Participants: Clifford Goldstein
Series Code: CFTF
Program Code: CFTF000007
|
00:21 Hi, Cliff Goldstein here,
00:22 welcome to the program Contending for the Faith. 00:26 This is part of a series 00:28 I'm doing entitled Faith in science, 00:30 in which we explore some of the issues 00:33 in science and in faith. 00:35 And this is important because we are in a day and age 00:38 where science has achieved a lot of renown. 00:42 So we want to look at science, what it does? 00:45 What it cannot do? What it tells us? 00:47 What it cannot tell us? 00:49 Because I really think that these are more difficult issues 00:54 than most people tend to realize. 00:57 What is science? 00:59 What are the limitations of science? 01:01 How does it work? 01:02 How do we know if a scientific theory is correct? 01:06 What are some of the misconceptions about science? 01:10 What kind of hope does science offer us? 01:13 Or is science something that can be even detrimental 01:17 to human beings? 01:18 These are just a few of the many questions 01:20 that I want to address in this series, 01:24 but especially I want to look at science in regard 01:28 to the question of religious faith. 01:31 How do faith in science interact? 01:34 Are they hostel to each other? 01:36 Can they be harmonized or as some say 01:40 do they do with-- deal with completely different thing? 01:44 All this and more I plan to explore in this series 01:48 as I said called Faith in science. 01:50 Because yes, there is a lot more faith in science 01:54 than people believe. 01:56 That is there is belief in science, 01:58 there's things and other words 02:00 that you believe in science but you cannot prove. 02:05 Science is at the core of human endeavor 02:09 and as such it comes with all the weaknesses 02:12 that humans bring to whatever they do 02:15 and one of the biggest weaknesses 02:17 is simply that we live with the fair amount of uncertainty. 02:22 I mean this is reality on everything that we do. 02:27 Someone once said 02:28 that nature doesn't give up her secrets easily 02:32 or in the different context, 02:35 but some what the same idea 02:37 Paul says "we see through a glass, darkly." 02:41 But whether we're dealing with the things of God 02:44 or dealing with the things of science 02:46 or dealing with the things of history 02:48 or the things of psychology, literature, 02:51 whatever we are dealing as human beings, 02:55 so we are dealing with them 02:57 with the certain amount of uncertainty. 03:01 We are dealing with things 03:02 that we just don't fully understand 03:04 or know or really could even prove. 03:08 Even things that we think we know, the most about 03:11 that were the certain about come with aspects 03:15 that we don't understand that leave black holes there, 03:20 even some of the simplest things. 03:22 I want you to listen to this quote from a book 03:24 called the Beginning of Infinity, listen to this 03:29 "If you fill a kettle with water and switch it on, 03:34 all the super computers on Earth working 03:37 for the age of the universe could not solve the equations 03:41 that predicts what all those water molecules will do 03:46 even if we could somehow determine their initial state 03:50 and that of the outside influences on them, 03:56 which is itself an intractable task." 04:01 Now think about that, we are not talking about here 04:04 what goes on in the inner recesses of the human mind 04:09 which is a total mystery to us 04:11 or what goes on in the belly of distant stars or of the sun. 04:15 I mean man of life, all that's very complicated. 04:18 We are talking here about a pot of water boiling 04:23 and what does he say, all the super computers 04:28 in the world working from the age of the universe, 04:32 couldn't tell us what those water molecules will do. 04:37 Wow, that's kind a heavy. 04:39 Now my point is simple, 04:42 science like everything else in life must 04:46 to a certain degree be taken on faith 04:49 because there are vast limitations 04:52 on what we has humans know or even can know. 04:56 In fact there is a-- in quantum physics 05:00 there is a thing called the uncertainty principle 05:03 and what it states is at the most basic level of nature, 05:07 it's impossible to know for certain-- 05:10 to know certain things about a particle, 05:13 it's not that our tools are limited or that by the-- 05:16 or that we don't have access to it? 05:18 No, it's by the very nature of the particles themselves 05:23 certain things about them just cannot be known. 05:28 If we know one thing about a particle, 05:30 such as its position, it's impossible for us 05:33 to know its velocity or if we know its velocity, 05:37 it's impossible for us to know its position. 05:42 There is at the most fundamental level, 05:44 the bottom right level, certain, 05:47 uncertainty built right in to nature itself. 05:52 At least at the far as level we can get to at presence. 05:56 But even if we get away from quantum physics, 05:59 even if we get in to the realm of everyday life, 06:03 there is a great deal we have to take on faith. 06:06 Hence the title of the series Faith in Science. 06:12 Yes, because science is very much a faith venture, 06:16 as is most everything we as humans do. 06:21 Anyway this title is as this talk is called the Rainbow. 06:28 And I can remember one morning, 06:30 I was driving to work and I saw this beautiful, 06:35 just this beautiful rainbow that just divided the sky, 06:39 it was a giant McDonalds arch, 06:42 but only instead of that grows McDonalds yellow, 06:46 it were the wonderful colors of the rainbow. 06:50 You know, and as I saw it I marveled, 06:53 I marveled that the beauty at the covering across the sky 06:57 it was beautiful and at the same time 07:01 I thought of the promise that God made to Noah, 07:05 the one after the flood, the promise 07:08 that He would never destroy the earth by a flood again 07:12 and the rainbow being the symbol of that promise 07:18 and He said here He says 07:19 "And I will remember my covenant, 07:21 which is between me and you 07:23 and every living creature of all flesh. 07:27 And the waters shall no more be a flood to destroy all flesh." 07:32 Genesis 9:15. 07:36 And when I saw that rainbow 07:39 I thought about the covenant promise, bariti, my promise. 07:45 And I smiled because really in a sense me 07:48 just simply being there, being alive to see 07:51 that rainbow in the sky 07:54 and that I or previous generations hadn't been 07:56 wiped out with a world wide flood, 08:00 mabul the Hebrew word, helped to affirm to me 08:04 that the truth of that covenant promise. 08:09 Now I realized to that many people, 08:12 even profess Christians those who claim 08:15 to believe in the Bible would have smiled at my reaction. 08:20 They might have a little perplexed at my naivete, 08:25 I mean I could just him oh, come on Cliff, 08:28 you can't be that naive, can you? 08:31 The rainbow, a sign of God's covenant promise 08:36 not to destroyable world with the flood 08:38 what are you free? 08:40 Get real. 08:41 No one takes that seriously anymore. 08:43 There is no scientific evidence to back that up. 08:48 Well, you know, there is all sorts of problems 08:52 hear with that, with that thinking. 08:56 If the flood were only local 08:58 but some there was the flood was just a local flood. 09:01 So if the flood were only local then every rainbow 09:05 instead of a sign of God's covenant promise to us, 09:09 actually becomes a mockery of that promise. 09:13 You know, not to promise-- not to do again 09:15 what He did in Genesis which was destroy 09:17 the whole world with the flood. 09:20 Okay, not some corner of Mesopotamia. 09:23 If the flood were only local then God lied to us 09:27 because there been a lot of local floods 09:29 and that every one of those rainbows 09:31 in the sky is a-- is a sign of God mocking us. 09:35 There have been all sorts of floods, 09:37 okay, so that's the point there. 09:39 If it was just a local flood the rainbow becomes a mockery. 09:46 But also I sometimes hear profess Christians say, 09:51 but there is no scientific evidence for a flood, 09:55 not a worldwide flood. 09:57 Now that's rich, it really is. 09:59 I wonder what would evidence 10:02 for a worldwide flood look like. 10:05 The Genesis flood was a one time event, a unique event. 10:09 Okay, how then a science boost dogmatically tells us 10:13 that there is no scientific evidence for something 10:16 they cannot examine and replicate. 10:18 What they could do is they could speculate about 10:21 what they might thing it would be like. 10:23 And that's fine, 10:25 but that's all it is speculation, 10:27 guess work about something they know nothing about. 10:31 What a definitely is not as hardcore 10:33 scientific proof of anything. 10:37 Science has no more disproven the worldwide flood 10:40 than it has disproven the resurrection of Jesus. 10:45 And yet as so often is the case, 10:48 science comes out and says something 10:51 as highly as speculative 10:53 as there is no scientific evidence for a worldwide flood 10:57 and the Christians and so many of them do 10:59 what they usually do. 11:01 They just have to bow down before. 11:04 Well, science says it, 11:06 and we can't be a bunch of Bible thumping hicks, 11:09 we have to believe what science says. 11:12 That seems to be the paradigm, but I don't want to go there, 11:15 that's not where my talk is going. 11:18 I want to go back to the rainbow, 11:21 I want to got to the back-- to back to the sign of bariti, 11:26 My covenant as God's said, the covenant 11:29 that He would not destroy the world again by a flood. 11:34 Now many people can no longer believe that 11:38 because well, they say, science has shown us, 11:42 what's wrong with you? 11:43 Science has shown what a rainbow really is. 11:46 Instead of the ancient midst about being a snake God 11:50 or a path between heaven and earth 11:53 that the God's traverse to go back and forth 11:56 or about it being the belt of tear the sun God 12:00 or whatever they-- people believed, 12:02 you know, we now thanks to science have 12:05 a decent understanding of what a rainbow is. 12:08 At least the basic physical interactions that create it. 12:13 We know that a rainbow occurs 12:16 when sunlight is both reflected, refracted, 12:20 refracted and reflected in drops of water, 12:23 that disperse the light at various angles. 12:26 Sometimes I think its somewhere between 40 and 42 percent. 12:30 Light enters a rain drop at one point is reflected 12:33 to the back of that drop at another, 12:36 okay, and then you know, creating the colors 12:38 that we see and even a host of colors that we don't. 12:42 Each tiny droplet of water or mist 12:45 acts as like a kind of prism, which will-- 12:47 which disperses the light into the various colors. 12:51 Some of the-- this light reflects back on the droplet, 12:54 and is reflected a second time 12:57 and it just spreads out drops at different angles 13:00 and distinctively different colors to the eye. 13:05 It involves things like refraction 13:07 and turn over reflection and dispersion. 13:10 All of which at one level it's fairly well understood. 13:14 Again we think of each this 13:16 as millions of drops as tiny prisms, 13:20 such as we played at when we were kids. 13:23 This is now how we understand 13:27 to least to some degree has rainbows are formed. 13:31 Therefore-- therefore the Bible story about the rainbow 13:36 being a sign of God's covenant is proven false. 13:41 Right or wrong? 13:44 Well, I don't know about you, 13:45 but don't you see something kind of wrong 13:48 with that kind of thinking? 13:50 I mean big time wrong. 13:53 It's a keen to saying something like this. 13:57 Let's try to put this in little formal, 14:00 more formal logic. 14:01 When science explains something, 14:04 it means that God had nothing to do with it. 14:07 That's point number one. 14:09 Point number two, Science explains rainbows. 14:12 Therefore, point number three, 14:15 God had nothing to do with it. 14:18 This is what formulaic calls a valid argument, 14:22 but not a sound one. 14:24 The conclusion might logically follow from the promise, 14:28 but the promise is wrong 14:30 and so the conclusion is wrong as well. 14:34 I mean, where did we get this idea? 14:38 Very commonly held that once we have 14:41 a scientific explanation for something, 14:45 and please don't get me started on what this notion 14:48 of what a scientific explanation is, 14:51 that can be quite controversial and we'll be looking at that. 14:55 But where did we get this idea 14:56 that once science helps us understand the mechanisms, 15:02 the physical mechanisms of some phenomena 15:05 then suddenly, automatically, God drops out of the picture. 15:09 Now we know how it works physically, therefore, 15:12 get rid of your Creator, get rid of your God. 15:15 Let me read you a quote from someone 15:17 who is always been one of my favorite authors. 15:20 He the late Christopher Hitchens. 15:23 He is one of the so called New Atheist, 15:25 so there is really nothing new about 15:27 their writings and ratings. 15:28 And I always like Christopher Hitchens, 15:30 right even after he died 15:32 I put his picture on iPad for a week or two. 15:35 But you know, he wrote this book called "God Is Not Great, 15:38 How Religion Poisons Everything" 15:40 and I was kind of it's not one of his better literary moments, 15:43 and I was sorry to see Hitch go down this path. 15:46 But anyway in it he wrote this, 15:52 he wrote "Religion has run out of its justifications. 15:57 Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, 16:01 it no longer offers 16:03 and explanation of anything important." 16:06 And I thought what in the world 16:08 was poor Hitch talking about here. 16:11 What has the telescope shown us 16:14 that nullifies the existence of God? 16:17 What has the microscope shown us 16:20 that makes the idea of God irrelevant? 16:24 In fact, what has science anywhere ever proven 16:28 and I think that's a very difficult word. 16:31 What has science ever proven 16:33 that negates the existence of God? 16:36 Well, people sometimes think, oh, what about Galileo? 16:39 When the Galileo trial with the church and all that? 16:43 Look what happened there 16:45 and how science disproved teachings of the Bible and God. 16:49 Well, if you ever study the story of-- 16:52 it's really something, 16:53 there is so much this information about that, 16:56 that whole Galileo thing. 16:58 You know, Galileo, there is the irony, 17:01 Galileo was accused of heresy for teaching things supposedly 17:08 that had nothing to do with the Bible. 17:11 They weren't even in the Bible, 17:12 he was surpassingly teaching things against Bible, 17:14 yet they weren't against Bible, 17:16 they weren't-- the Bible never talked about these things. 17:18 Where does the Bible say that the earth sits 17:21 at the center of the universe 17:23 and that the planets and stars all are orbit around it? 17:27 Where does the Bible say that? 17:29 These are even taken directly 17:31 or inferred from the teachings of Aristotle, 17:34 which the church had co-opted 17:37 and federally it becomes teachings of the Bible, okay. 17:41 They weren't teachings of the Bible, 17:43 this Galileo was convicted of heresy, 17:46 not heresy to Paul, not heresy to Moses, 17:50 not heresy to Jesus, 17:51 but to the prevailing scientific theory of the time. 17:57 That of Aristotle a pagan Greek 18:00 who had been dead for 2,000 years by then. 18:03 Anyway that again that's a whole other talk. 18:06 My point for now though is this, 18:10 where does we get the idea that the minute someone 18:14 has a scientific explanation again a very loaded word 18:20 that the minute they have that whatever they have 18:22 that the divine is automatically nullified 18:27 and or pushed out. 18:29 How does the fact that we now fairly 18:32 well, you know, understand the physics involved 18:36 in the making of a rainbow? 18:38 How does that it anyway 18:39 we refute or nullify what the Bible said 18:42 about the rainbow being a sign of God's covenant with humanity 18:47 that He won't destroy the world again by water. 18:51 Now, now if the text had said, when God said, 18:57 I would create this covenant sign 18:59 through weaving together angel feathers 19:03 and that mixture of angel's feathers 19:05 would cause this colorful rainbow in the sky, okay. 19:10 Now scripture said that then you know, 19:12 I think we might have a problem. 19:15 Okay, but I don't-- when I read the Genesis account 19:19 and I read in Hebrew over and over, 19:22 it doesn't say anything like that in all-- at all. 19:27 No does the Bible record, when it first created, 19:31 you know, say that when put the rainbow in the sky 19:34 did it specifically say that 19:36 it's not gonna be created out of water droplets, 19:39 reflect-- light reflecting of a water droplets in the sky 19:44 and acting like prism. 19:45 Did the text ever say that that won't be what is? 19:48 No, of course not, I'm being rhetorical. 19:52 This again the whole idea 19:55 that well, now that we know how the rainbow is made, 19:58 it proves that God had nothing to do with it. 20:03 That is such a false conclusion. 20:07 It's an assumption not wanted by the facts. 20:11 The promises do not lead to the conclusion 20:15 because the promise that one something 20:17 is understood scientifically means 20:21 that God must automatically have nothing to do with it, 20:24 He must be removed from the picture is not proven. 20:28 Where does that come from? 20:30 It certainly not a scientific statement, 20:34 it's a philosophical statement macerating as a scientific one. 20:41 The British poet John Keats, fear that 20:47 science would one day "unweave a rainbow." 20:54 But you know, even if we could parse, 20:57 measure, and predict and quantify everything 21:02 about a rainbow down to the inners of each photon 21:05 and to the underbelly of every quark 21:08 well, would that prove other than that 21:10 we better understand the natural laws 21:12 that God use to create the sign of His committed promise. 21:18 Science no more removes God from the equation 21:22 then the action of hormones in the limbic system 21:26 reduces human love into something 21:29 it came to the-- to the liver secreting bile. 21:33 Science might one day be able to explain everything about 21:36 how rainbows are made even up the 25 digits 21:40 to the right of the decimal point, 21:42 but it could never explain why. 21:47 And you see this gets into a whole other area 21:52 in regards to the question of faith in science, 21:55 especially has it relate as science relates to faith. 21:59 And that is the question of exactly 22:02 what does science do anyway? 22:05 Does science really explain why anything happens? 22:09 I mean the real-- does it give us the real why 22:13 or does it just explain how certain mechanisms 22:16 appeared to work. 22:18 See there's a big difference here 22:20 and it something that philosophers of science 22:23 have been debating for centuries now 22:27 or for a long time now. 22:30 Let's go back to the rainbow. 22:35 Why does the rainbow appear in the sky? 22:37 Why? 22:39 Well, because of the angle of the sunlight hits 22:42 the water droplets, right? 22:44 Okay, but why when the sunlight's hit 22:47 the water droplets at this angle 22:50 does the rainbow appears? 22:52 Well, it has to do with the specific way 22:54 that light is made and water is made. 22:57 Okay, I don't have a problem with that. 22:59 But why is a light made in such a way 23:02 that it interacts with water droplets 23:04 at a certain angle you get the rainbow? 23:08 Well, it has to do with how light-- light wave's act, 23:13 okay, but then why do light waves 23:16 when interacting this or certain angel 23:20 create the rainbow? 23:21 Well, it's because light waves 23:23 just act that way they just do. 23:27 They just do? 23:29 What kind of explanation is that? 23:32 But you know, it's typical in many ways 23:35 of all scientific explanations. 23:38 At some point your why comes to a dead end, 23:45 and science can't go further. 23:48 The why has to stop 23:50 because you get to the very bottom, 23:52 at least according to the rule 23:53 that scientists have made for themselves about 23:57 what science supposedly can and cannot do entail. 24:02 But again why? 24:05 Where is the why answer to the rainbow? 24:07 We have a lot of how's and yes, it's fascinating to think 24:11 that water and light can mix in such a way 24:13 and create such a beautiful phenomena 24:16 as the rainbow really is, 24:18 but the simply say that the reason it doesn't us 24:21 because well, you know, take it to any the levels 24:24 we looked at even the bottom level 24:27 you still don't have affirm why do you? 24:32 To say that the nature of light it weighs is to do that 24:35 in a sense of just going all the way back to Aristotle, 24:39 who once said something that the reasons 24:41 watch fall to the earth is that rocks love the earth, 24:45 that's why rocks fall to the earth. 24:48 Well, what isn't why-- 24:49 what is the nature of light waves to do that? 24:52 Even if we got down to the level 24:53 of the nature of photons themselves, 24:56 it would still be have to be really more 24:58 only a description than an explanation. 25:02 And logically there is no way out of this trap. 25:07 Science, it is now understood 25:11 can take you only so far than the explanation stop 25:16 without you ever getting a full why. 25:22 So I have an explanation, I think I have a why 25:27 that science can't give you. 25:30 Why then do rainbows appear in the sky? 25:37 Because God created our world in a such a way 25:42 that when sunlight and mist 25:44 are in right relationship to each other, 25:47 the mist breaks up the light by refracting it 25:51 and reflecting it at different angels 25:53 that create this electromagnetic waves 25:57 which when reaching our eyes laminate 26:00 the image of rainbows in our head. 26:03 And He did it the why that science 26:07 could never explain to remind us 26:11 of His covenant promise that never again 26:15 would God destroy the world by water, okay. 26:20 Now one could justly argue and I think they would be fair 26:26 that this is not purely a scientific answer, 26:29 and hey, I agree, 26:31 it's not purely a scientific answer, okay. 26:36 And that's because it takes us further 26:39 then where science can't take us. 26:43 Science can as we saw explain at least to a certain level 26:49 the how's, the how's, how this, how that, 26:53 but it never really gets to the why. 26:58 It's not even close. 27:01 And considering the nature of how it is practiced 27:05 science never will get close to it, 27:10 at least as it practice now. 27:12 Yeah, there is no question, there is no question 27:18 that rainbow I saw that morning, 27:21 that rainbow that was just beautiful, 27:24 glorious rainbow and indeed reminded me 27:29 of what God had said about bariti, 27:33 My covenant that's His covenant, 27:37 His covenant with the world 27:39 never to destroy the world again with a flood. 27:43 And yes, here I was evidence to some-- 27:49 here I was-- I was seeing evidence to some degree 27:54 that He had kept His word. 27:58 And as I looked at it, I thought about 28:01 all that science had taught us 28:03 about how the rainbow was formed, okay. 28:07 And that's fine, but nothing in science, 28:11 nothing by any stretch of the imagination 28:14 showed the reality of how it came, the one who, 28:18 the only true why of how the rainbow was created 28:22 and that was God. |
Revised 2015-02-19