[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Hello, I'm Andrew McDermott. Today I'm with Michael Newton Keyes, author of the new book 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion. It's published by ISI Books. Keyes is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a former Fulbright Scholar. After earning a PhD in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma, he won research grants from the National Science foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Caius currently serves as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Biola University and is on the board of Directors of Ratio Christi, an alliance of apologetics clubs on college campuses.
Welcome back, Mike.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back for this last, well, at least last for the time being episode.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you've released a book recently that debunks seven of the most popular and pernicious myths about science and religion. In previous episodes, you've helped show that these myths came from strange places and that they still persist in a lot of ways. And of course, what we can do about it. Today, we're looking at chapter 10 of your book on Johannes Kepler, whom one biographer calls not a mystic, as is often claimed, but rather a man of his age, devout and rational. At the same time, the topic of this episode has Christian theology successfully guided scientific discovery?
Well, Mike, much of your book is about defeating misconceptions concerning science and religion. Do you devote space to telling the positive story of how Christianity proved friendly to the rise of modern science?
[00:01:50] Speaker B: I do. And, you know, the first instance of this that I cite in a case study on Johannes Kepler is actually how Kepler helped pioneer science fiction as a genre, although it wasn't really widely recognized as a genre until the time of H.G. wells, like we talked about in the last episode. But Kepler imagined a trip to the moon and got a lot of it right. Like, you know, what it would be like to escape the Earth's gravity and what it would be like to walk around on the moon and how the moon would seem to be at rest and the Earth and other things in the sky would seem to move. And that, of course, was using sci fi to argue for Copernicanism.
You know, doesn't seem like our world's moving either. And yet it does.
So if you were living on the moon, you would think it was at rest. He used that quite effectively. And he thought that the creatures on the moon, if there were creatures, would have been designed by God to be appropriate for what he imagined was on the moon. Of course, he thought there was water up there and ways to live up there, but that turned out to be wrong. But he did imaginatively think of other possible inhabitable worlds that had creatures that were designed for those particular habitats. And that's an interesting instance of where Christians were ET Friendly. There are plenty of other critics of ET in the Christian tradition, but Kepler was one of the. The lovers of ET And I thought I'd just point that out since Kepler is one of my favorite scientists and I like sci fi, so why not?
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I knew that Kepler was a giant in science, but I didn't realize he had a part to play in the development of sci fi.
Yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: And he used it as a kind of a component of science education and scientific persuasion.
So sci fi can be used for a lot of different purposes. But he was also a very accomplished scientist and. And mathematician.
So Kepler is, besides Newton, of course, my middle name. Kepler was just a fabulous scientist.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Sure. Well, what did Kepler discover that's still taught today in astronomy textbooks?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Well, the three laws of planetary motion.
The first law says that each planet orbits the sun in an elliptical path rather than a circular one. Although they're almost circular, they're just slightly squashed circles, which is what an ellipse roughly looks like. But of course, an ellipse is not just some random squashed looking circle. It's very precisely defined mathematically. Rather than one center point, like in a circle, you have two foci, which was a term he coined in Latin, by the way, focus, which means hearth. Kind of like, you know, the sun is the hearth, the place where warmth and light is sent out into our local part of space. And anyway, his first law is that planets go in elliptical orbits rather than circular. And then he had two other laws that I won't detail that simply further specified how planets move in those elliptical orbits. And these are still taught in astronomy textbooks today. So that's a permanent contribution to the accumulated knowledge of humankind. Right, Right, Andrew.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Sure.
Well, how did Christian theology guide Kepler's discovery?
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah, Kepler was very explicit about the theological foundations of the way he approached science, partly, I think, because he almost finished a terminal degree in theology at one of the Lutheran universities.
He was Lutheran in southern Germany.
And he did accept a post as a mathematician just before finishing his doctoral degree in theology with the expectation that he could return if he wished to complete his degree, because he really wanted to be a theologian. But once he got on the field and started teaching mathematics and doing astronomy, which was considered like a branch of mathematics. He realized that there were some important discoveries that could be made that would glorify God in a way and point to God in a way that was complementary to what he originally thought was his calling, which was to be a pastor and a theologian.
So, for example, he contrasted his Christian approach to science with that of the very famous pagan ancient Greek, Aristotle. And I'll give you one quote. Kepler said regarding Aristotle that he did not believe that the world had been created and thus could not recognize the. Well, here's kind of a paraphrase. Mathematical design plans for the material world. And then back to the quote. Because without an architect or a divine architect, there is no such power in mathematics to make anything material. So math can't do anything on its own. Unlike the late Stephen Hawking who once said, you know, because there's a mathematical law of gravity that could create the world. Well, that's ridiculous. Mathematics, even mathematically structured natural laws don't do anything. They describe how the world works.
They don't actually do things. Agents do things.
But anyway, Kepler was onto this, that ancient pagans like Plato and Aristotle thought of the world as expressing deep mathematical regularities in design. So that they were design theorists of a sort of. But Kepler contrasted his Christian sort of take on intelligent design from ancient pagan views of intelligent design and said that, you know, he thought his made more sense. Because here you have an intelligent agent who actually can decide to instantiate mathematical rules into the physical world and create the physical world and put that math into it, whereas math by itself is passive and can't make a cosmos. Does that make sense?
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it does, yeah. Well, I really like the descriptor. Devout and rational at the same time. Is Kepler representative of a larger group of scientists who made similar achievements?
[00:07:54] Speaker B: He really is.
Galileo had a very similar perspective. In fact, he once said that in comparison with the Bible, which is God's special book of revelation, that God's general book of revelation, which is the cosmos, is written not in Hebrew and Greek like the Bible, but it's written in the language of mathematics.
So very similar idea that Kepler had.
And of course Newton, again similar. And Descartes and quite a few other natural philosophers or early modern scientists had this idea. And coming back to Kepler and again reflecting Galileo and others, he reasoned that mathematics existed eternally in the mind of God.
So there's a sort of necessity, if you will, to all the mathematical principles, some of which humans have discovered, and that God freely selected some of these mathematical principles and structured natural laws as he created the world.
To instantiate those into the world. And then he made humans, said Kepler in God's image so that we could discover those laws. And here's the absolute favorite quote of Kepler for many, many people that Kepler said, because we're made in God's image, we can share in his own thoughts, namely God's thoughts, that we can actually have some of the exact same thoughts that God has as we discover mathematical relationships, such as the three laws of planetary motion and others that govern the way the world works, which of course is an expression of the faithfulness of God in sustaining the universe according to these illustrious early modern scientists. So religion was not a science stopper, or it was a science starter for them. They really were motivated and guided by these theological ideas to go about investigating this purpose for world and find how it works.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Well, how does all this inform our understanding of how science and religion can legitimately relate to each other today?
[00:10:00] Speaker B: You know, one of Kepler's greatest insights about the natural world in relation to his own Christian worldview was that he thought that the world was designed for discovery. That is, that God had sort of rigged the world so that it could disclose itself to us as we pursue science. And one example that he gave was as a champion of Copernican astronomy, I.e. earth moving around the sun at rest, that it enabled him and others to make measurements such as the distance of Venus from the sun in relation to the Earth sun distance, by triangulating and making judgments of these distances that would be impossible if you were on a planet or if you were on an object in the center of the universe at rest.
So he actually structured this as a design for discovery argument and said, it looks like the Copernican view is more in keeping with a Christian worldview because it looks like the universe has been, and our place within it has been designed for discovery. Now, interestingly, that theme was picked up on by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in their book they co authored about a dozen years ago called the Privileged Planet, where they extend that design for discovery thesis, you know, a thousand fold to cover so many diverse fields of science that Kepler had no way of even knowing about because it hadn't been discovered yet. But Kepler had the basic idea there that they, our fellows at Discovery Institute had picked up on and wrote a book about it. And they didn't know that Kepler had actually had done this. But a fellow historian of astronomy, Michael Crowe, pointed that out to him or to both of them, and they were like, oh, wow, okay, so we're standing on the shoulders of giants like Kepler. So that, I think, is one example of how whether one is a design theorist or not, or whether one's religious or not, that science can be motivated by a theology that sets one up to expect to find mathematical regularities in the world. And religious motivation in science is really irrelevant to the main point is can you make discoveries that are testable, that can be examined in relation to evidence, particularly experimental evidence? Why? Or in the case of astronomy, distant observations that might support or disconfirm a theory. So regardless of how a scientist is motivated, whether an atheist or religious, what really matters is are you following the evidence where it leads? Are you making the best use of observational tools to really rigorously test your theories? So science and religion can be friends. There's a long history of them being friendly, and the same can be today.
But ironically, a lot of people will just, if they find out that a scientist happens to be religious, they'll say, well, oh well, he's motivated by religion, or she's religiously motivated. So I'm going to ignore what they say. Well, that's totally ridiculous, because you have to evaluate their work by its fruit, not by what motivation they may or may not have had. And furthermore, atheists have their own imaginative storytelling, and that kind of secular substitute for religion has its own effect on the way they do science. So there's no religiously neutral people doing science. We all have some kind of worldview shaping story that is governing or influencing what we do, for better or for worse. And there's a long track record of the Judeo Christian tradition providing a way of looking at the world that's been very productive for actual discovery that has been confirmed and is in science textbooks today. So that's kind of the main reason why I wrote my book, is to bring this to a larger audience. After teaching astronomy and biology for a quarter century to a small group of students, hey, it's time to go public with this stuff.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm so glad you did. You know, it's been a real pleasure unpacking your book with you. I've really enjoyed doing these episodes with you and just helping people to see that this war, the warfare that is supposedly between science and religion, it's just not what people say it is. It's just not there. And there is compatibility and there's harmony. And you've done such a great job pulling all that together.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Well, thanks, Andrew, for chatting with me for all these sessions and hopefully our audience will just enjoy it and think about how it affects the way they or others do science. And what an amazingly incredible and meaningful world that we live in that can be decoded through science.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, that's all the time we have today. This concludes our series Exploring Mike's new book, Unbelievable. We hope you've enjoyed the insight, and all that's left to do now is, well, read the book, get a copy. You can get more information@unbelievable myths.com you can also order it there. That's unbelievablemyths.com find more of my conversations with Michael
[email protected] or search for ID the Future in your favorite podcast app.
For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit intelligent design.org and idthefuture.com it.
