Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Greetings. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I am speaking with Dr. Melissa Kane Travis about her recent book, thinking God's Thoughts, Johannes Kepler, and The Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility. Dr. Travis serves as affiliate faculty at Colorado Christian University's Lee Strobel, center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics where she teaches courses and the history and philosophy of science. She earned a PhD in humanities with a philosophy concentration from Faulkner University's Great Books program, a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. She currently serves as an
[email protected], where she offers adult education courses on science and Christianity. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 00:00:59 Hi. Thank you. I'm excited to talk about my favorite things with you today.
Speaker 2 00:01:04 Absolutely. And I've really enjoyed getting into your book. It's a, it's a wonderful contribution you've put together.
Speaker 3 00:01:09 Oh, thank you so much. It was a joy of a project. All the best tears and joys wrapped up into one <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:01:18 I bet. Well, today is the first of three conversations. I thought we'd have unpacking your book thinking God's thoughts. So let's just jump right in. First, can you briefly tell us who Johannes Kepler is and what inspired you to write a whole book on his ideas?
Speaker 3 00:01:35 Sure. I think most people are familiar with the name Johannes Kepler, at least as an important figure of the scientific revolution. And then we have the Kepler Namesakes in space technology and things of that sort. So the name Kepler rings a bell for most people, but what many don't realize is just how important he was in western intellectual history in the history of science. In particular, he is most famous and is probably heard about in most high school science classrooms as the one who discovered the three laws of planetary motion. But beyond that, most people don't have much of a working knowledge of Kepler. And so when I was doing my master's degree in science, in religion, uh, and I really fell in love with the history and philosophy of science, Kepler made his way to the forefront of my notice. I was specifically captivated with this idea of cosmic comprehensibility.
Speaker 3 00:02:42 And when I read Kepler's famous words about how the study of nature allows us to share in God's own thoughts, something just clicked with me. I was intrigued by the possibility of connecting Kepler's natural theology with the contemporary science and faith conversation. And so when I dove into Max Casbar's definitive work on Kepler, and for anyone interested in reading that it's entitled Simply Kepler, I realized that there was a lot more worth exploring than I even expected, and I was totally hooked. The great Harvard University astronomer and historian of astronomer Owen Gingrich, who by the way, he passed away just a couple of months ago, Gingrich wrote that once you are drawn into the magic sphere that surrounds Kepler, you never really escape. Kepler's story is just so compelling. You have this man of devout Christian faith who fought his way through so much tragedy and so much adversity to make these monumental achievements in astronomy.
Speaker 3 00:04:04 So down this rabbit hole, I went and I began my doctoral studies at Faulkner University and their Great Books humanities program. Now, that was important in my trajectory. It was actually perfect for me because it gave me the latitude that I needed for interdisciplinary research. Uh, and it turned out that many of the great thinkers of western history that I would go on to study are actually included in the Great books canon. So the philosophers, the mathematicians, the astronomers, the physicists, um, these great men were included in a canon of western literature that I was expected to deeply interact with in my doctoral studies. So thinking God's thoughts is really an adaptation of my dissertation research. I wanted to preserve the scope and the depth of the material while also making it more interesting and more accessible to the educated lay person.
Speaker 2 00:05:10 Okay. So it sounds like you were all roads led to you writing this book in many ways. Well, tell us specifically what cosmic comprehensibility is all about. I thought that's an intriguing idea. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:05:22 Yeah. That's a mouthful, right? Cosmic comprehensibility. So what I mean by that term is the simple fact that the universe is intelligible to human beings. It has a rational structure, and we have the, these corresponding mental faculties for learning about that structure. It's a very odd situation if you really think about it. We didn't necessarily have to be creatures with things like logical and mathematical aptitudes, particularly to the degree that we happen to have them. As Einstein famously put it several times, the fact that the universe is comprehensible is rather miraculous. It's not something that we should have expected to find either in the fundamental structure of nature or in our ability to understand it. Um, and Einstein talked about how what we really should have expected this situation to be was something akin to chaos. But that's not what we find. And as he said it, it strikes us as rather miraculous.
Speaker 2 00:06:33 Absolutely. Yeah. It's an order, not just an order, but an order we can understand and comprehend and study and, and find fruitfulness in. Well, what qualities, uh, did Kepler exhibit earlier in his life that would serve him well in his scientific career? I you pull out a few in your book.
Speaker 3 00:06:52 Yeah, I love, I love the biographical side of my Kepler research. From an early age, he had a strong sense of wonder and a remarkable intellect when he was just old enough to be sent off to school. He entered one of the many German schools in the region where lessons were simply given in the common language of the people. But the teachers at that school very quickly noticed that he was a remarkably bright child. So what they did was they recommended that he be sent over to one of the Latin schools because the Latin schools actually provided a superior and more scholarly education, even at a very young age in what we would call the primary school years. And even though his schooling was interrupted by various family hardships, such as his father eventually vanishing, and he was afflicted with terrible eyesight because he had suffered from a really bad case of smallpox when he was very young.
Speaker 3 00:07:59 And despite all of that, he managed to complete the course of study at this primary school. And the, the curriculum there included training in Latin and reading some of the Latin classics. So just based on these first, this actually covers the first 13 years of his life. We see that he was highly intelligent. He was very motivated to learn, learn. He craved knowledge enough to fight through some very serious obstacles. And then he goes on to what was called at the time lower seminary. And it was at the lower seminary where his Latin really came in handy because that was what was both spoken and written at the school. But then he had to become fluent in Greek also. So we have these ensuing scholarly years that we would call his secondary education that actually involved an outstanding classical liberal arts curriculum. And it was while he was immersed in that, that Kepler developed a love of both classical poetry of all things and Christian theology.
Speaker 3 00:09:19 And, and as a side note, the disputes that were happening within the world of Christianity at the time grieved him deeply. He had a sensitive and very ecumenical heart. Um, and so all the clashes surrounding, uh, the Protestant Reformation and then the Counter Reformation were things that just, as I said, grieved him in a very deep way. And I mentioned that because it's actually evident that much later. Uh, Kepler's natural philosophy and his natural theology were very much shaped by his attraction to harmonic coherence we could call it, and to beauty. So he believed very much in there being, uh, an ultimate harmony to things that, um, harmony actually points us to the truth. And so I'm convinced that his classical liberal arts education, first in primary school and then in his secondary school studies, studies, and then eventually, as I talk about in the book, in his university education, uh, was deeply formative in these respects.
Speaker 2 00:10:38 Now you write about Kepler's tripartite harmony. Speaking of, uh, harmonics, can you explain what this is? Were you the, the first to coin this term? Or you, I know you focus on it in the book, but did you come up with that?
Speaker 3 00:10:50 I actually did. I just, I was, you know, casting about for some sort of description that was short and memorable, but captured exactly what was going on in Kepler's philosophy, and I ended up on tripartite harmony.
Speaker 2 00:11:10 Yeah. Okay. Well, tell us about that. What, what is that?
Speaker 3 00:11:13 Yeah. So soon after Kepler began his professional life, which actually turned out to be teaching, uh, primarily teaching mathematics, but also astronomy and humanities at a very prestigious high school, we would call it, um, his natural theology really began to crystallize, and what I call his tripartite harmony was his deep conviction that there are three major aspects of reality. Number one, the archetype, which is the immaterial rational plan for the material world that has existed from maternity in the mind of the creator. Then number two, the copy or the physical manifestation of that archetype, which would be our universe. And thirdly, the image or the higher rationality that exists unique, uniquely in human mind. Um, and all of these things, these, this archetype copy and image, um, they have this, um, resonance with the mathematical rationality that underpins nature. And so Kepler considered this ability to detect the rationality of the world, part of the image of God in mankind. And that's what enables us to investigate the natural world. And when we do that, we gain these glimpses into the divine mind. So this tripartite harmony of archetype copy and image turned out to be the major philosophical and theological driving force in Kepler's career. And it also greatly inspired his spiritual life as well.
Speaker 2 00:13:00 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and as he made sense of this, these were not, uh, new ideas. I mean, you can go way back and indeed you actually do early in your book, you point out that as German translator of Kepler, max Caspar says he was anointed with Pythagorean oil. I like that In part one, you trace the threads of Kepler's natural philosophy, beginning with the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras through the early Christian era and all the way to Kepler's own university education. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this, uh, walk through early philosophical thought. Why was it important for you to go back this far and connect all these thinkers to Kepler?
Speaker 3 00:13:42 Well, in the world of classical great book scholarship, we often refer to the big ideas of Western history. And these are the ideas that for better or worse, have shaped Western civilization and intellectual giants like Kepler for example, they don't just spring up in a vacuum. They emerge in a certain milieu formed over many centuries. And so we should desire to know what the big ideas were that influenced their thinking and led to these remarkable insights and these positive leaps, I call them, in our understanding of the world, we could say truth is wonderfully fruitful, right? And so by examining the intellectual history of great figures like Kepler, we find these wonderful threads of big ideas that shaped their thinking. And from the beginning of my study of Kepler, I was aware that he was regarded as this culmination of Pythagorean. And since Pythagoreous is about as far back as you can go in the history of Western philosophy, that seemed like a really good place to start.
Speaker 3 00:15:03 And for listeners that don't already know, this legend tells us that Pythagoreous was the one who even coined the term philosophy, which means the love of wisdom. And so going back and starting this intellectual history, what I learned was that even nearly 2000 years before Kepler lived, people were observing this order and harmony of nature, particularly in stellar and planetary movement. And they were concluding that mathematics is somehow behind the material world. And that mind rather than blind matter, is the ultimate source of this brilliant reality that we can observe with our senses. And that's where we get this concept of a cosmos. This is the ancient Greek concept of an orderly, harmonious whole. And these ideas persisted and they eventually influenced Kepler's thought and led to, uh, it turns out his great discoveries and natural philosophy.
Speaker 2 00:16:17 Yeah, it really is fascinating how old these ideas are and how long humans have been thinking of them. Well, you discussed the formation of the Pythagorean platonic tradition. In what ways was Plato's famous work TEUs a key transmitter of Pythagorean thought?
Speaker 3 00:16:33 Yeah, the TEUs super important, um, for reasons that I elaborate at great length in my book, but in this famous dialogue written by Plato Timus is the main speaker, and he's actually a Pythagorean philosopher, and he sets out to give an account of the cosmos. And he says, the cosmos was rationally structured by a transcendent craftsman, at least craftsman is how the term is normally translated in the tamima. And this craftsman, um, structured the world according to this eternal, immaterial, perfect set of patterns. We could think of it as sort of a divine blueprint. And this is reflective of Plato's famous doctrine of the forms, which some of our listeners may have heard of. So through the TEUs in this dialogue, Plato assigns a geometrical shape to each of what were considered the four elements back then earth, water, air, and fire. So there's this geometrical mathematical scheme that was imposed upon the material stuff of the world.
Speaker 3 00:17:45 And then the craftsman goes on to infuse all these things with soul so that the cosmos itself becomes an animated creation. And the heavenly bodies, the the stars and the planets and the moon, he says they move according to number. And in that way they serve to track the passage of time. So when we look up at the night, sky night after night, we observe what he calls a moving image of eternity. So we could sum up to me's basic idea this way, a mathematical rationality pervades the structure, the motion, and the temporality of the world.
Speaker 2 00:18:32 Wow. Yeah. As someone who studies technology and the philosophy of that I was really impressed by, and I haven't read to meas, I may have come across bits and pieces in college, but this was relatively new to me. And I really like the craftsman terminology there. And you know, in the heavens and the marking of time, Plato perceived an orderliness that he said murd that in his own soul, and again, connecting the mathematics and the order and nature to his own mind. Um, and we see that cosmic harmony that Kepler later discusses. Uh, and then we get to Philo, uh, Judas, the Jew, the Jewish writer and philosopher of the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, and a contemporary incidentally of the Apostle Paul and Jesus, what does he contribute that brings us closer to Keplerian thought?
Speaker 3 00:19:22 Philo Judeas is important to the conversation because he was an Alexandrian Jew. He was this major intellectual figure who produced a massive body of writings. And those writings are still used to this day, um, in the study of Christian theology. But Philo worked to harmonize Greek philosophy with Jewish monotheism, and he resonated strongly with Plato's doctrine of the forms, the idea that behind the created order, there's this eternal, immaterial, rational pattern for all things. But, but he said, rather than conceiving of this pattern as existing apart from the craftsman or the maker, or God in some eternal platonic heaven, as it's sometimes called, this rational blueprint was actually grounded in the very mind of God. And then great early Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine, followed suit in Philo's way of thinking and said that nothing independent of God can be uncreated and co eternal with God or dictate how God chooses to create things. So the only theologically correct way to think of it is that this rational plan for creation has to be ontologically dependent upon God in terms of existing in his very mind. There the thoughts in the mind of God, there are God's ideas, if you will.
Speaker 2 00:21:07 And was Philo one of the first to marry the Pythagorean platonic tradition with Christian scripture and with the testimonies of the gospels?
Speaker 3 00:21:17 Well, we would say he was one of the first to merge it with Jewish monotheism. So the Hebrew Bible? Yes.
Speaker 2 00:21:25 Okay. Yeah. Well, how did Kepler encounter the Pythagorean platonic tradition that so strongly influenced his work?
Speaker 3 00:21:33 Kepler did his university studies at Tubingen, which is a Lutheran institution where the course of study was heavily influenced by Philip Mehan. Mehan was one of the leaders in the German Reformation, and he was a major proponent of natural theology or this idea of God revealing himself through creation. So the theological training at the university definitely had this emphasis. It was a classical liberal arts curriculum, which included what is known as the quadrivium. So there's a fun, fancy word for our listeners. So the quadrivium are four of the classical liberal arts involved with mathematics. We sometimes just refer to them as the mathematical arts, and they include arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. But at tubing in astronomy was deemed especially important because it draws the eye upwards to the heavens, and it trains us to discern this rationality and harmony of God's handiwork. So even though Kepler entered university to become qualified as a theologian, he actually had to spend his first two years of study hearing lectures from the faculty of the liberal arts. And so he got this really solid foundation in mathematics, astronomy, and physics, the disciplines of natural philosophy. So it was during this time at university that Kepler really became acquainted and then immersed in the Pythagorean platonic tradition. And that was especially true when he was under the tutelage of his two favorite professors. So Jacob here, Brandon, Michael Malin. Malin was actually one of the early Copernicans, and he was instrumental in helping Kepler become convinced that Copernican Helios was mathematically superior to the Meic system that was so widely accepted at the time.
Speaker 2 00:23:49 Okay. Well, uh, as we wrap up this first portion of our conversation, just a final question. All these thinkers that we're talking about here had this idea that there was both an intelligible or invisible, uh, immaterial realm as well as the sensible visible material realm or domain. And I can't help thinking about the correlation with that. Today. In modern times, we take delight in studying that sensible, visible world, and sometimes we disregard or discount the material aspects of reality. Is that just human nature to dwell on what we can perceive with our senses? And is that why some materialists would insist on ruling out immaterial explanations for natural phenomena? Why is it important to remember both in science and philosophy? Well,
Speaker 3 00:24:38 To answer the first part of your question, I would say no, that it's not part of human nature to rule out the immaterial and just focus on the tangible. I think we naturally have an intuition to use that same word of their being something transcendent informing reality. And it's important to take all of this into account. When we approach our study of the world as Kepler was well aware. There are abstract truths, there are numbers, and there are the mathematical tools that equip us to do science in the first place. Those are not material things. And if we want a more comprehensive understanding of reality than what our telescopes and our microscopes can give us, then that picture needs to include, um, logical explanations for things like the intrinsic rationality of the world and our ability as rational creatures to discern it. And that means we have to move beyond the physical to the metaphysical. We have to be open to the possibility of a transcendent mind behind this cosmos. Since in our uniform experience, the only source of rationality is mind.
Speaker 2 00:26:03 Ah, well, listeners stay tuned for further discussions about this intriguing book as we take a closer look at Kepler's Major works Next, his major contributions to natural philosophy and how his ideas can make today's signs more authentic and robust. Melissa, I'm looking forward to those conversations. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3 00:26:23 Oh, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:26:26 Well, you can learn more about Dr. Travis's
[email protected]. That's Melissa Kain, c a i n travis.com. Until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:26:41 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
