course, there were individual challenges, but these needed to be thought about and needed to be worked out gradually, and that is the way that I became interested and began to speak more widely about the relationship between science and Christianity.
You say, Ian, that the reason that people sometimes experience this tension is because they are confusing science with what you call scientism.
Now, I don't think you coined that term, but it's a very interesting term because scientism has the odor or the aroma of an ideology.
You seem to be saying that science is one thing and scientism is another.
Are you saying that scientism is a philosophy about science and not itself a science, but is often confused with being a science?
Yes. In short, scientism refers to the idea that really science is all the real knowledge there is.
In other words, the only way to get true knowledge is to use the methods of natural science.
It is a philosophy and it's an approach to knowledge that is extremely widespread today.
Of course, in part, that's because science has been terrifically successful in finding out about the natural world and in developing the technologies that we benefit from.
And so science definitely gives us a great deal of knowledge.
But the idea that all knowledge must come by the means of science is simply a ghastly mistake.
It's not one that's widely examined or advocated, but it's sort of in the background of everything we tend to interact with in our society.
It's sort of the air we breathe in many academic and even in everyday life.
So my idea of I'm trying to understand the relationship between Christianity and science is to realize that, at least today, one of the main reasons that we feel these strong tensions between faith and science is because of scientism.
It's because of the erroneous belief that science is all the real knowledge there is.
Now, you know, I could specify kind of off the top of my head a number of fields which are not scientific and provide knowledge.
So, for example, there's historical knowledge.
Historical knowledge is knowledge about things that happened in the past.
There's philosophical knowledge.
So there are all these fields outside of science, political knowledge, and so on.
But here's the strange thing.
It seems to me that professionally, there's a wannabe phenomenon in which the scholars in these fields want to pretend to be scientists.
And so they will say things, and you mentioned this in your writings, some guy will say, I'm a political scientist.
You know, and you quote a man giving a talk at the American Historical Society who basically says that history operates exactly like the laws of gravity.
History operates in a scientific manner.
So is it the case that these people are, because of the social prestige of science, all trying to be, you may say, pseudoscientists and thus blurring the fact that there are legitimate domains of inquiry that are not science, but that nevertheless do contribute to human knowledge?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, I don't want to accuse all people who are in the humanities or social disciplines of practicing scientism, but there is a tendency, a very strong tendency, to try to push all of those disciplines in that direction.
Friedrich von Hayek, who was a very famous Nobel Prize-winning Economics, economist in the 1950s, actually was one of the first people to use the word scientism in the way that we currently use it today.
And he did so in a book all about his criticisms of the way in which his social disciplines were moving in this direction of trying to practice in a way where we have sort of laws of society as much as we have laws of nature.
But he pointed out that it simply can't work that way.
History doesn't work in the same way, doesn't acquire its knowledge in the same way that we do in the natural sciences, for example, and the same is true of other social disciplines.
And so to try to turn these disciplines into sciences in the same sense that natural science is a science is a mistake.
This is... Part of the problem, though, of course, is that the word science is a little bit slippery.
When you think about a discipline which calls itself political science, it is using the word science in a very archaic way.
When Latin was the language of common study and of the intellectual life, the word scientia was used to refer to any kind of systematic knowledge.
But today, science, when we use it unqualified, to most people means physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and so forth.
And so that's another source of confusion which helps to feed this problem of scientism.
When we come back, I want to pursue this question of the meaning of science.
I want to also explore the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's idea that science is all about the objective world, whereas religion or faith pursues subjective values.
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I'm back with Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. His latest book, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?
Ian, we were talking about the sort of nature of science and its potential conflict with faith and with Christianity.
Now, Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist, wrote a book called, I think it was called Rock of the Ages or Rock of Ages, in which he basically said, all right, listen, let's have a truce.
The entire domain of facts and the objective domain belongs to science, whereas the domain of values, not so much how things are, but the way we ought to live, that's the domain of religion.
Seems to me this is a little bit of a tenuous, problematic distinction.
Do you agree?
And if so, what's wrong with it?
No, I mean, Gould was not a religious believer as far as I know, although he's open to religion.
And I think he was genuinely trying to help alleviate some of the tensions between the intellectual life and religion, but I think he got it wrong.
I think, I mean, his Position was, he summarized by using the word noma, non-overlapping magisteria, meaning that there are at least two domains of knowledge and they don't overlap.
But the trouble is that they do overlap.
I mean, science, for example, has very important things to say about how the world has developed, about what governs the world, and so forth.
If people of religious faith take a position which is in contrast and in contradiction to that scientific position, then there are going to be tensions.
Similarly, there are compulsions that rest founded on religious belief.
That need to control the way that science is practiced.
So, for example, experiments on human subjects are governed by very strong ethical principles, and these therefore influence the science.
And so there are tensions.
There are overlaps.
Between these different areas of knowledge.
And so Gould didn't, in my opinion, have it quite right.
But he did, I think, aim to alleviate some of the tensions which arise from scientism that we've been discussing before.
Gould was, of course, active in the debate over evolution.
In fact, he was sort of sparring with certain creationists who were claiming perhaps that the Earth is only a few thousand years old or that man has only been around for a few thousand years.
Now, I want to turn to some very striking comments that you make about evolution that don't get into that debate.
You're actually not arguing with the evidence for evolution per se.
But you're making, I think, a rather profound point that evolution, the theory of evolution, Darwinian evolution, Gold's interpretations, these are not science in the same way that, let's say, Newton thought of science, or you do science, because, as I understand what you're saying, Newton thought that there was a kind of necessary force.
Gravity that holds objects together.
This is just as true of the moon falling toward the earth as of the apple falling on your head.
Any two objects anywhere at any time would feel this gravitational attraction.
This is a sort of different type of explanation than the evolutionary one, which you say is often concerned with, not so much with necessary connections, but rather it could have happened this way.
We think it might have happened that way.
This is a plausible account of, let's say, for example, how all different types of mammals have similar types of ears.
Talk a little bit about these sort of levels of explanation and why evolution, in a sense, perhaps belongs more in the category of natural history than it does a science.
Okay, well, let me be straightforward right at the beginning, but I find increasingly highly persuasive the explanations that science offers of the past history of the universe.
I think the universe is clearly 13.8, roughly, billion years old.
The Earth is 4 billion years old.
And evolutionary developments in the sense of the biological mechanisms of natural selection and so forth.
These are very persuasive explanations of the way things have come about.
But the distinction between natural science and natural history is really to do with whether something is a law of Nature, which allows you to make predictions about what future actions will happen, so that the law of gravity is such a law, or whether they are explanations of how things developed in the past.
Now, these two types of explanation are very closely related together.
I mean, we need to know the laws of nature if we're going to form an informed scientific natural history.
And so I think that's the distinction what it's trying to draw.
Sometimes it's a said...
By some anti-scientist scientific advocates that science can't deal with the past.
That's not correct.
Science can deal with the past.
So when we were saying earlier that the discipline of history is not pursued by scientific methods, that's true.
By and large, it isn't for human history.
But that doesn't mean that science can't address the past.
Science can find out lots of Of considerable detail about the past.
For example, how the climate has changed over the past few million years and things like that.
We can find those things out.
But when we're finding those things out, they're really natural history in the sense that they're a description of what has happened in the past in the very general sense.
And they don't, by and large, address questions of human history, of the development of society, of the development of ideas, for example, and they are more aimed at phenomena that have the kind of reproducibility that science generally demands in its investigations.
One of the things that you seem to be arguing, which I think is very persuasive, is the idea that explanations operate at multiple levels.
And can you illustrate what you mean by that to show how these levels of explanation don't cancel each other out, but provide together a comprehensive account?
Yeah, I usually illustrate that by talking about the human person.
You know, a human being is made up of quarks and leptons.
He or she is made up of atoms, of different chemicals, of important biological mechanisms that are governed by DNA and so forth at the cellular level,
that I am a An animal, warm-blooded, a mammal, that I am a person, a human, but I'm also a father, a lover, a thinker.
And beyond that, I would also say that I'm A sinner saved by grace.
And I am an eternal spirit, beloved by God.
And those are all different levels of description, all the way up from, you know, the smallest things to the most abstract things.
And none of those descriptions rules out any of the others.
And so multiple levels of description are vital in our understanding of a person or of it or of more or less anything else in life.
And so when the anti-theists of today, you know, talk in terms of the fact that since we know a lot about physics and chemistry and biology of humans, that rules out the possibility of these other aspects, the higher level aspects, I think they're just missing the boat.
It isn't true that science tells us everything about a person.
There are many other aspects of a person.
Some of them are human, and some of them, I believe, go beyond the human and reflect the image of God.
When we come back, let's take this idea of beyond the human and explore an issue that is the subject of, well, the title of one of your latest book, The Subject of Miracles.
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I'm back with Ian Hutchinson, professor at MIT, author of a new book on miracles, which is not, I think you said to me, Ian, not only about miracles, it's kind of a dialogue about various questions of science and of faith.
Let me start with what perhaps is the original miracle in the book of Genesis, which is, this would be obviously after God creates the world.
This is the miracle of God breathing a soul into human beings.
And thus providing a kind of connection between human beings and their creator.
Now, let's explore how and when this might have occurred.
Because you said, and I agree, the universe is 14.5 billion years old.
The Earth is 5 billion years old.
Certainly a kind of humanoid creature has been on the Earth for maybe 100,000 years now.
So, can you, what is your, and this I'm sure has to be something of a guess, when did God, do you think, breathe a soul into humans, thus creating, in effect, the first humans, Adam and Eve?
Yeah, this is, of course, a question about one of the most vexed conversations that Christians often have about science and the Bible, and it's to do with the first few chapters of Genesis and how creation took place and so forth.
If you take a modern scientific perspective of the universe and the world, then it's clear that the first chapter of Genesis, which talks about the various days of creation, It shouldn't be taken as if it's some kind of scientific description of the creation, and that's the first mistake that Christians really need to set aside.
I mean, sure, it's a terrifically important story.
It's a And I take the view that the Bible is authoritative in the way that it reveals God to us.
But we mustn't take our own interpretations, impose them on the Bible, and then say the Bible must be this.
And one of the interpretations that's often imposed upon Genesis in modern Christianity is to say, therefore it took place in 24 hours, you know, days of 24 hours length and so forth.
So that isn't what Genesis is about.
Genesis is not about explaining how God created the world.
It's actually the most important thing in the first chapter of Genesis is for the Hebrews...
The people of God to realize that God created it, not how he created it, but that he created it, okay?
And that was a very important part in the development of the Hebrew understanding of God, that God was not just one of the The pantheon of gods that were believed in by the people round about them, but that God, Yahweh, that God was the God of everything.
If God is God, He is the God of everything.
Now, coming to this question of the breathing of the soul, if you like, which occurs, of course, in chapter 2 of Genesis, the way I tend to think about it is that the natural...
Development of the universe, the earth, and so forth, led to creatures who are beginning to be sentient, humanoids and so forth, but that their relationship with God was perhaps similar to the relationship of many other animals with God might be today,
but that at some point they reached the point of development where God God began to interact with them, and so the Bible says that the man was formed from the dust of the earth, and then God breathed.
And the word breath in the Bible is the same word as the word for spirit, of course.
And so that man became, in a certain sense, a spiritual being.
The follow-up, of course, is also then for Christians to think about, well, what then does the fall mean if we were to accept the account that science gives us of the past history of humans?
The answer, I think, would very naturally then become that the fall was not the first physical death of humans.
It was the spiritual death of humans.
That they experienced after entering into this relationship with God through God's breath.
And that's what the fall means.
And so I believe that when we think about...
The historic Christian apostolic doctrine about the fall and about salvation, those teachings are fully compatible with this kind of picture that I've just drawn, and that what we are being saved from is the spiritual death that was brought about by the fall of mankind.
Now, I don't want to say that this is the right interpretation of the Bible.
I don't think there actually is one right interpretation, for example, of the first two chapters of Genesis.
The Bible isn't a scientific textbook.
It's something where ambiguities and multiple meanings are vitally important.
And so there isn't one correct interpretation of these whole things.
So I don't wish people to think that my explanation is right.
But I do think we need to have a more flexible approach than some...
You know, when you said a couple of minutes ago that the first book of Genesis, the concept of the ages, the days, need not be taken and perhaps must not be taken literally, you might have some people who sort of, you know... Blanch at that because they feel like you're moving away from the clearly stated language of the text.
It's important to realize that the Hebrew word, four days, can also mean an epoch, a period, an age.
And that this is, by the way, not an argument that you and I have devised to fight off the critics of science now.
There are early Christians going back to Augustine, the fathers of the church, who interpreted the Bible in exactly the way that you are and said that this refers to eras.
of God's creation and not to literal specific 24-hour days.
Let me just sort of bring this to a close by asking you this question, and that is, where do you think this debate is headed?
We seem to have this militant atheism that uses scientism in the manner you describe against Christianity.
Christians appear to be a little bit more on the defensive.
I think part of your message is Christians should oppose scientism, but they shouldn't be afraid of science.
Would that be a pretty good summary?
Yeah, that's certainly as an aphorism is exactly what I'm arguing.
And I think that in general, you know, the Christian Church, of course, has a whole range of opinions about how we should go about interpreting the Bible.
And that's in part because of what I just said, that there isn't one right interpretation of any given passage.
There are many different interpretations.
That's, by the way, It's sort of obvious from the way preachers treat the Scriptures.
It doesn't matter how authoritative a preacher considers the Bible to be, he or she begins to unfold the multiple layers of meaning in the text.
And of course, the early fathers were doing that, and they experienced some of the same difficulties that we do today.
And so what I hope is happening in the Christian church is that we're reaching a realization that the Bible is not a scientific textbook.
It's actually a book of many, many different types of literature, of Prophecy, of poetry, of letters, of gospels, of history, and so forth.
But what it isn't, for sure, is a scientific textbook, because science, the way we understand it today, didn't exist when the Bible was written.
So it could possibly be a scientific textbook.
And if we set aside that wishfulness to have this clear answer in a scientific sense, Then we put aside many of the arguments between science and faith.
Of course, you know, the anti-theists will still probably try to deploy scientific, scientific arguments against the faith, but that shouldn't force us Christians, you know, into a reaction which makes us adopt, you know, some kind of literalistic view.
Absolutely. Ian, I feel like we've only scratched the surface, but thank you for making the time.
I appreciate it. Maybe I can persuade you to come back and we can dive into these themes once again.
Thanks for joining me.
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