Episode 37 - The Celestial Covenant: Uniting Science and Faith in the Tapestry of Creation

Could the study of science be one of the most profound acts of Christian worship? We're venturing into a conversation that bridges the gap between divine reverence and empirical discovery. 

In a world where the quest for knowledge often seems at odds with spiritual belief systems, we're turning the tables to show how the pursuit of science can be a testament to the grandeur of God's creation. I'll be guiding you through the age-old narrative that paints science and Christianity as adversaries and revealing a far richer tapestry of collaboration and wonder. 

From the Logos to the Holy Spirit, we'll examine the theological underpinnings that make scientific inquiry an extension of faith itself, while dismantling the 'God of the gaps' fallacy that limits the divine to the realms of the unknown.

As we traverse the historical landscape of celestial mechanics , we encounter a neglected ally in our journey towards truth: the Church itself. 

The episode unpacks the myth of a flat Earth belief and rectifies the misconception about Christianity's resistance to a heliocentric solar system. We revisit the contributions of early thinkers who set the stage for Copernicus and share how the Church's liaison with Aristotelian philosophy was not as rigid as often portrayed. Hear how Christian scholars like Galileo and Kepler advanced our understanding of the cosmos, prompting a fusion of faith and science that continues to inspire awe and curiosity. This episode is not just a lesson in astronomy; it's a pilgrimage to the heart of where science and sacred wonder meet.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Well, welcome to episode 37 of the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization, and we're continuing to look at science, and then we'll perhaps spend a little bit of time after this looking at the Christian doctrine of creation that underlies all that we've been looking at, but for now I just want to build on this idea of whether science takes us nearer to our worship of the living God or is a barrier or that relationship. At the end of the last episode, we were thinking how the great Christian scientists, particularly in that 17th century explosion of pioneering, the more they understood the universe, the closer they felt to the creator of the universe. For those great scientists, the work of science was an act of worship, and it is holy work, and the really great scientists even today that I talk to sort of think like that. It's very rare, though, to meet a contemporary scientist who has such a kind of sacred view of what they're doing. That because science has become so secularized and so dominated by, like pagan foundations, and therefore it's lost, I think, in some ways something of that sacred aspect, and you'll think about that more as we go on, but the best Christian scientists, even today understand it as this act of worship and holy work, alan Hamilton. Here's a quotation from Alan Hamilton. He said people think of science as rolling back the mystery of God. I look at science as slowly creeping toward the mystery of God. I mean that's very much a sort of 7th, 16th, 17th century way of thinking.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Joan Veil says a science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless. If science is the attempt to appreciate and reflect the mind of Christ as displayed in His creation, then an increase in scientific understanding should only mean an increase in appreciation and worship of Christ Himself and as well, that way in which the Spirit that flows from the Father through the Son out to the whole creation, that Holy Spirit breathed out by the Father poured out on the Son, that if Christ is the one who cried and we're using the word Christ very specifically there, it's like I was talking to Steve Levy recently from Swansea Mount Pleasant Baptist Church and just that we were just enjoying that idea that the word Christ is this Trinitarian word, because it takes us not just into the life of Jesus in the Gospels but the life of God, the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, all the way through the Old Testament, but also into eternity, that he's always been, this eternally begotten Son of the Father, who is anointed, but with the Spirit from the Father. The Father's always poured out the Spirit onto the Son so that he can be and do all that he's done for endless ages and so on. So this concept of Christ and then, if it is the case that Christ is the Logos of creation, who holds it all together, it is the Spirit that gives life and light to everything in creation through Christ, and so there's that way in which it's not just we really want to be filled with the Spirit in our scientific endeavours, and that the more science is successfully and genuinely comprehending reality, or at least the physical aspects available to us, that can be this tremendous, like almost the charismatic gift of the Spirit.

Speaker 1: 5:38

However, a common idea that occurs in popular culture is that God is only mentioned to explain the things that science does not understand. And you get this. There's even things like YouTube and things where people seem to imagine that discovering weird, unexplained things is of some interest, is of special interest to Christians, like as if we enjoy finding things that seem weird and unexplainable, as if they are somehow more relevant to people who believe in God, as if we that's like, oh, that here's something that is seems almost irrational or unexplainable. That's a bit of space for God to show up there. I mean, I know it sounds if you've been listening to this and we're thinking together. We can't understand that we'll say what, but it's very popular. There's a whole popular culture around this idea that unexplained mysteries are good for religious people, because and really I'm only interested in Christians, I'm not interested in religious people generally, but for, somehow, for Christians, because that's a bit of space to have Christian things.

Speaker 1: 7:18

The idea is, then, that there are aspects of the universe that just cannot be explained, and those are the bits that point to the existence or activity of God, and that all the rational, reliable, real things that we enjoy exploring and understanding with science, that isn't what God hasn't done, those things, that's nothing to do with God. He's supposed to just do kind of weird things like making faces appear in toast or I don't know that sort of thing. So the idea then is, as more and more of the universe is explained or understood, so there is less and less space left for this, what is called God of the gaps, the idea there. So God of the gaps? It is a bizarre view of science and truth that there's a God who has to find little gaps to fit in that. Worse, science hasn't, either hasn't yet, explained things, or maybe I mean there are things that are beyond the reach of scientific explanation for all sorts of reasons, and so that's good. There's a bit of space there for God to still have a business and still have somewhere to do stuff. Now it is a bizarre view of science and truth.

Speaker 1: 9:00

According to the Bible, as we've been exploring, the living God, the divine Emperor, is at work in every detail, in the whole universe. Everything is the work of God and His glory fills the whole earth. The infinite and eternal God, who you know, is this Father, who's appointed His Son to be the divine Emperor and fills Him with the Spirit and gives Him His will to implement all of that, that divine Empire, the cosmic civilization. It does not peek out in random weird events or unexplained phenomena, or pieces of toast that have suggestive patterns on them, or cloud formations that are slightly odd or things like that. How rubbish would that like? As if the universe, like God, is kind of trying to communicate with the most bizarrely, like trying to indicate weird patterns of clouds or toast or whatever, when the entire cosmos is in fact, the patterned, logical, real, rational, reliable display of how the Father loves the Son and is empowered by the Spirit. The Cross, resurrection, ascension, the Gospel Sacraments, all of that is displayed in wonderful detail and precision by the entire heavens and the earth, not in sort of bizarrely incidental things Now. So the divine Emperor shines forth in every part of the heavens and the earth.

Speaker 1: 10:55

I love Jeremiah 14, verse 22. Listen this carefully, jeremiah 14-22. Do the skies themselves send down showers? No, it is you, lord, our God. Therefore, our hope is in you, for you are the one who does all this. The Bible constantly points to the Lord, god, as the one who makes the sunrise, the clouds form, the lightning strike, the animals reproduce, the stars shine and everything to stay firm and stable.

Speaker 1: 11:45

What we call laws of nature are, in fact, our summaries of the ways that he normally orders and controls all things. Let me just say that carefully again, because we talk about laws of nature as if the universe has built within it Laws. So the analogy of the 18th century was the idea of it being like a watch, and the mechanisms are designed in such a way that it only needs to be wound up and then it operates according to its own principles and laws built into it, but that doesn't correspond at all actually to the biblical vision of the heavens and the earth run as the divine empire, because there it's much more direct the rule of the divine empire over creation, and that we think of laws of nature, as we call them. But all what really trying to do with those things is this what we're doing is describing how the divine emperor normally orders and controls all things.

Speaker 1: 13:25

Miracles are simply when he works in a different way, and we might spend time just thinking about miracles in a later episode. There's a lot to unravel, because the danger is that people think of miracles as breaking the laws of nature, or sometimes it's God breaking into the universe or something like that, but no, miracles are just when he does something in a way that he doesn't normally do it. Strictly speaking, we do not search for laws of nature as if nature wrote its own laws or as if there was an impersonal cosmic order that had come from nothing. No, we are trying to describe the regular ways that Christ governs His creation and holds all things together. In other words, the more we understand about the way that Christ governs the heavens and the earth, the more we can appreciate His glory.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Or I like putting it like this an increase in scientific understanding should always mean an increase in Christian worship. John Clayton says this. Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies. So for him, the study of science cured his disease of atheism. Arthur Peacock famously said Such an emphasis on the imminence of God as creator in, with and under the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences is certainly in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates of the 19th century.

Speaker 1: 15:45

Now let's think about how it is, then, that people have come to think of this odd what we the God of the gaps idea, or the idea that science is somehow against the Christian faith. How did that come about, given everything that we've understood about the true foundations, the actual history of science and so on? How did that come about so that, as Arthur Peacock said, there were debates in the 19th century and it was earlier than the 19th century to this idea of like a? It really is an 18th century problem that issues in public debates in the 19th century, this idea, that reason, is destroying the Christian faith. Well, throughout the 18th to the late 20th century, the great success of the scientific project was plagued by this myth that science was in some way in conflict with theology or the Bible.

Speaker 1: 17:00

Now we're going to see there are things that were particular. Particular scientific theories do in fact collide with either really really collide with the Bible particular theories, or they collide with the way that people, what people think the Bible says. There's all that and those are things we may get into in future episodes in more detail. But for now let's we want to just examine the thing as a whole, although it might be good for us to look at the issue of the whether the sun is the center of the universe or the sun, or whether the earth is at the center and all that kind of stuff. Those are quite big debates, like because the reason why it's good for us to look at that issue of the how the earth operates in relation to the sun, s-u-n. I think it's a good one, because lots and lots of people have in their minds a kind of myth of what the Bible teaches or what Christians believe about the earth in relation to the sun and as if science was something that destroyed the Bible and the Christian faith on that issue. Because I think in many ways the idea that science is in conflict with theology or the Bible comes, developed, developed, from a popular retelling of the controversy over the place of the sun in the solar system, with Galileo the Galileo incident, let's think about that.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Then the ancient philosopher Aristotle, in the fourth century BC. Aristotle and then the Greek think of Ptolemy in his work called the Almagest. That's from 150 BC. So it's Aristotle and then Ptolemy developing that, like 150 years after Aristotle, that they developed a vision of the heavens and the earth which saw the earth as the center, and then hell inside the core of the earth, or the underworld, let's just say the underworld of Hades and so on, inside the core of the earth and the stars moving with in vast crystal spheres around the earth, with the highest heaven lying beyond the spheres. Now there is a lot to be said for this way of thinking, but we won't get totally into that now. What we want to do is just see how that vision is not exactly what the Bible says. But it's not what the Bible says. But let me just say this.

Speaker 1: 20:44

The Ptolemaic cosmology was not universally accepted and various people questioned it. And people did propose models with the Sun at the center. So the idea that nobody thought of the Sun at the center, yeah, the idea that nobody thought of the Sun at the center until like modern times, that's obviously false. Even someone like Aristarchus of Samos in 270 BC had proposed the idea that the Sun is at the center and that the universe is much, much larger than Aristotle imagined. Philolaus of the fifth century BC suggested a similar idea of this great fire of the Sun at the center of the universe. So Aristotle had a view of the universe as quite small, the earth at the middle and and so on.

Speaker 1: 21:50

And lots of people questions that and said no, the universe is much, much larger and it's better to think of the Sun at the center and things like that. Another example Bishop Nicol Orsem of the 14th century and the great Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th century both proposed that the Sun is the center of our system and the earth rotates on its own axis. So these ideas had been explored throughout. The idea of the Sun as the center rather than the earth had been explored, understood, theorized about, examined, and bishops had proposed such a that that's, a better, a superior model of the universe, to put the Sun at the center of our solar system. Really, then, they're thinking about the Sun as the center of the entire universe, but so that idea wasn't something that was like an unthinkable thought or anything like that. Christians had thought it, explored it, proposed it, but it was Copernicus, in the first half of the 16th century, who worked out a mathematically detailed account of the solar system with the Sun at the center.

Speaker 1: 23:24

I will just summarize his argument, his book. It was published in 1543 and it was called On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Let me summarize the argument and then we'll think about how it was received. His argument can be summarized like this Firstly, there is no single center for the orbits of all the stars and celestial objects. Secondly, the Earth is the centre of its own physical system and of the orbit of the Moon. Thirdly, the celestial objects orbit around the Sun and therefore the Sun is the centre of the universe. Fourthly, the Earth is a great distance from the Sun, but this is a very small distance compared to the very great size of the universe as a whole. Fifthly, the apparent movement of the celestial objects is largely caused by the rotation of the Earth around its own axis. Sixthly, the apparent movement of the Sun is caused by the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Thus the Earth is spinning on its own axis but also orbiting around the Sun. And seventhly, the apparently strange movements of the celestial objects is caused by this complicated movement of the Earth spinning on its own axis and orbiting the Sun rather than any of the movements of the stars and the planets. So it's not all them that are moving, it's primarily the Earth that is moving.

Speaker 1: 25:25

So that's his argument and you can see it's a brilliant argument and it's very much like a few notable exceptions, but it's very much like moderns would tend to think of the universe. I mean not the Sun at the centre of the universe, but essentially. You can see how good his thinking is. It certainly seems good to me that. But so he produces this book on the revolutions of the celestial spheres, and when I've summarised it there, you'll think oh, that's absolutely amazing. But wouldn't people have been very upset with that, wasn't that? In the mythology the idea is that Christians at the time perhaps believed in a flat Earth? I don't know, people didn't believe in a flat Earth. That is really only something that's been believed since the 19th century, like ancients didn't believe that, not in the Christian world anyway. But you see, the interesting thing is Copernicus put out his book arguing those things and it provoked very little theological comment because it was proposed only as a theory for consideration. It was proposing this model to consider and people, as we've seen, there are the bishops who had proposed similar models, so it was perfectly fine. Everyone was happy. It's a good theory to be considered.

Speaker 1: 27:17

When Galaleo so that was Copernicus did that. When Galaleo, like 60, 70 years later. When Galaleo assembled more detailed arguments for this Copernican system at the beginning of the 17th century, initially he received support from church leaders, especially the brilliant and influential cardinal Bellamine. However, as Galaleo began to ridicule the Ptolemaic view and more strongly asserted his proposal, that's when he began to be accused of heresy. Now the controversy has been told and retold in many ways down the ages. Bertolt Breck's Life of Galileo is one of the most famous examples.

Speaker 1: 28:28

And that's that play specifically portrays the theological authorities as idiots who refuse to follow rational arguments and clear evidence. And the purpose of that play is to do that. It's propaganda, it's to make it look as if science was this, like total ration, like science. Science was something against theology. Theology, superstitious, blind nonsense. Science, rational, clarity and light. But in truth, as we've already begun to begin to see, the historical situation was more complex.

Speaker 1: 29:09

First the Roman Catholic Church had embraced I suppose let's call it a pagan philosophy of Aristotle, because we've seen that that view of the universe, the Ptolemaic one, was from Aristotle through Ptolemy, and then kind of embraced by the Catholic Church. But it had done that, it embraced. It was perfectly okay to say well, here's an interesting way of thinking of the universe that seems quite successful model, that's interesting. And to hold something like that gently, that's perfectly fine, because all our we hold, you know, we can hold lots of theories of the universe and ideas gently, but it's always we should hold them in a very provisional and light way, because we're always aware we want to approximate to the mind of Christ. So we may have something and think this seems quite good, it's quite make sense of things, quite successful. But if we're healthy Christians we'd always want to say but we're only holding this very provisionally, because as as the scientific process goes on and we unfold more of the tapestry, we may have to relinquish any or all of the theories we currently hold in order to make way for better ones. So it was okay to us to say this Aristotelian Ptolemaic system could have been held in a provisional way.

Speaker 1: 30:49

But I think the problem was they'd embraced Aristotelian philosophy in such a complete and wholesale way, and Thomas Aquinas is partly responsible for that, but not really. No, not responsible because it was already happening and he had to try and tidy up and deal with the fact that the Aristotelian philosophy was being embraced so strongly, but because the the Catholic Church had done that, it was very reluctant to reject the Ptolemaic theory that had been so dominant for more than 1,000 years. So the argument it was not so much between the Bible and science as between the Ptolemaic cosmology and the newer cosmology through the scientific work of Christian men like Galileo and Kepler. I mean one person I was reading just said it was a collision between an older pagan view of the universe versus this newly emerging Christian view of the universe. Now we'll leave it there and pick up this Galileo story in our next episode.