Exploring the Intersection of Theology and Science

The first of all is in spite of our living in a time of intense specialization in fields of academic discipline, one cannot study any particular area of investigation for very long without bumping up against other fields of inquiry because that’s just the nature of the whole scope of knowledge, and as a theologian I’m profoundly interested in theories that are set forth about matters such as creation—questions of the nature of the cosmos and of the origin of the cosmos. [00:00:36]

One does not need to be a physicist, a biologist, or a chemist to be able to examine the cogency of inferences that are drawn from various data. That gets us, as I say, into the formal realm—the realm that involves the use of logic and language. Logic and language. We are all involved in that enterprise of trying to speak in an orderly, cogent manner about the things that we study. [00:02:12]

Logic, which is the formal side of the scientific method, has no content. Logic gives us no information. There is no data found within the confines of logic. All logic does is measure the rational relationship between propositions. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle, who did not invent logic but rather defined it and discovered it, argued that logic itself is not a science, but rather it is what he called the “organon,” which is the Greek word for “tool” or “instrument” of all science. [00:02:55]

Now what is going on here in that classification system is this whole business of taxonomy, and this enterprise began, according to the Bible, in the Garden of Eden. The first scientific mission to which Adam and Eve were assigned was the business of taxonomy. They were called to do what? To name the animals. And they could have done it in a very simple way. “There’s a duck-billed platypus. There’s a giraffe. There’s an elephant. There’s a rhinoceros,” and so on. They put names, or labels on individual kinds of animals. [00:06:23]

As we learn more and more and more about reality, we make closer and finer distinctions among various things. We measure, we observe, we experiment in order to understand similarities and differences among things. The doctor who is a capable diagnostician has to be able to know the difference between a common, ordinary stomachache and a life-threatening cancer. The two, symptomatically, may be similar at first glance, but he probes deeper and deeper into his examination, not only to discern the similarities among various maladies, but also to discover the distinctions among them. [00:07:30]

I mentioned that chance is not a thing. It has no power because it has no being, and yet we find people using the term “chance” frequently as if “chance” were indeed a thing—not just a thing, but a powerful thing, powerful enough to create the whole universe. And so what I’m asking today is this: What is the meaning of the word “chance”? [00:11:44]

Now, equivocation takes place in an argument when the meaning of the term changes, all so subtly, in the middle of the discussion. My favorite illustration of that, quickly, is the old syllogism that proves that cats have nine tails. I ask people, “Do cats have nine tails?” And they say, “No.” And I say, “Well, I can prove to you that cats have nine tails.” And they say, “Let’s see it.” And I’ll say, “Okay, do cats have eight tails?” And they’ll say, “No.” I’ll say, “Any cat have eight tails?” They’ll say, “No.” [00:15:32]

David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, made this comment, “Chance is only our ignorance of real causes.” Now all three of these men have said virtually the same thing, and they’ve used the same word to describe the misuse of “chance.” And what word is it? The word “ignorance.” When we say that something is caused by chance, what we’re saying is we don’t know what caused it. We don’t know why it happened. We are expressing, not a new form of magical causality, but we’re expressing our ignorance. [00:18:44]

He said, “Fifteen to eighteen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being.” Now, as one interested in being—interested in the science of ontology and philosophy and theology, I almost drove my car off the road and had an accident. I said, “What did he say?” He’s a brilliant astrophysicist, but he just went to sleep. He said, “Fifteen to eighteen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being.” Well, what did it explode from? Non-being? Did it not be before the explosion? [00:19:58]

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist made the comment that in this day and age we can no longer believe in spontaneous generation. I was glad to hear that. He went on to say that now science requires us to believe in gradual spontaneous generation. And again, I did a double-take. I said, “Gradual spontaneous generation?” That is, something cannot suddenly, quickly, spontaneously pop into being by itself. In order for that to happen, it takes time. [00:21:11]

Time is not a thing. Time has no power. Time has no being. But here again we’re in magic because this man is telling us that spontaneous generation can happen given enough of nothing. I see it this way: space plus time plus chance—I don’t know how many otherwise brilliant people I’ve heard use this formulation for creation—space plus time plus chance equals the universe. What this amounts to is nothing plus nothing plus nothing equals everything. [00:22:32]

Now, if one say, “We have five different definitions for nothingness,” that’s a legitimate statement, but to speak soberly of five kinds of nothing illustrates the failure of the deductive side of the scientific method to prevail in our day. [00:24:01]