God versus Nature

And his book was, if I remember the title, history of Warfare Between. I can't remember the exact title, but it has to do with warfare of science and religion and Christendom. And both of these books were very popular when they came. Mean John William Draper's book selled extraordinarily. Well, it was translated into at least maybe at least a dozen different languages, so it was very popular.

And also, Andrew Dixon Dwight came out, like, a little bit later, not as popular, but much more detailed. A long book, like at least eight or 900 pages long, going into lots of detail about science, conflicts between science and religion. Both of these books the main theme of the book is conflict, conflict between science and religion throughout history. And when I discovered the books, I discovered that there were issues with the books.

Certainly they were written over 100 years ago, so we've discovered more. And our understanding of a lot of issues in history is a lot better in many ways. But certainly I discovered that modern professors in history of science and otherwise look at these books with absolute contempt that these books they consider completely worthless. I think the main issue is well, there are two issues. One issue that the issue that they keep bringing up is that, well, they get a lot of facts wrong.

And, yeah, there are facts. If you look hard, you can find a number of facts here and there things that at least things we know, we're confident about, about history that we know today that these guys got wrong. And there were certainly issues with these books. And both of these authors were inconsistent. They were philosophically inconsistent in certain ways. And at various times, they said in their books, they said, oh, I'm not against religion. Religion is a good thing.

They would say things like that. And then they would come out at some point in a later chapter and they would say faith and religion are absolutely at war and they're completely opposed to each other, completely in all their forms are opposed to each other. And so if you just read just on their own terms, they're a bit contradictory sometimes they just didn't go far enough, in my opinion, in terms of attacking or explaining what's wrong with religion.

But I think today's historians of science really unfortunately, they really don't know how to deal with abstract issues like science versus religion. That's a very abstract issue in terms of a lot of these professors of history. They're comfortable with a lot of very concrete facts.

So if you ask them about to describe the relationship between this type of Protestantism and this kind of science within this decade of the 17th century, they will talk to you for hours and they'll be very confident what they say. But if you start talking about, well, science and religion in general, they will start saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is all abstract terms. This is a lot of hot air. You're just going way beyond what's justified by any kind of rational study of the past.

So in my opinion, there's a lot of concrete bound thought in a lot of historians of science, okay? And on the other side, there are a number of historians of science who are just very sympathetic to religion for one reason or another. They really don't like some of them religious raised with religious backgrounds, and they just don't want to attack religion. So a lot of them will come out and say, well, there's this thing called the conflict thesis.

The conflict thesis is that science and religion are at war throughout history and they say, well, today we know the conflict thesis is wrong. And they say, well, then they start. Tons of books have been written about this in the last 40 years. It's amazing how much has been written on this by academics. And basically they sort of dance around the subject and they basically say, well, sometimes science religions seem to work together. There are all these scientists in history who

were religious, right? Look at Gregor Mendall and his was the Monk and he did all this work on Peapods and Isaac Newton believed firmly in God. And so they give all these examples and then they say, well, yes, there were certain conflicts and then they said, well, there must be really a complex relationship. So now they're saying, well, what, we should replace the conflict thesis with what they

call a complexity thesis? In my opinion, they're very confused and I really just don't know how to deal with abstractions as such.

I don't have a firm opinion on that, although I tend to try to avoid the word belief because it just sounds a little bit too much like a religious view.

But again, as Blair said, to understand the concepts and the words meaning and so on. But on the other hand, as you said, to really get to the point. So yeah, please continue.

And I also thought that Ein Rand, in her philosophical work, especially regarding the nature of reason and her metaphysical view about the nature of reality, I thought that Einrand had some really important insights that really need to be brought bear on this subject. And I think it really helps illuminate the history of science, the history of the conflict between science and know throughout history.

So my main goal was sort of come up with an updated, very readable version of a book like what Draper and White did, just making sure I get all the facts right and also getting a really good historical perspective and bringing in some philosophical insights from yes.

Of the book is about the birth of science in ancient Greece, as I argue, and that there were things that were being done before the Greeks, that Greeks learned from the Mesopotamians, were doing work in a lot of astronomical work, certainly recording positions of the stars and things like that. And in Egyptians also, there was a lot of mathematical and other things being done in those cultures. But I argue that it was with the ancient Greeks where a real scientific mindset really started.

And with thinkers like Thales. Thales is kind of an outline border case, but you can see it to some extent with was he before him, everybody was really talking about the gods as causes and they were looking for supernatural type of explanations for things. And that was pretty much any kind of abstract explanations of anything always went to gods and things like that. But with Thales you see evidence at least that he was trying to get a more naturalistic view of the world.

And I gave one well known example with Thales is he believed that water, everything is made out of water, is in some sense the universal stuff. And we can talk about that. But that's another issue why the ancient Greeks like to look for one of the fundamental stuffs or reduce everything in the world to like one or a few different kinds of things. And he ended up thinking of water, but he thought people were wondering about earthquakes and where did earthquakes come

from, what was the cause of earthquakes? And Thales said, well, there must be a lot of water underneath us where the solid earth we're living on is maybe resting on something which is not so solid, some sort of water that's beneath us. And so when there are waves in that water that's causing the earthquakes we're experienced.

And the fact that he came up with that explanation as opposed to there were some supernaturalistic explanations that were common at that time, then that sort of points to that naturalistic view. And if you look at other Greek thinkers, you see a lot of the similar kind of things going on. They were really looking for more naturalistic ways of looking at the world.

They were very focused on certain practical issues, but philosophically they really tried to stay away from any kind of abstract ideas. In the Roman period, figures like people talk about the persecutions of the Christians under the Romans, and these persecutions did happen, and some of them were horrendous. And the Diocletian, the Emperor Diocletian is probably the worst of the Roman emperors in terms of persecuting Christians.

However, they were not that universal in Roman history and were often long periods of time in which there wasn't any real Christian persecutions. And it wasn't until the Emperor Constantine I'm trying to remember 313, I believe, he basically officially recognized sort of Christianity as a valid view of the world, a valid religion, and basically decided for political reasons, basically, he said he was going to accept Christianity.

He needed to unify all of Roman, basically under a single religion. That's what he decided he wanted to do, and it would be Christianity. He basically decreed Christianity is correct and it's acceptable, but it turned out to be more than that. People talk about it was good for religious freedom, but at that point there are basically more and more steps that the Roman government took in order to basically give an edge to Christian churches.

And basically there's a lot of government money from Rome went to Christian churches supporting Christian churches, and nothing else.

They were basically made into legal magistrates and arbitrating legal disputes and things like that. So this went on for a while and basically gradually the Romans basically started to stamp out anything that was not Christianity. And I think it went on gradually, but over time it became clear that this was the only religion that was acceptable in the Roman Empire. And at a certain point, all other Christians were made illegal. I think it might have been Theodosius it was a later Roman Emperor.

He said any views, philosophical or pagan views outside of Christianity are illegal. And he actually issued the death penalty for teaching or promulgating other views like these.

But then in the Islamic world, there were certainly elements of the Islamic world that rediscovered Aristotle and a lot of this other ancient Greek thought about science especially, and really did exciting work with it. And then later that all got there was a translation movement that was supported by certain people, like in Baghdad, and that got a lot of translated, a lot of these works from ancient Greek into Arabic.

And then you had these whole schools, a lot of scholars in the Islamic world really studying this stuff and then actually mastering a lot of the ancient Greek work in astronomy and medicine and then going beyond it and just extending it further. And that's part of basically considered the golden age of Islam. Yeah.

This is all antireligious, in a sense, because what's most important is God's will. And God's will is everywhere and is beyond, is the ultimate. And that is what's important. And that's the only real explanation of anything. And he basically came out and said, who are you to say that if you have a match and you bring a match, a piece of paper, and the paper starts burning, he sort of said, who are you to say that the match causes the paper to burn? It's not that.

It's that we see the match, we bring it to the paper, and of course, it's God doing everything. God is basically causing the paper to burn. And we just happen to see these things that look like they go together, but everything that happens is God's will.

And we can look for kind of scientific laws, in a sense. But the Asherites basically said they you know, that's really limiting God much too, you know, al Ghazali, his ideas triumphed in the Islamic world. So that's the big catastrophe. Yes. Although, I mean, scholars also debate about the extent of his influence and at what point, because the decline of science in the Islamic world was not sudden. It was very gradual.

And those places where there's a small area where they do overlap, he basically said they're going to give us the same knowledge. And those areas that they do overlap, he talked about the fact that God exists. He thought that could be proven by reason. And some of God's attributes, like that God was all good, or that he was somehow infinite, he thought that could be proven by reason. But he was basically saying reason is fully valid and in the domains for which it applies.

And in that day and age that was a big deal. And he became very influential for.

I mean, the bottom line is, I think that Galileo was trying to defend the Copernican worldview and the Catholic Church basically came along and said, this is contradictory to certain lines in Scripture. And at a certain point the first issue, I think was in 26 excuse me, the year 1616, that Galileo had sort of a conflict with the Church and somebody denounced Galileo. And it's been a while since I worked on this, so I'm a little forget some of the details.

But basically he was told not to defend the Copernican view anymore, not to formally, not to say the Copernican view was true. And he promised, he said, okay, I'm not going to do that. That was in 1616. But then years later that things started changing. The politics of the Catholic Church seemed to be changing in some ways that could be favorable to him. There were certain key figures who died and an old person friend.

If somebody, a Pope who had actually seemed to be Galileo's friend and supported him, the person became Pope who had previously been supportive of Galileo in certain ways.

And so Galileo probably wasn't quite as careful as he should have been, and he was just a little too vociferous, basically. He couldn't help himself, and he had to make the case for the Copernican view stronger seem stronger than the other cases. And then certainly at the end of the book, there were some words that the Church had told him.

You have to put if you're going to say something good about the Copernican view, you have to say something about well, there was a certain sentence or a set of sentences you had to say, which sort of had to qualify everything and basically say, well don't really know anything and God can do anything. And he basically took those words and he put them in the voice of the person of the story, who was really kind of a simpleton Simplicius, I think was Simplicius. That's it.

Yeah, that's the character. Simplicius. So that's what basically led to more denunciations. And then the Pope getting absolutely furious when he learned what happened. And then he was dragged before the Inquisition and forced to recant, basically. And then put under initially was meant to be imprisonment for life, and then it was later commuted because the many powerful people tried to help Galileo at this point.

And at that later, it was commuted to house arrest in his home know, in Arquetry IBLI. But I mean, the big conflict, of course know, how much is this Galileo thing, the Galileo affair? How much does it tell us about if there are conflict between science and religion? Because a lot of historians today have come out and said, well, this doesn't say that there's a real conflict between science and Galileo. He just didn't know politically what was going on.

He just overstepped his bounds a little bit. He could have finessed his way better through this, things like that. It was a bad political situation for the Church and so forth. And certainly Galileo, he certainly was very assertive, and he loved to ridicule his enemies, and so he had made a number of enemies. There's a lot of debate about that.

But in my mind, this still comes down to ultimately the fact that he was arguing for the truth of the Copernican system based on evidence and trying to give rational arguments for it. And the Church was basically using force against him to censor him. That is the main issue, and a lot of historians just don't want to.

And he says but he says whatever you do, do not mix them because you're going to cause all sorts of problems if you do mix them. And he said this repeatedly in his writings. And Bacon was very influential, certainly all the British thinkers after him. I think Bacon wrote a lot of his work around the year a little after 1600, 1620 was his book on logic, 16 five, I believe, was one of his books about the grand project of science.

But he was very influential on a lot of people at this time, a lot of people looking into trying to learn about scientific type things. But I saw God's. Two books. This whole idea of God's two books and you shouldn't intermingle them struck me as very much as coming from probably very indirectly, but coming from Aquinas and his idea that there's reason here and that works and there's faith here. And there's not much little overlap between the.

But if you look at so there was some here, people who speculated wildly here or there about the mean. But the first person who really came up with a solid theory was Jean Baptiste Lamarck. And so this was like, I think it was in 1809, he wrote he published a book, I forget his exact, exact position, but he was within the French government. He was supported by the French government in some way doing his studies.

And he came out with his theory of, I guess what's now known as Lamarckism or the idea that inherited certain characteristics can be inherited. And the famous one we hear in school when. We learn this is about the giraffes, right? Why do giraffes have such long necks? Is because at a certain point, trees were getting within a certain area, trees were getting sparser, and more of the leaves were higher up.

So these animals, the precursors to the giraffes, kept on having to stretch their necks to get to the food. And the act of their stretching their necks to get to their food basically got into their system in such a way that the children of these giraffes basically had longer necks because of the striving that they had to find to reach the food.

So anyway, Lamarck did have he thought that there is a kind of natural must be some natural process by which living things over long periods of time slowly get more complex and change over time. He actually thought that living things must have somehow emerged out of nonliving things and that somehow there's some spontaneous generation that went on and maybe he thought still goes on, that in the world around us, there's always some.

If you look at pond water and take a piece of pond water, you'll see that there's little things that start growing in it. So he saw that as evidence. Well, there must be things, living things come from non living things. And then as they get more people were looking also at all the fossils, and that's a fossil record. And they could know if you go back much further in time, the fossils become simpler, the organisms are somehow simpler. So that's where Lamarck his ideas came from.

So his ideas were not super popular. And then after Lamarck, there were other figures. There's a Scotsman named Robert Chambers who wrote a book basically saying that somehow God created the world so that all living creatures evolve in a certain way. But his book, while very popular, was also mocked by so many people because Chambers didn't really have any evidence whatsoever for this idea.

And then Darwin came along and he was doing his research, and it took him I mean, after doing a lot of research with the certainly he went on this long boat trip with the HNS beagle and basically did a lot of observations of tons of different animals and similarities and differences in animals.

So it was basically looking at the kinds of similarities and differences among animals in different places that could possibly explain something about more fundamental about where they came from or that they've changed over time.

But, yeah, he noticed things like he noticed kinds of similarities and differences between different animals that did not quite make sense if you would think that God designed every different organism to be perfectly fit, its exact environment right there, which was the predominant view among a lot of scholars of scientists at that time. So that didn't make sense, basically because of the similarities of different animals.

Things like the fact that Marsupials, you only find them in certain parts of the world close to where Australia is in that area. But even though those identical types of environments, if you know, in the new world, if you look in almost places which have almost exact identical environment, you have something different. So it made sense that certain animals might have migrated nearby to different places and changed in that migration. And then eventually he came across this idea.

He started thinking about how animals, when it's difficult for animals to live in a certain environment, a lot of animals die and there's a lot of variation. He was also impressed by how much variation there is among when animals reproduce.

And if you look at the children of a certain group of animals and if you look at their descendants, how much every little attribute that they have seems to be a little bit different, and that he was basically by looking at that fact and looking at the fact that a lot of these don't survive in challenging environments. Perhaps most of them don't involve survive. Then he looked at, well, this must be some sort of natural selection.

And he was aware of what was called artificial selection, that breeders, when they wanted to treat, get the right kind of dogs to use, they were always selectively deciding which dogs to breed with which other dogs in order to try to change their dogs in a certain way. And that clearly worked. So clearly, the dogs we had somehow people over thousands of years, we have changed dogs. The nature of dogs.

In fact, Darwin himself, backpedaled on know, after Lord Kelvin, had basically looked at the Earth, the nature of the Earth and the heat flow within the Earth and concluded that the Earth couldn't possibly be that old because assuming Earth was molten anyway, there were certain ups and downs. And at a certain point, genetics, the idea of Mendel's discoveries had to be brought into the fold. And that didn't happen later. So there wasn't the clear idea of evolution as a whole.

And the whole Darwinian was called the Darwinian, the synthesis of Darwin into a really complete theory of evolution that probably didn't happen until the 1920s.

It can explain things if you're talking about small, very small changes over a certain period of time. But if you look at certain mechanisms, biological mechanisms, and some of them seem so complicated, there does not seem any conceivable way that very small changes over time could possibly have led to these changes. And one of the most famous ones was the bacteria flagellum. So this is kind of like a tail on certain bacteria that can wiggle and propel the bacterial cell, propel it around.

And this thing has kind of a it has kind of a thing which allows it to rotate. So it's like a little bit amazing little mechanism, kind of a motor. And so one scientist, I think his name was Michael Behe, if I remember correctly, promoted this idea and he talks about this. He said, well, this is obviously too complicated for evolution to do. This is an example of there must be some intelligent designer that designed this to be the way it is now.

Other people after that came along and looked at it and said, well, yes, the flagellum is pretty complicated in this way, but if you look carefully, look at the pieces. His famous example also was the mousetrap. He said if you look at the pieces of a mousetrap, you have the piece that holds the cheese and you have the piece that the big spring that flips over all these pieces.

If you had a process which could just change one piece at a time, there's no way you could actually create something as complicated as a mousetrap because it's only valuable if it's a complete mousetrap. If you have half a mousetrap, it's not going to catch any mice. If you have the pieces, if you have all the pieces except one in a standard mousetrap, it's not going to work at all.

So this was the idea where the bacterial flagellum was like was supposed to be kind of like this mousetrap type thing. But other people, other biologists came around and said, well, wait a minute. Just because a mechanism seems to let me see how they argued this. They basically said just because a particular if you look at the bacterial phagellum, it has a couple of parts, and it turns out some of these parts actually have use for other purposes for certain bacteria.

So there's actually the piece which is sort of the rotating motor part is very pointy. Well, it turns out there are other organisms which have a piece which is almost just like that, and it doesn't rotate at all, but it's used to inject itself into a cell of something it's trying to attack, and it's injecting itself.

So basically the idea is that Beh wasn't looking hard enough to try to explain where these things came from, where these parts came from, and that these pieces, even though you might not have had to complete all the pieces that led to the flagellum that each other pieces could be seen as actually useful and actually life enhancing for that thing, but not necessarily doing the same thing. I don't know if I've butchered that. Does that make sense?

So he thought the idea of God writing these laws that the rest of the world must sort of fall in line with is inherent in the whole idea of a natural law that scientists are trying to find. And if I think I can find just look, find a quote from him.

But if you look at what were they really doing when they were studying the natural world? They were making observations, they were using logic to trying to understand these observations. They were putting together plausible hypotheses and trying to test them. And if you look at what they're doing, doesn't have any real connection with the religious worldview. The Bible presents God as somebody who likes to act a lot and likes to intervene a lot and does all sorts of things.

And so I think Stark really doesn't have an argument to stand on.

And that a faith based view of the world is basically accepting the primacy of consciousness, that God's consciousness, that some consciousness has created the existing world, whereas the scientific, the reason based view ultimately is based on what Einran calls the premise of existence. That existence exists, and it's the starting point for everything.

There are some mystical interpretations of modern physics that happens, although I don't think many physicists today take any of the mystical approach very seriously. So that's good news. And then certainly in terms of medicine and medical ethics, that's where there's more of a threat to religion.

The religious approaches are still used a lot there a lot of people are using religion as their framework for understanding any kind of issues in medical ethics and of which many more will come up in the future. And also I have a chapter talking about certain what I call religious like elements of the environmental movement.

And I think that's probably going forward that's probably the most of the threat that I see going forward where people are looking at untouched nature apart from human interaction. Untouched wilderness, wilderness in itself.