A Great Conversation on Science and the Church

Every time I talk with Brent Roam, lead pastor of One Family Church in Saint Louis, I come away inspired. This was absolutely the case when I met with him recently (via Zoom), and we discussed how he integrates science into his church's ministries. 

There's a video of the full interview--with an abbreviated version here. This is just a taste of our conversation, on the topic of "mutual curiosity."

(Me) When churches are working out how to connect science and faith, relationships with scientists are key. In the process, it also validates their call to science.

(Brent) I’m definitely always curious about what scientists are thinking and what they’re doing. I want to learn from them and grow by listening. As a result, scientists seem to be interested in what I’m doing as a pastor, like teaching theological ideas—that’s just my normal thing. But it’s interesting because there’s a mutual curiosity there. When we’re genuinely interested and not intimidated, we reap the rewards, not only in the relationships, but also in the sermons and the quality of what we can present to our congregations.

I love that phrase: "mutual curiosity." I find far too many people in our polarized world that find comfort and identity in their "tribe." They stay there and listen to those who create easy and safe boundaries. But how much more we can learn in life when we're curious. How much more when we engage with others in mutual curiosity. 

Why We Need to Bring Science to Church

Since the nonprofit organization I co-direct has a mission of “cultivating a stronger church through meaningful dialogue with mainstream science,” I thought I’d give the key reasons why the task of Science for the Church is strategic and valuable. 

Here are my top five.

1. Why: Because the Church needs a viable Gospel.
   • In their research, the Barna Group found one of the top six reasons emerging adults are leaving the church: They see it as “anti-science.” Too often this perception is accurate, and we need to stop this. Barna also found that 49% of church-going teens believe the "church seems to reject what science tells us about the world."

2. Why: Because, without this dialogue, the church loses the glorious insights of science. With it, the Christian community flourishes.
   • Following Psalm 19, as well as Francis Bacon in the 16^th century, and Francis Collins in the 21^st, we see that God has written two texts: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Since these have one Author, these two books do not contradict. Our task, as the church—as the people who follow Jesus—is to bring together “mainstream science and mere Christianity.”

3. Why: Because this is our heritage as Christians.
   • The Scientific Revolution arose in the Christian west. This, of course, isn’t to say that all of science arose from Christianity (that would discount Muslim science, for example). Still, I will say (along with many others) that the Christian doctrine of God’s creating a cosmos, and not a chaos, means that we can study it and understand it. This is our Christian heritage, and we must not forsake it. It’s also a key part of our American history. I think of the Puritan pastors, like Jonathan Edwards, who, as the most educated people of the day, regularly combined reflection on theology with “natural philosophy” (the name for science in those days).

4. Why: Because the United States needs Christians engaged in the sciences.
   • In order for the country to stay as leader in this world, we need the two-thirds of our population who names Christ, to be pro- science and technology. There are far too many examples of Christians denying science.

5. Why: Because, as people disaffiliate from churches, we need to Christians to be in the world of science and technology.
   • God gathers the church in worship, to be sure, but God also sends out the church scattered. This is naturally an evangelistic task, but also, as Makoto Fujimura calls it, the task of “culture care.”

Those are my top five. How would you prioritize them? Do you have any to add?

A Park Bench in DC and God's Yes (A New Year's Reflection)

The full version of this piece appeared in our Science for the Church website newsletter. Here's an excerpt.

Physicist Charles Townes had a significant problem. 

Towne's (on the left) with the laser he developed

He’d been trying to figure out a solution to a long-standing conundrum of how to create a pure beam of light—one that’s short in wavelength and high in frequency. More than three decades earlier, the great Albert Einstein had in fact theorized that it could be done. But no one had yet managed the feat. And despite Townes’s best efforts, this brilliant young professor hadn’t figured it out either.

It was 1951, and Townes was in Washington, DC waiting for a breakfast restaurant to open. He sat down on a park bench.

I’ve read this story numerous times, and it seems that this brilliant future Nobel Laureate let his mind wander. That morning, he said No to trying and took a moment to pause.

Last week, I looked at the process of quieting ourselves, of taking Sabbaths as a way to renew ourselves. We need to slow down and stop striving. Not only Scripture, but science teaches us that this changes our brain chemistry in ways that allow for new insights.

That’s the practice of saying No. And this week I want to emphasize the Yes. Scripture also tells that No is never the final word. Instead, God wants us to hear a Yes because in Christ 

In Christ “every one of God’s promises is a “‘Yes.’” (2 Corinthians 1: 20) 

And so when we wait for answers, we wait with expectation. As we read in the Psalms,

“I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word, I put my hope. I wait for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.” Psalm 130:5-6

In Townes’s case, God had a profound Yes for this young Christian physics professor as he waited for an answer. In fact, something happened on that park bench fifty-eight years ago—I would say, Townes heard God’s Yes. Here’s how the event was reported:

“On that bench, surrounded by blooming azaleas, the solution came to Townes, then a 35-year-old Columbia University researcher. It involved a flash of bright light, a population of excited ammonia molecules and a mechanism for limiting the wavelengths they could then emit. On the back of an old envelope, he ‘just scratched it out,’ he said of his brainstorm.”

That solution led first to the development of the maser and then the laser, and ultimately Townes’s 1964 Nobel Prize. Few other modern inventions have had the wide-ranging effect of the laser. They are at the core of home DVD players, military rangefinders and altimeters, grocery store bar-code scanner, and police speed detectors, to name just a few applications.

How might we find God speaking to us in 2020? 

In my view, after we’ve made our “No Year’s resolution,” we wait with hope for God to bring a new vision. Put another way, it is a new year, 2020, and a time to say Yes.

Townes listened to the God who can speak a Yes and who guides our lives… especially when we’re listening. He often spoke about this moment as a "revelation." But maybe it's about how he lived and what he was always ready to hear. In an interview with UC Berkeley News, Townes commented that God was present in everything he did: 

“I feel the presence of God. I feel it in my own life as a spirit that is somehow with me all the time.” Nobel Laureate physicist Charles Townes

May we take his words to heart as we begin this new year.

An "Upgraded" Apologetics

This week a piece of mine appeared on the BioLogos website, and I thought I'd give the first two paragraphs and direct you there to read the rest.

When I was a college student at UC Berkeley—and a new convert to Christian faith—my pastor offered this stunning definition of apologetics: 

“Proclaiming the gospel, fully aware of the arguments presented against it.” Presbyterian Pastor Earl Palmer

Honestly, I’m probably paraphrasing Earl Palmer’s insights a bit, but still, I think it expresses the gist of his interpretation of how the church needs to do apologetics. He was talking about C.S. Lewis as an apologist and why he was so effective in the 20th century, and I’m convinced this definition holds for us today. There’s wisdom in moving away from primarily defending the Gospel (which, I admit, is embedded in the Greek word apologia) toward presenting our message with skill. Embedded in our presentation is often a skillful and winsome defense.

And this brings me to the heart of the mission of BioLogos and the question before us: What are the arguments against the Gospel we face today? I am convinced that, if we want to do apologetics in age of science and technology, Christians have to recognize the challenges presented by the arguments swirling around the minds of emerging adults (age 18-30), who are actively leaving congregations in droves and not coming back....

Keeping Faith in a Science-Saturated Culture

Recently, I was asked to answer the question of how Christians keep faith--and even provide a witness--in a science-saturated culture.

I came up with three answers.

First of all, I'd learn from the great scientists in the past and present and be inspired by the heritage of Christians in the sciences.

It’s clear that almost every great thinker of the explosion of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth scientific revolution were deeply affected by the Gospel: Copernicus, Pascal, and Galileo. Does that last name surprise you? At least in part, he was trying to reform the Catholic church of his time so that they would take in the emerging sun-centered (heliocentric) universe, and in the process he made remarkable statements about faith and his scientific work:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

And then, as science continued to develop, great thinkers like Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were both profoundly committed to their Christian faith as they made their mark on 19th-century science. Today this legacy is carried forward by Jennifer Wiseman, who is Senior Project Scientist for NASA’s Hubble space telescope, and by Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project and now heads the National Institutes of Health. 

“I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.” Francis Collins

Second, I'd remember the beauty in reading God’s two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Consider how this comes together in two verses in Psalm 19:

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." Psalm 19:1 

"The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul." Psalm 19:7

These biblical verses speak about these two books, which are complementary (though not exactly the same) and have one Author. God has written the law (or Torah) to direct human life and has authored the natural world, which leads us to see God's glory.

  

Third, I'd continue to learn worship through insights into the beauty and intricacy of the natural world. As the 18th-century theologian and natural philosopher Jonathan Edwards wrote about the beauty in nature: 

“All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.” Jonathan Edwards

The Limits of Science and Religion (Some Jottings)

As much as I like to see them collaborating on key issues, I also admit that both science and religion have limits and cannot answer all questions.

As for science, it’s not clear to me that it can answer moral questions. As I’ve written in Mere Science and Christian Faith (page 141):

Science can inform, but not dictate ethics. 

We need to look to neuroscience to tell us whether, for example, the prefrontal cortex or the amygdala is "lighting up" and that can indicate whether emotions or rationality are in play as we make a decision. But that cannot, by itself, determine what decision to make.

Science is also always embedded in some metaphysics. The brilliant 20th century British astronomer Fred Hoyle was clear to state that he resisted big bang cosmology because it didn't fit with his materialistic metaphysics. And in general, the sciences do not have the capacity—without the help of philosophical reflection—to make statements about meaning and reality. Science studies the natural world and its relations. 

As the world-class physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne commented, this is why science is so powerful.

John Polkinghorne

Science’s success has been purchased by the modesty of its explanatory ambition. It does not attempt to ask and answer every question that one might legitimately raise. Instead, it confines itself to investigating natural processes, attending to the question of how things happen. Other questions, such as those relating to meaning and purpose, are deliberately bracketed out. This scientific stance is taken simply as a methodological strategy with no implication that those other questions, of what one might call a “why” kind, are not fully meaningful and necessary to ask if complete understanding is to be attained.

Similarly, religious insights have their limits (which, I would distinguish, from God's insights, which are infinite). For one thing, every religious tradition assumes some scientific picture of the world and of the nature of reality. As the theologian Harold Nebelsick noted, "to ignore the discussion of today’s science is simply to discuss our faith in terms that are related to the science of the by-gone era.” We should read Genesis 1-3 as a description of God's creation, not as a scientific text. How would early readers grasp the subtleties of big bang cosmology and quantum physics embedded in the creation of the universe?

I'm not sure if this solves every conflict that looms between science and religion, but it could help.

I'll close this image: I love my cats, but when I sit down to read, I don't think they get what I'm doing (partly because they like to jump up and block the book from my sight).

Likewise, these's a great deal that lies beyond my reach intellectually. But I have faith in the God whose insights are way beyond my (or anyone else's) human understanding. 

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”declares the Lord.“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Something New and Fresh in the Multiverse (Another Soul Dialogue)

News flash: Andy Walsh is moderating an online book club about Faith Across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science (read an excerpt here). It's moderated through Joshua Swamidass's Peaceful Science, and you can sign up here.

Andy talking about his book with grad student

(The walk, and dialogue on the soul at Gordon College, continues...)

Bob (my imaginary friend): Greg, what do you think about Andy Walsh's new book?

Greg: Do you have a few minutes for me to spiel a bit? It's a fascinating book...

The best way for me to understand this remarkably different presentation of faith and science in Faith Across the Multiverse is to highlight that Andy Walsh is a “translator.” Why do I arrive at this? We found ourselves together at a lunch meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation in late July where he spoke to a group of graduate students from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF).  Andy commented on the book (and I quote from notes enhanced by memory): 

“This book is full of stories because stories orient us. Theology and science can be abstract, and so I fill this book with narratives from X Men movies. In many ways, Faith across the Multiverseis a translation.” Andy Walsh

(Full disclosure: Andy is a blogger for the Emerging Scholars Network, which received a STEAM grant for which I’m project leader. I felt like I needed to say that.)

Andy’s words reminded me of the one I call Saint Clive—Clive Staples Lewis—and how he viewed translation. As a boy, Lewis never forgot reading the fantasy fiction of a Scottish minister, George MacDonald. 

“In reading Fantasies, my imagination was baptized.” C.S. Lewis

As a result, in Lewis’s fiction and even his non-fiction, Lewis sought to baptize his readers’ imaginations, which implied translation into vernacular images and language. As he once advised Anglican priests and youth leaders, 

“You must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular…. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every ordination examination.” C.S. Lewis

Though not an Anglican priest or youth leader—Andy works as a science writer for IVCF’s Emerging Scholars blog and the Patheos network (among other things)—he still could be earning a St. Clive Certificate of Translation. (To be honest, someday I hope someone will award me one.)

Not saving my quibbles until the end, let me verbalize that translation is hard work. When I comment that there are several pop culture analogies in Faith Across the Multiverse, I’m not overstating. The book truly is replete with X Men, Star Wars, the Justice League, et al. allusions. Though I don’t mind an action hero movie, I’m no fanatic, and sometimes the analogies seemed to me overwrought or simply repetitive. In fact, some I like much better than others, which represents one issue with pop culture—X Mendoesn’t do it for me, and so I preferred the topic of entropy addressed via Joker and Two-Face in Christopher Nolan’s Batmanseries (pp. 120ff.)

But even further, pop culture is not called “high culture” for a reason. It doesn’t always carry more substantive ideas. Do we need to limit ourselves as translators of faith and science issues to what popular media can provide? Do we need to take the scraps, or fast food, from their table? 

I couldn’t entirely suppress these questions. But then again, I’m at least a couple and half decades older than an important demographic. His use of popular media means has remarkable ability to speak to a population that I care deeply about, 18-30 year olds. In an email, Andy told me that the Faith across the Multiverse “might be particularly relevant to emerging adults, as there is also a significant pop culture element. Since both the science and theology can get abstract, I introduce each topic with a sci-fi story to help with accessibility.”

I’ve mentioned several points on presentation, and so I only have space to touch on a few topics.

Again from the email, 

“I find it helpful to think about God's grace using the idea of strange attractors from chaos theory. The hope is that believers might see new value to science in helping them get a fresh perspective on God & Christian teaching, while science-literate folks might find that Christianity makes more sense in these terms. (And, of course, plenty of folks may fall in both categories.)” Andy Walsh

I’d add to this the topics of mathematics, physics, and computer science all play a role. And several of these combinations strike the reader (or at least this reader). That belief in God is axiomatic is generative. His title for chapter 7, for example, that “The Genome Made Flesh” is arresting. His delayed approach to evolution (it doesn’t appear until page 243) is striking, in which he tells the reader that “I was just as surprised as you when I realized it, this entirebook has actually been about evolution” (243). That might surprise his more conservative readers. All in all and as a result, I suspect that most readers will end up learning quite a bit, about pop culture, biblical texts, theology, and a variety of sciences.

I close with this. Having been in the business of studying theology and science books for at least three decades, I find a freshness in Faith Across the Multiverse. It might even be, in the lingo of emerging adults, “legit,” “cool,” “tight,” “sweet,” or “ill.”

So there you have it. Bob, read it and see what you decide.

Bob: Super interesting! Hey, look over there--I see Josh, who's moderating the book club on Andy's book--talking with Steve Moshier. Aren't they both STEAM grantees? Let's head that way.

Greg: Let's do that, and why don't we talk a bit about what Scripture and positive psychology about the soul...

(To be continued...)

Speaking Sense to a Listening World

This post is an adapted form of the message I preached on the Friday following Pentecost at the final worship gathering of the STEAM (Science and Theology for Emerging Adult Ministries) grantees. It summarizes so much about why I believe this engagement of faith and science is critical for the church and for the world.

We closed the worship in a circle singing "Amazing Grace."

The year was 1710, the year (I’m told) that Queen Anne approached the architect Christopher Wren and offered her assessment of his newly finished St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. She declared three simple words: “awful, artificial, amusing.” 

      

To us, who don’t understand the vernacular of 18^thcentury British English, this might sound incredibly offensive. But instead of offense, Wren felt flattered. Her words? “awful” (inspiring awe), “artificial” (full of artistry), and “amusing” (amazing).

      

Which brings me to my central point: It is important to know words at a particular time and context in order to understand their meaning.

My wife Laura and I lived in Germany between my Master of Divinity and my doctorate. It was a glorious year in many ways, and one of the glories consisted in learning the German language. But the subtleties of the complex German language can be tricky. I studied theological texts with my Duden dictionary by my side, sometimes looking up 20 to 30 words a page and writing meanings in the margin. I also had to pick up household German and mastered words, which proved advantageous for everyday life, like Steckdose(electric outlet or socket). One other trick consisted in listening to the radio, and in the process I learned news and how to speak about heavy traffic, or ein Stau,on the A4 autobahn. 

      

One day in fall, Laura got a head cold and didn’t quite know the right word to tell the doctors. I was so excited, and blurted out, “I know—I’ve got the perfect phrase!” And so I taught her. We headed into downtown Tuebingen. She walked up the pharmacist (which in Germany is where some of our medical consults happen) and exclaimed with utter confidence, “Ich hab einen Stau in der Nase!” which essentially means “I have a traffic jam in my nose.” 

Learning the intricacies of any language presents significant challenges. Today, in our scientifically and technologically saturated world, one of the languages in which we are to speak is the language of science. We’ve got to get it right. Let’s look at the text of Pentecost and discover some electrifying truths about the Spirit’s gift of languages that help us speak sense to a listening world.

Acts 2 (NRSV)

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.² Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³ They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 

         ⁵ Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. ⁶ When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. ⁷ Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? ⁹ Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome ¹¹ (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” ¹² Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

The pouring of the Spirit

From this text, we learn three major truths: the first two I will only outline, but the third I will develop at greater length.

      

The pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost is the birth of the church. Put simply without the Spirit, the church has no life. And sometimes it’s better to know the Spirit through what the Spirit does. And what does the Spirit do? Create in the Christian community two fluencies.

The Jewish celebration of Pentecost, also called the Feast of Weeks, celebrated the giving of the law. Notice in verse 2 that the Spirit comes in the style of God’s appearances from the Hebrew Scriptures. Just like when God came “a whirlwind” to speak to God (see, for example, Job 38:1). Here too the Spirit comes “with a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” 

      

The second aspect to notice is a contrast with the Hebrew Bible. There, the Spirit was given to specific people at specific times for specific tasks (such as with Othniel in Judges 3:1). In this case, verse 4 says, “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” Not just some, but all. This is very important: the Spirit is given to the young and the old, to women and men, to slaves and to free.

A fluency in the Gospel

The first fluency is a fluency in the fundamentals of the Good News about God’s work in Jesus Christ. This is a critical task for any church.

      

If you want to experience this fluency, read ahead. See what story Peter tells in verses 14-36: the fulfillment of prophecy in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and especially the call to respond to this message. That’s fluency in the Good News of Jesus the Christ.

A fluency in dialects

But I'm focusing on the second fluency: learning the native language of those who have not yet heard the Gospel. This theme I would like to develop most of all.

      

It has been said that we all tell jokes, experience pain, swear, and dream in our native language. The Spirit leads the church to speak languages that outsiders can understand. This is the “fluency in the culture.” But in this passage, the abiding meaning is that God wants us to speak the vernacular, the “native language” (verse 8) that people can understand. (Notice as well the related word, translated as “tongues,” appears four times in the passage.) 

            

The impressive biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall, in his commentary on the book of Acts, sets out an answer to the question, How could Galileans speak in all the people’s languages?

“It has been objected that probably most of the crowd would speak Aramaic or Greek, the two languages which the disciples would also speak, and that therefore the miracle of tongues was unnecessary. But this difficulty must surely have been obvious to Luke also. What was significant was the various vernacularlanguages of these peoples were being spoken.”

Most of people coming to Jerusalem would have known Greek or Aramaic, but here God leads the church to speak in the common language of each person. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists and others tell us that language is the root component of who we are. God is communicating here that we aren’t simply known by the God as “a person,” but as Siri, or as Michelle, or as Ron, or as Melissa, or John.

      

This means we have to work hard to get the words just right. As Mark Twain once quipped, the difference between the right word and almost right word is the contrast between “lightening” and “lightening bug.”

      

I believe one of the main areas today is the language of science. Let’s make sure we find the right words.

The language we dream in

The first time I preached this message was at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City on Sunday School recognition Sunday. Why did the topic concern me and what did it have to do with the day? I thought of my then-5 ½ year old daughter Melanie. You see, she often mentioned to Laura and me, “I want to be a scientist.” (In fact, just last year she graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University with a degree in anthropology.) Here’s the problem: as a scientist in our congregation once said about much of natural science today: “They’re atheists, and they have the best science.” I never wanted my daughter, or any other church kid for that matter, to be forced to decide to between good science and her faith. I don’t want any of the Sunday school children to have to split their Christian faith from their thinking.

The angular effect of ethical engagement

Speaking the language of technology and science means that sometimes we in the church have to speak challenging, ethical words because science does not have within it the ability to boundary itself. 

      

During those WWII years, the Nazi regime had very few resisters. One of the few was the small Confessing Church in Germany led by the theologian Karl Barth. They said a distinct No to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews because—as they put it—Jesus Christ is the “One Word we have to hear and to obey in life and in death.”

      

One young physicist expelled from German was Albert Einstein who later said of the Barmen declaration. (I’d like to think it’s possible he reflected on as he walked past my alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary on Mercer Street on his way home.) He made this observation:

“Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

Work out all y'all's salvation

I conclude by turning to a final text, Philippians 2:12-13 (NRSV):

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;  for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Just so we understand this passage, this is about not working for our salvation, but about working out our salvation. It’s not a faith versus works text. The verb katergazomai means to “work out the implications.” Work out what God has worked in. Even more interesting, in this passage, the Greek word for “you” in verse 13 is plural, and “salvation” is singular. In other words—and here I’ll lean what I’ve learned from the Southern dialect: “All y’all, work out your singular salvation.”

      

What does that look like? 

• What does speaking the language of science and technology mean when you’re sharing the Gospel in light of evolutionary science in Canada, or witnessing to the integration of mainstream science and mere Christianity on Facebook?
• What does it look like when you’re ministering to students at Cal Tech, NYU, and the University of Madison?
• What does engage faith and science sound like in the dialects of Oklahoma City, Nashville, and New York City?

I don’t entirely know. I’m not in your contexts. I don’t know your specific dialects. So you tell me.... Or better, you tell them--those to whom you’ll go back to after this conference.

      

And so I close with this prayer: May you STEAM grantees know the Power of the Spirit to speak languages that a listening world wants to hear. May it be so. Amen.

Thinking Like a None

Last week I stopped by setting out questions from the nones (i.e., those who profess no religious affiliation). In a way, since I’m a Christian, this is an act of imagination. But in another, it’s clearly not. I grew up in a non-religious environment. This leads to a number of things, but one is that I often fall prey to thinking that God might just be inside my head. (This I learned from the 19^thcentury philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach that we make a god in our image.)

As I post this blog I've briefly snuck of out a conference this week. This event has brought together over 50 leaders in Christian ministries throughout the United States, with a couple in Canada, who have received money through I grant I manage (called STEAM) to bring together Christian faith and mainstream science, especially as it relates to the lives of 18-30 year olds.

Conference of STEAM grantees

The current cultural moment is important. We are grasped by a culture war that pits one side against another—one that holds to traditional Christian values against radical secularist, atheist, scientific values. The first rejects the science behind climate change and evolution, and other ungodly ideas in order to assert beneath mainstream science lurk forces that are anti-God. This is certainly the case with the more radical elements of the science and religion like Answers in Genesis, who teach that the earth is only thousands of years young, but even the more intellectually credible Discovery Institute who often complain—in shorthand—that scientific agencies like the NAS and AAAS are “out to get them.”

If this were a real dichotomy and I were thinking like a none, I know the choice I’d be forced to make. I’d go for the truth we find in science and conclude that Christianity has nothing to offer. I’d say, I want to go where the evidence is. I want to support people who believe in a planet for future generations and the best description of how we as humans came to be. 

Thankfully, there are other options.

Thinking Like the Devil's Advocate

Many don’t appreciate the role of “The Devil’s Advocate.” But that’s the part I’m going to play in this post. So it’s important to set things straight.

The first thing to grasp is that Devil’s Advocate or (Advocatus Diaboli in Latin) is a

Reeves as lawyer (or advocate) for the Devil (Pacino)
Not what I'm talking about here

technical position in the Roman Catholic Church. To clarify, I’ll let the online Catholic Encyclopedia do some heavy lifting. 

"A popular title given to one of the most important officers of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, established in 1587, by Sixtus V, to deal juridically with processes of beatification and canonization. His official title is Promoter of the Faith (Promotor Fidei). His duty requires him to prepare in writing all possible arguments, even at times seemingly slight, against the raising of any one to the honours of the altar."

And though I believe in the importance of integrating mainstream science with mere Christianity, I thought I’d think like the Devil for this post (and maybe the next one) and pose some demanding questions. They aren’t entirely a surprise, many make their way into Mere Science and Christian Faith and are part of my research for an upcoming book, Science and Religion in the United States: The Present State and Future Directions.

Nevertheless, what are the toughest issues facing science and Christian faith? Here are four categories.

1. Evolution: To paraphrase Jesus (cf. Mark 14:7), “Evolution you will always have with you.” In fact, it may represent an eternal hot button issue. (In fact, some say that by accepting evolutionary theory we may be placing ourselves in an eternally hot place. That seems to me like hyperbole.) Since I, listening to the consensus of mainstream science, don’t see this is a theory that has guided scientific research in a variety of fields for almost 160 years going away, I have a question or two. What does it mean to assert that God creates through evolutionary processes? What do we do with those who see this as contradictory to God’s creation? How does this make us, as homo sapiens, nothing entirely special in the animal kingdom?
2. Sexuality/LBGTQ: We used to think science wasn’t that sexy, now that’s changed. Whenever I talk about science with emerging adults, I hear the questions like, “Doesn’t science tell us that we don’t choose to be gay?” Is it true that the church that doesn’t embrace gay and lesbian Christians appears ignorant? 
3. Genetics: Let’s just take one example: CRISPER gene editing represents a powerful means of changing ourselves through gene therapies in ways that will affect future generations. Why not use this technology for the good? Why is the church standing in the way like they’ve always done? And in general, are we “nothing but” our genes? 
4. Cognitive science and neuroscience: Functional Magnetic Imaging Resonances (FMRIs) seems to show some fairly clear things about what happens inside our noggins. As the Harvard scientist Stephen Pinker asserts, “I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder-principle.” Does science rid us finally believing there’s a soul? Is God all in our heads? Or even more, is my thinking and feeling—the components that make me—simply a physical process like digestion? 

This heads in a slightly different direction, but I like it...

The Catholic dictionary continues on the role of the Advocatus Diaboli, 

“The interest and honour of the Church are concerned in preventing any one from receiving those honours whose death is not juridically proved to have been ‘precious in the sight of God.’”

In closing, I sense deeply that I may be able to formulate some questions and a few responses, but the horizons are beyond my vision. I know I need colleagues on this journey. Even more, I hope that’s what I’m trying to do here as the Advocatus Diaboli for the integration of mainstream science and Christian faith. Let’s not declare honorifics on too easy resolution. Maybe this work is even precious in the sight of God.

What do you think? Are there tough questions about Christian faith and science that you’d like to post below?

A Parable That Arrived A Bit Too Late

I have to admit that not every great idea in my head made its way into Mere Science and Christian Faith. (And I'm sure some bad one inserted themselves. I just don't know which ones they are!) 

There’s a parable that arrived after the book was published, but that's found its way into almost every talk I’ve done since its publication. (For example, you can find it in this interview.) In this “laying alongside of two things”--the technical definition of a parable--I draw from my experience in two academic institutions: a marvelously secular ivory tower, the University of California at Berkeley, and an icon of rigorous theological scholarship, Princeton Theological Seminary.

The comment below from Mere Science and Christian Faith presents a convenient springboard for my parable:

“I’ve discovered, for the Christian message to have any impact today, it must engage science. To appropriate the term Lewis made famous, mere Christianity needs to meet mainstream science. That’s why I’ve focused much of my life’s work on science and faith. Moreover, since I’m trained in theology and biblical studies, I can help sort out whether scientific insights and assertions are neutral, helpful, or antithetical to our faith.”

But why “mainstream science”? 

And--with a quick glance at last week's topic--why not take alternatives to the mainstream like the research programs of Intelligent Design or Creation Science, paths which some Christians follow?

Here’s why. 

At Berkeley, when, as an undergrad, I first start studying the history of ideas and the great questions that literature and philosophy have presented, I decided to be sure I learned ancient Greek, and more specifically Attic Greek (around the 4^thcentury BC), namely the language that was spoken in Athens around the time of Aristotle and Plato, and the sort that encompassed koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. I wanted to read the sacred scripture of Christianity in its original language. And I can tell you that by my senior year of college, I found myself in an independent study with two other students and a professor, sitting together in a dusty room in Dwinelle Hall on Cal’s campus, reading the Gospels in the original. It was profound. It was intellectually challenging. And it was an almost overwhelming gift.

The next four years I owned and managed a small business (and tried to keep my Greek active). At the end of that life chapter, Laura and I sensed that it was time for me to pursue a dream of studying theology, the Bible, and a host of other things for a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so we got our U-Haul, and with some friends, moved across country. I found myself almost immediately in biblical studies.

Here’s the thing: When I started investigating the New Testament at Princeton, the Greek I learned at UC Berkeley—this glorious cathedral to liberal secular thought—the Greek (its grammar, vocabulary, syntax, et al.) was exactly the same. In fact, I carried the same Nestle-Aland Greek-English Bible that I used at Cal. There were no concerns that now I had to learn some new “heavenly” Greek in my divinity studies. Princeton trusted the education at Cal in a critical tool for understanding our most sacred writings.

And so I look at the grand consensus that mainstream science has forged—a consensus built on great theories like special and general relativity, and the related theories of gravity, as well as the weird world of quantum mechanics, and the theory of evolution, all of which have been around for at least 100-150 years, and I ask myself, 

“Why is it that people go to seminaries or to churches and learn a different form of thought from mainstream science? Why don’t our theological voices trust the sciences to offer an accurate picture of the world when we trust the science of classical Greek studies to offer us the tools to study the most sacred texts, the words that bring us to the knowledge of Jesus Christ?”

I’m not sure I can answer my own rhetorical question except to affirm that’s why I seek to engage mainstream science with mere Christianity.


P.S. I've switched the date for my posts to Thursdays instead of Mondays.