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. - 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. Here I discuss two hypotheses about the origin of mathematics and natural laws against each other: an impersonal and material universe versus a personal creator and lawgiver.
- Galilo was right, but so were his adversaries.
Many like either to attack or try to excuse the church for the Galileo affair, believing the myth that this was about science versus religion. However, Galileo knew 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 the scientific consensus started to favor Copernicus. In Galileo's lifetime, the geo-heliocentric model of Tycho Brahe, ignored by Galileo, had better 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 have. 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.
- 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, e.g., from primates to human societies with natural language. Biologists seem to deal with this lack of explanation by either 1) accepting it, 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.
- Six scientists of faith and three perspectives.
There have been many Christian scientists throughout the ages, both well-known and less well-known ones. The lecture will give examples of both the science and the faith of some of them. I also discuss these scientists with respect to three perspectives on science and faith: dialog, conflict, or independence. Examples will be taken from the lives of Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Nicolas Steno (Danish), Mary Anning, William Buckland, James Clerk Maxwell, Peter Waage (Norwegian), Georges Lemaître and Francis Collins.
