I give lectures on these topics:
- The imagined conflict. On science and God.
It is widely believed that there is a conflict between natural science and God. I present instead how science and a creator give complementary rather than competing explanations. I also explore topics such as the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, and the origin of human rationality or soul. These are topics that fill many with wonder and stimulate thoughts about where the boundaries of natural science lie. - Ten Christian scientists that you meet every day.
Starting with your mobile phone waking you up in the morning, I take you on a journey through a typical day where you, probably without knowing it, encounter many of the most important (natural) scientists through history. Suprisingly many of them turn out to be Christians, and that is not only in name due to a general cultural influences. It is clear that the Christian faith meant something personal to them as well, as illustrated in the lecture by quotes from their own writings. - Based on upcoming book on "The suprising faith of scientists," 2025.
- The roots of mathematics and natural laws: materialism or theism?
Nobel laureates such as Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner wondered about the comprehensibility of nature, which they saw as a miracle defying rational explanation. They were particularly struck by how mathematics is so well suited to describe the universe as seen in physics. 17th century scientist Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, had a very good explanation for why that was so. Here I discuss two hypotheses about the origin of mathematics and natural laws and compare them: an impersonal and material universe versus a personal creator and lawgiver.
- Learning from C S Lewis’ relationship to evolution.
“In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth, it is a fact about improvements” is what Lewis wrote in the Funeral of a Great Myth in the 1940’s, demonstrating both an acceptance of and a scepticism to the explanatory power of biological evolution. One cannot understand Lewis’ scepticism to explanations for improvements in evolution without considering his reading of Haldane, one of the founders of Neo-Darwinism, and an atheist. Nearly a century later, biologists still state that why the major evolutionary transitions happened defy explanation. These transitions are different from the imprecise term macroevolution, as they occur at an even higher level. They include the origin of life (which strictly speaking is not part of the theory of evolution, but a condition for it), and the transition from primates to human societies with natural language. Biologists seem to deal with this lack of explanation by either 1) accepting it as unexplained by current theory, 2) by a more or less justified trust in a future resolution, or 3) by denying that there is progress at all, often leading to a low view of humans. I argue here that Lewis’ view can still guide us today in expressing awe and wonder over the process of evolution as well as scepticism to the claims of evolutionism that everything has been explained, what Lewis liked to call the Myth. - Galileo was right, but so were his adversaries.
Many like either to attack or to excuse the church for the Galileo affair, believing the myth that this was about science versus religion. However, Galileo knew very well that he did not have a very good case scientifically for the hypothesis that the Earth revolves around the sun. It took several decades after his death before scientists in general started to favor the Copernican model. In Galileo's lifetime, the geo-heliocentric model of Tycho Brahe, ignored by Galileo, had better scientific support. This is hard to understand with a presentist view of history, where the past is understood in light of present knowledge, as many scientists unconsciously do. Upon investigating how scientists at the time reasoned, one finds instead that it is impossible to comprehend the Galileo affair without understanding the importance of Brahe's model.
