[00:00:00] Speaker A: And I think in many ways, you can't even understand modern science properly without to some extent understanding what came before it and sort of the ideas it was reacting against in order to fully understand how we think about scientific issues Today.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: What can we learn about science and faith from those who lived before the rise of modern science? Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I welcome software engineer and intelligent design researcher Winston Ewart to the podcast to discuss his new book, the Heavens, the Waters and the Partridge, A closer look at the interaction between Christianity and science before modern science.
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 to ID the Future.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Thanks. It's good to be on.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Absolutely. Well, I'd love to have a discussion with you about your work challenging Neo Darwinism or your exploration of design patterns and nature, but we'll reserve that for another day because today I want to discuss a new book that you've published through Inkwell Press called the Heavens, the Waters, and the Partridge. In it, you explore the fascinating and underappreciated history of the interaction between Christianity and science and. And again before modern science. And some people be like, what there was science before then?
Well, there's been a lot of discussion of that, of the relationship, you know, after modern science began in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, but not nearly as much about what we can learn about the interaction before the period of modern science, the period of classical science, as you call it, covering the thousand years before the scientific revolution.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:13] Speaker C: So, Winston, let's start with this. You're a software Engineer with a PhD in Electrical and computer engineering. Why did you write this book?
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Well, because nobody else had written it.
I just became interested in looking at the history of some of these issues, obviously with my work in intelligent design.
Very involved in some of the modern controversies over between Christianity and science and how that plays out.
But I became interested in some of the more historical interactions and science questions that were discussed before modern science, all the way from the early Church up until the Reformation and how the Church of those days interacted with their own scientific questions.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Yeah, fascinating.
Now, how does the influential early church, Father Augustine, figure into the journey of how you came to write this book?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's a Quote from Augustine that gets trumpeted out. Let me see if I can just find it here. Yes.
Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian presumably giving the meaning of holy scripture talking nonsense on these topics. And we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
All right, so strong words from Augustine. Basically saying in context something along the lines of, you know, when Christians talk nonsense on scientific subjects, it's bad for us all and embarrasses the Christians and embarrasses the church. It turns people away from the gospel.
And so modern people who think we shouldn't be challenging things like Darwinian evolution like to throw this quote up and say, hey you guys, knock it off. Even Augustine is on our side.
And so lots of people argue, you know, whether that applies or not. But I read that quote one day and I'm like, what is Augustine even talking about?
He's like, lives in the 400s.
Science hasn't even been invented yet. Like, what issues is he talking about? He's not talking about the age of the earth, that's not an issue yet. He's not talking about evolution. That's not a thing yet. What in the world was he talking about? And that's how I actually started this project, as I'm just like, I gotta go read Augustine's book to see what in the world he was talking about. And then from there I just started to learn more about how the ancient world interacting with those scientific questions.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, early in the book you write that false narratives lend support to false views. You say that if we get the history of the relationship between Christianity and science wrong, it's going to be difficult to get it right in our modern day. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean, if you take a view of science which is like, oh, the church has over and over again just fallen on its face dealing with scientific issues. You know, first defending a flat Earth and then defining geocentrism and then defending this, that and the other thing, you know, if you have that as your history in mind, of course, when you come to a question like Darwinian evolution, you're like, well, of course the church should just accept this issue, get it over with, because they lose when they try to fight scientific battles. And you say you should, you know, go for maybe a non overlapping mysterio or some approach like that that tries to avoid those conflicts.
Now on the other hand, if you think, oh, the church has triumphed over all of the scientific opposition or something, you're going to have a very different perspective.
And so the history of how that interaction has gone and how you perceive that, rightly or wrongly, is really going to influence how you think we should tackle these issues today.
[00:05:39] Speaker C: That's very wise. I thought that was a great early point to be making in the book. Now there's a view out there that suggests science is a distinctly modern phenomenon and that we can't learn anything about science from ancient cultures and peoples that came before modern science because they didn't have the technology we have, or they weren't enlightened, didn't have an enlightened perspective on things that we might claim to have or the modern problems that we have now. Your book says otherwise. What can we learn about science from those living before the rise of modern science?
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And if you go back and you start to understand why they sought certain things, you realize they're doing the same essential thing. Modern science says they're looking at the world, they're making observations, they're using the reason, they're trying to figure out how it works.
And so, yeah, sure, their scientific method is not as refined as ours. We have learned some things. But the truth is historically there was scientific ideas and they were trying to solve these kinds of problems. And so if we take it from the perspective of, oh, this is brand new and it's never been done for, that's actually just a complete misunderstanding of the history of science. And I think in many ways you can't even understand modern science properly without to some extent understanding what came before it and sort of the ideas it was reacting against in order to fully understand how we think about scientific issues today.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: Yeah. And more than just interesting, you actually say there's an advantage to studying obsolete scientific issues from the past.
Can you tell us what that is? I know you're touching on it here.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah, well, one of the things if you get into any debate is that it colors how you understand even historical discussion of it. So when you have an issue that you're on one side of and you're partisan, that colors everything you see about it and it's very difficult to be objective and clear headed about it, even when you're trying to say, what did this person say 100 years ago?
People can tend to what they think today, colors how they're interpreting it. But when you're looking at an issue which isn't live and it's gone and it's like irrelevant. Now that actually enables you to be more easily clear headed and objective about what people were saying, what the merits on each side of the argument were because, you know, it doesn't affect you as directly in the same way and it's just a little bit easier. Yeah.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: I think you put it in terms of observers and participants. You know, we can observe things of the past, but we're participating in things of now. So the modern scientific debates. Yeah, we've got a stake in those, we can participate in those. And how we see things does color our view of that. But when we can observe these ancient debates, you're saying we can learn things without the heat and the passion of directly participating, is that.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Exactly. That's the, that's the firm point where I think there's a real advantage in some ways to studying obsolete issues.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: Yeah. Gives a, gives a certain clarity and benefit of longevity to our perspective. Well, another thing we tend to think is quite modern is the scientistic worldview. Tell us what scientism is and why. It's actually a very ancient idea.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So scientism is sort of science as a religion or science as your basic worldview. It says, you know, science is the way to truth and we try to learn everything through sort of a scientific method or apply scientific ideas.
It, we think of it many times as kind of being a modern phenomenon, but actually it really traces back to sort of Greek philosophy.
So Greek, there were many different schools of Greek philosophy, but what's so interesting about them is they would bring together ideas about morality, about how the world worked, a sort of cross disciplinary in a way that would be really confusing to us modern people. But because they have their philosophy sort of flows into and affects everything.
In a similar way, if you have a scientific philosophy, that's going to happen. And so really our modern scientistic philosophies that happen are just kind of the same general idea as these Greek philosophies that had a very similar kind of thought about the world.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Now what about materialism, the belief that matter constitutes the fundamental reality of the universe and that all phenomena are reducible to physical processes and interactions. That worldview seemed to get rolling around the time of Copernicus and has marched forward in confidence since Darwin's Origin of Species. Now you say it actually goes back a lot further again. Right.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is interesting. That is have a better understanding, having done the research for this book, if just how much the Epicurean philosophy really matches a modern materialist philosophy and Epicurean philosophy Actually shows up briefly mentioned in the Bible when Paul goes to Athens and there's a brief mention of the Epicurean Stoic philosophers. And you know, if you've read that you might have just passed by and not even known who were the Epicureans and who are the Stoics. But the Epicureans were basically proto materialists. They believed everything is just matter and void or atoms and void they would say and everything is sort of these natural processes. They believe in the gods in some sense, but they don't think the gods made us and the gods don't have anything to do with us. I'm not sure what the pront of them still believing in gods was but they seem to have some belief in them anyways.
And so that sort of idea is very much in line with kind of a modernist materialist thinking.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: So a lot of the things we think are modern are actually going back quite a ways and have their roots in ancient thinking.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: There's nothing new under this now.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: In his foreword to your book Jed Makosko wrote that after reading Ewart's book one begins to admire the ancients reasoning powers. Despite their not having the technology we have for measurements and observations today, pagan and Christian thinkers were still able to tease out many of the ways our universe works. Are we reasoning today as carefully as our predecessors? Can we learn from how they did it in the classical science period?
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, so I think we have to be fair. In some ways we are, you know, better at doing science than they are. We have a more refined notion of the scientific method. You know, if someone today came up with something like Ptolemy's epicycles, you know, it wouldn't be a widely accepted theory and it wouldn't stand for a thousand years like Ptolemy's epicycles did. Because we have a somewhat better idea of, you know, distinguishing good ideas from bad ideas in science because we have learned. But in other ways we can be very lazy in ways that they couldn't be right. We don't. They didn't have the scientific instruments we have, they didn't have the data that we have to try and draw conclusions from. And so it can be very impressive the kind of things they were able to figure out like getting measurements in circumference of the earth based on pretty limited information or how far away the sun is and you know, doing a fairly decent job of getting some of those estimates and working out from you know, ground zero. Oh, the Earth is a sphere, something that deeply unobvious until you can start to put all the pieces of information together. So I think there's some very impressive work they've done in figuring things out that I think that we could certainly be in awe of and learn from.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: Sure.
And a separate related question I suppose is that, you know, there's so much information swirling around us and we have access to a lot today of information.
Just so much, you know, more than. More than any period in human history. Is that making us lazy? I mean, some would even say anti intellectual in ways.
Do you see that affecting modern science in a way that it wouldn't have affected ancient science?
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I suspect that there are some cases where, you know, you can just present, you know, a statistical analysis of some data and be like, hey, here's this pattern I found. And you don't have to do some of the more careful thinking that was required.
Now, not that I ever want to go back to a world where not having all that data is because I love data and it's great, but I think that, you know, we are able to rely more on data and we've lost perhaps something in terms of having to work really hard on the thought side of things.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: Right. Yeah. Perhaps something else we can pick up from the ancients as we study how they went about their debates.
Now, in his endorsement of your book, McCoskill says that your book unlocks opportunities for us in the present, opportunities to re examine our pet theories, the prevailing wisdom, and the questions that have haunted humanity from time immemorial.
Now I want to come back in a separate episode to unpack the historical discussion of just some of the questions that have haunted people for so long. After all, that's mainly what your book is about, is addressing all these questions that relate to all these different debates over time that we've had.
Before we end today, let's just take a few minutes to discuss the book itself, who your intended audience is and how your book is set up. So what kinds of people do you hope will pick this up?
[00:14:37] Speaker A: I want everyone to pick it up, but I think I did specifically write it to sort of a lay audience.
Some people who may be familiar with some of my past work might worry that this book is not for them because I tend to write on highly technical subjects and I try to make it always understandable, but you know, sometimes that's hard. This book is very much lay audience that you, anyone should be able to pick it up and read it and understand, get some idea of what the history is here.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Okay. And you don't have to necessarily have a vested Interest in the Christian faith, necessarily?
[00:15:11] Speaker A: No, I think if you. Anyone who's interested in the history could find this very interesting. Now, obviously I'm writing from a Christian perspective, but I think even outside of that, if you're interested in the history of how people have thought about these kinds of issues, then absolutely.
[00:15:26] Speaker C: Tell us about the questions, just in general, and how you format each chapter. You have a specific way of kind of going about each chapter.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So the questions look at a wide variety of things. We have some cosmological issues, like what is the nature of matter? What is the nature of the heavens?
Some things like is the earth a land mass floating on water?
And then some details like in the references in the creation account, like, what's the sun doing being made in the middle of creation week? What's the deal with these four rivers flowing out of Eden?
And then, you know, some random things like what does the Bible think about charging interest on loans? And, you know, the closing chapter, do partridges steal eggs? So just a variety of different subjects there for each topic. What I do is I break down firstly or secondly, depending on what is the scientific question here. And I look at what did the ancient world say about this?
Why did they think that? And then you look, comparing to those, what are the biblical references say? And what do these, what did these biblical authors, what were they trying to say? And how. How might different people interpret that? And sort of laying the foundation for understanding the discussion. And then I go through historically different Christians and what they've said on this subject, you know, starting from the early church, working way towards the Reformation, just how different people have interacted with the question, what they said. And then we sort of summarize this is what the big picture is of how Christians interact with that. And then we say, well, what did modern science do? What do we think about this question now that modern science is here, and how has that changed this whole question? And then with that in mind, what lesson can we learn from this particular question?
So each chapter actually is very nicely independent for the most part. So if you want, you can just read the chapters you're interested in. I don't care, as long as you buy the book. Right.
And so you can. Each chapter sort of independently looks at one of these questions and goes through those steps.
[00:17:20] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I like the way you've set it up. And like you say, they can be read independently of one another or one after the other, sort of up to the. The person who has purchased the book. Well, another theme that emerges from it is that we've been here before.
Debates between Christianity and the science of the day are not a modern phenomenon. Why is that important to remember? And circling back to the point that false narratives lend support to false views, how can this idea that we've been here before, that this is not new, how can that help us today?
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think it can be very tempting. If you think of modern, the scientific challenges to Christianity being a modern thing, you think, oh, you know, the whole world's being overturned by science. And that would pretty much incline you to begin to question, you know, is Christianity even true? Because, you know, it's having all these trust scientific problems. But when you realize this is a long history of science claiming to overturn Christian claims, basically all the way from the early church, you know, Greek philosophy has been trying to object on, you know, questions that, you know, some very familiar but all kind of ringing true in the same general character of objecting to the Bible on scientific terms.
Oh, this isn't a new thing. This has always been here. And actually we have a pretty good track record of dealing with these questions.
[00:18:39] Speaker C: Yeah, that is a benefit of studying, that is you do get to see the track record over time.
And as you're saying, it comes out pretty well. Well, in our next episode, we're going to jump into some of the questions you explore in your book. Questions like, are the heavens immutable? Is matter conserved? Has mankind always existed? Are the heavenly bodies alive? Do the stars determine our actions? Do some living things arise by spontaneous generation? And again, your book invites us to explore these issues not as issues of our day, but as observers studying issues from long ago to see what we can learn about how these issues were evaluated in light of the available evidence as well as the authority of scripture. So it's a worthwhile venture, to be sure, and a fascinating window into the age old interaction with between science and Christianity. Well, Winston, thanks for your time today.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Thank you for having me on.
[00:19:33] Speaker C: And by the way, how can listeners and viewers learn more about the book and get a copy?
[00:19:38] Speaker A: All right. You can find on Amazon. You can also go to my substack, which is winston your.substack.com Winston your is W I N S T O N E W E R T and you can see there I've got a post about the book. You can look at links to Amazon or you can just search for the book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other bookstores.
[00:19:57] Speaker C: Okay, fair enough. Well, we'll get our copy and we'll look for episode two and we'll be back doing that shortly. For Idea the Future, I'm Andream Dermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
