So thank you to Nick for inviting me. And thank you all for your willingness to come listen to a professor. You do that all week long. I'm surprised that that didn't scare everybody off from coming out tonight. But I will try to be less academic and more interesting. Is that how we should put it? Right? A big subject, to talk about science and faith. And obviously more than we could ever hope, I think, to get through in one night, in about 20 or 25 minutes. But what I hope to do, really, two or three things. One is, if you're at a place in your life where you're not sure, whether you're not sure whether or not you're a Christian, if you're sure you're not a Christian, not sure what being a Christian is all about, not even sure if God exists, then I've tried to gear the presentation towards answering some of the questions you may have. If you're in a place where you say, I am a Christian, and I'm thankful to be a Christian, but I'm not sure that Faith and science really go together, but I'm interested in finding out about that. I've tried to gear the presentation towards you as well. And then also, if you're pretty confident, and maybe some of you are, if you've done some apologetics reading, if you've done some of the reading from Christians who are scientists, then hopefully this will help support things you already know. Perhaps I won't say anything profound. Perhaps I will. But we will leave that up to the Lord. I want to use the theme of thinking outside the box. Because we have sort of had that running around the economy for the last 10 years or so, the idea that we're looking for people in business who can think outside the box, right? We want college grads who are good communicators and who can be good at problem solving, thinking outside the typical sorts of problem solving paradigms. But in this context, I want to think about science and faith, or the natural world and the supernatural world. And can we think outside of the box that is our sort of natural world, time, space, and matter? And if so, what might that allow us to do? And if not, where does that leave us? So first, I want to talk about science and faith. What do we mean by science? Well, interestingly, for a discipline or a field of study, you would think, particularly with them scientists wanting to be very exact, that it would be easy to find a definition of science. What do you think? Is it? No, it's not. In fact, even among scientists, There are scientists who say, no, you're not a scientist, right? So even trying to figure out what is science, right? And, well, if you include applied sciences and, you know, it's, well, the point is it's not as exact as we might think, right? Just even defining what science is. But Webster puts it this way. So knowledge about or the study of the natural world, based on facts learned through experiments and observations. So we might say, and if we have some scientists here and you don't feel like I'm being fair in the way I'm presenting this, certainly feel free to interrupt me. I am not a scientist. I am a student of rhetoric. So that certainly is the perspective from which I approach this. One type of science is observational or empirical. So we're talking about tests, experiments, repeatable things, looking at facts that we can observe, that sort of thing. The other is historical, which we would say deals with making arguments from evidence about the past. Based on whatever artifacts remain. Now if you ask your average scientist, they're going to tell you what they do is not rhetorical. It does not involve subjectivity. It does not involve interpretation. There's no need to make an argument like we think of it in the humanities. It's just here are our cues, research questions, hypotheses, the data we're going to examine, the methodology we're going to use. We run the study, we do the experiment, whatever it is. Here's the outcome, here's the possible implications. That's pretty much science. Except when you start talking about the past and things that you can't go back in. observe, which is Darwinian evolution. And it's foisted on us as though it is a proven fact, and we will talk about that a little bit later. It is not a proven fact, it is still a theory, and it's in the realm of historical science. People making arguments about things from the past, how events may have occurred. So, my battery is running out, I hope not. It's always something. I may just have to stand over here. Okay. So, empirical science is equipped, we know, methodologically, to examine nature, right? The natural world. And what do we mean by nature? The natural, physical, material phenomena in the universe. Are you with me? Astronomy, biology, all those sorts of things. Let me switch my batteries in here, maybe that will revive it. And they look for natural causes. Natural cause-effect relationships. Alright, well, I'm out of business. No, I'm not. OK. We do believe in miracles. OK. Historical science, then, is equipped rationally with argument by inference from extant artifacts or existing artifacts. So you're going to look at the evidence observe, make some sort of inference, and then make an argument. So science, at least historical science, is very rhetorical. It does involve interpretation of data. What would be examples? One is the geologic column. Does the geologic column speak for itself? Do fossils, does the fossil record speak for itself? Like Elijah falling on a dead man's bones, right? And they come to life, the fossil record. No? Well, what about cosmic microwave background radiation? Does it speak for itself? No. But these things are there, okay? And so, in terms of historical science, scientists are going to look at these things, think about what we know about the natural world, and they're going to make arguments, right? Well, what about faith, then? And I am operating, obviously, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, personally from a Christian perspective. Faith is the substance or realization of things hoped for, the evidence, confidence of things not seen. Now, you could stop me right there and say, OK, Dr. Howell, there's the problem. That's why science and faith don't go together. Because one is dealing with the natural world, the things that are seen. And one is dealing with the supernatural world, the things that are unseen. They're not even speaking the same language, right? Well, just because we're talking about the supernatural or the metaphysical or the immaterial or the spiritual does not mean that we're not also equipped with what we would call observability and rationality. Faith is not blind, is it? I mean, it can be. You might just say, well, here are the facts, but I'm going to believe this anyway. OK. Sometimes we do have to hope against hope, right? But just because we say it's faith and it's dealing with things unseen doesn't mean that it's blind, right? Think of what the Bible tells us. in the Gospel of John. And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, things they saw that were supernatural, operating outside the laws of nature, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that believing you may have life in his name. Most people don't think about this in terms of faith, but what John is saying here is, here's the evidence. Here's the evidence. We've seen it, right? He does in fact write that later in 1 John. He says, I'm writing to you about that which was from the beginning, talking about from the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. Look, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled concerning the word of life. Welcome. Glad you're here. So faith is oftentimes thought of, well, it's blind faith. You're believing in these things you can't see. My faith is based on things that we're seeing. So don't let the scientific folks tell you that, well, there are really two worlds. Science is the stuff we can trust because it's the stuff we can see, we can verify, we can observe, we can do spin. Faith is, ah, you know. Out there, yeah. And if you have questions about that, if you are where I was at one point in life, well, how do I know I can trust the Bible? Let's talk afterwards, right? Because we do the same kind of thing with the text from the Bible that we do with other classical texts. We try to date them, we look at their reliability. Faith, Dr. John Lennox says, has its reasons. Faith is not blind, nor does Christianity really call us to have a sort of blind faith. So let's think about the limits of science then. As great as medical science has been for us, as great as cures have been for humanity, we learned early in the 20th century that science has its limits. Well, you can use the atomic bomb for energy, or you can use smashing the atom for energy, or you can use it for bombs to destroy all of humanity, right? Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, said that true knowledge is the knowledge of causes. And that's what science is. Looking at cause and effect. Where though? In the natural world. I don't know who did that. I was playing with my PowerPoint. So the idea is that science is what gives us truth. And to a certain extent, science does. Because I can ask you, are there any marsupials on the island of Madagascar? And you can go tell me whether or not that's true, right? Because you can verify it. Now, I don't know if there are. I'll just use that as an example. I could talk to you about sub-sequence rotor dynamics and heat exchange. But that's, yeah, that's about all I know about mechanical engineering. So there are things that we can verify. Here's the problem, though. The statement, empirical verification is truth, cannot be empirically verified as true. But that is the basis of science, that empirical verification is what gives us truth that in itself cannot even be verified. Well, what's going on here? Does empirical verification give us truth? There's no way to empirically verify that claim. Science is not equipped to test for supernatural causes, the supernatural, metaphysical, immaterial existence of cause-effect relationships. So science is limited. If it is not equipped to test for supernatural phenomena, then how can it ever prove or disprove the existence of a God who is spirit, who exists outside of the time-space continuum, who is not matter? Jesus said God is spirit. Can science ever prove or disprove the existence of a spirit? So, if anyone ever tells you science has disproven the existence of God, you can giggle. It says more about their knowledge and understanding, maybe, than it does about your faith. Since the Enlightenment, science has adopted a very staunch and rigid anti-supernaturalist paradigm. So the effort has been to explain everything on the basis of natural, physical, material processes. What does a priori mean? An a priori assumption. Faith. Well, it might involve faith. Would you say that atheism is a faith, a religious belief? Why? Why or why not? Because you have faith that there's nothing. Well, yeah. See? Can you prove or disprove the existence of God? No. So if you say God doesn't exist, that's a faith. Unless you've proven that he doesn't exist. An a priori assumption is something that you just assume. ahead of time. So science, in this anti-supernaturalist paradigm from the Enlightenment, adopted an a priori assumption. There's no supernatural agency for anything. Now maybe that's because they knew that science was limited, we couldn't test for that, but they decided there's no supernatural causes for any natural phenomena. The problem is, that is not a testable hypothesis. Is it? Can science test and verify that there are no supernatural causes for any natural phenomena? Only if they have methodologies for testing the supernatural. And they don't. So they just assume, going into any sort of examination of the natural world, that there's no way No way anything outside of nature could have been a cause for the effect. Have you heard this example, Dr. John Lennox? Why is the water boiling? Why is the water boiling? Say it again. Probably get something like this, right? Well, the stove top is hot, you're at sea level, the heat has reached at least 212 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat's conducted through the base of the kettle, it's agitating the molecules of H2O inside the kettle. Agitation's causing molecules to act like Hokies in their Sandman. They're jumping up and down inside the kettle, right? And so that makes steam, the water's boiling. It makes perfect sense to Hokies, right? Actually, no. Why? The water's boiling because, my former students know, I like coffee. It's boiling because I want a cup of instant coffee. You see? And that's what science does. It removes agency, as Dr. Lennox puts it. The scientific explanation itself of what's going on with the water boiling, why it's boiling, would be absolutely incomprehensible if you didn't put it into the context as to why or how the kettle got on the stove in the first place. Why is the water boiling? Because somebody put the kettle on top of the stove. But the a priori assumption is there's no agent involved. It's just nature. It's just random chance, right? Mindlessness. Random mutation, natural selection, unguided. The problem we have is when scientists talk about explanation, well, first of all, we have to ask, does science really explain anything? Or does it just describe what it observes as phenomena in the natural world? Dr. Lennox says, it's a very sophisticated multi-level concept and narrowly reducing it to mechanistic explanations through naturalistic processes is extremely limiting. And we're on a college campus, right? And we always talk about tolerance and multiculturalism and diversity and intellectual diversity and, well, go ask a scientist, why are you so narrow-minded? What do you think they'll say? No, of course I'm not narrow-minded, right? Well, why do we try to explain everything so narrowly through mechanistic processes? Why do we do that? Could there be other causes? But they're not open to that, right? Well, just because they're not open to it doesn't mean that those causes don't exist. An a priori assumption, right? If you exclude ahead of time, Any possible supernatural causes, will you ever find one? Nope. You never will, because you don't think it's there, and you're not looking for it. And you might just find what you're looking for, and not find what you're not looking for. So do our assumptions affect our science? You bet. We often only hear that as a one-way street, though, right? Well, you're a Christian. You're doing intelligent design. You just want prayer in school, or whatever it is, right? You religious fanatics. as Richard Dawkins says, we're dyed-in-the-wool faith heads and we're immune to argument. No, the problem is you're not open to anything, right, in terms of a supernatural agency. When we privilege science and say that is the only way to truth, well, that automatically excludes anything that's not in the natural world. Time, space, and matter. But God by definition, right, is spirit. So science limits itself in the way it does its science, but there's a further limitation that science has. And Darwin wrote about it himself. Personal correspondence. But then, with me, the whore of doubt always arises, whether the convictions of man's mind which have been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy? Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind? Why would you put a chimpanzee in charge of your laboratory? What is Darwin struggling with there? If we're just descendant from the lower animals, What empirical basis do we have for trusting our own minds? Yours is a little smarter than the gorilla in the zoo, but what does that mean? Even Darwin struggled with that. Well, let's go one step further. The atheist John Gray, in his book Straw Dogs, wrote this, which was especially frightening to many of his fellow atheists, particularly those who were Darwinian evolutionists. Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true, this is impossible. Why? The human mind serves evolutionary success. not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian era that humans are different from all other animals. If Darwinian evolution is true, our minds don't serve truth. They serve one thing, evolutionary success. So why should we trust our minds? And yet, what is science based on? Scientific rationalism. that we can trust our minds to do these experiments and they will lead us to truth. Not so, says John Gray, the atheist. So science is further limited by its embrace of Darwinian evolution. And I should go back and show you one thing, just as an encouragement. Nick, how am I doing on time? Good. Are you sure? Yeah. Just by way of encouragement, is anybody familiar with scientific dissent from Darwinism with this website? If Darwinism's evolution is a proven fact, then we need to ask this question. There are 22 pages here. We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence of Darwinian theory should be encouraged. Who are the people signing this? Well, director for the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, people at the University of Georgia, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, PhD in astrophysics at Princeton University, I won't go all the way through it. If you want the website, I'd be glad to give it to you. Are these just dyed-in-the-wool faith heads who are immune to argument? Do they suffer from the psychological God-delusion that Richard Dawkins says people who don't believe Darwinian evolution suffer from? Look at these. These are PhDs, right? Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University. Texas A&M, my alma mater where I got my PhD. These are not unintelligent or unenlightened people. And they said the evidence is not there for Darwinian evolution. I don't recommend going to the head of the biology department and asking him if he's familiar with this website, but you might mention it over coffee. Okay, as we move to wrap up, I want to think about Is it possible for us to think outside the box? If so, what makes it possible? How can we grasp transcendent truth? Can we? If we do, would we know it? Can our thinking transcend the time-space continuum? Can science provide transcendent truth? Science is not set up to provide transcendent truth. It's set up to look at things that are within the time-space matter universe. Truth, if it is transcendent, is above that. Science won't get us there. And I'll show you in just a minute why we shouldn't even trust our rationality alone. Look at the questions that are beyond the scientific method. How did it all begin? Can the scientific method get us there? No, it can't get us there from here. Is there purpose within nature? Science is not set up to examine for purpose. Right? It's just evolutionary processes, unguided, chance, Natural selection. What about human origins? Can the scientific method get us there? No. What's the meaning of life? What's the point of living? Can science answer those questions? And those seem to be really like the important questions of life. What about God? Eternity? Death? Afterlife? What about heaven? What about hell? Well, there's one thing I think that science and faith can agree upon. No one has seen God at any time. John 1.18. No one has seen God at any time. So scientists, Christians can agree. Science says it's because the supernatural is non-existent. You have to ask yourself the question, can science prove that? No. So they're answering a question that's outside their domain. Faith says God is spirit. That's what Jesus said. How can we know if he's out there? That's the question, is it not? How can we know if he's out there? Will rationalism or science get us there? Doesn't appear so. All right, well let's look at this, so I wrap up. Let's look at this from a different perspective. You ever wish you could read somebody else's mind? I don't know. Yes and no, right? The Apostle Paul asked it this way. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Who knows your thoughts? Have you ever seen a thought? Maybe let's get a little more elemental, essential. Have you ever seen a thought or an idea? Have you ever seen an idea? No? How do I know you have any? How do I know you have any thoughts in your mind? I feel like asking that in a lot of my classes that I teach, but I don't. You all get the final say, right? It's called the spot evaluation student perception of teaching. Thoughts are immaterial. They're meta, physical, right? The mind and science, particularly psychology, has done all it can to erase the idea that we have anything more than a brain. But they're immaterial. Well, for instance, do numbers exist? Well, I don't have a dry erase board, but if I wrote the number two here, you'd say, what is that? You would say, two! Man, they let this guy teach college classes. That's the number two, Dr. Howell. Okay, so if I erase it, then does two cease to exist? Because what I drew up here was a numeral, not the number. It represents the number. So numbers are concepts. Where do concepts exist? In mind. Concepts exist in mind. So the question is, who knows your thoughts? Well, can we know your thoughts? Is there a way that we can know your thoughts? Yeah, talk. Somebody said use words. So you can reveal them to me. Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3. The king is praying. Hamlet's hiding off in the corner. He's listening to him. What does he say? My words fly up. My thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. What is he talking about? Well, can you say one thing and think another? So how do we really know you? How do we know the thoughts of a man? If we who have so much in common, our molecular structure, our human needs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, emotional desires to be long, to be loved, if we can't even understand one another and we are so dependent upon revelation to know other people, why do we think we can put together the scientific method and know God or disprove God? or through our own rationality, figure him out. We have trouble even understanding one another, and we're within the same time-space continuum. He's not, so we're kind of in trouble, right? What about God? What about the mind of God? The deep things of God? Alright, a few scriptures and we'll close. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except whom? The Spirit of God. The natural man, the scientists, the rationalists, the humanists, the whatever. The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God for their foolishness. Hebrew don't rise from the dead. Miracles don't occur. Fishing loaves, feeding 5,000 people. Well, we know that's not true. We do. How? Well, nothing supernatural exists. We've proven that. Have we not? It's foolishness. We privilege our own rationality. We privilege our own scientific methods. We privilege our own ways of examining the time-space-matter universe. And then we say, aha! Nothing outside of what we say exists, exists. And Paul says, that's foolishness. But here's our problem, right? The things of God are spiritually discerned. We can't discern them in our natural minds. So what do we need? We need God to invade the box. We need God to reveal Himself. The way we reveal ourselves to one another. Otherwise, how else are we going to know Him? Again, we have trouble knowing each other. Talk to me. I don't want to talk. Well, how can I know what's going on with you if you won't talk to me? So we say, God. Does God talk to us? Although He existed in the form of God, that is, He was God, one, in essence, with the Father and the Spirit, He didn't regard equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but He emptied Himself. He took the form of a bondservant. He was made in the likeness of men. That is, He was born. He had flesh and blood. The Infinite One, who created time, space, continuum, matter, so that there could be history, He came down and became part of history. How else would we know Him? He didn't have to do it. That's why we call it grace. That's why we call it mercy. That's why we call it love. He became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. The Infinite Creator, Jesus, the image of the invisible God, by whom all things were created, the heavens and the earth, visible and invisible, all things have been created through Him and for Him. He's before all things and in Him all things hold together. The Infinite Creator has made Himself known. No one has seen God at any time, but that's where science has to stop. In faith, we move on. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has what? He's declared Him. He's made Him known. In the Greek, we might read this differently. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm not a Greek scholar. The only begotten God, He was the second person of the Trinity. The only begotten God, right? That's how He could make Him known. He said, I'm going to put on flesh. I'm going to go down there and be one of them. How do I know the thoughts that are in you? You use the same words I use, so I can understand you. So he left the throne where the angels cried day and night, holy, holy, holy. He said, I'll go down and be a part of their finite world, and I will declare God to them. So beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy, even if it is scientific rationalism that can be empirically verified. Beware. It's empty to see. Our own minds at the center of the universe, our own rationality as God, these methods that microscopes and telescopes and whatever sort of scopes that we make, made by men, finite human beings that we make. And then we say, we can prove that there's nothing beyond us. Beware. It leads to conceitedness. And we deceive ourselves. The traditions of men. Well, hasn't science proven that God doesn't exist? If you want divine truth, if you want transcendent truth, don't go to a human source. Don't go to a human source. go to a divine source, the one who has invaded the box. They may know a lot about the basic principles of the world, law of causality, law of, what is it, degrading entropy, the second law, first law of thermodynamics, and all these laws, and they have great brain power, there's no question. But limited by time and space and matter, can they transcend that? to the truth. No. Fortunately, we don't have to. Right? In him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily, that is, in bodily form. He came down and he made himself known to us. Do you have any questions? Yes, sir. What would you say to somebody who used the argument, yes, that's true, you can't see concepts or ideas, but then you can draw them and we can see them and we can communicate them, that's how we know they're real. Well, you're trying to explain to me how sub synchronous rotor dynamics and heat exchange works And I'm not getting it, right? So you draw it Have you revealed it to me? I would say. Whether you use language, verbal or non-verbal, the word became what? So we could understand. So we could see it and hear it and hold it. It had to be revealed. Because if I'm looking at you and you say, buddy, I'm going to tell you how to make potato-less mashed potatoes. And so I'm waiting and you just keep looking at me. I'm waiting, you just keep looking at me like, what are you gonna tell me? And like, I am. No, I can't reach him, I can't get in, right? You gotta reveal it to me. So whether you draw it or use words, right? It's gotta be revealed. Did that answer your question? Yeah, so it's the revelation of Jesus. Yeah, exactly. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. That's why he came. Doesn't mean that God has long hair and beard and he's Semitic. But it does mean that even the wind and the waves obey him. He's not constrained by the laws of nature, right? He is the maker of the laws of nature and he tells them how to operate. How do we know that? What did Jesus do? How else would we know it if he hadn't revealed it?