[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Andrew McDroumid.
Bertrand Russell once wrote that only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation be safely built.
But is this worldview of scientific materialism in line with what science has revealed to us in the last century? On this episode, we're pleased to share a recent conversation between Doctor Melissa Cain Travis and author and teacher Doctor Ken Boa on the Explorers podcast.
The topic is beauty in the sciences. Doctor Travis is a fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, where she serves as an instructor of adult education
[email protected]. dot she is the author of thinking God's thoughts, Johannes Kepler, and the miracle of cosmic comprehensibility, as well as science and the mind of the maker what the conversation between faith and science reveals about God in this discussion, Doctor Travis expounds on what she calls the principle of cosmic comprehensibility, the idea that the universe is intelligible to us.
She provides examples from the work of CS Lewis, as well as early 17th century astronomer and giant of the scientific revolution, Johannes Kepler. Melissa and Ken also discussed the universal longing for meaning and purpose that's inherent in human existence, and how even scientific materialists acknowledge this in their work. Let's listen in now to Doctor Melissa Cain Travis, speaking with doctor Ken Boa.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Welcome to explorers. And I'm Ken Boa. And I'm with my guest, Melissa Cain Travis, who is the author of several books on the realm of science, but also on wonder of beauty of the imagination as well. We share a common interest as well in the works of CS Lewis. And Melissa, I want to welcome you to our Explorers podcast.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Thank you for that. It's my pleasure. And I'm looking forward to a delightful conversation.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, you've written a number of books on the story of the cosmos, the science and the mind of the maker, and also thinking God's thoughts.
I love the way you approach this material because you're looking at it from a number of different aspects, from the microcosm, the what I call the Midi cosm or the biosphere and the macrocosm. And each of these has the fine tuning arguments, the whole dynamics of compelling evidences from the biomacro molecules of DNA, all the way to other realms in the sedimentary strata. And just if you would kind of give us an exploration of what are the things you most love about kind of tying all these threads together, and not just with the sciences, but also the arts and the whole idea of the use of the creative imagination that we were just talking about.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Well, I should start by saying that my background is in the biological sciences. Before I decided to go to graduate school to study the intersection of philosophy and theology and science and arts, I worked in biotechnology. And it was through having conversations with non believers in a laboratory setting, a lot of them with much higher scientific credentials than I had, that I started to really think deeply about what it means to have effective evangelistic conversations. And I knew that somehow the Lord had planned for me to move into an area that still utilized my scientific background, but I knew there must be something much more to it. And there's a long story that led me to getting my graduate education in this area, but the result of it has been discovering that there is this wonderful and deepen interconnection among all of these different disciplines, this idea of all truth being God's truth, and different categories of truth. We have rational truths, we have imaginative truths, intuitive truths, moral truths that all work together to give us this rich, meaningful understanding of the world.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: And of course, all along the way, CS Lewis's writings played a huge part in shaping my love for these areas, shaping my understanding of the interconnections that I mentioned, and also sparking, really, a passion for the project of apologetics.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: That's wonderful. Yeah, and that's really. And you're talking about it in terms of truth, and we could speak of it in terms of knowledge. It's the same. The epistemology that are multiplicities of epistemologies, rather than just scientific knowledge, which has its own validity. But the danger is a scientistic notion that suddenly that commandeers everything else and trumps all the other forms of knowledge, which, of course, by Michael Pauliani, made very clear in personal knowledge, in the tacit dimension, are certainly not so, because you have personal knowledge, which is a different, as, you know, a different entry point. The epistemological entry point is of a different nature. And then there's also historical knowledge, and there's a philosophical knowledge, and there's religious knowledge, and there's aesthetic knowledge. And all those realms are so fascinating that we are such complex, interconnected beings that to break us down into just little components would be a reductionistic task.
[00:06:04] Speaker C: Yes, I completely agree. The sociologist Peter Berger wrote a short little book years ago called signals of transcendence.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: I love that book.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: It's wonderful, isn't it? And it really shaped my thinking about what it means to have, let's use the word arrational rather than irrational, but a rationale, forms of knowledge. And he talks about the human responses that we have to things like intense beauty and, you know, imaginative story that just pulls on the strings of the heart in such a way that we know we're getting an insight into a very deep truth. But often it's a truth that's maybe a bit beyond our ability to articulate in philosophical or theological terms.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: No, that's exactly right. I sometimes put it this way because I'm in this really. I think there's a real kindred spirit here with us in this respect. I find myself in the pursuit of a story driven amplification of imagination. If I just stop that for just a second there. Story driven, the narrative, the need for beauty, the need for narrative, and the need for authenticity in our time seems to be quite profound. And if I can amplify the imagination through story well told, whether it's film or literature or music or art or whatever, I then point janam tots to the greatest story ever told. So that will winsomely compel people to long for more.
I want people to long for more than they do.
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Right, right. And Lewis talked about that. Right. You know, he talked about this piercing, bittersweet longing we have, this desire we have for something that seems to not be of this world.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: And he argues that that means that we were clearly made for another world.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Another world, because we cannot find it. We find the other needs met, but not this one. But it means that most probable explanations, we were meant for another world. And indeed, that seems to be the theme of his whole way, to weight of glory and the idea of the nature of this imagination and this inconsolable, as he puts it, this inconsolable secret in each of us, that Zainzug, he doesn't use it there, but that's the word he has in mind, isn't it? The idea of that longing for something that points beyond almost haunting and compelling and sometimes as poignant, as poignant as grief, and yet it impels and creates this longing for a better world and knowing that there's got to be more.
[00:08:59] Speaker C: Yes, yes, yes. I have to say, if I had to pinpoint one nonfiction writing from Lewis, that is my favorite. The weight of glory essay has to be it. And every time I read that line that comes at the end of the essay, where he says, we have this overwhelming impression that we're on the wrong side of the door, that all the pages of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that one day we shall get.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: We shall get in.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: I weep every time I read that.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: This whole idea of him delivering this thing as a sermon. I know it was published beforehand in theology, but in 1941, I was imagining being in that St. Mary the Virgin, which was across from my college in Oxford. It was Oriel College. And so, right across the high street, I often went into that church and imagined that audience hearing that sermon.
But as many times as I've read this, I find something new in each time I read it.
It's the most wonderful sermon I've ever read about this. And when he adds this thing to please God, to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness, to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in, as an artist delights in his work, where a father and a son, it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. What magic.
He just. He makes you long for more.
[00:10:39] Speaker C: He definitely does. And I love reading all that he's had to say about the power of story, the power of narrative, to help us rediscover, or maybe a better word, would be to reawaken to the longings that we've been talking about. One of my sort of side loves, if you will, is science fiction literature. And I especially love the science fiction literature written by mid 20th century materialists. And the reason I enjoy reading it so much is, and Lewis read this, this literature as well. And that would be a whole separate conversation.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: It would be a separate. Yeah.
Words to Arcturus. He mentions that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: But one of the things that I enjoy so much about it is that you see in between the lines, the materialist longing for story, for a meaning and a purpose, and a grand narrative in which to situate yourself.
And how do you do that if there's no such thing as the transcendent? How do you do that if all of this is finite, if one day nothing whatsoever will exist, there will be no consciousness to remember or to love or to find purpose and meaning in existence.
And so I think you can use some of the literature written by these great minds who were, unfortunately, scientific materialists and see that coming through. See that longing for more coming through the stories.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: I have a collection of science fiction things, and there was a very similar list that you're describing. When I think about an Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury, and I'm thinking of some of these other writers that, as you rightly say, they wanted a sense of a signal of transcendence. It was an imminent realm. But they wanted to have a sense of mystery, of something more, something bigger than us, ourselves, because just being tethered to this world was not enough. They knew there had to be something bigger in a greater vision, but their worldview, it was corroded by the essence of its own assumptions.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: Right, right. Isaac Asimov is one of the Asimov.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: My gosh, the foundation trilogy. I don't know how many times I've read the foundation trilogy. I'm not delighted, by the way, with what they've done with the Apple tv version of it at all, because they've had, in my opinion, messed it up. But maybe I'm too much of a purist, but I don't know who could pull it off. But what wonder, what genius, what an insight that he had, for sure.
[00:13:29] Speaker C: And I would agree with you, the adaptation is not fantastic. But one thing that I did notice, especially in the first season, was that this theme of a longing for narrative and finding significance by being situated within a narrative actually comes through very strongly in the tv show, especially with the subplot of Kleon traveling to that very religious planet.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: That is true. Yeah. And going, it does capture that.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's. Through that pilgrimage, and then there's a very clear sense at the end of his disappointment, as it's fleeting, but it's there. And there are all sorts of other themes in Asimov's writings about this particular idea. He wrote a short story, and I wonder if you've ever read it. I think it was one of his more famous stories called the last question. Do you know it?
[00:14:34] Speaker A: I don't think if I know that one. No.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: It's available online. You can google it and find copies. But the idea behind that short story is finding transcendence through science.
And I can't give away the twist at the end. I want you to read it.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: All right.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: It's right in line with everything that we're discussing now about how the materialists search, and they're putting this.
This intense faith in the ability of science to help them achieve meaning, purpose, to help them achieve transcendence. Doctor Clay Jones at Biola University has this wonderful phrase. He uses this phrase, immortality project.
And for sure, we see lots of scientific materialists using science as their immortality project.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yes. And the danger in some of those cases can become like that hideous strength, which is the implication, the actual, as you know, the fictional realization of the abolition of man and the whole idea of becoming a disembodied brain, a brain in a vat, this horror horrific. I remember this horrible science fiction movie called Donovan's brain. Hymns from the fifties was dreadful. But the idea of being a disembodied consciousness and disconnected from DNA and then quantized and then put in uploaded is my idea of a horror because it would be like being a pod slave in the matrix. The idea of just being disembodied, disconnected, would be not my idea of a. I think what we really long for, and this is the hard thing, and it's wired in us, because if we're bearers of the Imago Dei, even though that's distorted, it seems to me that we have this need for relationship, this need for meaning, aesthetics of purpose that we long for more than this world can provide. And we try to find and hope we're gonna find it in another way. But we're trying to have God have eternal life without God. And that leads to this disembodied horror, to me. But yet there's this. It's driven by a desire for more than ourselves.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Right. I completely agree. And so part of the project of evangelizing the world really has to be helping people to reflect in very serious, philosophically sound ways about what it means to have those kinds of longings.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: You know, and just shepherd them towards the truth of the fact that there is only one fulfillment for those.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yes, it's a good way. You're saying that shepherd them toward the truth because you are actually being a guide in that context and as a shepherd would feed and protect and also provide.
And this idea of dialogical apologetics, which I know that you practice, I'm certain, is asking good questions and asking them, what do you think about that? And then based upon their questions, asking them further questions to help them, really, it's like the myudic method, where you're kind of a midwife of ideas, where you give birth and that baby may be ugly, but it's theirs. They have to own it.
[00:18:04] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
But it's a lovely idea, isn't it, of our seeking to be better listeners, in fact, and to ask them good questions. That's fascinating to me about this. And you're not being an adversary, but rather really being an agent, where you're helping them think further than they otherwise would have on their own.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. I find a lot of times that just by asking questions, imparting no information whatsoever, but just asking questions help them recognize incoherences in their worldview, various other problems, the logical conclusions that they assuredly would not want to affirm things like that.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Yes. By asking them questions. Yeah. It forces them to see that if maybe they didn't have it together as well as they had supposed.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: Right.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: But then they realize it themselves. I've had those encounters, and there's a sudden realize that they know that you know, that they know that it doesn't work, and it's kind of an action in between. I had one person who was a cosmogenist. He was writing a book on cosmogony for ten years. I met him at Kruger National park in South Africa, and he was from South Africa, and he happened to be the one. I was sitting next to about 30 people in this photo safari. And when he told me about his book on cosmogeny, my astronomy background, of course I was interested. And we began, I asked him questions, and I have to say, I've never seen anything quite like it. 2 hours later, everyone was gone. And suddenly we looked up and we realized we were all by ourselves.
And by this point, he'd realized that he'd painted himself into a corner.
And it was the most extraordinary experience because after this long a time, I said, it's Jesus, isn't it?
That's when he knew that I knew that he knew it was true. It had to be the, it had to be infinite and transcendent. It had to be personal. Infinite and the infinite and eternal being and the logos and all of that idea that he was appealing to. But what's interesting that we knew it. And I gave him handbook to prayer the next day, but two days after that, he acted like it never happened.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: Oh, wow.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Yeah. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
And so he knew it. But then he wasn't ready for the implications because, you know, this is the interesting thing, to your point about it's not just the logical reasoning, it's. It's a personal encounter with a terrifying reality that you're invited to let loose of the illusion of control that you never had. He never had it.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Right.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: And then you don't. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: And of course, Lewis talked about this, and it was his very own experience.
You know, he described himself as the most dejected and reluctant convert.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: All of England, beautiful images of that, because he was fighting against this, because he saw that he didn't want God to be personal. And when in that bus, as he goes up and he goes up from Headington, and then it was for him an extraordinarily gradual, incremental array of things where it brought him from one to another, but in each case, though, it was not just intellectual. This had to do with a claim on his life.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: Oh, for sure.
And that is. Goes a long way in explaining why his conversion journey was so very long.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
But an honest quest for truth. There are some people who, you know, that there are truly are seekers, and there's. I kind of think of it as people or two kinds of people, those who seek to know God and those who seek to avoid him. And in a certain way, both will succeed in the end. And so it's the idea of those who seek will find. Those who ask, it'll be given to them. Those who knock, it'll be open so that. But he won't impose or push it upon us. But he woos us, but he won't force us.
[00:22:24] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
Amazing things.
So we love the same things.
If you had to select, though, some of your very favorite reasons or evidences or the things that you most revel in sharing about, whether it's beauty in nature, the aesthetics, dynamics of that, or the nature of our kind of a collective minds that take place where there's a collective whole that relates to these matrices, these connections, these links together, what are the things that you most enjoy sharing in that realm?
[00:23:07] Speaker C: Well, I am a passionate student of intellectual history.
Probably my most favorite thing to talk about when it comes to what I would refer to as a very holistic case for a creator in whose image we are made, is the topic of cosmic comprehensibility, of the universe being intelligible. And what is it that allows that to be the case? And we can actually go back to the earliest writings, the earliest surviving writings of western philosophy, and see that this is a question that occupied great minds throughout the millennia. And then you see this wonderful, maybe not culmination, but this wonderful transition and elevation of these ideas during the scientific revolution happened with devout christian men. Johannes Kepler is my big hero. If I had to name one other than cs Lewis, it would be Johannes Kepler. And Kepler very much tapped into the glory is the only word I really know to use the glory of this concept of the intelligibility of nature.
And he saw that there was a very real problem. If you did not believe in a transcendent mind who had created the world and made us in his image, such that we could discern the beauty, the order, the rationality, the harmony, harmony that exists in the created world, it turns out that this line of argumentation that Kepler did not formalize, but that he talked about at length throughout his life, is something that's an even more robust line of argumentation today.
And so we look at things like the applicability of mathematics to the natural world, look at the necessity of an immaterial element of rationality, so that humans can carry out things like the advanced mathematics and theoretical physics and so on and so forth. And so that's where we see this wonderful fusion of philosophy, theology, mathematics, scientific reasoning, coming together to pose this monumental question. And that is, how can we do science in the first place?
[00:25:53] Speaker A: Yes, yes, it's astonishing that he. It's riddled with little hints and suggestions, and each one would then open the pathway to another like the periodic table. You just think about how each thing led to the next one, and then one insight about what an element is and so forth, but how it develops. And now it's accelerated because of this cumulative knowledge that we've been privileged to see as a result of the scientific revolutions that have occurred. It's quite an astonishing thing, just the capacity to enhance our ability to grasp this. And as you well know, Lewis, one of his arguments was that the rational mind would be suspect if it was based upon just immaterial and irrational causes.
For our arguments to have any bearing or weight without being self defeated would require something that goes beyond us for them to be embedded. That whole idea of the transcendentals of beauty and of truth and of goodness that are required for our ogyms to even cohere, for sure.
[00:26:59] Speaker C: And the idea of the aesthetic leading to truth, that was not a foreign idea to think. Great thinkers like Johannes Kepler. Johannes Kepler was obsessed with the idea of harmony. And by harmony, I mean that in all the best senses of the word, intellectual harmonies, aesthetic harmonies. And it was that very concept that was fundamental to his drive, uncover the secrets of nature. In addition, of course, to this.
Well, this famous phrase of his that really encapsulates this, that by exegeting the book of nature, we're able to think God's thoughts after him, or sharing God's own thoughts. And it was the concept of harmony, of beauty in this harmony that brought him to this idea. He liked to refer to natural philosophers, what today we would call scientists, as priests in this holy temple of God, uncovering some secrets about the mind of God through the investigation of all that he has created.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: No, I love that idea. And you're seeing as well the harmony of music, the music of the spheres. So here Kepler is seeing, as you're rightly saying, all these components are harmony, which produce an ultimate shalom, a spiritual infusion that informs all the other components but they're all manifestations of the glory of God in each way. The book of nature, it seems to me, the book of the God's world is profound source of revelation, of beauty. And it points, in my view, to the. To the truth of God and in God's word. And so these people integrating, as you say, a theistic vision of God, of the world, and confusing that with science. And so they are now creating a condition where you couldn't have even had it empirically based science before then.
[00:29:13] Speaker C: That's exactly right. It's interesting to read. Well, I call them scientific materialist manifestos, but we have these New York Times bestsellers that seem to come out every couple of years from high profile scientific materialists, and they've recognized this lack. And so they're coming up with all sorts of ways to not necessarily explain it away. That was sort of the old approach to it, this new approach. Sean Carroll, the cosmologist, calls it poetic naturalism. So all there in the language of his view, is this nod to the fact that beauty, meaning, purpose, are very important to human existence. And so the had this convoluted, acrobatic attempt to convince their readers that it's okay, that there is no transcendence. We can simply fabricate these things that we desire. We can fabricate meaning, and we can fabricate purpose for our lives, and then we can use poetic language and beautiful art and music to celebrate these things that we have invented.
But at the end of the day, this falls very flat because we know that this is nothing more than a recycled version of the old noble lie, right?
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Yes, exactly right? Yes. It's this delusion that somehow we've explained it all away. And the nothing buttery that Lewis talks about, that reductionistic approach somehow making it a noble sacrifice. We realize we have to sacrifice the illusions of religion, but we have a poetry that we can live upon, that we've created ourselves. But the whole thing is a stultified project. It defeats itself because it's basically saying that there isn't any meaning. We're just an episode between two oblivions. We're a cosmic blip, but it's just a prettier way of putting it, a poetic naturalism. That's great, right?
[00:31:38] Speaker C: And, you know, back in the day, let's call it the good old days of the atheist philosophers. Bertrand Russell was very honest about all of this. Remember, he talks about how the only option open to us is to build our worldview upon the firm foundation, the.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Firm foundation of unyielding despair.
Exactly.
[00:32:06] Speaker C: On the very next page, he talks about the importance of celebrating beauty and seeking nobility for its own sake and so on and so forth. So he talks this big game, but then he doesn't even stick to it at the end.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: It doesn't even work together. And that's one of the beauties of Lewis's discussion on Addison's walk with Hugo, Dyson and Tolkien. That whole realization that the best poetry turned out to be in the myth turns out to be historical. And so the putting of the two together was that great moment of insight, which is just the opposite, where you love the poetry, but that's all it was, was just nothing but that. But no, it's nothing. Something war that really did happen. But without that real happening, we are living in a world that says we came from nowhere, we're going nowhere. Nothing will be remembering us right again. He's right. The firm foundation of unyielding despair. But we can't live that way because we can't live. This is where I say that non believers live better.
They cannot live logically or consistently, the logical implications of their own pre suppositions. So they live better than their worldview, whereas the believer lives worse than their worldview.
Right.
[00:33:28] Speaker C: Right.
I liked how William Lincoln puts it. He said, if the scientific materialist lives consistently, they can't be happy. It's abject misery.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Abject misery.
[00:33:41] Speaker C: But if they attempt to live happily, then they're not living consistently.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Consistently. That's exactly. That. Sub summarizes it. You can't have it both, but yet the scriptures say we have a both. And here what you long for is a hint of home. It's the hint of what's best to come. What's going to come. And that gives me great comfort in a world where we see what appears to be a tragedy.
And yet what this tragedy will be is we'll realize that it's truly a comedy in the resurrected life to come.
But right now we see the inexorable decay and diminishment and so forth, the weight, the pull that pulls us down, and yet this glory, this pull toward me, upwards, where I now see that the greatest moments of beauty, of intimacy and adventure I've ever known, are those patches of God light in the woodlands of my experience.
[00:34:35] Speaker C: Yeah. This image, as you're talking, I get this image of the door that Louis mentions in the weight of glory and a bright beam of light shining through the keyhole from time to time. Right? We get these glimpses.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah, hints of home. And there are hints of greater glories that I will ever be able to grasp. Now, every so often, you have something that makes you weak because of the beauty is so extraordinary, and you just wish to be in there one day it will be so, and it'll it. But it'll be better if I imagine myself. I have this way of thinking I'm going to go be able to somehow zoom down orders of magnitude into that flower and just immerse myself into that thing and be. Because right now we can't immerse ourselves, as Lewis rightly argues, in that. But I'd love to be able to zoom down in there and then zoom back up orders of magnitude. And if it isn't that, it'll be even better, because the best is yet to come, and I don't have capacity yet to grasp what's going to be true of the resurrected life in the resurrected world. That's why I'm chewing more on that than ever before.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: I love to tell my students that they should read the weight of glory in parallel with the last battle.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: That's a good way to do it.
[00:35:59] Speaker C: In the Narnia Chronicles, because of all that you see this wonderful nonfiction essay that speaks to these things, but then you see it written in an imaginative method to spark this longing for the far off country, as he puts it.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: This profound longing for something better than you had. Yes. I just think it's extraordinary with the last battle that really, when he says at the end of that, no longer looked to them like a lion, but the things that did happen after that were so great and beautiful, I cannot write them. And he goes, but for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. I love this way he ends the Narnia, in all their life in this world, and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the COVID and the title page. Now, at last, it would begin in chapter one of the great story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before. How can you get better than that?
[00:36:56] Speaker C: Yeah, right, right.
So there was this theme in some of the writings of the Church fathers. I know Irenaeus was one of them. The others are escaping my memory. But he talked about this idea of the path of sanctification is progress toward true humanity, and that Jesus Christ was the only fully human, fully human human that ever lived. Well, of course, fully God and fully man. But we aspire to this humanity of Jesus, and our journey of sanctification is progress towards real humanity. This idea of being subhuman by virtue of our fallenness.
And as we pursue Christ's likeness, we actually also become more human. And Lewis illustrates this so beautifully in the great divorce.
Remember, the characters are, they're translucent and less solid.
But as it goes on, the main character, he becomes more real, more real, more robust, more thick in his journey towards the far off.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Yeah. They become more thickened. And the others, that. The thinness of that. Yes. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. I think it was Ignatius. What does that mean?
We haven't yet seen that full glory being revealed. We have hints of it and we've seen it in Christ.
But one day we will actually, because he's in us, as I like to put it, the infinite word became the incarnate word so that he could become the indwelling word. And now if you and I are indwelled by infinity and eternity, it's a deep and profound mystery I can't even begin to articulate. But the best is yet to come. And it's a perspective that I think we both embrace.
[00:39:04] Speaker C: Yeah. It gives this whole new higher wonderful to the idea of our glorified selves in the new creation.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: Yes. So you have a philosophy that says it's so and a reality that will make it so. So the two go hand in hand. This has been a lovely time to be with you and I'm looking forward to your being with us at the Museum of the Bible. It's going to be grand in July 13. So glad of that.
[00:39:34] Speaker C: I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm excited that some of my colleagues from Discovery Institute will be there with you.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: That great.
[00:39:41] Speaker C: It's so great.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. We've got Jay Richards is joining us as well now. So wonderful heritage. So it's going to be an extraordinary day.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: I'm looking forward to it. I can't wait to see the theater as well. I've never been there.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: I've been there. This is, this was my second time. But they didn't have the theater when I was there and it was pretty impressive. It's really. You won't be disappointed. And some of the new exhibits that they have are very very compelling. Very, are cutting edge. Really amazing work. Yeah.
[00:40:14] Speaker C: Did you have a chance to see the science and faith exhibit that they did last year?
[00:40:19] Speaker A: They did have that exhibit and I think it's still in part because I think John Lennox was featured in there, if I'm not mistaken, at the very.
[00:40:28] Speaker C: End of the exhibit. And I had a video where I just talked, I guess, for five or six minutes about the rise of modern science.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Yes. I think that's still there. Yeah. Okay. Which is great. You get to see yourself.
Well, thank you so much, Melissa. I look forward to our getting to know each other better.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: Oh, me, this is wonderful. Time flies when you're having fun.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: It does indeed, just zip by. We had 39 minutes together here, actually, when we started the thing officially, but before that. But we share lots of things in common with the aesthetic and the artistic, the philosophical, the scientific. And really there's that whole idea of being. I think you're like me, you're kind of a generalist and who synthesizes and translates and applies.
[00:41:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I would definitely say that. At heart, I'm an interdisciplinarian. I love to pull strings together and weave them together and just try to present a richer picture than someone has seen before.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And the more elements you put together, the more rich the tapestry becomes, the more it reinforces and everything becomes a greater than the sum of the parts. It becomes holistic and synergistic and all of those wonderful things combining together. And if that's what it's like in this pre resurrected life, what do you suppose our minds will be like when we see and say, I wish if I'd only known and living with that in mind?
[00:42:10] Speaker C: Well, as Lewis said, something that's presently indescribable and unimaginable, that we have it to look forward to.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Yeah, we won't be disappointed.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: That was Doctor Melissa Cain Travis speaking with Doctor Ken Boa about beauty, harmony and truth in the sciences.
The interview originally aired on the Explorers podcast.
We're grateful to Reflections ministries for permission to share the discussion here. You can learn more about Doctor Travis's work at our website, melissacaintravis.com for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
