Rethinking Science and Religion: Are There Pathways to Knowing God Through Science?

Hello, everyone. It's Richard Beattie. What does it mean to be thinking Christian in regards to science? Does God speak science? Dr. James Spencer and author John Van Sloten continue the conversation they started last week on this edition of Thinking Christian. Scientists in large part are rooted in observation. We can open up an EMT what's in there. We can poke around on the brain and, in sort of layman's terms, and figure out how it's working. We can develop theories based on what we observe. We can kind of try to understand and anticipate and predict how, you know, one thing is going to act in relation to another and determine whether or not we're on the right track with our observations, right? And so it is an observational sort of discipline. And then, you know, there comes the presentation of science, which does start to bridge a little bit into the art. There's an interpretive aspect to it, just like we would when we were studying the Bible or writing theology, right? It does get into that a little bit more of an imaginary space. We've observed and now we're trying to put this all together, summarize it and package it for someone else and present our findings in a way that is both compelling and truthful, but also understandable and sort of packageable because we know that, you know, people can't have the exact same research experience that we've already had. So we've got kind of that down a little bit more, I think. So here's my curveball question. I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking around artificial intelligence and around digital worlds and virtual worlds. There's part of me that feels like we should view them as art, that these are interpretive renderings that, just like you're describing, standing and looking at all these different beautiful paintings, you know, you're surrounded by the artist. And when we go out into creation, we're surrounded by the big A artist, right? And so there's a part in which those virtual worlds are doing something very similar. Then there's the other side of me that says, yeah, but these aren't necessarily even truthful representations of reality. They are often based on what we desire as opposed to what we're seeing. And so I'm wondering if there's a distinction in your mind, just having done all the work that you've done, and I realize you don't discuss this necessarily, so that's why I'm saying it's a curveball question. Do you have any initial thoughts on that? Just how does that strike you? Where are you seeing some of the technological innovations go, particularly in terms of the way that they're creating new worlds that are increasingly immersive and really, I think, in some ways, drawing people out of God's creation as opposed to towards God's creation. Yeah, many times I've had a, and not an expert in AI and following the story as closely as some, but many a Babel-esque kind of vibe, right? We're giving birth to this thing and we're all gonna, and so a caution rises up in me in response to that. But also, as you're asking, I think about the difference between sort of the pure science, that is the nature of science and scientism. And scientism is where science kind of steps out of its lane, its empirical lane, that's good at figuring out how things work and describing how things work and designing experiments to understand and help repair and how things work. But when science tries to answer the why questions, aka Dawkins and others who are fundamentalists, I think on this front, then yeah, that's falling into scientism and there's a problem. So I would think there is technology-ism and AI-ism, and it's playing out right alongside what I'm still theologically reformed enough to believe is God's good gift of artificial intelligence. We are, I haven't preached on this, but we are creating something that in a very, very, very small way through AI reflects what God would have done making our minds, right? And creating our capacities to think things that capacities that image God. I'm not worried that the tower is ever gonna get so high that God's gonna feel threatened. But I am, yeah, the cautionary tale of this far and no further. Yeah, we'll have to, I mean, I've not read a really great sermon on faith and science written by ChatGPT yet, so I'm not feeling personally threatened. But yeah, we’d be foolish not to think that it's gonna eventually get to a point where we can't tell the difference, right? And yeah, so just initial thoughts. I think your distinction between science and scientism is actually really helpful. And so I would tend to, yeah, it's just really helpful because I think that there are all of the, the way I think about it from sort of an academic-y perspective is, you know, you have all these different disciplines and the disciplines are going to have boundaries. And those boundaries are really strongly related to what it is that humans can observe, what we can see. And so we can't see why. We really need God to help us understand that purpose, you know, because the, and I think, again, go back to that quote you had in the book, you know, the Bible gives us a different, it corrects our vision. It sort of directs us and guides us into understanding why is there all this complexity? Why is it that we should begin manipulating and creating with this matter? Why, you know, what is it that we're doing? We're doing all these different things. And I think we need that revelation. And so each of those disciplines is almost bounded by it. They can't go beyond their own observation. And so as we've been given Scripture, obviously, we can begin to understand those disciplines in a more robust manner, but there has to be that infusion, I think. Am I reading that correctly in your work? Yeah, and one person's work who I've not ever been able to really understand or delve into, but a reformed theologian named Doyen talks about an idea of sphere sovereignty. And so, you know, the church is a sphere within which God works, the creation, education, politics, and they all have these boundaries. But what also comes to mind as you were asking or sharing was, I'm really intrigued at the intersections, the overlap of these things. And I think there's a little bit more overlap than we in the church sometimes want to control everything that we've allowed. And it, like, I feel like I'm stepping on science's turf when I try to talk about, you know, and it's mostly covered in the book by quotes around everything that's coming from an expert, right? But I feel like, can I go there and how thick is this ice? But yet feeling compelled to step out because believing that it's precisely in the overlap, it's precisely where these things connect, where this is that thing happens and the why presents itself presents itself in relationship, not just between those two things, but between me and God, Christ in the moment of seeing the connection between those two things. That, yeah, for that, I will go there, right? And I mean, yeah, I get the, I get how we think about it in terms of these multiple spheres, but Christ is the Lord of all of those spheres, right? And so there should be echoes and they should rhyme with each other and they should reflect each other in ways. So always a bit of a dance, right? Like respecting where those boundaries are and where your expertise is and isn't. I mean, where I feel what's good for me is I'm not an expert theologian or an expert scientist, so I'm willing to go there on pure naivety. No, you know what's funny? One of the gentlemen that I've looked at from a sociological perspective, his name is Pierre Bourdieu, and he talks about semi-autonomous fields or domains of competition. His whole theory is based on sort of competing fields. But what I find when you're talking is it sort of echoes back to him, because these fields can't be separate, these spheres, they can't be completely separate because they're going to rub up against one another. And the reality is that, you know, the church doesn't stay isolated as the church. You know, the church has doctors, lawyers, you know, different scientists.

And they go out all over the place. And they're carrying that sort of what we might call the sphere of authority from the church with them. And so there is an inherent integration. They're not autonomous fields. They're semi-autonomous fields. You know, they each have their distinction, but they interact with each other all of the time. And I tend to agree with you. I think there's more carryover than we probably think. And I just appreciate your approach of, I mean, I think, you know, again, coming from that sort of academic side, the tendency is, okay, let's draw lines. Like, where can we, where should we start and where should we stop? I mean, I even asked you a question about it, right? But I think you're probably right, is that our experience in these things is probably a better guide in a lot of ways. As we experience them, as we're open to hearing from God through creation, we then begin to sift and sort, you know, and hone our senses. I appreciated you talking about that in the book as well. You had a portion on the senses. But I think we do have to hone our senses so that we're not just observing the matter or we're not just observing the phenomenon, but we're actually observing God behind the matter, God behind the phenomenon, and in the phenomenon. And entering into, sorry for interrupting, and entering into experience, right? Presence, near unto God, Abraham Kuyper. His whole thing was being near unto God. So two days ago, I'm reading my grandfather's Bible, a verse before I go to bed, and it's from Psalm 46, his psalm, and talks about there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. And it's beautiful. And I've always, I've never really studied it, but thought, yeah, this beautiful river, and it just feeds the whole of the city of God's holy city. And all of a sudden, you know, here are the record needle being lifted. The streams actually don't go out from the river as they've always done in your imagination your whole life. They actually feed into the river. So scientifically, it's a little bit different than I've been imagining. And so I started to think about what it means that God uses streams to gather what God is doing in common grace ways throughout the city, and then that all comes together in the fullness of a river, which is what cities are and people all coming together and God's gift through all of us. And it was a beautiful understanding. And I felt like, oh, that's even kind of more beautiful in a way than my bad science idea of streams going out to those places. But then the next day I went to a local waterfall here in Cananasca's country, just in the foothills, called Sheep River Falls. And I'm standing there and there's the stream and there's the river. And I think about this and then I shoot a little 60 second reel starting with a stream and then panning over to the river. And not just the river, a waterfall, like a holy, powerful, all of this mountain hydrology coming together and flying off of this cliff, waterfall. And as I'm holding the camera on the waterfall and I'm kind of narrating, I say what I wrote in God Speaks Science, right? I think it was Augustine saying, you know, what I can experience of the Holy Trinity, the nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I can experience that a lot more than I can ever understand the nature of what the Trinity is. So knowing the how and articulating good theology and good doctrine and all the stuff we spend so much time on doing so well is one way of knowing, but to stand there and to have it wash over you and to hear its roar and to feel the freshness of the mist coming into your face. And so, yeah, two ways of knowing, two ways of learning, two ideas about streams and two ways of experience streams and rivers. I'm not enough of a mystic to say the latter far outweighs, but it kind of far outweighed, you know, writing down a little spiritual practice about streams whenever you encounter them in your life. I should have just taken everyone on a field trip. This is what it's doing with our church too. Over the years as I hear myself saying that, I have been the kind of curator and the gatherer and the meter with scientists. Sometimes we bring them in and they do a little presentation, like in two weeks that's going to happen in our church. But I've been the kind of the one who's really limited this idea from getting out into everyone's life. And we're now trying going forward to include people in the process more. Bring live streaming into a lab interviewing a scientist. So in theory, a thousand people can be gathered in that little lab as you're asking these questions. And you're not going in a pre-asking them and then having it all figured out. Let them glimpse the actual conversation because what kind of good pedagogy is that, right? In terms of helping people be attentive to and ask the right questions of the world. And include more people, you know, at the waterfall. And that, you know, shooting a 60-second video and posting it on social media is one way to do that. But, you know, if there's not going to be a temple there in that new heaven and earth because everyone's going to know him in all things already, then what will the church and a faith community, I mean, we'll just be everywhere all the time doing this together. So what can the church do now to begin forming itself for that reality? What I think is interesting, I guess my sort of my last question I really want to ask you is, you know, as you reflect on this book and, you know, people are buying it and reading it. And, you know, you're doing a lot with your church. You're moving toward, I find it fascinating you do, you know, a live stream from a laboratory and let, you know, everybody kind of listen into that conversation. What are you trying to form in the church, both yours and the broader, you know, people of God? What message do you really want to leave them with? What practices do you want them to start cultivating? Like, what's the sort of bottom line? Hey, everybody, we're missing out on something. You need to do this. What is that? What you brought up earlier about the scriptures being, like Calvin said, a pair of glasses, lenses, a lens through which you can then see as letters written by God in creation, God's revelation there. Somehow getting, I mean, we can't get people to read that book in our churches, right? And really know that. But somehow to compel people to be engaging the scriptures and teach them how to do that with the idea that then you're going to experience God everywhere in all of your life, right? To make that connection so that, that sounds just backwards, right? But people may want to read their Bibles more if they can experience God at the river more, or it just seems that sometimes we're in a world where that kind of rationale would be compelling. So, so, yeah, I mean, I'm doing all of this, having gone to catechism, having gone to church for two decades. I know the Bible stories. I know that. And then I went to seminary. Like I've got the traditional foundation from which to go and play in these new places. Right. Yeah. I can't expect that my kids, what, what am I, if you're engaging God in here, when does this become some kind of universalist pantheist or pantheist kind of thing, right? So the separation of God from creation and always coming back. I went to a liberal, a more liberal progressive church in town and talked about how I'm not a pantheist or a pantheist and somebody asked me, why not? I'm going, yeah, that scares me, right? But I dedicate God speaks science to my dear wife, who's also my editor, who is, if I'm not an empiricist, she's even more so. But was, she went through a process of editing the book 10 times and something grew in her in terms of her empirical sensibilities that she is now at the river, at the sheep falls, she says, and we're separate and kind of off in these little moments of flow together, engaging different parts of the river. And she's bent down collecting little stones. And she, when we reconnect, she says, if you listen to the water and it's rushing, all I'm hearing is the water. She says, you can hear all the pebbles turning over underneath. And it's these clicking sounds and different sizes make different sounds. And, and I listen and sure enough, like she's, she's been changed in terms of her relationship to a river through the engagement of this at a pretty deep level. Yeah. What, what if all of us were

Then, how would we treat that river? And how would we treat those animals? And how would we treat fellow human beings? Et cetera, et cetera. So is there an experience of God in those places? And I'm now thinking about people outside of the church who are already having the experiences. We're just going to put a name to it and make it personal that can lead to, yeah, an orientation shift in life that can bring more flourishing to the world. But yeah, I mean, we're just three people on this podcast, right, talking about it. Like, we can all be shaking our heads, but it really will take a big, I think, Holy Spirit thing to compel a whole bunch of church leaders and people of faith to be able to do it, to get it out there into the church more. So again, a meandering answer, but... No, it's really helpful. I mean, I think, just as I suppose a word of encouragement, as I look at the cognitive psychology literature, for instance, they're working on embodied cognition and making this distinction that I hear you making of, you know, knowing about, so the analogy I usually use is, I know what a bike is. Like, I could label a bicycle, but there's a difference between knowing what a bicycle is and understanding and really knowing what it's like to have your quads burning as you're trying to get up a hill on a bike, what it's like to have the wind blowing in your face as you go down the other side of that hill. People who haven't ever ridden a bike don't know that. And so there's this participatory or embodied knowing that, like I said, cognitive psychology is working on, and the more I read about it, the more I really do read it in Scripture. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Well, that's not an affirmation of a fact about God. Like, you know, God is good. Here's the doctrinal statement. Do you affirm it? Yes, I do. You know, it's not quite that. It's an experiential moment where we taste and see that the Lord is good. And I think that's more of what I, like, when I read your book and now that we've talked, I just, I feel that sort of resonance where we do need to be more present. We need to be more observant, not less, you know, and we need to be paying attention to the world around us because if God is speaking through it, as you've argued, you know, if it's our second book, right, we're going to hear and see and feel and taste and smell things that drive us more closely or that help us to conform more closely to the image of Christ. And so I do think there's going to become, be an increasing convergence toward this. That sort of, hey, let's participate with God. Let's participate with one another. Let's participate in creation. And let's not discount that knowledge just because it can't be stated as a proposition. Right, or controlled, or we get to the end of it, right? We can't put it between two covers, nor can we the Scriptures. But I know a lot of my friends who aren't into the Christian faith and won't go to church, they'd be interested in that, in my imagination, that beautiful end-around way of God to get past some of what in the church holds people back from him and starts to whisper directly to them through experiences and thoughts and ideas that they've had, what they love when it falls into sync with the one who spoke that thing into being in love. What a beautiful way to include a lot more people in this. And it's so enriching. I mean, I have the best job in the world. I get to meet this, you know, I preached on the theology of a horse and met a local prize-winning rancher in southern Alberta standing in the middle of a pasture surrounded by these animals. And it was just like, ah, it was heaven on earth, right? He, you know, he wasn't a person of faith, but as I started to name it all, it was as though the veil was pulled back a bit. The kingdom's now, not yet here, but not fully here. Like, it became a bit more there for him and for me. It's almost like you're paraphrasing Paul in Athens, right? You know, people of the world, I see that you are fascinated by this wonderful creation before you. You know, these things that you're naming, you may not fully understand. Let me help explain them to you. Let me put a name to it. And that's essentially what Paul does with those folks in Athens. He recognizes that they are religious in every way. He's not discounting them or calling them heathens or thinking that they're horrible human beings. He's just saying, I see you searching. I also see you not finding. You shouldn't settle. You should keep searching. And here's what you should be searching for. Right. And so, yeah, I think your book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved reading through it. And it definitely spurred a lot of thinking for me. This is not an area that I've, like many other people, I'm sure, have really thought about a lot. And I think that, you know, as opposed to some of the more academic works that have been written with like tons of footnotes and a lot of theory, I just so appreciated yours because it had that pastoral feel. And it really did lead me into a more observant sort of lifestyle, which I very much appreciate. I got to jump in on Paul, though. And he cites in making that point, a contemporary philosopher and a poet, right? Like, so Paul, through that particular passage, God is saying, it's okay to read what I'm doing and take the truth that's out in the world back then. And in fact, it's so okay. I'm going to make it part of the Bible, which I know none of you out there have a problem with. So, and I mean, that you start to look at where so much of what fills the scriptures and the Old and New Testament and the echoes of other stories that were happening. This is not new culturally. God's been tapping into truth in, yeah, old legal structures and working through pagan empire kings for a long time. One, I think the most interesting thing about all of that is that God has not only been doing it, but we watched the Apostle Paul be adaptable. You know, Paul does not forcefeed the law down people's throats who aren't going to know the law. I mean, he actually says, I try to be all things to all people that I might save some. And part of what he means there is, you know, the way, the difference when he talks to, you know, the way he speaks in 1 Thessalonians, for instance. You know, he talks like a Greek in 1 Thessalonians in a lot of ways versus other, you know, books where he's really heavily quoting the Old Testament. You can tell people have a different background, but he adapts himself to those different circumstances. And I, yeah, I just really appreciate the fact that creation can be, amongst other things, an evangelistic tool for us if we're wise enough to understand and to tap into the way that people ultimately, I don't want to say experience God, but start to be open to something transcendent, something that's bigger than themselves. And recognizing the complexity of creation is not trivial. It can be transformative. Hey there, it's Nicole Younis, host of the How to Study the Bible podcast, where every single week we join together to encounter God through his word. You can subscribe at lifeaudio.com.