[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my discussion with Dr. Melissa Cain Travis about her recent book Thinking God's 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 in 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 of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, she currently serves as
[email protected] where she offers adult education courses on science and Christianity. Melissa welcome back to the podcast.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Hey, Andrew, I'm glad to be here.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: This is our third conversation about your book Thinking God's Thoughts. In Part one, you introduced us to the concept of cosmic comprehensibility, and you reviewed with us a lineage of great thinkers, as you put it, that influenced Kepler's thinking from the ancient Greek philosophers right through to astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. In part two, we focused on Kepler himself, his university years, his major works, his importance as a natural philosopher, and his natural theology. Now, this time we're exploring the last part of your book, the last third, where you put Kepler in conversation with scientists and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. We're also taking a closer look at Kepler's tripartite harmony and how it can be applied to science today.
So let's jump right in. Chapter nine and ten, as you admit, get a little technical, but I thought you could maybe give us a short summary in simplified terms of the content of those chapters.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Sure, I think that's a good idea. So in our previous episode, I explained what I call the tripartite harmony of Kepler's natural theology, the archetype, copy and image that, taken together, explain cosmic comprehensibility.
In chapters nine and ten, I investigate the first strand of this, the idea of an immaterial archetype for creation, by asking how it should be characterized philosophically to help it best fit with an orthodox conception of God. It turns out that there's this really lively contemporary debate in philosophy over what we call abstract objects. So these would be immaterial realities like numbers and mathematical functions.
Now, some philosophers take a hard Platonist view, in which abstract objects have simply coexisted alongside God from eternity, and thus they're uncreated entities.
And I devote Chapter 9 to an exploration of these Platonist views. But some think Platonism undermines the doctrine of God's sovereignty.
They don't like this idea of there being something uncreated existing alongside God from eternity.
And so they argue for an opposite extreme, referred to as nominalism, which says that abstract objects don't exist at all. We just have this useful terminology for the idea of something like a number or a mathematical truth.
But in between those two extremes, there's a range of nuanced views. And so in chapter 10, I outlined those alternatives to hard Platonism, and I've chosen to defend the one that's known in contemporary philosophy as theistic conceptualism. And that's the view which basically says, well, abstract objects really exist, but they exist as thoughts in the mind of God. So that would mean that abstract objects are ontologically dependent upon God, even though we wouldn't say he created them per se.
They're, I guess, a good way to put it would be they're an eternal aspect of God's rationality.
Now, this debate really gets deep into some philosophical weeds on various points, but I think, at least regarding numbers and mathematics, to conceive of abstract objects as being grounded in the rationality of the Creator is really a philosophically respectable and defensible view. And what that means ultimately, from my purposes, is that the first strand of Kepler's natural theology, this idea of an archetype, is still wonderfully viable even in the current conversation.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Okay, well, thank you for breaking that down a little bit simpler for us. Next, you dive into the intriguing topic of cosmic intelligibility, specifically the applicability of mathematics to the natural world. How has scientific progress over the past century affected this conversation?
[00:05:15] Speaker A: This is really where the second strand of Kepler's natural theology comes in, the material copy, or the created universe. The idea is that mathematics applies so beautifully and fruitfully to the physical world, because the physical world is structured according to a mathematical plan, or what we're calling the archetype.
The work of guys like Kepler, Galileo, and Newton showed us that there are these mathematical laws of nature. But. But these great thinkers never could have imagined just how deeply mathematical the universe actually is.
The physics revolution of the 20th century did a lot to demonstrate this. So Einstein's theory of general relativity and all the amazing advancements made in particle physics all involve very advanced mathematics that, quite frankly, very few of us are trained to understand.
But we have these elegant systems of equations that not only describe nature, but they've even allowed us to make predictions about the existence of unobserved entities. And a great example of that would be the elementary particle known as the Higgs boson, which in popular science writing had the nickname the God particle.
This particle that was detected by the Large Hadron COLLIDER Back in 2012, almost a half century after it was predicted by mathematical equations.
So this miracle, as I'm calling it, of the applicability of mathematics to the natural sciences, and by the way, Eugene Wigner famously described it this way as a miracle multiple times in his famous essay. And if our listeners are interested in that, you can look it up and read it for free online.
And it's a wonderful piece of not only science history, but of philosophy of science.
And even Wigner said that this is something that has not been explained by the advancement of science. And that's still true today. It's become an even more impressive phenomenon, and it really presents an intractable problem for the naturalist, but not for Keplerian natural theology.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Okay, well, one of the prominent scientific figures of the 20th century that you bring into the discussion is physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who worked with the late, great Stephen Hawking. You described Penrose's three worlds, three mysteries problem. What is that, and how is it related to your thesis?
[00:07:57] Speaker A: What I love about Roger Penrose is that he's this brilliant, highly accomplished physicist who has acknowledged that science can't explain the astonishing phenomenon of cosmic comprehensibility.
And he calls this the three worlds, three mysteries problem. It's a lot easier to explain when I can use a diagram, but I'll try to sum it up in a way that makes sense to our listeners.
So, three worlds, three mysteries. The first world in Penrose's, it's really a triangular scheme. So picture a triangle with a world at each corner of the triangle triangle. The first one is the Platonic world, and this is where all the abstract objects, including numbers and mathematical functions, would exist. A small subset of that world of this Platonic world applies to the second world, or the material realm. This is where we talk about mathematics applying to nature. And then a small subset of the material world, namely our brains, gives rise to the third of the three worlds, which is the conscious mental world. And it's this mental world that perceives the truths of the Platonic world of mathematics. So you've come all the way around the triangle at this point.
The connections between these three worlds are what Penrose calls the three mysteries, because they really can't be explained on a materialist view.
So three worlds, three mysteries, Platonic world, the material world, and the mental world. So our listeners are probably starting to see the connection between what Penrose is calling a great mystery and Keplerian natural theology, Right?
[00:09:53] Speaker C: Yeah, good. Good explanation of that. And, you know, as you point out, some scientists argue that mathematics exists only in the human brain, a product of their evolutionary development.
You point out, though, that both Einstein and Penrose reject the idea that humans simply project mathematical order onto the observable nature they see. In fact, it's quite the opposite, Penrose says. He says Einstein uncovered a profound mathematical substructure that was already hidden in the very workings of the world, the very structure of space and time. And you don't get more physical than that. Neither Einstein nor Penrose was a theist. Einstein considered comprehensibility of the cosmos an eternal problem. What about Penrose? Did he ultimately explain this? Three worlds, three mysteries?
[00:10:42] Speaker A: He doesn't have an ultimate explanation. He regards it as an open question that science can't even begin to answer. I've heard him speculate that maybe someday in the distant future we'll have a complete reimagining of physics, and this new physics, for lack of a better phrase, will subsume metaphysical questions.
But it is not at all clear how that would ever be possible. Metaphysics is called metaphysics for a reason.
But more recently, what I find interesting is that William Lane Craig has had an opportunity to have personal conversations with Roger Penrose. And Craig, on an episode of his podcast, revealed that Penrose actually seems very open to the idea of a transcendent mind, which would be the grounding for this fundamental rationality of nature and would ultimately solve the mysteries of Penrose's three worlds, Three mysteries problem. So I hold out hope that maybe that's where Penrose will ultimately land.
[00:11:54] Speaker C: Wow. Yeah, that's interesting.
So the issue of human rationality is a big part of the phenomenon we call cosmic comprehensibility. What's perhaps surprising for some will be that you devote a chapter to a relevant argument made by C.S. lewis. Can you outline that for us briefly?
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So this essentially deals with the mental world of Penrose's three worlds, three mysteries problem. C.S. lewis calls attention to the problem that human reason poses for a naturalistic worldview. And he does this in the third chapter, chapter of his book entitled Miracles.
Essentially what he argues, that is that on naturalism we have no grounding for genuine rationality. In other words, if all that's going on in our heads is particles behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry, then rationality doesn't really exist. What we call our rational deliberations are actually entirely determined by blind cause and effect.
Not our free will working in conjunction with the immaterial laws of logic. We don't really have ground and consequent reasons for the conclusions we reach. Our conclusions are the result of purely material processes that we have no control over.
In more recent years, Lewis famous argument from reason has been beautifully developed in a few different ways by contemporary philosophers like Stuart Goetz, Victor Repert, and Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga's version is the more complex of them all. I think it's known as the evolutionary argument against naturalism, or the eaan.
And it says that if unguided naturalistic evolution is true, we have no rational justification for believing it to be true because our mental faculties have evolved based on fitness of behavior, not the truthfulness of the beliefs that we hold. Therefore, we wouldn't be justified in trusting our minds to produce truth about something like an abstract theory of biological evolution.
This is a very complex and admittedly debated form of the argument, and I really think other versions are easier to understand and turn out to be more useful for my purposes. And so if our listeners are interested in delving into that more, Reppert's book is entitled CS Lewis's Dangerous Idea.
And the gets book that I think is great on this issue is from the Blackwell Great Minds series, and it's simply entitled CS Lewis. So if you want to get copies of those, they're really helpful in unpacking and developing the Argument for a reason.
[00:14:51] Speaker C: Okay. And you do go into the pedigree of the Argument for a Reason. It goes all the way back to, what did you say, the fourth century or so?
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it goes pretty far back. And ultimately, a defensible argument from reason, which I very much believe we have, validates Kepler's belief that because we have souls made in the image of God, we have rational faculties necessary for studying nature.
So that's. That's why it's. I find the argument from reason so relevant to my project.
[00:15:26] Speaker C: And some may be surprised that even Charles Darwin, you note this, had doubts about a fully materialist account of the human mind. In his autobiographical material, he says this, and this struck me. I don't know if I've actually read this or come across it before. He says, this follows from the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into the future as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, Darwin says, I feel compelled to look to a first cause, having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man and I deserve to be called a theist. Wow. That was Darwin's doubt. Not Stephen Meyer's book necessarily, but that was one of his nagging doubts. What is Darwin saying there?
[00:16:16] Speaker A: Well, he's definitely admitting that human rationality makes a lot more sense on a theistic conception of the world.
But if you keep reading after that passage, he goes on to express doubt about the reliability of the human mind if it's merely evolved from the mind of a brute animal or brute animals. But then he goes on, you keep reading further and you find out that he's really become satisfied to remain agnostic about these issues. He, he really does not want to go as far as admitting theism.
So as you read through this chapter of the autobiography, he waffles.
And I love that he's honest about his doubts, but I think it would be fair to say that he just resolved himself to be agnostic on issues of human rationality.
But it's a useful passage because it shows that he realized and was willing to acknowledge some of the problems that are faced by the scientific materialist.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, even, even the great Darwin had his doubts and second guesses about the explanatory framework he was putting across.
Well, thinking God's Thoughts culminates with an argument against the adequacy of naturalistic evolution as an explanation for the grand success of the scientific enterprise. How would you explain this argument to the average layperson?
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Well, basically this is my tweaked version of Stuart Goetz's development of the argument from reason on page 264 of my book. I outline it as a three step argument and I'll just read the argument and then say a bit more about it. So it has two premises and a conclusion. Premise one says the success of the natural sciences heavily depends upon the ability to freely draw logical inferences and carry out mathematical deliberation activities that require genuine human rationality. Premise two says genuine human rationality would not exist if a naturalistic account of the human mind were correct. The conclusion that follows is therefore the observable enormous success of the natural sciences strongly undermines a naturalistic account of the human mind.
At this juncture, it's important to point out that even some non theists have remarked that human rationality enjoys a level of advancement that naturalistic evolutionary theory simply cannot explain. I'm thinking of guys like Dr. Paul Davies who says that human intelligence is like a big case of overkill. That's the word he uses, overkill. And that the capacity for things like the advanced Mathematics used in physics are a world away from survival in the jungle.
That's the phrase he uses. It's a world away from survival in the jungle where our brains allegedly evolved. So, as Sir Roger Penrose openly admits, the scientific materialist is really left with no satisfactory explanation for cosmic comprehensibility and thus for the very existence of science.
But I'm going to start sounding like a broken record here, if I don't already. Keplerian natural theology does, and it's more robust than ever before.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: Yeah, and I was going to share a few words from your conclusion along those lines.
You note that naturalism's only explanations for the deep connections between mathematics, nature and mind are either one, a fortunate convergence of accidental circumstances, or two, a deep, unsolvable mystery.
And that's all you have, really, with naturalism. Now, as you're saying, in contrast, Keplerian natural theology offers a philosophically rigorous and theologically sound explanation for this grand cosmic resonance.
It's an intellectually satisfying metaphysical unity that you find that materialism simply can't provide.
And you say it's very useful in the cumulative case for cosmic design. In fact, you call it one of the enduring treasuries of Western thought. And I would hardly agree.
So I guess my final question then, as we wrap up our conversations, as the multiverse hypothesis proliferates throughout our culture today, and as we enter an exciting and strange new age of AI space exploration, and even transhumanism, why is it important for us to understand Kepler's ideas today?
[00:21:16] Speaker A: Well, the immense strides made in our understanding of the universe and the enormous progress we have in our technology, they're very impressive. And there will likely never be an end to the hypotheses like the multiverse that are meant to circumvent certain design conclusions.
But I'm convinced that Kepler centuries ago already held the trump card.
Science itself, which allows all of this kind of scientific and technological activity, can't even be explained within the framework of scientific materialism.
And this lack of explanation is far more fundamental.
So if you really want to have an ultimate explanation of the reality that we observe, then you aren't going to find it within a scientific materialist worldview, much less by holding to a philosophy of scientism.
We have to look outside the box to really get an intellectually satisfying answer. And I firmly believe that Kepler and many of his intellectual predecessors got there long, long ago.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Yeah, as we look forward, we have to look back and look no further than Kepler for this grand idea that explains the cosmic comprehensibility. We enjoy as humans. Well, Melissa, I'm thoroughly enjoying these conversations. I'm sad they're ending. But the next step, listeners, is just go get the book and read it for yourself. It's a fascinating journey. Melissa, thank you for your time.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Oh, thank you so much. This was a joy.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: Well, as I said, you can purchase your copy of Thinking God's Thoughts and learn more about Dr. Travis's work at her website, Melissa kaintravis.com that's Melissa Kane travis.com and if you missed the first two episodes of this discussion, be sure to go back and tune in for ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
