Transcript PowerPoint Presentation - Science and Christianity

een fysicus over
de kosmos, de
aarde en het
leven
Dr. Ard Louis
Department of Physics
University of Oxford
www.cis.org.uk
www.faraday-institute.org
www.cpgrad.org.uk
Botsende culturen?
Woorden
Gewoonten
Tradities
Gedrag
Geloof
Waarden
Aanamen
• Christelijke subculturen
• Wetenschapelijke
subculteren
• cultuur ligt vaak onder de
oppervlakte
Mijn argument:
Much of the tension
between “evolution”
and “faith” is due to
unrecognized “cultural
assumptions”
Beginnen met de Bijbel
• Bijbel aan de grondslag van mijn leven
• Ik ben classiek evangelisch/charismatisch in mijn
Bijbel interpretatie en praxis
• Wetenschap heeft een dienende relatie, geen gezag
– kan b.v. helpen met interpretatie
• Henri Blocher “In the Beginning” IVP (1984) p 25
• Nooit ons wereldbeeld boven de Bijbel
• B.v. Copernicus/Galileo en Aristoteles
• Culturele verschillen:
• Metaphoren zijn belangrijk
• Toeval etc…
• Antropomorphisatie (survival of the fittest)
• Waarom een groot verschil tussen
Christelijke profesioneele wetenschappers
en leken?
• Wetenschappelijk “bewijs” met tapijt argumenten
Biologische self-assembly
http://www.npn.jst.go.jp/ Keiichi Namba, Osaka
• Biologische systemen self-assemble (ze vormen zichzelf)
• Kunnen we dat begrijpen?
• Kunnen we het nabootsen? (Nanotechnologie)
Virus self-assembly
viruses
T=1
7/17/2015
T=3
Self-assembly van “computer virusen”
Computer virusen?
Monte-Carlo simulaties: stochastische optimalisatie
http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/IainJohnson/
Self-assembly met lego?
Eiwitten en het Paradox van Levinthal
Levinthal Paradox:
150 amino acids
~10 angles between them
~10150 different states.
How does protein find its
folded native structure?
CULTUUR VERSCHIL:
Physici/Chemici/Ingenie
urs vinden dit
belangrijk;
Biologen niet zo
belangrijk
we used same
design principles to
make viruses selfassemble
C.M. Dobson, Nature 426, 884 (2003)
Biologicsche self-assembly
Als we het niet zouden zien
zouden argumenten er tegen
sterk lijken(Levinthal)
“onmogenlijkheids argumenten”
hebben weinig success in de
biologie
Hoe interpreteren we de natuur?:
Natuur Theologie:
• Paley – Newman – Barth …..
• The fundamental thesis of the book is that if nature is to
disclose the transcendent, it must be "seen" or "read" in
certain specific ways -- ways that are not themselves
necessarily mandated by nature itself. It is argued that
Christian theology provides a schema or interpretative
framework by which nature may be "seen" in a way that
enables and authorizes it to connect with the
transcendent.
•
--- A. McGrath p x about "the Open Secret"
Wonderlijke toepasselijkheid van
de taal van de wiskunde
Quantum Mechanics + Relativity = Antimatter
Schrödinger equation (Quantum Mechanics)
+
Paul Dirac
1902-1984
=
Energy-Momentum (Special Relativity)
Dirac Equation (1928)
Electrons
Positrons (antimatter) discovered 1932
Zie ook: “The applicability of mathematics as a philosophical problem”, Mark Steiner HUP (1998);
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Communications in
Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960), Eugene Wigner
Wij zijn gemaakt van sterrenstof:
He
C via een resonancie
Sir Fred Hoyle,
Cambridge U
• “A common sense interpretation of
the facts suggests that a
superintellect has monkeyed with
physics .. and biology”
• His atheism was “deeply shaken”
Tapijt argumenten
Wetenschap als een “tapijt”
--de kracht ligt niet aan één enkele
draad maar aan het geheel en hoe ze
zijn zamengewoven.
Je kunt aan een paar draadtjes
trekken, maar daardoor breek je het
tapijt niet.
The Golemization of Relativity, David Mermin, Physics Today 49, p11 April 1996
.
Ik geloof net zo in het christendom als dat ik geloof dat de zon is opgegaan –
niet alleen omdat ik hem zie, maar omdat dit mij in staat stelt om al het andere
te zien
C.S. Lewis, “Theology as Poetry” in The Weight of Glory,
Natuurgeschiedenis
Grootheid van God
het universum:
100 miljard stellenstelsels, met elk 100
miljard sterren
•De hemel verhaalt van Gods majesteit Psalm 19
•Wat is de mens? Psalm 8
In our galaxy there are 100,000 million stars, like our
sun. our galaxy is one of 100,000 million galaxies. In
a throwaway line in Genesis, the writer tells us, "he
also made the stars" .. Gen 1:16
Natuurgeschiedenis
Grootheid van God
Analoog aan het universum:
•Ruimte   tijd
24 uurige aarde – je leven = 1 milliseconde
•De hemel verhaalt van Gods majesteit Psalm 19
•Wat is de mens? Psalm 8
Natuurgeschiedenis
• EMOTIONEEL DEBAT ?
Determineert waar we
vandaan komen wie we zijn
en hoe we zouden moeten
leven?
Intermezzo: het vertroebelend woord Evolutie
1) Evolutie as Natuurgeschiedenis
•De aarde is oud(+/- 4.5 Billion years)
•Complexere levensvormen volgen op simplere levensvormen
2) Evolutie as a mechanisme voor biologische complexiteit
•Mutaties en natuurlijke selectie
(note: Christenen zijn het er over eens dat God dit geschapen heeft)
micorevolutie, immuunsysteem etc…
3) Evolutie als wereldbeeld (evolutionisme)
George Gaylord Simpson:
"De mens is het resultaat van een doelloos en natuurlijk proces dat hem
niet heeft bedoeld. Hij is niet gepland.
of Richard Dawkins:
"Darwin maakt het mogelijk om intellectueel vervulde atheist te zijn.”
Zie ook Bas Haring, Midas Dekkers, etc..
Tapijt argumenten: case
study 1: een oude aarde ?
Science is a tapestry -- you can pick at a few strings, but that doesn’t
break the whole cloth
•Radiometric dating (many overlapping isotopes)
•ice cores:
up to 8000 years -- volcanoes like Vesuvius
up to 740,000 years
•Milankovitch cycles
•Tree rings
•All these methods (when used properly) agree.
There is no scientific controversy
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
Tapijt argument: een oude aarde ?
Milankovitch Cycles:
here seen in 420,000
years of ice core data
from Vostok,
Antarctica research
station.
Common descent in biology?
Page from Darwin's notebooks ~ circa1837 showing his first known sketch of
an evolutionary tree depicting common descent.
Case study 2: evolution of horses
Can sound like
weak inductive
reasoning to many
physical scientists
Case study 3: common descent of human &
chimp?
Divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages occurred about 6 million years ago; the times of lineage divergence are
not to scale
News & Views: The chimpanzee and us, Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, Nature 437, 50-51
(1September 2005) .
tapestry arguments in biology:
chromosomal banding:
Humans have 46 (2 X
23) chromosomes
Apes have 48 (2 X
24) chromosomes
chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. J.J Yunis and O. Prakash,
Science 215, 1525 (1982)
tapestry arguments in biology:
fusion of chromosome 2?
chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
tapestry arguments in biology:
evidence from the human genome
Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having
emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric
chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise
fusion site has been located in 2q13−2q14.1 (ref. 2;
hg16:114,455,823−114,455,838), where our analysis confirmed the
presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5,
8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A).
During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two
centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the
centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric
structure quickly deterioriated [42].
Generation and annotation of the DNA sequences of human
chromosomes 2 and 4, L.W. Hillier et al., Nature 434, 724 (2005).
endogenous retroviruses
HERV-K insertions
In humans endogenous retrovirus sequences make up about 1% of the genome.
Lebedev, Y. B., et al. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of
humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.
tapestry arguments in biology:
more threads of evidence
•Genetic threads
•SINEs (Alu )
•LINEs
•Retroviral insertions
•pseudo genes (e.g. olefaction)
•chromosomal inversions
•Phenotypal similarities
•Fossils
Tapestry arguments in biology
•The tapestry for: do humans and chimpanzees share a common
ancestor? seems to most biologists to be unbreakably strong
For some physicists, mathematicians and engineers
-- these arguments may still seem foreign and vague;
It doesn’t “smell” like the scientific method they are familiar with
-- for example: where is the repeatability? What is the predictive power of
these arguments? Where are the numbers?
TERUGBLIK:
•Tapijt argumenten
•Vaak moeilijk voor een leek om goed in te
schatten
•Verschillen van discipline tot discipline
•Biologen (ook Christelijke) geloven in de
evolutie (type 1 & 2) omdat tapijt argumenten
daarvoor sterk zijn.
•Er blijven uiteraard nog veel vragen over
details.
VOLGENDE VRAAG:
Hoe zit het dan met de Bijbel en Genesis 1&2
Newton en de planeten
• De planeet banen
zijn onstabiel: God
“hervormd” ze
• Sir Isaac Newton
Leibnitz werpt tegen
“als God de gebreken van
zijn schepping moest
herstellen, dit zeker
afbreuk zou doen aan zijn
ambachtelijke
vaardigheid”
•John Hedley Brooke, Science
and Religion, CUP 1991, p147
Leibnitz werpt tegen
•“En ik houd vol dat God, als
hij wonderen verricht, dat
niet doet om in de
behoeften van de natuur te
voorzien, maar in die van de
genade. En wie anders
denkt moet noodzakelijk
een lage dunk hebben van
de wijsheid en macht van
God”
•-- geen God van de gaten!
God van de gaten?
•
•
We begrijpen iets niet --> God in het gat van onze kennis
“When we come to the scientifically unknown, our correct policy is not to rejoice because
we have found God; it is to become better scientists”
•
Prof. Charles Coulson, Oxford U
Meer Intermezzo’s?
o Bijbelse taal
o “jaagt God voor de Leeuwen? (Job 38, Ps 104)?
o Secondaire en Primaire oorzaken
o Natuurwetten beschrijven het “gewone handelen” van
God?
o Denkpatronen over wetenschap en geloof
o
o
o
o
Nietsandersdanisme
Mechanisme en betekenis
Wetenschapisme
God van de gaten
Dawkins en atheisme van de gaten?
"The individual organism ... is not fundamental to
life, but something that emerges when genes, which
at the beginning of evolution were separate, warring
entities, gang together in co-operative groups as
"selfish co-operators". The individual organism is not
exactly an illusion. It is too concrete for that. But it is
a secondary, derived phenomenon, cobbled
together as a consequence of the actions of
fundamentally separate, even warring agents.
From Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow,
(Penguin, London, 1998) p 308.
Prof. Richard
Dawkins (Oxford)
Gene language
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies,
safe inside gigantic lumbering
robots, sealed off from the
outside world, communicating
with it by tortuous indirect
routes, manipulating it by
remote control. They are in you
and me; they created us, body
and mind; and their
preservation is the ultimate
rationale for our existence.
Richard Dawkins -The Selfish Gene (1976)
[Genes] are trapped in huge
colonies, locked inside highly
intelligent beings, moulded by
the outside world,
communicating with it by
complex processes, through
which, blindly, as if by magic,
function emerges. They are in
you and me; we are the system
that allows their code to be
read; and their preservation is
totally dependent on the joy that
we experience in reproducing
ourselves. We are the ultimate
rationale for their existence.
Denis Noble -The Music of Life:
Biology Beyond the
Genome (OUP 2006)
Natuurgeschiedenis
• EMOTIONEEL DEBAT ?
Determineert waar we
vandaan komen wie we zijn
en hoe we zouden moeten
leven?
Intermezzo: het woord Evolutie
1) Evolutie as Natuurgeschiedenis
•De aarde is oud(+/- 4.5 Billion years)
•Complexere levensvormen volgen op simplere levensvormen
2) Evolutie as a mechanisme voor biologische complexiteit
•Mutaties en natuurlijke selectie
(note: Christenen zijn het er over eens dat God dit geschapen heeft)
micorevolutie, immuunsysteem etc…
3) Evolutie als wereldbeeld (evolutionisme)
George Gaylord Simpson:
"De mens is het resultaat van een doelloos en natuurlijk proces dat hem
niet heeft bedoeld. Hij is niet gepland.
of Richard Dawkins:
"Darwin maakt het mogelijk om intellectueel vervulde atheist te zijn.”
Zie ook Bas Haring, Midas Dekkers, etc..
Metaforen: Toeval of Stochastisch?
• Random mutations and natural selection...
• Stochastic (Monte Carlo) optimisation
• e.g. used to price your stock portfolio .....
Lego blocks or clay?
• Evo-Devo Lego Blocks:
•
•
•
•
•
pax6
sonic-hedgehog
shaven-baby
tinman
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science
of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal
Kingdom. S.B. Carroll (Blackwell Science 2005)
Why so few genes?
Mycoplasma genitalium (483)
(300 minimum?)
Drosophila Melanogaster
(13,500)
E.coli (5416)
C. elegans (19,500) & P.
pacificus (29,000)
S. cerevisiae (5800)
H. sapiens (23,000)
Why so few genes?
We share 15% of our genes with E. coli
“
“
25% “ “ “
“ yeast
“
“
50% “ “ “
“ flies
“
“
70% “ “ “
“ frogs
“
“
98% “ “ “
“ chimps
what makes us different?
Gene language
Why are there so few genes?
complexity comes from the
interactions
gene networks
systems biology
transcriptional network for yeast:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Gene language
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies,
safe inside gigantic lumbering
robots, sealed off from the
outside world, communicating
with it by tortuous indirect
routes, manipulating it by
remote control. They are in you
and me; they created us, body
and mind; and their
preservation is the ultimate
rationale for our existence.
Richard Dawkins -The Selfish Gene (1976)
[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies,
locked inside highly intelligent
beings, moulded by the outside
world, communicating with it by
complex processes, through which,
blindly, as if by magic, function
emerges. They are in you and me; we
are the system that allows their code
to be read; and their preservation is
totally dependent on the joy that we
experience in reproducing ourselves.
We are the ultimate rationale for their
existence.
Denis Noble -The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the
Genome (OUP 2006)
Contingency v.s.``deep structures’’: Re-run
the tape of evolution?
“Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play
again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly
small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.” In
evolution, there is no direction, no progression. Humanity is dethroned from its
exalted view of its own importance
S.J. Gould: “Wonderful Life”; (W.W. Norton 1989)
When you examine the tapestry of evolution you see the same patterns emerging
over and over again. Gould's idea of rerunning the tape of life is not hypothetical;
it's happening all around us. And the result is well known to biologists —
evolutionary convergence. When convergence is the rule, you can rerun the tape
of life as often as you like and the outcome will be much the same. Convergence
means that life is not only predictable at a basic level; it also has a direction.
Simon Conway Morris “Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely
Universe”; (CUP, 2003)
Convergent Evolution?
"For the harmony of the world is made manifest in
Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all
poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the
concept of mathematical beauty." (On Growth and
Form, 1917.)
Convergent evolution in mechanical design of lamnid sharks and
tunas
Jeanine M. Donley, et al. Nature 429, 61-65 (6 May 2004)
Convergent Evolution
North America:
Placental Sabre-toothed cat
South America”
Marsupial Sabre-toothed cat
Convergent Evolution
compound eye
camera eye
Convergent Evolution?
•
•
Enormous number of examples ... from proteins to vision up to societies to
intelligence.
Are rational conscious beings an inevitable outcome? “
The principal aim of this book has been to show that the constraints of evolution and the
ubiquity of convergence make the emergence of something like ourselves a nearinevitability. SCM, “Life’s Solution”, (CUP 2005) pp328
TERUGBLIK:
•Metaforen zijn belangrijk
•“toeval –v.s. kansprocess”
•“genen taal etc..
•Er is nog veel te ondekken
•Atheisme van de gaten?
VOLGENDE VRAAG:
Waarom de sterke consensus onder
biologen dat de evolutie waar is?
Tapijt argumenten
Wetenschap als een “tapijt”
--de kracht ligt niet aan één enkele
draad maar aan het geheel en hoe ze
zijn zamengewoven.
Je kunt aan een paar draadtjes trekken,
maar daardoor breek je het tapijt niet.
The Golemization of Relativity, David Mermin, Physics Today 49, p11 April 1996
.
Wonderlijke toepasselijkheid van
de taal van de wiskunde
Quantum Mechanics + Relativity = Antimatter
Schrödinger equation (Quantum Mechanics)
+
Energy-Momentum (Special Relativity)
=
Dirac Equation (1928)
Electrons
Positrons (antimatter) discovered 1932
See also: “The applicability of mathematics as a philosophical problem”, Mark Steiner HUP (1998);
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Communications in Pure
and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960), Eugene Wigner
Wetenschap en Schoonheid
A Scientist does not study
nature because it is useful; he
studies it because he delights in
it, and he delights in it because
it is beautiful. If nature were not
beautiful, it would not be worth
knowing, and if nature were not
worth knowing, life would not be
worth living.
Henri Poincaré 1854 – 1912
Tapijt argument: een oude
aarde ?
Science is a tapestry -- you can pick at a few strings, but that doesn’t
break the whole cloth
•Radiometric dating (many overlapping isotopes)
•ice cores:
up to 8000 years -- volcanoes like Vesuvius
up to 740,000 years
•Milankovitch cycles
•Tree rings
•All these methods (when used properly) agree.
There is no scientific controversy
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
Tapijt argument: een oude
aarde ?
Milankovitch Cycles: here seen in 420,000 years of
ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research
station.
Tapijt argument: gezamelijke
afstamming Mens en Chimpanzee?
Divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages occurred about 6 million years ago; the times of lineage divergence are
not to scale
News & Views: The chimpanzee and us, Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, Nature 437, 50-51
(1September 2005) .
tapestry arguments in biology:
chromosomal banding:
Humans have 46 (2 X
23) chromosomes
Apes have 48 (2 X
24) chromosomes
chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. J.J Yunis and O. Prakash,
Science 215, 1525 (1982)
tapestry arguments in biology:
fusion of chromosome 2?
chromosome 2: Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Orang-utan
tapestry arguments in biology:
evidence from the human genome
Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having
emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric
chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise
fusion site has been located in 2q13−2q14.1 (ref. 2;
hg16:114455823−114455838), where our analysis confirmed the
presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5,
8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A).
During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two
centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the
centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric
structure quickly deterioriated [42].
Generation and annotation of the DNA sequences of human
chromosomes 2 and 4, L.W. Hillier et al., Nature 434, 724 (2005).
endogenous retroviruses
HERV-K insertions
In humans endogenous retrovirus sequences make up about 1% of the genome.
Lebedev, Y. B., et al. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of
humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.
tapestry arguments in biology:
more threads of evidence
•Genetic threads
•SINEs (Alu )
•LINEs
•Retroviral insertions
•pseudo genes (e.g. olefaction)
•chromosomal inversions
•Phenotypal similarities
•Fossils
•The tapestry for: do humans and chimpanzees share a
common ancestor? seems to most biologists almost
unbreakably strong
for physicists, mathematicians and engineers
-- these arguments may still seem foreign and vague; where is the
“proof”?, how do you know? -- so communities talk past each other
tapestry arguments in biology
“But others [biologists], I soon came to realize, regarded logical arguments as suspect.
To them, experimental evidence, fallible as it might be, provided a far surer avenue to
truth than did mathematical reasoning. .... Their implicit assumption seemed to be:
How could one know one’s assumptions were correct? Where, in a purely deductive
argument, was there room for the surprises that nature might offer, for mechanisms
that might depart altogether from those imagined in our initial assumptions? Indeed
for some biologists, the gap between empirical and logical necessity loomed so large
as to make the latter seem effectively irrelevant.
•Evelyn Fox Keller, in “Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development
with Models, Metaphors, and Machines, HUP, (2002)
You can’t ask those kinds of questions!!!!
(Biologist to AAL at “Protein-Protein Interaction Conf”, June 2004)
“Where are the equations” -- a physicist might ask
Tapestry arguments
• Basic scientific principles are shared across fields
• But what is considered “necessary” or “sufficient” for
a (self-organised) tapestry varies from field to field
(often unwritten)
• cultural iceberg, above and below waterline
• evidence: grant or paper review
• demarkation problems
• mathematics->physics->chemistry->biology>medicine->engineering
• Differences --in spite of apparent epistemic laxity ... it
still works!
• Christian evaluation needs communities of scholars
TERUGBLIK:
•Tapijt argumenten
•Vaak moeilijk voor een leek om goed in te
schatten
•Verschillen van discipline tot discipline
•Biologen (ook Christelijke) geloven in de
evolutie (type 1 & 2) omdat tapijt argumenten
daarvoor sterk zijn.
•Er blijven uiteraard nog veel vragen over
details.
VOLGENDE VRAAG:
Hoe zit het dan met de Bijbel en Genesis 1&2
Bijbels of cultureel?
Wat is de genre?
•
•
•
Genesis 1-2:3
Phrases that occur 10 times:
• 10 times “God said” (3 for
mankind, 7 for other
creatures)
• 10 times creative commands
(3 x “let there be” for
heavenly creatures, 7 x “let”
for world below)
• 10 x To make
• 10 x According to their kind
Phrases that occur 7 times
(heptads)
• “and it was so”
• “and God saw that it was
good”
•
•
•
•
Genesis 1:2-3
Phrases that occur 3 times
• God blessed
• God created
• God created men and women
Other numerical patterns:
• Intro 1:1-2 contains 21 words
(3 x 7) and conclusion (2: 1-3)
contains 35 words (5 X 7)
• Earth is mentioned 21 times
and “God” 35 times
-- see e.g. H. Blocher “In the
Beginning”, p 33 or E. Lucas
“Can We Believe Genesis Today”
, p 97
Wat is de genre?
FRAMEWORK VIEW
SHAPED
• Day 1
• The separation of light and
darkness
• Day 2
• The separation of the
waters to form the sky and
the sea
• Day 3
• The separation of the sea
from dry land and creation
of plants
INHABITED
• Day 4
• The creation of the lights
to rule the day and the
night
• Day 5
• The creation of the birds
and fish to fill the sky
and sea
• Day 6
• The creation of the
animals and humans to
fill the land and eat the
plants
Day 7:
The heavens and earth were finished and God rested
Wat is de genre?
•
•
Gen2:4-7 -- more patterns:
These are the generations
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
•
of the heavens
and the earth
when they were created
in the day that the Lord God made
the earth
and the heavens.
Chiastic structure (C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4 P&R (2006))
When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the
field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on
the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was
going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the
ground— then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a
living creature.
•
A completely different emphasis!
Wat is de genre?
• More like Revelation than like Luke
• But very clear in its teaching e.g.
• God created the world
• Creation is good
• I Tim 4: 1The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon
the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2
Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences
have been seared as with a hot iron. 3 They forbid people to marry
and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be
received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the
truth. 4 For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be
rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 because it is consecrated
by the word of God and prayer.
Wat is de genre?
• More like Revelation than like Luke?
• But very clear in its teaching e.g.
• God created the world
• Creation is good
• Man is made in God’s image
• Mankind (adam) has fallen into sin
• A promise of redemption (seed of woman)
• MANY! More things
• No problems with perspecuity on doctrine
Wat is de genre?
• Is it chronological?
• "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first
and the second and the third day … existed without
the sun and moon and stars?”
• Origen 185 - 254: First Principles, 4.3
• “On this subject there are three main views. According
to the first, some wish to understand paradise only in a
material way. According to the second, others wish to
take it only in a spiritual way. According to the third,
others understand it both ways, taking some things
materially and others spiritually. If I may briefly
mention my own opinion, I prefer the third”
• Augustine of Hippo (354-430) De Gen. ad litt VIII, 1. (on
the literal interpretation of Genesis)
Jewish Commentators
• “…the sages agree that the creation of this earth and sky was a
single divine event and not a series of distinct occurrences
spread out over six or seven days
• N.M. Samuelson, “Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation”,
CUP (1994) p115
• “The text does not point to the order of the [acts] of creation
… the text does not by any means teach which things were
created first and which later [it only] wants to teach us what
was the condition of things at the time when heaven and
earth were created, namely, that the earth was without form
and a confused mass”
• Rashi (1040-1105), “Commentary on Genesis”
• Many more examples, e.g. Maimonides (1135-1204) etc…
Wat is de genre?
• Strong internal hints at “elevated prose”, more like
Revelation than like Luke
•
•
•
•
Two separate narratives (tablets)
Numerical patterns
Thematic patterns
A common understanding of church fathers, early Jewish
commentators and early Evangelical leaders.
• Main theological teachings are crystal clear (perspicuity)
• Physical interpretation less so -- there science can take
a “servant role” and help you decide.
• We must be very careful not to import our own cultural
biases into interpretation
Bijbel en Wetenschap
• De wetenschap: een knechtenrol voor
Bijbel interpretatie
“The Bible must not be placed under any other authority!
…no authority, even one at the apex of the scientific
world, may impose his authority on the Bible in order to
dictate how it is to be understood, even with the best
intentions.”
“Instead of an authority, however, a ministerial, servantrole apears possible. ….. The knowledge derived from
the observation of reality (`science’) would help us to
understand the language of the Bible better.”
•Henri Blocher “In the Beginning” IVP (1984) p 25
Aside:Emergence of Humans?
e.g. at what age is a child spiritually responsible to God?
John Stott on “Homos Divinus”
Advice from C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image,
he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child
makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may
think of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final
appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well
as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing. Both are
denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power
inherent in itself has produced spirituality.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
Advice from Billy Graham
"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science
today and the Scriptures. I think that we have
misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to
make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I
think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is
a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The
Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the
Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I
believe that God created man, and whether it came by an
evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this
person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not
change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way
God did it makes no difference as to what man is and
man's relationship to God.”
• - Billy Graham quoted by David Frost
•
Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p.
72-74)
Samenvatting
Complexe materie!
Evolutie als
1. Natuurgeschiedenis
2. Mechanisme om biologische complexiteit te maken
3. Wereldbeeld (evolutionisme)
Metaforen zijn belangrijk
Mechanismen van evolutie kunnen mooi zijn
Tapijt argumenten en de consensus onder wetenschappers
omtrent Evolutie 1&2
Bijbel interpretatie – belangrijk om goed naar genre te kijken.
Writers of “the Fundamentals”
•
•
•
James Orr
1844-1913
One of the original “Fundamentalists”
There is not a word in the Bible to indicate that in its
view death entered the animal world as a
consequence of the Sin of man.
When you say there is the “six days” and the question
whether those days are meant to be measured by the
twenty-four hours of the sun’s revolution around the
earth -- I speak of these things popularly. It is difficult
to see how they should be so measured when the sun
that is to measure them is not introduced until the
fourth day. Do not think that this larger reading of the
days is a new speculation. You find Augustine in early
times declaring that it is hard or altogether impossible
to say what fashion these days are, and Thomas
Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaving the matter an
open question.
The Bible and Science
Wayne Grudem
The lesson of Galileo, …, should remind us
that careful observation of the natural world
can cause us to go back to Scripture and
reexamine whether Scripture actually
teaches what we think it teaches.
Sometimes, on closer examination of the
text, we may find that our previous
interpretations were incorrect.
•Wayne Grudem, “Systematic Theology” IVP (1994)
p 273
The Bible is not a science textbook
• The whole point of scripture is to bring us to a
knowledge of Christ --- and having come to
know him (and all that this implies), we should
come to a halt and not expect to learn more.
Scripture provides us with spectacles through
which we may view the world as God’s
creation and self-expression; it does not, and
was never intended, to provide us with an
infallible repository of astronomical and
medical information.
John Calvin
1509-1564
Advice from Schaefer
Francis Schaefer
1912-1984
• We must take ample time, and
sometimes this will mean a long
time, to consider whether the
apparent clash between science
and revelation means that the
theory set forth by science is
wrong or whether we must
reconsider what we thought the
Bible says.
• Francis Schaefer
Warfield on evolution
• B. B. Warfield (1851-1921). A biblical inerrantist as
evolutionist. Livingstone DN, Noll MA, 1: Isis. 2000
Jun;91(2):283-304.
•
The theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the intellectual basis for
B.B. Warfield
1851-1921
modern creation science. Yet Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of
Princeton Theological Seminary, the theologian who more than any other
defined modern biblical inerrancy, was throughout his life open to the
possibility of evolution and at some points an advocate of the theory.
Throughout a long career Warfield published a number of major papers
on these subjects, including studies of Darwin's religious life, on the
theological importance of the age of humanity (none) and the unity of the
human species (much), and on Calvin's understanding of creation as
proto-evolutionary. He also was an engaged reviewer of many of his era's
important books by scientists, theologians, and historians who wrote on
scientific research in relation to traditional Christianity. Exploration of
Warfield's writing on science generally and evolution in particular
retrieves for historical consideration an important defender of mediating
positions in the supposed war between science and religion.
God openbaart zich door de natuur
Psalm 19:
De hemel verhaalt van Gods majesteit,
Het uitspansel roemt het werk van zijn handen
Melkweg: 100 miljard sterren
Universum: 100 miljard sterrensteden
”God maakte … ook de sterren" .. Gen 1:16
Intelligent Design (capitalised)
heterogeneous movement -- will focus on ID centred at Discovery Institute
some key publications and people
•The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984)
•Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen
•Evolution, a Theory in Crisis (1986)
•Michael Denton
•Darwin on Trial (1991)
•Philip Johnson
•Darwin’s Black Box (1996)
•Michael Behe (CT book of the year)
•Icons of evolution (2000)
•Jonathan Wells
•No Free Lunch (2001)
•William Dembski
What is ID
•
•
Intelligent agency, as an aspect of scientific theory making, has more
explanatory power in accounting for the specified, and sometimes
irreducible complexity of some physical systems, including biological
entities, and/or the existence of the universe as a whole, than the blind
forces of. . . matter.’[1] That is, intelligent design is a better explanation
for entities exhibiting complex specified information (CSI) than are
appeals to the inherent capacities of nature (i.e. chance and/or physical
necessity). ID suggests that the world contains objects that exhaust the
explanatory resources of undirected natural causes, and can only be
adequately explained by recourse to intelligent causation.
(definition from Peter S. Williams)
Irreducible Complexity
Michael Behe (1996)
•Bacterial flagellum, immune system, etc...
are too complex to have evolved
This result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as
one of the greatest achievements in the history of science ... The discovery
[of intelligent design] rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and
Schroedinger, Pasteur and Darwin.”
Complex Specified Information
William Dembski
• CSI -- information that could not have come there by
chance alone?
• e.g. when we see a statue v.s. weathered rock
• “Law of the conservation of information”
Intelligent Design
• Philosophical issues:
• Definition of science (demarcation) ?
• Problems, but why not follow the evidence?
• Theological issues:
• when/why does God intervene?
• miracles?
• Newman/Barth critique
ID and Christians
• Major issues is -- why these miracles?
•Miracles occur to serve God’s redemptive purpose
•Origin, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin etc...
“And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it
in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace.
Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean
notion of the wisdom and power of God” Leibnitz
e.g. what is the Biblical rationale for supernatural action
aiding the creation of the flagellum?
Intelligent Design (capitalised)
•GOOD
• Looking at complex questions in science/philosophy
• counteracting evolutionism
• middle road, broad church?
•LESS GOOD
• Detached from scripture
• doesn’t solve some pressing questions (like death before fall)
• very political
•
http://www.discovery.org
• William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson
Calvin on using science
•
As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Galileo had any direct knowledge of Calvin's writings.
Nevertheless his understanding of the nature of the language used by the Bible when referring to the
natural world is the same as Calvin's as the following quotations from the Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina show.
•
B1. These propositions set down by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes
in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. (p.
181)
•
B2. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to
speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is
concerned. (p. 182)
•
B3. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or
which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon
the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. (p. 182f)
•
B4. ...having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in
the true exposition of the Bible and in the investigation of those meanings which are necessarily contained
therein, for these must be concordant with demonstrated truths. (p. 183)
•
The first two quotations express the same 'accommodation' understanding of biblical language as Calvin
adopted. The third recognises that, as a result of this, the literal sense of the biblical text may sometimes
be at variance with the scientific understanding of the natural phenomenon described. In the final quotation
Galileo makes the point made by Prof. McKay that one reason why biblical interpreters should take
scientific knowledge into account is that it will help them to recognise when the biblical writers are using the
language of appearance or cultural idioms, and so help them avoid the kind of misinterpretation made by
those who condemned Galileo.
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/lucas/lecture.html
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