Canceled Science: Scientific Discoveries Some Atheists Don't Want You To See

does examining the implications of science amount to teaching religion in the classroom i want to take some time to go through how to respond in a conflict like that and share some of my experiences i feel like it's important for us to realize that while natural processes can do some things naturally they can't do everything [Music] [Applause] well good morning everybody thank you for the introduction john and i am so grateful to be here today it's really a privilege and uh thanks also to denton bible church for hosting in this beautiful facility i'm from indiana i thought i was going to be coming south for a little break from the winter weather the plane maybe took a wrong turn and went to chicago or something i don't know but um surprised me so at least it's sunny and i'm thankful for that i'm also grateful to see so many uh smiling faces out here today it's it's a encouragement to me just to see so many people interested in these topics and wanting to learn how to share faith in a way that is honoring to god and what he has created so i'll just um show you a brief outline here of my talk and i'll initially discuss sort of the background for this course i taught at ball state university for about six or seven years called the boundaries of science and uh kind of ask the question does examining the implications of science amount to teaching religion in the classroom or pushing religion down students throats as some of my detractors said and there was certainly a conflict over the course that developed and i want to take some time to go through how to respond in a conflict like that and share some of my experiences in what was encouraging to me from the scriptures from other believers and what helped bring us through and i believe a way to respond that can really reflect the heart of christ and then time permitting i will go through a few of sort of my choice of a few evidences for design there's so many and we'll look at a few things that i feel are key that point to god as a designer so the boundaries of science course that i developed at ball state it was designed to kind of address the question or look at the question of human significance in the light of what nature can do but also what it can't do and i feel like it's important for us to realize that while natural processes can do some things naturally they can't do everything and i think that's an important distinction to make that there are boundaries to science i might more accurately say boundaries to natural processes but boundaries of science sounds a little easier to say so that's what the course was titled in from the course description uh printed right on the syllabus that students had and they could preview this before they even signed up for the course we will examine the nature of physical the physical and the living world with the goal of increasing our appreciation of the scope wonder and complexity of physical reality so you sort of have to write a course description so that you can attract students and that you don't want to scare them off with too much uh difficult physics we've also investigate physical reality and the boundaries of science for any hidden wisdom within this reality which may illuminate the central questions of the purpose of our existence and the meaning of life so i thought that a course like this would fly because before i even developed this course uh which was eventually taught in the honors college at ball state i had been teaching astronomy and this is ball state university in indiana muncie indiana and uh when i started there they were offering you know eight sections of astronomy teaching like 800 900 students per semester introductory astronomy and so i taught lots of astronomy courses and just to connect with students i would ask them some kind of open-ended questions at the start of class and one of them came from the introduction to our astronomy textbook where the author made the statement that astronomy can help us to understand the meaning of our existence and i'm sure he had in mind sort of our place in the cosmos and all of that and how the stars and elements formed and but i thought well let's follow up on that and ask students what is the meaning of our existence and so i just said get out a piece of paper write this down what do you think i collect them you know stack of 100 papers go to a coffee shop and sit there and just collate their answers and read through them and it was astounding how students were really interested in this question what is the purpose of life or what is the meaning of our existence and some pointed towards god some pointed towards hopelessness um some said i've never even thought of the answer to this question never even bothered to consider what's the meaning of my existence and then i realized okay it's worth asking this because nothing more tragic than to get through college at least and and not even have considered the meaning of your existence so a couple other questions that i asked there one of them was can science explain everything or are there limits to what science can explain and so we had things like yes science can explain everything or if not yet then someday it's had a good success so far others say it'll never explain things like my emotions or true love or it can't explain my girlfriend or something like that you know there were there were a variety of responses but um over a few years i collected you know 100 200 of these per semester and i had a lot of data and so i actually wrote an article published in the journal of college science teaching called questions from the edge and the idea was to use these responses to kind of build a bridge with the classroom in a science class sometimes students feel like they're at a disadvantage a lot of these students are forced to take science because it's a requirement you know to graduate and and so i wanted to kind of develop some rapport to engage with students and i found that if i asked these questions and then talked about some of their responses in class afterwards you know over the next weeks it helped to kind of break down that student professor divide so that was the intent of the article which this was just a copy of the front page of it it was a point of view piece that was written in this journal of college science teaching and um kind of as a follow-up to that i began to develop this course called the boundaries of science where we could spend the whole semester looking at these big questions [Music] so i'm going to be sort of transitioning into a bit of what happened after teaching this for a number of years some of the conflict that developed over the course and as a prelude to that to kind of set things up maybe ask a a few questions here does discussing scientific evidence that might conflict with the paradigm of naturalism equate with teaching religion in a science course i mean think about that you're teaching science science results scientific discoveries such as you know in astronomy we actually taught the big bang model of the universe which indicates that the universe began from a point out of nothing in the finite past well that's a pretty well established scientific result but it also has some massive scientific and philosophical societal implications because it indicates that there may not have been a natural explanation to the universe but it looks like the universe had a transcendent cause because if all space-time matter energy began than anything within space and time cannot have been the cause of that beginning and actually in discussing that type of a question one time in a small group in this boundaries of science course one of the students in the group later said to the whole class this convinced him to depart from atheism and that there must be some sort of a higher power you know he wasn't sure what it was yet but just thinking of some of the questions can in fact have a ramification that affects our worldview so can the study of nature inform metaphysical questions and i really believe that it does how would we even know what the boundaries are between what's natural and what is kind of metaphysical without a thorough study of physical nature so i wanted the class to be grounded in science i if i got any complaints from students about the class it was there's too much physics and maybe it doesn't take more than one equation to get you to that point uh i i sympathize with that been a physicist all my life and i know it doesn't make good dinner time conversation it's just the way it is um most of the time but um one metaphysical question that i believe the study of nature can certainly illuminate is the question is it natural and i contend as a scientist that that's a fair question to ask i don't have to approach nature with the worldview and the presupposition that everything in nature happened naturally we see natural things like you and me are we natural is life natural that's a good question what about intellect imagination a spiritual sense our appreciation of beauty true love is that just a consequence of one of the four fundamental forces of nature inner plane on the atoms that make up our being so where is the boundary well asking that question apparently can lead to some conflicts and sometimes having faith at work and there is a group of professors and staff at ball state who began to meet some years ago it was called the faith at work group professors who had a faith in god but sometimes it leads to conflict and this is just a snapshot of one of the articles that came out in the spring of 2013 after a prominent atheist and evolutionary biologist named jerry coyne wrote a letter to the chair of my department at ball state and he had gotten a hold of the course syllabus for the boundaries of science course and was accusing my department chair saying this course syllabus indicates that religion is being taught under the guise of science as it says here preaching rather than teaching and that led to follow-up threats from the freedom from religion foundation to the university sent letters to the president and the board threatening to sue the university over my my course it's like okay you know i was an untenured faculty member just trying to enjoy teaching and suddenly national news and then of course the university administration began to investigate and set up an ad hoc committee composed of ironically professors who were not objective on the questions but actually most of them quite antithetical to the idea of their being design and that led to the eventual cancellation of the course but that was after a long period of um sort of media turmoil and articles written that were misrepresenting what i was teaching such as pushing religion down students throats and that i was teaching creationism or even that i was teaching intelligent design and i i thought that was strange i don't actually remember ever mentioning the words intelligent design in my class you know i just presented scientific evidence and had the students discuss whether or not this can be explained naturally or what are the implications and let them draw their own conclusions so what do you do when this kind of tribulation comes and as a christian i think we should expect it that's one thing i learned the bible talks about in the world you will have tribulation indeed all who desire to live a godly life in christ jesus will be persecuted so that kind of comes and with it we can actually feel a sense of privilege and even though it was traumatic for me my family it was you know just intimidating i didn't know what the outcome was going to be the word of god tells us that we can rejoice and be glad our reward is great in heaven when we're trying to stand up for truth and receive some persecution as a result of that it was interesting i i recollected at this time that maybe only a year earlier or so i felt like the lord had told me that i will bless you here at ball state and i was thinking oh this is good you know apparently there's more than one definition of blessing and it depends on whose perspective but from the eternal perspective it really is a blessing um an honor honestly to have any sense of being or any experience of being persecuted for the name of christ some other things we can do to strengthen ourselves uh take advantage of truths that are in the word of god even the idea that yes there is a god and yes god is the author of life and is the author of creation in the universe and i contend that truth is stronger than a lie sometimes lies tend to grow and seem big but honestly they have no inherent foundation they are built on nothing and they will eventually pass away so truth will prevail and so when you stand with truth you're on the right side um we can take things and strengthen ourselves like the word of god there's many promises in the word i'll share in a minute but also to realize that and i'm sure a lot of you are connecting with this that you're not alone if you've ever felt intimidated for your faith or maybe you've tried to share about your faith in god as a creator and gotten some pushback or some snide comments or persecution outright realize that there are others who have experienced this first and i began to realize that as well in my time at ball state uh people would reach out to me who maybe i didn't even know from around the country and in courage and some of those i knew had been through persecution as well folks at the discovery institute connected with me at this time and i had heard of this gravity institute for years and really was impressed with their work but i didn't have any personal relationship with any of the people involved but it was in that year 2013 casey luskin called me just like who is this guy but because i was really nervous because it's always getting kind of hounded by reporters trying to angle in and get me to say something that they could twist in the in the news report um but um i realized okay casey is the real thing and he's uh he's on my side and then john west also many conversations during that time that just helped keep me from making things worse by um saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or trying to defend myself inappropriately and uh they kind of came to my defense in very real and tangible ways that were significant so the lord himself is on our side as well and we know that in speaking of jesus that he also suffered but when he suffered when he was reviled it says he did not revile in return he didn't threaten i mean he could have right god could like you're messing with me no that's not that's not what he did um he entrusted himself to father god who will eventually judge justly and the word promises that after we've suffered a little while he will restore and i can just testify that even from my personal experience there was there has come a restoration i eventually uh received tenure at ball state i didn't lose my job thankfully and i stayed there in another five years enjoyed relationships with others in the department uh actually my department was always very supportive of me other faculty there it was just those that didn't know me and thought they knew me uh who were kind of misjudging me but the word promises that when you're in this fight and there's an enemy coming the battle is the lord's and my wife and i had just a lot of time in the word where we sought the lord's strength and some of these verses stood out to us you will not need to fight in this battle stand firm hold your position and see the salvation of the lord on your behalf so whether it's david standing before goliath or whether it's one of the israelite kings who is being threatened by a foreign army the lord will fight for you you have only to be silent and uh that was spoken to moses right before uh the red sea parted and uh so you know how god kind of delivered them at that time so now we come to some part of this response from kind of a biblical point of view that i think is is the most important and that's like what do you do with all those emotions and feelings from your experiences of being mistreated and it believe me it stirs them up there were times when i just wanted to get my sword and go out fighting you know but it was thankfully um wiser minds prevailed and it's like no that's that's not going to be a good idea the word of god jesus encourages us to forgive others because we have received forgiveness we're not better than they are we're just in relationship with the king so as we have been forgiven we are called and commanded to forgive that can seem hard it is hard at times our emotions get in the way and i can remember consciously working through this with certain names um trying to honestly genuinely authentically forgive this or that person that was particularly rude or troublesome during that time sending un unfair accusations against me but um for example the apostle peter says do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling but on the contrary bless bless bless who bless your enemies bless those who persecute you bless and do not curse them and so today i publicly bless those who were if you want to use the word persecuting if that sounds too harsh just bless those who were opposing what i was doing bless those who spoke against me unfairly who misrepresented even lied about what i was teaching in class and bless those who caused hurt and i i found this years later this was a sketch my wife made it was in a journal that she was keeping at that time and she said that she had kind of a picture of this in her mind and she wanted to sketch it out it's an offer of forgiveness to jerry coyne the instigator of what happened to me at ball state and i want to say amen to this we have to realize that god our father is longing the heart level longing of our father is that people would come home to him people who we might think are the problem people who are even the enemy but it's our role and i believe that we can attain victory in all of its meaning all of its dimensions ramifications by extending forgiveness and realizing that it's not us them but we can on behalf of god say i forgive you and i do i speak forgiveness and i want to take this more globally than just me and what was happening at ball state but for the whole um movement the whole intelligent design movement there is sort of a sense of we're the little guys and we're trying to fight for truth and and god is helping us but you know it's so massive out there against us and it's us versus them but as priests of god which is part of our role as believers we can take the offering of christ on the cross and say father forgive them they don't know what they're doing bring them home extend your spiritual authority over their lives reveal truth lead them into fellowship with us and the father and the son in jesus name so as it says here grace to you in peace in jesus name so i'm going to transition now and share just a few summary thoughts on sort of the boundaries of science where maybe does science fall short and where science falls short of being able to explain what is in our natural world such as living things then i believe that we have to look elsewhere for an explanation and one of the kind of linchpins of naturalistic views on for example the origin and development of life is that random processes will eventually generate anything if you wait long enough right i mean they'll they'll generate you and me and laptops and and buildings because if we're natural then everything we made is natural and uh that gets hard to believe but in a more practical focused sense there are limits to randomness this universe according to science has had about 13.8 billion years of time in about something like 10 to the 80th particles to work with the forces of nature to create you would think anything that's a lot of particles and it's a lot of time and and yet in this world we'll only find roughly 94 93 naturally occurring elements there are not an unlimited number of combinations of protons and neutrons and electrons and it doesn't matter if you wait longer the laws of physics preclude what can form naturally we will never find um some new atom that that has say 200 protons that's naturally occurring or an isotope of carbon with dozens and dozens of protons or i'm sorry with neutrons in it no matter how long we wait again the laws of physics within this universe set the boundaries of what can happen naturally so there are limits to net natural processes and again even if a multiverse of universes exists and some have supposed that in these universes there will be different laws of physics and again the thought process is well whatever generates different universes is going to generate an infinite variety of random conditions but if our universe is any example that's not going to happen it's like maybe there are multiple universes but if so probably most of them are going to be pretty much like ours or within limits and it seems that nature is not able to generate infinite variety using random processes so for a long time i've been reading about and kind of impressed with the whole idea of information theory as a boundary to what nature can produce in terms of the complexity the information rich structures that are found in living systems and i believe that physics which is is my field i'm not a biologist or a biochemist i'm an experimental physicist and that was my training and then i did computational nano electronics and higher dimensional physics and so i studied nature what it is what it can do what are the forces of nature and i believe that nature cannot overcome this gargantuan information barrier between non-life and and life and it's it can get complicated in studying information theory but it basically boils down to this anytime there are more pathways to go wrong than the pathway to go right that's left but anyway i should have started with this hand gone off this way but it was right for you watching me i guess where was i let's see here sorry information theory anytime you can go wrong more easily then you can go right you're going to go wrong most of the time and if you have a multi-step process which nobody thinks that one snap of the finger all of the atoms that are involved in a cell came together just in a lucky shape of the ingredients so it's a multi-step process perhaps these two came together and then this one joined with that one and then you kept having to build and build and build but what we know is that at each step in the building process whether you're talking about a protein or more complex structures within the cell there are more ways to go off the rails than there are to keep on track to get towards the goal of a living functioning organism and so if you have multiple steps and at each step you can go wrong more likely than to go right it builds to an impossible situation where you will never end up with this complex functional outcome due to random processes and i will say that as a physicist not just it's improbable but it will not happen within this universe and that's because our universe as we know from physics is not infinitely old so we don't have infinite amount of time we have actually a finite amount of time even if it's you know good many years longer than our life spans it's finite within the universe and also the physical size of the universe that's relevant for interactions is also limited so limited resources in physical ingredients physical particles and also in time actually lead to the impossibility of these very complex functional so that means there there's a specific outcome it has to work it has to it's not just a complex pile of stuff like a pile of rocks outside of a construction site it's something that is like a machine and that will not happen naturally there are physical laws that that discuss this this one is called the new generalized second law it comes from statistical thermal physics it tells us that natural machinery does not exist to systematically increase the complexity of biological structures with the passage of time and um you know that it's connected even even with quantum mechanics the if you have quantum mechanics you have a wave function which contains all the information that can possibly be known about the system and unless that system is locked down tight and enclosed entirely that wave function will spread with time which means the information is more diffuse and uncertainty increases okay well mind over matter i think that our ability to think rational thoughts is a very strong evidence for something beyond nature because i've never met an adam that is thinking so naturalism which insists that we are only results of natural forces insist that natural forces gave rise to us with our ability to be creative and imaginative and um to design we can design right people design this they design bridges they design airplanes well if we can design and we're natural then that's actually equal to saying that nature can design but it just that's not part of its job description it's not it's not in its toolbox again as a physicist i know what do the forces of nature do anybody know what do the force they push or they pull that's it so you've got a lot of atoms they can either push or pull one another and how will that get together and create someone that can write a symphony or do something more impressive now divine design on the other hand creates some pretty spectacular outcomes humans can try to replicate that there on the left we've got sort of a man-made imitation of a divine design but in terms of beauty it's it's hollow the human design though is radiant it has a depth of beauty and it comes from the information-rich structures as well as the i believe spiritual side of things within the living being nature can produce what we think oh that's a spectacular design the snowflake see nature can design well actually the information contained in a snowflake is really not that great because even though it's beautiful it's regular and it's crystalline structure and it doesn't take that much information to program say an instruction set to create a snowflake it's specific but it lacks complexity the cloud which is also water but in the vapor form is very complex where are each of those molecules of water in that cloud well if you try to specify them all it's very complex but it's also random it doesn't matter you can drive an airplane fly an airplane through the cloud and it's still a cloud it doesn't hurt it but the wheat in the foreground of the picture there has both complexity and specificity so the point is here thinking about beauty and design i think that our minds can appreciate beauty in a way that a rock can't appreciate beauty even a cat or a dog doesn't so much appreciate beauty the way we can as humans who are made in the image of god the complex specified information found in living systems gives rise to radiant beauty that has depth to it and that's you know comes from the dna the information rich structures in the cell which again i believe are a result of the design of the author of life we can contrast two great pieces of art [Laughter] mine hasn't made it into the louvre but um the uh the fact is that we noticed the difference between child's play in a masterpiece i would contend that nature is a child it's exuberant in creating scribbles not as as kind of unimpressive as mine you know a sunset is beautiful and impressive but it is possible to describe the appearance of a sunset with the laws of physics to explain the scattering of light by the air the reflection off the water the regular pattern of the waves all of that is explainable with basically first or second year physics in a college course but if you ever saw a sunset and there was something like a michelangelo painting appearing in the sky or you know a clear depiction of someone you knew in the clouds in the sky this is going beyond what nature can do so nature in its laws has the ability only to create limited depth and that kind of beauty we would call radiant beauty now another favorite explanation of evolutionary biology is that there is an information ratchet that happens when natural selection acts on random mutations and if natural selections find some advantageous mutation it can select it and ratchet up the complexity of the system there's an analogous analogous situation in physics that was proposed over 100 years ago that a box full of gas with a partition in the middle could be used to in a sense generate energy if you had some little imp or it's called maxwell's demon just because you know just some being some little thing that could open a door between the two sides of the box and allow all the fast-moving molecules to move to one side keep the slow ones on the other side and thereby get high pressure high temperature gas on one side versus the other side and that would in a sense create energy physicists didn't know how to answer that for a while it seemed to be getting something for nothing but it was then determined by a man named salard that [Music] there is no information ratchet you can't gain energy by using information because you actually lose more energy than you gain by that information so i thought can we turn this around can you use energy to gain information such as in biology you know any form of energy can you use that to ratchet up the information content and it sounds suspiciously like this um falsified idea from physics it's kind of the opposite way but i believe as it says in bold print here in the middle the information needed to make this selection of any kind always exceeds the possible gain that you can get in information like a printing press can print lots of books but it can't print more than what was sort of pre-programmed into it to start with so i don't believe that nature has the ability to put out a new book so to speak by any means that we would call natural i'm going to just end in about two minutes here but we've also heard the argument that well fine-tuning of the universe fine-tuning of um conditions for life on earth is really no big deal it doesn't point to god because if the universe wasn't set up so that there are conditions necessary for life well life wouldn't exist we wouldn't be here no one would be impressed by it so if we've got living beings it's just automatically true that we have to have the conditions necessary for life i would agree with that but there's no reason that those conditions those parameters have to be so knife and sharply finely tuned as we see them in many instances we might expect just sort of a broad range of parameter space that is okay for developing life but we don't see that as this graph shows the reality is there's a narrow spike in the range of possible values for a given parameter in nature that allows life and i think that's something trying to get our attention so sort of my last point here is that physicists have come to the idea that information is underlying it's fundamental to the universe one of the prominent physicists that lived in the 1900s john wheeler coined this phrase it from bit meaning it everything comes from bit which is the idea of information and um another quantum physicist in this uh longer quote at the end if you read down to the last phrase there he even identifies what physics has sort of found about information being fundamental to the universe he identifies that with the first verse of the gospel of john saying that this idea of it from bit is actually old knowledge and he says according to john in the beginning was the word the word is our idea of communicating an intelligible message a message of design a message of artistry a message of significance for our lives so i want to leave you with that that our lives are significant we have evidence from science i don't believe it'll ever be overturned remember truth is stronger than a lie and that we can have confidence that even though our viewpoint is maybe not the majority viewpoint right now truth will stand and it's permanent and it's real and it will increase so i've written a lot more about evidence for design in my book and i've even made the connection with my own faith there i believe that what we see in nature can strengthen our faith but that my faith is really based in my relationship with god through the witness of the spirit in my inner being so there's my book and i'm thankful to discover institute for being able to kind of publish that [Music]

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 190,987

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet, Icons of Evolution, evolution news

Id: TA4QutvxX88

Length: 43min 23sec (2603 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022