Bias in the Scientific Community | Dr Tour & Dr Sy Garte Discuss His New Book

that's false that whole dichotomy of either you're a christian or you hold to science but the two can't go together that is a false meme [Music] welcome to the science and faith podcast with dr james tour i'm dr james tour and i'll be your host and you can find out my professional credentials at jmtour.com uh or you could see see uh more about my social social media at drjamestour.org that's drjamestour.org and uh uh the the uh my producer for this podcast as well as a lot of my my newer videos is eric herron and uh he's with philosopherfilms.com i'm a practicing scientist i don't just talk about science most of my day is doing science most of my days mornings nights it's doing science and uh but i love jesus more than anything else in the world i just love jesus and i'm not afraid to say it and and uh i'll proclaim it hopefully till the day i die that that i love jesus more than anything else and if you do not know about the resurrection and if you do not believe in the physical resurrection of jesus christ and you'd like to know why this scientist believes in the physical resurrection of jesus christ i would love to spend an hour with you now this is not for believers this is not for people that believe in the physical resurrection this is for a person that does not believe in the physical resurrection of jesus christ i give you an invitation send me an email to to tour that's t-o-u-r at drjamestor.org tour at drjamestore.org and i will respond to you and we will get together for one hour uh it might be less than an hour it certainly doesn't take more than an hour and i'll tell you about how i came to believe in the physical resurrection of jesus christ the evidence that i've seen and and why i believe in that and i'd love to be able to tell you that story so with that i'm going to start by introducing our guest and our guest today is sai gart inside is a phd and has a phd in biochemistry and he's the author of the award-winning book the works of his hands a scientist's journey from atheism to faith and i have gone through this book and read this book and it is a good book and i'd suggest it that you get this book and uh little bit more about psy he's he's been a tenured professor at new york university rutgers university and the university of pittsburgh he's been the division director at the center for scientific review at the national institutes of health and the interim vice president for research at the uniformed services university of the of health sciences he's currently a visiting professor of pharmacology and toxicology at rutgers university he's published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and he's written five books as well as articles on science and christian faith in periodicals such as perspectives in science and christian faith more to life and christianity today and he's been on numerous podcasts and youtube channels he's presently dr garth is presently serves as editor-in-chief of the american scientific affiliations asa's online quarterly magazine god in nature and also as vice president for the washington dc metro chapter of the asa he's a member of the board of advisors for the john templeton foundation and dr gart became a christian later in life and is now a certified lay servant of the united methodist church in rockville maryland so welcome psy to the podcast thank you it's great to be here thanks for having me here and my first question to you is why do you even as a scientist why do you believe in something as amazing as the physical resurrection of jesus christ yeah um well you know i didn't always as you said i came to faith later and later in life in my middle age uh but when i began and we'll talk about this probably a bit more when i began seeing the possibility of god the possibility of theism being true i began investigating this the claims about jesus christ and i found them amazingly convincing intellectually i found that you know all the the eyewitness testimony that's recorded uh the rapid spread of christian faith in those early days and and all the other testimony that we've heard from so many people in so many books was very convincing to me but the real reason the true reason that i absolutely am certain that jesus christ was who he said he was is that i experienced him in my life jesus jesus visited me in dreams and in other experiences which are discussed in the book you mentioned and at a certain point it became undeniable and as soon as that happened and i confessed to myself out loud that i do believe i am a believer that the the transformation was instantaneous and overwhelming i had a sense of amazing joy relief understanding and just uh i don't know how to put it it was it was transformative and uh i've never gone back since then and you know to me there's no question it's not something that needs to be thought about there's no question that jesus christ was who he said he was he's he's a part of the trinity of god and uh he is uh he's everything well there you go and he's he's everything to me i love to hear that and i think that it's important for people to hear that that um uh you've published a lot of scientific articles 200 over 200 peer-reviewed articles so you're a real scientist you're not somebody who just talks about science you actually do it because there's a lot of people out there that talk about science and that's great i think it's great to have lots of people talking about science but you are a practitioner of science and you've been teaching biochemistry and you've been talking about it i want to go to your book and i want to read different different portions and we're not following along the order of the book i've taken out things and that i just found interesting and i want you to i'll read this and then you just expand upon it so you wrote while most of the material in this chapter played no transformational role in my faith journey it could play such a role for some readers let me before you answer before you expand on that let me just pull out something else that you wrote you wrote this students who were on the verge of rejecting christianity who felt forced to choose between their faith and the science they were learning in college have found a third way a way to see that you can be a christian and a scientist pastors struggling to keep their congregations aware but not afraid of the blows from the secular society that use science as a weapon to create doubt have come to see with renewed vigor the compatibility of christian faith with the reality of science youth leaders church lay leaders and seminary students have seen the value of the evolutionary creationist message agnostics and people of spiritual yearning who had shunned christianity because of fears of being trapped in an anti-scientific worldview have found an evolutionary creationism the path to allow the joy of god's grace to fill their souls without any sacrifice of their reason so i read two portions one short one a little bit longer talk okay uh let me start with the second one um the purpose there was to explain the reason that i wrote the book and who my target audience was i have been dismayed as i know you have been uh whenever i hear of a student or a young person who grew up in christian faith which i didn't have the opportunity to do but i and these students then say well you know i was i believed in that until i got to school until i got to college and i learned science and you know i i was told and i see that science disproves all of that the bible is wrong jesus christ could not possibly have risen etc and so now i've given up my faith and this happened innumerable times and it's still happening as we know and and that and that group was my target audience that's who i felt i was writing to and my main message is exactly what you just read uh you that's that's false that whole dichotomy of either you're a christian or you hold to science but the two can't go together that is a false meme that is very prevalent in the world i i was at a meeting recently not recently but a short while ago when um it was it was just a open discussion in the community by scientists to explain signs to the public and there was a physicist speaking and uh somebody asked a question and uh the question had some theological overtones to it and the physicist said something like well you know um i don't know why you're you're raising that and the and the person asking the questions said well i'm a christian but i'm also you know i also am a physicist and the speaker said really that's amazing and i i that was so disturbing to me because you know i have come to know thousands literally thousands of scientists who are faithful christians the the organization you mentioned the american scientific affiliation is an organization of christians who work in science most of them are professors in geology biology chemistry physics and they're all they're all christians and this idea that you you can't be a scientist and have faith in god and follow jesus is just false and and that's the message i want everyone to know and uh yes i hear the same thing i hear the same thing and and this is this is why i wanted you to pull this out because young people need to hear this that you can be a christian walking closely with jesus and be a scientist and a very good scientist publishing the top papers these are not exclusive to one another right absolutely and and i think we and many others are our testimony to that i mean i know in addition to yourself i know quite a few very well respected very well-known uh scientists in their fields i just mentioned francis collins who is you know the head of the nih uh who are devout christians and i know several others nobel prize winner uh bill phillips who is a methodist and you know won the nobel prize in physics so you know this is this is an important message to get across and it could go even further than that frankly because and this is something i don't know if we'll get into or not but i've found recently that there's a lot of science denialism not among christians but among atheists because a lot of the science the kind of science effect that you and i are working on with on abiogenesis and and the basic nature of life many atheists are denying the basic scientific facts that have been accepted for decades like the genetic code and the nature of the genetic code and and so i think what's happening is science is is actually moving in a in a slightly theological direction how much is hard to say but it's getting very annoying to those atheists who think and they're not scientists they're the atheists who think that you know science is the antidote to religion it's the word they often use in fact it's just the opposite it may become clear soon that uh science is actually a buttress to christian faith and it's the atheists who are going to turn out to be the ones i believe who are anti-science yeah well we're going to get into that more that's exactly right that's exactly right let me let so let me let me go back to this other short statement while most of the material in this chapter played no transformational role in my faith journey it could play such a part for some readers and i came to the lord at the age of 18. i just turned 18 and uh when i heard the gospel a few months after that i came to the lord and it was not a scientific thing that drew me in it was an experience with jesus christ when i asked him into my life and to ask him to forgive me and and uh um so you know some people get this impression that you know as i studied science i saw something in the the it can be that way most people that i know it came more through the heart than through the head and i think that that's what you're suggesting but you're also just suggesting that through the head people are getting drawn astray so carry carry along that thought for me yeah i i agree completely with what you said jim and i and i think the way i would put it is and what happened with me was that uh what i learned in science turned me away from the dogma that i had previously learned the dogma was that everything is materialistic everything is reductionist naturalism can explain everything easily and what i learned in science turned me away from that and broke down that that uh resistance that i had to even think about the possibility of god and uh and that's important because there are many people who suffer the same way as you just said who just think well okay um no i i may have had a good experience or i may maybe somebody brought me to church and i was impressed but science tells me no it's impossible and that's what has to be broken down first i was i was i had experiences with the holy spirit my whole life the most impressive one when i was 16 and i just ignored them or i just literally said to myself no that can't be true that can't be real they were real but i wouldn't accept it because of this wall that i had built against the possibility of believing in god and when i began learning about you know modern physics and modern biology uh i saw wait a minute uh that that's not correct what i what i thought it's not true that science gives us a purely materialistic worldview view there's a lot of things in modern physics that sort of shape that idea so uh that was helpful to me but you're right it did not bring me to faith it what brought me to faith was intervention direct intervention by the holy spirit i mean the way i sometimes put it is he grabbed me and he pushed me across the threshold and i had no choice once i was past that threshold it was clear that you know the truth was the truth and i saw a close friend of mine rick smalley the discoverer one of the three discoverers of c60 buckyball and ryan who ushered in you know a real push in nanotechnology i saw rick go from being quite antagonistic to coming to the lord and many people think it came through the head no for rick it came right through his heart something touched him in his heart and then you know he started thinking more about this in in in in deeper terms so yeah this is this is a a a a constant pattern okay so this and let me let me also continue along this thought that that god often touches the heart we get it drawn astray very often by by pulling us from from the mind but this whole idea that that science is now bumping up against what was formerly called the metaphysical uh we see this for example in nde near-death experience where people who die for five minutes and they're they they flatline for five minutes and this happens now i i listened to a presentation by somebody who'd interviewed hundreds of people have gone through near-death experiences and it's across the board different religions atheists christians hindus and and there's some common features there's uncommon features but mysterious things happen people see themselves raising up out of their bodies you say well this is their imagination well they described things on the tops of shelves that were in the hospital room that they could not have seen when they were lying down on a gurney then they described going up and they described things that are on the roof of the hospital that they could never have seen and then they check it out yes these exact things are on the roof there are things that happen that scientists have no explanation for and and uh so really science is is is really bumping up against things that we that it really cannot explain and we're going to get into this more through some statements in your book but i think you'd agree with this absolutely absolutely yeah i think i think there's a lot that that we're discovering in every branch of science that makes you scratch your head at least or makes you wonder well that we're missing something here we have it's it's not all easily explained that's for sure yes and and and let me let me just tell tell the audience here because it didn't come out in in that that very short vignette that you gave us about your testimony is that and and you can correct me if if i'm if i'm wrong he he's a jew but his parents were were communists which is not that uncommon for people that that that uh were were kind of grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in the united states that you had the the intellectual class that that kind of thought communism was going to be this big savior of everything and he grew up in a home like that and he's not speaking from a young man that grew up in a christian home it was actually just the opposite yeah uh my family were were atheists and communists going back three generations my grandparents were atheists uh and communists all four of them and so were my parents and so were all my uncles and great uncles and everyone else uh and uh and that's how i grew up so i i was taught that you know comrade stalin was the greatest man who ever lived and uh you know christianity was the worst evil that had ever appeared on earth uh all religion was bad i never had any rel i didn't even know i was jewish frankly the first few years of my life i never went to hebrew school did any any hop no holidays at all we gave presents on new year's day because that's what they did in the soviet union they gave presents to kids on new year's day so that's when i got my presents uh so yeah i was about as extreme as you could get and uh i absorbed all of that and remained an atheist a very strong atheist uh in through my 30s i i dropped the communism part much earlier but uh you know the atheism lasted longer and and what you know it's very hard to break out of a dogma like that that that dogma that i learned was uh just you know from early childhood was very difficult to break out of and that's one of the things that contributed to my to my wall of of you know resistance yes yes so so um let me let me read a couple of more statements and then then talk about this you wrote in your book life was designed by the creator it is divine design not intelligent design and the mechanism by which life was designed and created are not currently within our ability to understand i prefer to characterize what we see behind the creation of the universe and of life on this planet as divine design not intelligent design yeah i i take exception with the term of intelligent design because it implies that god is intelligent i think god is way beyond intelligent i know a lot of intelligent people as do you uh and god is is is not an intelligent you know person god is way ahead of that and intelligent design itself i think is interesting has some very interesting ideas i'm not completely opposed to it i think some of their ideas are good especially related to the origin of life uh but my problem with intelligent design is the lack of a uh a positive scientific explanation so it's not for me it's not enough simply to attack evolution although i will say that there are parts of evolutionary theory that are difficult and you know may need to be changed and they need to be you know revised but it's you have to do more than that you have to actually propose an agenda and i think that's important and i call it divine design because that implies that we may never understand how life came to be and how life is what the way it is because we can never understand the mind of god and if that's the case i don't know if it is or not but i have a feeling it might be that i think the divine design is the right term because god designed our life the origin and and the evolution of life to result in us in a way that uh maybe beyond our our human understanding and even understanding ourselves human consciousness look what we're doing right now i mean you know how many chimps have have you know done a podcast recently you know it's not something any other animal could do or could dream of doing or have an understanding of where we're something different and of course that goes along with being made you know especially in the image of god as the bible says and that image of god gives us an ability to know that god exists to worship god but it doesn't allow us to look that closely into the mind of god there are still many mysteries we don't know about how god created and what his intentions were and so i like to call it divine design and then explore it as much as we can and i think that's worth doing good good you know you know uh uh it it's it's uh this this statement that you wrote this this paragraph you that i'm about to read fits right into this these things that you were saying the things that we don't know you say you wrote in short i had reached the point where my certainty that there was nothing in the universe that could not be scientifically described was gone many of the arguments against theism seemed no longer valid i now find it interesting that even though this became clear to me while i was still an atheist i didn't believe in god many anti-theists those who believe theism is rational or evil continue to use those same tired arguments they claim that belief in a deity is irrational for example or that miracles defy science these claims cannot possibly hold water when science itself tells us that the universe is not rational and that much stranger things than miracles are everyday occurrences wow you got to tell us about this okay right so yeah there's a lot in there but i think the the bottom line is this describes the the what what i mentioned before is the breaking down of my resistance to the idea of god to the idea of anything supernatural or or miraculous or spiritual and you know at one point i actually i was still i think an atheist or maybe becoming an agnostic i wrote a little essay about mysticism in fact jewish mysticism in fact because i had just been reading a book about uh jewish mysticism and as i read it it sounded very familiar and then i i began reading um some uh works on on the you know the the i guess the tao of physics was one book i read which was about you know how quantum mechanics uh implies some aspect of spirituality that might exist and i put the two together and i said you know you you can you can write a paragraph where the the key person is is a mystic and then you can change mystic to scientist and you have the same paragraph because what they're looking at is the deep reality of the world and in one case we call it physics and in the other we may call it metaphysics but the words describing the experience and the methodology to some extent and the ways of thinking are not that different and that's that struck me as sort of a revelation now i had not yet become a believer when i wrote that but it made me think you know maybe maybe all of this uh anti-mysticism anti-spirituality which i had learned as a child was just completely wrong and you know uh the whole idea of the uncertainty principle of you know wave functions collapsing the observer effect these things are not part of a reductionist materialistic universe these are things that we don't understand philosophically we we can't really grasp them and i i recently read something by the physicist sean carroll who's a pretty strong atheist who said that you know the the way physics students learn this is um they see something that's kind of strange and uh like the schrodinger equation with its wave function and they're told shut up and calculate and that's all we have to do don't think about what this all means you know what what it means that in fact reality is based on probability you know there's a probability that the electron is here rather than here it's not here and it's not there there's a probability that it's in these places and that you know even einstein didn't like that but but it's true i mean it's real fact and uh what are the implications of that so that's what i started thinking about and when i said that the universe is not rational what i meant was rational the way we used to think of rational so if we went back to the to the heyday of physical science let's say in the very late 19th century when people were still thought they had really figured everything out there was not much else left to do in scientific research except a few decimal points and the only problem they had was this issue of the speed of light you know they couldn't understand how the speed of light could be constant and if we went back there and told them well you know what guys it turns out the speed of light is constant because time is not constant time gets slower and faster and then we told them you know you the the electron is not in any particular place until you actually measure it and then it's integral they would have said to us well you're crazy that's completely irrational that's nonsense and the fact is this science does not stay constant even the methods of science are not constant they change okay so the quantum mechanic people had to use different mathematics you know that with all these operators and uh lagrangians and all these mathematics that were new and then they were able to make progress and i believe that's exactly the case for biology and biochemistry we've gotten to a point where we can't really go much further in understanding the basic fundamental principles of life like how it began unless we expand our scientific methodology and our scientific paradigm to include things that so far have been forbidden well i i i really i really resonate with this that the the universe is not rational in much stranger things than miracles are everyday occurrences so when i hear for example people talk about the origin of the universe from a point everything happened from the from nothing all of this happened and there was a big burst in all of this and everything started shooting out from this one point that kind of sounds like a miracle to me yeah this is uh a really miracle and people will now speak of this as oh this is this is well known this is well accepted yeah and then but nothing else miraculous but jesus rising from the dead no that could never happen but but uh all of this from nothing no problem no problem now let me uh let me touch on something else so you know i think that it is harder for me to grasp evolutionary theory than it is for you because you're a biologist and i'm an organic chemist and and uh i just know how hard it is to get molecules to do things and my experience is biologists have been using something that is so amazing biological chemistry and they're used to just mixing things and seeing amazing things happen whereas a synthetic as a synthetic chemist i look at that and i say this is extraordinary that biology can do this this is extraordinary try to get try to get uh molecules to do this type of thing i mean we we haven't the the foggiest idea how good could do this and so then when i start probing evolutionists for more details they start telling me stories i say tell me more how did you come to that conclusion how does that happen and then they start to tell me a story and they tell me some grand story and then i say well that can't be right because of such and such they go okay well what it could have done is this and then it's a different story and it's all accepted now what you do is is you you kind of play with this idea of storytelling and so i'm going to read a paragraph that you know that you wrote and and you were being facetious so i just i just want to alert the the the viewers that you're being facetious when you write this and and you know this this is typical professor play i mean you you professors do this type of thing here's what you wrote take for example the well-known human tendency to bite one's fingernails when nervous we could say that long fingernails presented an impediment to the manual dexterity needed to properly wield a weapon and therefore when nervous humans human tends to be sure that his or her fingernails are as short as possible this is complete nonsense that i just made up without any more than a moment's thought about about it but that it sounded good in other words this is the kind of talk that i hear from evolutionists and so you say what why do why do humans bite their fingernails they bite their fingernails because you had to yield a weapon and you wanted your fingernails to be short so they didn't get in the way and so this is why humans do that i'm telling you psy this is the type of thing that i get from evolutionists and as as as a physical scientist as a chemist it's very hard for me to grasp it and i even ask students sometimes when they're at giving a presentation saying how does that happen they they'll show something amazing that happens in the biological world how does that happen how did they go well all this is came about evolutionarily and because they said evolutionarily i'm supposed to go oh i see i bow down now i understand once you say evolution i've got to accept it and the student doesn't know doesn't realize that they don't know anything about this and you can't just throw out that term evolutionarily and have it accepted so based on what you wrote based on my experience help me out here yeah that's great i'm really glad you brought this up um you know i am an evolutionary creationist which means i believe that god used evolution to create the diversity of life we see but what i'm always trying to do on youtube on online everywhere including in the book and things i write is explain to people that evolution explains some things and not others here's what it can explain it could explain obviously microevolution everybody agrees with that you know even young earth creationists do it can explain speciation in in a way that's sort of an extension of microevolution but the most important thing is what it does not explain it does not explain anything about what happened before the arrival of the last common universal ancestor l-u-c-a luca and luca we know i mean we know this because every cell that now exists has the same properties of leuca that's why it's called the last universal ancestor but luca was an amazingly complex organism it had it had a genetic code the genetic code it had dna it had a protein synthesis machinery that is unimaginable we no human could ever come up with such an incredibly complex design uh it had excuse me i had energy conversion systems it had photosynthesis it had all kinds of metabolic pathways it was full of enzymes which are incredible catalysts i don't have to tell you about catalysts uh you know incredible catalysts unseen in the in the non-living world with specificity and efficiency you know thousands of times beyond anything else all that was already present how did it get there we don't know it's very simple we don't know and and you've been saying this for for a long time so i'm talking about after we have all the molecules which you often talk about how we after we have rna after we have peptides after we have nucleotides even after all that how it all gets put together in these complex systems and you have a living cell we don't know so evolution doesn't cover that because all of those systems are required for evolution to work and here's a very important point when you talk to evolutionists or anybody else what is evolution they will tell you it's variation followed by natural selection they've left out a key step there's a third step that's just as important as those two and that is accurate self replication you don't get evolution unless a cell can make two almost identical copies of itself how does it do that there is nothing in the natural world that self-replicates no chemical right no structure i'm talking about accurate to 99.9999 accuracy if you see a house that you like and you want to make a replica of that you could do it but it would be very difficult there's no house that makes a copy of itself there's nothing that makes a copy of itself and cells are far more complex than houses or anything else we know about so you have to have that and how do you get that you can't evolve it because you have to have self-replication for evolution to even start so everyone leaves out that step and that's what i'm actually working on now in a theoretical biological way and i published one paper and i have another one impressed which we can talk about later uh but the the other thing about this the other part that evolution does not explain is us human beings yeah we very likely our bodies very likely that well they are they're private we're primates we very likely evolved physically from some primate you know uh common ancestor of chimps gorillas us etc but that tells us nothing about who we are why we do what we do why are we creative why can we do art why could why do we make jokes why do we do science why are we interested in the world why do we worship god where does all that come from it doesn't come from evolution evolution has nothing to say about this nothing and what i was saying in that paragraph it was a satire on what's called evolutionary psychology which is the i consider a really pseudo-scientific attempt to explain everything in life including everything in human life through evolution can't be done and why not because evolution is a very clear specific scientific theory and it's defined as a change in allele frequency in a population with time so allele frequencies that means you have to look at genes okay alleles for those uh listening who are not aware alleles are forms of genes and when you get a mutation you get a new allele so those alleles can change in frequency during because of natural selection with time in a population that's a very clear mathematical scientific definition and nothing in evolutionary psychology they never identify a gene they never identify an allele they never show that a particular gene has a particular behavior they just say well okay let's say you know people were good to each other because if they were good to each other then the other person was good to them and so that helped their chances what there's no science here zero there's no gene there's no evidence nothing so my point is that when we get to humans evolution is done and in fact even richard dawkins the famous atheist has said human beings are past evolution we don't we've only had a few mutations in in the human population since you know we develop diverged from other other primates one of those is that now we many of us not all of us but many of us can drink milk as adults that's a big mutation we have changes in skin color we have a few other changes that have occurred you know in evolutionary time which is hundreds of thousands of years otherwise we're exactly the same genetically as we always were and yet do we live the same way no we don't we don't even live the same way we live you know 10 years ago i mean you know i'm still trying to figure out how these computers work um and why is that that's because of cultural evolution cultural evolution has nothing to do with biology it's it's a product it's something that happens with human beings because of our brains not our genes and and why are our brains the way they are because we're made in the image of god this is a gift from god that we have these brains that we have this consciousness that we have our souls this is not science this is theology good good i'm glad that that these statements that some evolutionists will make bother you as much as they are terribly yeah i can tell you one more very funny story if i may on this go ahead i recently read i recently read that a paper was published i don't know the journal of some pseudo social science journal i guess which said they had an explanation for why girls prefer pink and boys don't boys like blue and the explanation was that way back at the beginning of humanity the women were often the ones who collected berries and other fruits and since berries are red girls like the idea of red and pink and that's theory that was published well somebody wrote a a response to that saying you know what first of all the premise is false girls don't prefer pink even a hundred years ago in western europe pink was considered a masculine color and in china today pink is considered a masculine color so the whole idea is wrong so they're coming up with a just so story to explain something that has been true i mean this is not science right that's not science i want to i want to continue a little bit along this thought you've been you you said you you watched uh some of the series that i did on origin of life in response to a young man nate that calls himself professor dave and he came with another response to what i had done and you were telling me how hard it was for you to listen to that because of the nonsense that was thrown out there so i'm not the only scientist that has trouble listening to this stuff putting aside putting aside the the the personal attacks just the science the way he described it is is so ridiculous but he i want to i want you might want to comment on that you can or if you want to but here's here's what you you a paragraph that you wrote in your in your book glib pronouncements of evolutionary mechanisms for explaining all aspects of human nature along with the claim that scientists found that human beings are nowhere as special as we like to think are not scientific but philosophical statements other pseudo scientific claims that have become popular is that dna is not a code that we understand how a uni universe can spontaneously arise from nothing and that the origin of life is now almost completely understood and explained by chemical evolution none of these are true theologians pastors and christian lay people should be advised that they might not be dealing with legitimate science every time they hear somebody scientist or not claim that science says something and they should be cautious about trying to incorporate such philosophical views into christian theological thinking right talk about that yeah well this is a pet peeve of mine and uh people like the the person you mentioned uh you know are people who propagate this mythology and i i think it's um it's unfortunate because uh people like him and others are not actually scientists they they you know watched a lot of videos on youtube they've maybe read a few papers or books but they haven't done any research of their own they don't know what science is they don't know what it involves uh and uh you know one of the main things they don't understand is the tremendous care and caution that every working scientist employs uh you know i mean i don't have to tell you i'm telling the audience that when when we do an experiment whatever that experiment may be we have to be so careful in how we do it and then how we interpret it and the last thing we want to do is jump to a conclusion and say ah we've discovered something here it is no you have to repeat that experiment many many times and you have to make sure other people can repeat it also i have i have published papers that turned out to be wrong i uh one in particular where i found something uh it was very uh striking and had to do with a genetic variant that might have that we thought led to an increased susceptibility to lung cancer and the data looked good and we published it it's one of the mistakes that i made in my career uh there was nothing wrong with it the problem is our sample size was too small and so the statistics that we did were not really very good and two other people tried to repeat it they didn't get it and uh we tried to repeat it also and we found out that in fact we were wrong you want to avoid that because that doesn't look good in your reputation if you have too many incidents like that so we are extremely cautious we're extremely careful both in our scientific work and when we talk about things so to say that we've discovered something that we're almost there we've almost got it it's just a few more steps and we'll be there that's that's very few scientists speak that way if anything they're going to be very careful and say we have found something that is consistent with the possibility that such and such might or maybe not be true i mean that's about as strong as you get and when you hear somebody like the individual you mentioned dave uh say oh yeah we know that you know that chirality is easy that's not a problem all of these statements of certainty of oh i absolutely know what's going then you know you're not listening to a scientist you're listening to someone who you know studied a little science at some point in their life but they're not a scientist and uh you know it it's this is why i think it's important for people to understand that when scientists come to faith uh especially in cases like us and many others where they weren't originally uh believing people but came to faith you can bet that it took a lot to get them there okay that they had to overcome uh their resistance their reluctance to jump to a conclusion before all the data's in and i am very happy to say that i did not i have no sense that i jumped to any conclusions when i accepted jesus christ the savior i had you know i i looked at all the at all the data and uh it's all consistent and and you know and here so yeah yeah i mean that this is you're right we are we have to be very careful what we say and what we write i've even been interviewed sometimes by christian leaders and i'm not saying quite what they want me to say and they'd say can you just say on camera this this and this and we'll record you saying that no i can't say that i i can't say that right and and they don't understand why i can't say it i said you you can say it as a pastor you can say it right i can't say it because i don't know i don't know that i know certain things to be true but i know other things i don't know i want to read something else you were talking about about uh knowledge and how how there's this idea sometimes that only scientists okay science has the knowledge and you wrote this you wrote i once met a professor of english who specialized in 15th century poetry and was a respected scholar in this field he had a great deal of knowledge about things that most scientists would not even be interested in but it was knowledge the denial of any knowledge other than the scientific kind gives us a distorted view of reality by insisting on scientism we are not only harming non-scientific scholarship we are also harming science because we are encouraging a misleading understanding of it that can only lead to eventual disillusionment and even abandonment of science as an activity important for humans yeah tell us about that well scientism i think is the enemy of science that's the enemy of faith it's the enemy of everything because it's just a false doctrine it's completely false i would even call it satanic if i were inclined to use that term uh it's it's a lie it's a big huge lie and of course what scientism is is the belief the philosophical belief that all truth and can only come from scientific proof and of course the the nonsense of there is that we don't even look at proof i mean science does not do proof we do evidence we do you know consensus we do uh you know this is very likely true we don't talk about proof i once challenged someone find me a paper in science that uses the word proof and he came up with one but in fact it was a mathematical paper and so you know yeah you could you have proofs in math you have proofs in logic but not in science so whenever these atheists say to me uh you know prove your god i just ignore it i mean there's no reason to answer them because they don't know what they're talking about uh and and scientism is is dangerous because of what i said it leads people who hear about it who hear people say that the only issues or science uh uh scientific that that are real uh well they're leaving out you know everything else they're leaving out love they're leaving out politics they're leaving out history they're leaving out you know social interactions and and so many things that are so important to the way we live so i think it's a dangerous and and really evil doctrine that that has spread and taken over it's been disproved many times over many different you know historical periods and i'll tell you something interesting the first person who told me that science cannot uh prove everything cannot even address all questions was my atheist father who himself was a physical chemist and he said to me you know there are there are questions that science can't address yeah i mean you pointed out in your book you talk about pi right three points four one five nine two that that uh uh and these other constants planck's constant for example was the that the speed of light that constant that these are constants but but but they're there yeah but we're not we don't understand their origin right we can never and in fact when i asked this question in fact this may have been why this may have been what sparked my father's response i said i think it was avogadro's number which you know is so important in chemistry and i said why is avogadro's number that's what 6.23 something 6.023 yeah okay uh and he said that's a question that science doesn't answer we don't ask it we don't even have is anybody doing research on why avogadro's number is that number no there's no way to find out you use the cons the numbers and the constants to you know make other discoveries to come up with laws to make predictions but why is it that number why is pi what it is you know why is it irrational why is it why is it uh you know uh all of these questions these are scientific questions that cannot be answered by science and think of all the other questions which cannot be answered by some right let me let me let me follow along with that you you you talk a little bit about this a simulated universe and so so i i mean i i kind of i like your writing because you you you you know you poke people and and you try to look at the reaction so you say according to simulation hypotheses we are characters in a much more advanced analogy of a computer game something akin to the fictional world of the film the matrix as the argument goes if we lesser mortals can simulate reality at some level then some putative highly intelligent aliens might have already incredibly become incredibly good at simulations and we could very well be living in one of their projects apparently this hypothesis has is being taken seriously by some scientists my question is is if you are going to talk about simulators those who made the simulations how exactly is that different from talking about a creator why is the idea of simulated universe acceptable for scientific discussion while the idea of a universe created and maintained by god is not right i was watching a discussion hosted by uh neil jeff tyson exactly yeah and uh several very good very good scientists on there tyson himself uh is is an atheist and has or an agnostic atheist i'm not sure but he has you know he has indicated his uh unwillingness to to accept the idea of a god and i think everyone else on the panel possibly with one exception were atheists and they were seriously talking about this this hypothesis of simulated universe and uh you know i i i guess somewhere else i wrote maybe is in the book i don't remember but i wrote that you know we have the choice between a a loving creator uh who who came to earth to set us straight to save our souls you know jesus christ uh versus some you know alien teenager in his mother's basement who's making fake universes i think i'll go with jesus christ right right yeah and and it's interesting that they will talk about these sorts of things and it's totally acceptable yeah but should you mention god and especially god of the bible no no no no no no no yeah i know it's it's crazy it's just yeah amazing you talk a little bit about when you first became a believer you said when i first became aware that i was a believer i wondered what effect it would have on my scientific world view i was quite delighted to find that if anything my scientific worldview was strengthened worship of god has led me to want to probe deeper into the truth about the universe faith in god is a wonderful asset to a scientist who strives to understand the meaning behind the laws of physics and biology that rule our universe yeah i i really i didn't know when i when i came to faith which is described in chapter nine the way the way that happened uh i i knew that i was a believer i couldn't go back but i was worried because i did not know at that time any other christians who were scientists it turns out that i did but i didn't know that they were christians they were they were not open about it they were being quiet um like i was like i remained for some time and and i think the first time i knew there was another christian who was a scientist was when i read francis collins book the language of god and you know and as i said once uh now i knew there were two of us but then i found out that there are many many and i i also found out that you know it's not necessary to give up the idea of evolution uh it's not necessary to give up uh anything in your scientific worldview what you do is you find out why you're studying science which is the same reason that the original scientists became scientists you know back in with with newton and galileo and copernicus and oh my goodness boyle and and pasteur and faraday and maxwell all of whom were devout christians okay and and and basically were investigating the rule the laws the the reality of physical nature to understand god to understand god's creation to understand the the you know the the book of nature the the book of his works uh which is is actually the title of my blog but that's uh you know the the book of works is god's revelation to us through nature and it and it relates to that famous passage in in in uh in in in scripture you know uh we i can't say it by heart because i'm very bad at that but you know we we we know god from the from what we see from the works his works that we see and we're we're without excuse because uh it's all here i mean just look around and there's the evidence for god uh and so that's so that's why i say that with a belief in god you know why you're doing what you're doing you know what you're looking for you're looking to understand god's creation and and it helps with worship and it helps just with you know being a good scientist of being honest and faithful and true and uh for me it was thrilling to come to that conclusion and you you follow along this thought in the on the same page you say there's this erroneous idea that while scientists are always open-minded and searching for new ways to see truth people of faith think they have have it all figured out they believe they know the final truth the dogma that cannot change in reality open-minded people are open-minded about science and faith and close-minded people are dogmatic about both yeah and that's been my experience and i'm sure yours as well we all know scientists who cannot change their minds right i mean they have they have a theory that they stick to in the face of all opposition and we all know uh uh religious people i i gotta tell you one of the things that always amuses me is when atheists come up with one argument which is well if god is real why there's so many different denominations and then the next breath they say well uh you know uh this whole question of of uh why is there uh rigidity okay so the next breath they'll say oh but christians are so dogmatic they all have to believe one thing well if they all have to believe one thing in a dogmatic then how can you be complaining about all the different denominations the reason there are so many different denominations is because christians are open-minded and christianity changes and has been changing it always changes so yeah that that that's complete nonsense and uh uh i think that you know it's important to be open-minded it's important to seek the truth and we can seek it through science we can seek it through philosophy we can seek it through any way we want but uh you know be open and be honest about what you find right and i think the this is this is another thing so what you do in this book is is you keep grabbing at things that people think are tremendous ideas and and you you blow them apart and so you say another way to look at this issue relates to the problem of consciousness as discussed in chapter six if consciousness is an illusion a quote nothing but unquote the meaningless firing of certain neural circuits as would be the case of pure naturalism were true then human reason a product of that illusory consciousness would itself be illusory right and it would be impossible for humans to actually know anything to be true based on reason which of course would be a product of that illusory consciousness yeah i stole that idea from alvin plantiga i think uh he has made a very strong case of this and i and i think i i don't remember if i cited him or not but if not it was a mistake because i got it from him uh from something he wrote but uh yeah i mean this relates to the self-contradictory uh nature of true philosophical atheism if you or or true or naturalist pure naturalism uh it's it's very hard for a human being with the brain that we have with the mind that we have with the way that we can think to claim that everything is you know just a qu is nothing but you know that famous nothing buttery phrase is nothing but molecules in motion and energy and you know the basic principles of chemistry and physics if you claim that how can you trust anything right you know where where does that all come from and and the answer is very very clear this is why this is why theism makes so much sense the answer is yeah we have a good mind that can do all this stuff and it has neurons but we also have a soul and it's the soul that allows us to think these thoughts and and and feel these feelings and have these emotions and understand yeah what the world is all about right you know some people are going to be upset that i even gave you time on this podcast because you like like joshua swamidas uh uh are are an evolutionist and that that that bothers people and so let me let me uh uh let me read read something and and then and then let me let me just say look evolutionists can love god just as you do psy they love god and as far as i can tell from the scriptures that if you confess with your mouth that jesus is lord and believe in your heart that he has risen from the dead risen from the dead you will be saved romans 10 9. i mean this is it and and this is the key you don't have to believe even an adam and eve if that were essential that would have been in that verse we are told what is the essential it is the confession that jesus is lord and the believing in our heart that he has risen from the dead and we will be saved there are lots of ways that people think other things some people will say well if you grab in on to evolutionary theory you discount uh the genesis account and as you quite nicely put in your book look we we look at scientific things we look in in the things of of the bible and we can misinterpret things all the time we do it in science all the time i mean i've misinterpreted things in science i've published a lot of papers and you misinterpret things and you publish another paper and you correct things you do that with theology all the time i mean sometimes i can teach something and go out of the class and think that was all wrong i mean i'm talking about a bible class right and so so you know it this is these are hard things you may get these things wrong or things that i've taught i read great theologians and they show me that yeah that wasn't right what i was thinking so we can misinterpret things all the time the key for salvation is jesus christ is lord and he has risen from the dead amen i want to give you a just a few minutes to talk a little bit about this because this is important because this is a you you spend time in your book talking about this and and i think you you do a good job and you you you know you you don't try to get too deep for people but you talk about why you believe that evolutionary theory is is is is the right way and you you say this many atheistic evolutionists acknowledge that evolution has a direction and stop there but what or who directs it an atheist can argue that no director is needed other than natural selection for me evolution makes god's providence in the biological world apparent i believe that the direction of evolution toward greater complexity including multicellularity efficient energy conversion and the vertebrate body plan the development of neural circuitry and the emergence of brains all have a purpose determined by god's will in ways that we cannot understand it is god's providence that exercises that will on the biological world much as his providence answers our prayers and allow the miracles of his own incarnation and the resurrection on earth providential evolution should be should reassure both the christian and both the christian believer and the agnostic that evolution is not only consistent with but is also a fundamental part of god's work god granted humans a soul and we are created in this image but the soul must inhabit a body and the human body was created by god using providential evolution so i want to give you a chance to just just run with that for a while right so um what my feelings about evolution are they're actually somewhat changing a little bit with time but basically the the bottom line i would say is what i said before that i think of evolution as a scientific theory which has a huge amount of evidentiary support from genetics geology paleontology fossil records etc there are a lot of holes and evolutionary theory is not finished uh the old neo-darwinian theory is pretty much out the window and there's a lot of new developments uh in evolutionary theory uh sometimes they're called the extended evolutionary synthesis and some of these new developments are are very interesting because they kind of point to something beyond pure naturalism and i can't go into detail because it gets pretty complicated but uh what i think is true and and this is going to be very controversial and i'm not sure anyone has said this publicly before i think it's time for christians to stop talking about evolution it it doesn't matter and here's why i say this if you look at young earth creationists people people from id stephen meyer for example who i i recently had a very brief exchange with and very satisfying uh people at biologos who are evolutionary creationists there's very little argument actually going on uh nobody's saying that there's that evil the basic principles of evolution are wrong if you look at ken ham and anthony genesis the creation museum they're talking about evolution they're talking about the creation of kinds which are up at the order level and then let's say a cat kind and a dog kind and a bear kind and the cat pine then evolved after the flood into lions tigers pussycats berry jaguars all the different kinds of cats we now know today and the mechanism of that evolution which had to be very fast but still was mutation variation genetic variation and natural selection exactly the same mechanism that evolutionists as you call them believe so we're talking about young earth creation saying well we go along with this kind of evolution and of course everyone as i said before agrees that microevolution is real that a species continually evolves and improves itself so uh all you have to do to get to get everyone to agree completely is to demonstrate that macro evolution is actually micro evolution but you know on a different scale and that now that doesn't solve everything because there's still open questions like how do we get multicellularity how do we get body plans and there's a lot to do evolution is not finished but it's a good theory and the fact is it's not an atheistic theory at all it's a theory it's a theory of science it's like the theory of gravity i mean it's nobody talks about you know is is is gravity real or is it just the theory nobody says that you know is the theory of gravity uh wrong because the bible talks about god you know making sparrows fall down no gravity is accepted as a fact as a you know as much of a scientific fact as as anything else and we have a law for gravity and we have another law for gravity you know we have general relativity evolution is heading in the same way what is really important i think theologically is not how animals evolved from each other but those two areas that i mentioned are not covered by evolution the beginning of life from nothing from chemicals in small warm ponds okay to luca to the first living cell that is not covered by evolution and that's where we need to focus and the second part is us how did we get the way we are how did we how do we have obvious souls how do we have you know these mental capacities that don't exist anywhere else how do we have how do we have uh you know altruism how do we have love why do we love we don't need love for survival i mean some people would say better if you don't love you know it's pain gloves can be painful but we we have it we do it why do we laugh why do we have humor why do we paint pictures where does all this come from there's nothing to do with evolution so at the beginning and at the end those are the two areas that to me are where we should be devoting our efforts to attack evolution and to defend evolution i think is becoming silly it's not going anywhere if you say evolution is not biblical because it doesn't agree with genesis what you said is absolutely right we don't know exactly what genesis is saying can anyone tell me that they really can really understand genesis and what it means uh i don't think so because if you do then you've got a lot of problems like you know genesis 1 and genesis 2 and all the problems in genesis 2 and 3. so these these are i am i i believe in the inerrancy of the bible i think the bible has nothing wrong in it it's all correct but saying that does not mean we can understand it and interpret it properly and what i think is there's only one truth it's god's truth and we get to it from two different ways we get to it from his book of words from the bible and we get to it from science the book of works and when they don't agree which is often we're getting one or both of them wrong and sometimes for example uh you know for up until our lifetime it was believed that the universe was a steady state past eternal always been here no beginning that was the scientific view and now we know that well it turns out genesis was right science was wrong okay we now know that the universe had a beginning 14 billion years ago but it was a beginning so sometimes we'll find out that you know we misinterpreted the science and other times we'll find out we misinterpreted genesis but to say that because of what we now know scientifically and what we now think we know about interpreting the bible is is the truth the absolute final truth there's nothing more to do that's ridiculous we're going to learn a lot more science as time goes by and we're going to have a lot more insights into the bible and my belief is that when we do that we're going to see the two truths coming closer and closer together i don't know we'll ever get to the final answer but they're going to become more and more uh uh close to each other as as as as time goes on and eventually they'll they'll merge in one group and i i will say if you have if you have children that are going to be going off to college and uh or they've gone to college and they're they're wondering about their faith that they learned at home and christianity uh this book by psygart the works of his hands this book would would i think would not be a bad place for them to to just park for for a few hours and read this book it's it's not very long and and and uh and to see that that uh there are scientists out there that really can do good science and embrace these sort of things and it doesn't have to shake one's faith when they go to the university i want to close with something that you read and then give you a chance to to share anything about that that you would like psy okay you wrote there's a lot we don't know we don't know if the newer evolutionary theories are correct we don't know if life originated on some other planet if the galaxy is full of other christ worshipers or if we are all there is we don't know how much god intervenes in any part of our lives or in his creation but we do know that we live in a world lovingly created by god and we are made in his image yeah um we do know that and we do know that jesus christ rose from the dead and and it's the path to salvation and i think that's what we need that's what we need that's what we need indeed psy thank you so much for uh for coming on and joining us and i think that this is going to be a real help and a strength to many and uh um i want people to also see that that psy say and i don't agree on everything when it comes to to evolution because because i look at it a little bit differently and there's just a lot more that i don't understand i've never said that these theories are wrong it just said you know there's there's a lot that i don't understand yet psy and i agree very strongly on our love for jesus that he is the best in every way and we are on the same side of this thing and uh um and within the realm of science i mean it's not unusual for scientists to have big disagreements about things because we know that that uh science is evolving in the sense that we're learning from this and it's changing all the time and we get new pieces of information we develop new tools which give us new insight and we go whoa so i wasn't quite right on that you know this this goes by such and such a mechanism and uh and we're supposed to try to keep an openness and an open mind on these things but that we know exactly what size said god does love us we've been made in his image jesus christ is the son of god he lived on this earth and he gave himself for us he was put in a grave and three days later he rose from the dead and he lives forever more to make intercession on our behalf thanks again psy and god bless you thank you and god bless you [Music] you

Channel: Dr. James Tour

Views: 49,141

Keywords: Dr. James Tour, Jim Tour, Science, Faith, Jesus, nanomachines, NanoEngineering, Bible, Professor, Chemistry

Id: C_neIY8aKn8

Length: 81min 29sec (4889 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021