[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's important to be humble in terms of you realize just how long some of these ideas were prevalent and how obvious they seemed and they turned out to be wrong.
And so certainly there's a lesson for humility for any of us in any area of life, and especially when we're looking at scientific theories.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The relationship between Christianity and science is much older and richer than you might think. So what can we learn about today's scientific debates by studying that history?
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude a two part conversation with software engineer and intelligent design researcher Winston Ewart about his new book, the Heavens, the Waters and the Partridge, an exploration of the interaction between Christianity and science and before modern science.
Now, Winston has a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Baylor University.
His work focuses on computer simulations of evolution, genomic design patterns, and information theory. A senior research scientist at the Biologic Institute and senior Fellow of the Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Winston has written a number of articles and contributed to several books. Winston, welcome back.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Thanks for having me again.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, now for those who may have missed the first half of our conversation, tell us why you wrote this book in particular and what you think readers might gain from it.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I wrote this book because I realized I didn't know or have any idea what kind of scientific debates had happened before modern science and how the church of its day had interacted with those.
I saw references to these kind of debates in Augustine, but I'm realizing I don't even know what he's talking about. And so I researched it and eventually collected what I had learned and put into this book for you to enjoy without having to go through all the work I did.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, it's always a journey as an author to gather all the research and put it together and then we get to benefit from it. That's the beauty of a book, and this one is a beauty.
And I wouldn't say it's short either. You're quite comprehensive in how many questions you tackle, and we will jump into that shortly.
Now tell us about your work as a software engineer and intelligent design researcher.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah, so one of the things that I've done is sort of apply software engineering ideas and talents to the field of intelligent design. I sort of started my intelligent design career looking at computerized simulations of evolution, looking at how they worked, and sort of making a critique of an argument from them that, hey, evolution works in my simulation, therefore I should work in Real life.
I also worked applying some ideas from theoretical computer science to specify complexity. And you can see the product of some of that work in the second edition of the Design Inference.
I've also done work sort of modeling genomic similarities using ideas from software engineering and that you can look at my dependency graph work.
So I've sort of been contributing to a few different areas of the intelligent design world, always staying on that theme of, you know, taking computer science ideas and then applying them to different areas of intelligent design.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's great work and great contribution and I appreciate all the time you've put into that. Now. In the first episode, we talked about the value of studying scientific debates from the past as observers rather than participants gaining clarity through historical distance and learning from how earlier Christian thinkers reasoned with the best science that was available to them at the time. In this episode, I want to do exactly that. Rather than treating these questions as live controversies, we're going to look at them as case studies, windows into how people in the past thought about order, purpose, intelligibility and the limits of science. So let's dive in with a few of the questions you explore in the book. First, are the heavens immutable? Starting us off, what did ancient scientists mean when they said the heavens were immutable? And why did that idea seem so reasonable based on what they could observe?
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, so the idea of immutable is not changing. So they thought the heavens never changed. And they got this, I think, largely from they look up in the sky. You know, they didn't have electric lights, so they spent a lot more time looking at the sky than we did. And they would see that the stars would rotate around the North Pole, but the same stars were there and, and they, they would move, but they would be rotating in a consistent pattern.
And they thought, hey, nothing up there ever changes. We've been watching for a long time. And besides the rotation, nothing ever changes. The heavens are probably made of this other material that can't change.
And if it can't change, well, it's been here forever because by definition, if it can't change, it can't have been created and it's going to be here forever.
There were other various other arguments that were came up that were come up with to try and support that. But I think that's really the core observation that gives rise to that idea.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and how did Christian thinkers engage that scientific picture, especially given the biblical claim that the heavens were created and could change or pass away?
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So Christians very consistently Always said no, the heavens are not eternal. They've not only been here, God made them.
How they actually tried to fit that with the science of the day varied. So early on you will find people who will basically say no, this science is wrong. The heavens are not made of this other immutable material. Heavens are made of normal material like stuff here on earth because they were comfortable challenging scientific ideas today. Now you get later and you get Aquinas and Aquinas tries to accept that science and, but still make it work basically by saying, well you know, God is omnipotent so he can create things that are uncreatable if he wants to.
So there's a shift there and I think that's since Aquinas is later and from then the perspective it shifted from. These are the ideas of, you know, the Greek philosophies of poster Christianity. And by the time Aquinas comes around, these are the ideas of the great lost Greco Roman civilization that had kind of collapsed with the fall of Rome. And so they have different perspectives on there in terms of how they try to incorporate that. They all agree with the idea, oh we should, we can't say the heavens are actually eternal like Aristotle had said, but they differ to the degree to which they were willing to work with the scientific ideas.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
And, and again, you know, we can sit here today and, and look back at just the last hundred years when that answer has really come to the foreign that the universe is not, you know, eternal and self existent. That there actually in fact was a beginning. And you can scientifically show that there was. I mean we're, we're enriched by that modern perspective, but they were not right. But you're pointing to the fact that we can learn from them even, even though they didn't have that firm scientific evidence. What does this debate teach us about how confident we should be when science presents certain features of the universe as fixed or unquestionable?
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean certainly I think it's very interesting because that was very widely held for a very long time, you know, longer than any of our modern scientific theories.
And yet it comes crashing down. We start getting telescopes out there like ah, no, stuff in the heavens is changing. We just couldn't see it before now. And even the idea of eternal heavens, you know, was around longer than ingest the immutable heavens. But it all kind of came crashing down as we learn more about it. And that certainly should give us a certain degree of humility about any scientific theory.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Yeah, humility is, is a great ingredient for for doing science. Definitely. Well, another chapter on your book addresses this question. Is matter conserved? Why did many thinkers in the ancient world believe matter could not be created or destroyed? And what observations supported that conclusion?
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, so one of the major observations is you notice that every time something changes, it changes into something else. It doesn't just go away.
You know, if you put toast in the toaster, the toast doesn't disappear. You put bread in the toaster, it doesn't disappear, it comes out as toast. Obviously the ancients didn't have toasters, but you get the idea. And so if you build a house, well, the house didn't come from nothing. You put a bunch of materials together and you made a house and you take apart the house and those materials go elsewhere. And even if your house burns down, the materials don't seem to go nowhere. But you see, well, you know, some of it turned into this ash and some of it became the smoke and some of it became this sun, not sun, this fire coming off. And so you could see. Well, it seems like there's this, this principle where nothing is ever created or destroyed. It just changes form. And that gives idea to sort of a conservation of matter idea where, you know, matter is never created or never destroyed.
Yeah.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: And how did the early Christian fathers and thinkers distinguish between what science could legitimately say about matter and what it could not rule out?
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Right. So of course this is where the Christian doctrine of creation ex niho comes from.
If you go through the Bible, you'll never find it articulated that way that God created the world out of nothing, except I think in some, I guess, the apocryphal books. So if you accept those, it's canonical, you might see it in there.
But really the idea of creation ex nila only really comes up in opposition to this conservation of matter idea that matter can't be created or destroyed. And so the Christians looked at this and they came to the conclusion pretty early on, no, God actually creates matter out of nothing.
He's not creating it from pre existing materials. And so that's how Christians decided to conclude is that yes, God had divinely created matter out of the world and the whole world out of nothing, rather than reusing some sort of re existing primordial materials.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: And as you look at that today, I mean you, you get the big bang and the beginning of the universe and you see that something outside of that had to be the, the, the thing that would create the matter and the energy. So we're, we're still looking at that question Today, aren't we just with more information about the Big Bang?
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think we have more information now. And I think a really strict conservation of matter kind of argument that some of the Greek philosopher, which is matter can't have been created, really becomes pretty untenable when you start trying to fit in with things like the Big Bang.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so what's the takeaway from that historical debate, do you think?
[00:10:39] Speaker A: I mean, I think a takeaway here is that Christianity was actually correct to object to the strong version of that principle and to say, no, it is possible for things to be created or destroyed because the Bible says so. And it turns out that does seem to be backed up by what modern science says. So Christianity looks pretty good on that particular issue for having stuck on the right side of the issue and for not in. In that sort of trying to critique an idea that that was generally true.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Well, here's another interesting question you explore in the book. Do the stars determine our actions? Why did astrology once seem like a scientifically plausible explanation for human behavior rather than mere superstition?
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, there's a number of things that come together here. Part of it is that if you think about every.
Everything that happens has a cause, and, you know, that cause itself had a cause. And if you trace those causal history back far enough, what are you going to do? Well, you're going to come off of Earth up into the heavens. Right. And they always thought of the heavens as being sort of the superior, better place as opposed to the Earth down below. And so it made sense that what's going on in Earth has got to be a reflection of causes and things going on in the heavens. And so this very naturally gives rise to the idea that, oh, we could look at the stars and view things. And certain things do correlate very well. You know, it's. It's hot when there's a big star out in the sky called the Sun.
And the Romans noticed that when you.
When the sun was in a particular constellation called Canis Major, it was particularly hot. And that is where we get the idea of the dog days of summer.
They thought, oh, there's some connection between the stars there. Now today we'd say, well, yeah, that's just because that's where the sun happens to be in summer.
But you can see that all these things kind of line up to make it seem, yeah, there seems to be some connection between what's going on in the stars and what's here on Earth. It would make sense that you might Think you could predict things on Earth based on what you see in those stars?
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Right. So quite natural to have the desire to draw certain connections with what was happening in the heavens. How did Christian thinkers argue against this astrological determinism while still affirming that nature operates according to real patterns and regularities?
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah, they would point out things. I mean, one of their big objections to it was a moral argument like, if you're not, you know, responsible for your own actions, you can't be, you know, punished justly for it, or things like that. But they would also point out, like, you know, you have twins, they're born at the same time, and yet they have very different lives. This. This doesn't make any sense.
You know, the stuff like, you know, if it, if it really worked, you should do it based on the conception date, not the birth date. And they would make those kinds of arguments that this just didn't seem to work in practice.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. Well, what cautions does this debate offer us today when scientific explanations start drifting into, you know, claims of inevitability or determinism?
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah, it is interesting that even though, you know, scientists today would totally scoff at any kind of astrology, they actually often are thinking in very deterministic terms. So they actually have the same underlying assumptions. They just have a less naive conception of the connection between the stars and what happens here. So I think it gives us a good caution in terms, particularly of even ideas that were very widespread and seem hard to challenge, like astrology. And you go to even some of the Christians who are challenging astrology, they're not willing to push back entirely and say, oh, it's totally wrong, because it seemed very that this should have worked to them. And they. They seem to think they had some successes in their productions.
And so I think it tells us, oh, just because you seem to see this compelling case, it's not necessarily always true.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Right.
Well, let's look at one more fun question you examine in the book. Do some living things arise by spontaneous generation? Why did spontaneous generation seem so obvious and persuasive to people for centuries? I mean, it went on for a long time, even among careful observers of the natural world.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is that the life cycle of many living things is so small, you can't see it unless you got a microscope. And so you see, oh, there's this dying, frauding flesh, and suddenly there's maggots on it. Like, where do those maggots come from? Well, yes, there are flies flying around, you Know, laying eggs on it, which you wouldn't. You can't see the eggs. And it maybe is not totally obvious that the maggots and the flies are the same species, because, you know, why would you think that? And so because of that, it seemed like. Well, it just seems. This just happens. You leave out meat and this thing grows. And that. That seemed very obvious.
Including. I remember reading one case there was someone gave instructions for growing mice of the particular things you had to mix together to get the mice to grow.
So it just seemed like pretty obvious that that's how it worked. And that wasn't questioned for a long time.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Yeah, welcome to the microscopic world, which was not yet there.
Yet. Well, how did Christian thinkers evaluate this claim in the absence of microscopes that we have today?
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Yeah, for a long time, Christians did just accept it because it didn't occur to them to question it. And they would even try to find a few passages that could be taken to refer to it. They probably don't, but you could take them that way.
But, you know, once we get into somewhat later, into a little bit of more modern period where there starts to be some pushback against sort of classical science ideas, then you find people saying things like, you know, this really doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective, that things would grow on their own. Right. God is the Creator. He needs to create these things here.
And so they started to push back at that point in time, sort of towards the end of the period I look at.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Yeah, well, what does the long history of this now discredited idea teach us about humility? Back to humility again when dealing with modern origin of life questions. I mean, you see the origin of life field in there. Well, we're so close to.
We're this close to being able to create life synthetically or figure out how it happens. And yet they're not.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: I think they operate on a different definition of so close than I do. Yeah, but, yeah, I think, I mean, in general, a lot of these lessons get repetitive.
It's important to be humble in terms of. You realize just how long some of these ideas were prevalent and how obvious they seemed and they turned out to be wrong.
And so certainly there's a lesson for humility for any of us in any area of life, and especially when we're looking at scientific theories.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Well, again, I'll mention this as we wrap up today. One of the themes that really comes through in your book is that we've been here before. The debates between faith and the science of the day are not uniquely modern, and that earlier generations navigated them with varying degrees of success and failure and with an admirable amount of reasoning power. As we wrap up, what do you hope readers and our audience will take away from these historical examples when they think about today's debates?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think I sort of distill it into three points. So one is, we've been here before. This isn't novel. This isn't like a new thing we've had to deal with.
Another thing is it the importance of always going back to the source. You know, always going back to both.
What does the biblical text actually say on the subject? Often, you know, ideas get confused because someone misread it once and that idea gets repeated or the translation was wrong and you got to go back to the original source. Or you got to go back to the source your scientific data said. Did the scientific data actually say this? And sometimes the answer is no. We actually just had that scientific data wrong. And that's where this came from. And sort of when you understand and go back to the source, you can often resolve these kind of conflicts. And then I think just simply, you can take a lot of encouragement from how well this handling has gone by. Yeah, there are missteps, but I think the church actually has acquitted itself pretty well on its handling of these historical scientific subjects.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Yeah, much to be learned just by looking at how they handled these ancient debates.
Well, Winston, tell us how our audience can get hold of your book.
I have mine, you have yours, obviously. But how do they get theirs?
[00:18:46] Speaker A: All right, if you want your own copy, you can go to. You can go to your favorite bookstore, Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anything like that, and search for it. Or you can go to my substack, winston ewart.substack.com that's w I n S T O N E w e r t.substack.com and you could read my post there. I give a little more details of book and have links to purchase it.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Now if I walk into Barnes and Noble, you know, in my city, am I going to find this book? I mean, what is probably not?
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Are there still Barnes might be in the window? Are there still physical Barnes and Nobles? Is that a thing?
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Ah, yeah. I used to work at one.
Had a lot of fun connecting people with books. But see, so you're saying that bn.com
[00:19:29] Speaker A: that's Barnes and Nobles website, you can buy it there if you want. Yeah, yeah, I suspect you could go to a Barnes and Noble store and they could order it for you or something.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah, this is true. This is true.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: That would just be an extra step. Just go to BN.com there you go.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: There you go. Well, you heard the man. Go get a copy of this book and enjoy reading more about the older history of the relationship between faith and science, in particular Christianity and science. It's nothing new, you know, and we can get a lot of encouragement from that. And so, Winston, thank you for your time and for, for this.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks for having me on.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah, you're welcome. Well, for ID the future, I'm Andrew Dermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
