History Of Faith And Science (part 2)

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History Of Faith And Science (part 3)

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Well, good morning, everyone. We're here for week two of Adult Sunday School, the summer version.
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And let's try to get this a little straighter on the screen. I think that's about as good as we're gonna do. So people at the back, you probably won't see some of the finer print.
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Is there a way to dim the front lights just to make it, I mean, can you see it okay in the back? You guys can see it all right, right?
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All right. So we're in actually week two. Thanks, Mark.
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Awesome, thank you. We're in week two of three of Summer Sunday School, and we're doing a series called the
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History of Science and Faith. And we're doing a series of, when
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I say science and faith, it's really where the Bible data from the scriptures and the data from inquiry and empirical study of nature seem to conflict.
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So when we talk about science and faith, that's what we're talking about. And so just to recap of last week, there are handouts if you'd like them.
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From last week, the debates pre -Copernican, and Copernicus kind of marks a watershed of sorts.
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And of course, the screen does that, so. It could be because I got it leaning up weird. There we go.
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So Copernicus, the Copernican era, just to mark it around 1500 and going forward, really marks a watershed in the history of science and faith before the pre -Copernican controversies centered around biblical data versus philosophical speculation, because there really wasn't much data before the modern science.
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Sometimes the questions were clear. The cosmos is finite.
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, Genesis 1 .1. Sometimes those answers seem clear. Sometimes there is no data in the scriptures or in the earth from the senses.
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We don't know where the earth population is. Where does it stop? Are there lands across the seas?
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That was unknown, and people speculated about that, and they took theological positions on those things.
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It's kind of funny as that may sound. That's kind of how it worked out. And sometimes you had data from nature and you have data from the scriptures.
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So when you were dealing with the shape of the earth, you could derive a model from the study of the scriptures on the shape of the earth, and people still do that today.
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If we look at the internet, we can see that, right? There are flat earthers. There are geocentrists, and they're out there.
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So the goal ultimately is to preserve inerrancy in scriptures, in our interpretation of the scriptures, and affirm that, and also to have an accurate picture of the data from nature.
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That's really the goal. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna get into the Copernican theory. In my view, the most fascinating era when it comes to this topic before today, which
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I find pretty fascinating as well. So what were the issues at stake in early modern cosmology?
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Now, cosmology is the study of the cosmos, the study of the solar system, and so forth.
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Aristotle really held the philosophical first place. He held that there was special heavenly stuff.
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Once you're here on the earth, you've got earthly stuff, the matter of earth. But once you go outside the rhekia, the firmament, the expanse, whatever you wanna call it, it was different.
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It was different, and we'll talk about that. Ptolemy in cosmology, he had a model that the earth was the center of the solar system.
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And we'll talk about why that was. It's called the geocentric model. When we talk about geocentric, we're talking about the solar system.
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When it's a heliocentric, the sun is at the center. When it's geocentric, the earth is at the center. Natural observations.
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We were able to see things we couldn't see before in a more progressive way.
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We could see more every decade, every century that went by. So that seemed to affirm that the earth doesn't move.
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How do you square that with scripture? And the sun does move. That's what the data said. How do we deal with that? We also had the pesky planets.
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By the way, the word planet, some of you know where that word comes from. Does anybody know? Any Greek students?
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Yes, Corey. Yes, it's from the Greek word planao. Corey said it means wanderer.
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That's right. When you think of planets, think wanderers. Why is that? When you look up at the sky, the Big Dipper seems to have the same configuration, generally the same location.
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Orion's Belt, they don't seem in relation to each other. They're just like this big, kind of a planetarium, right?
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It kind of moves against that. It's what it looks like. But the planets, on the other hand, they do funky things.
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They crisscross, they move around, and they move backwards sometimes. What's that about? Okay, so we're gonna look at that.
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By the way, this is a famous painting by, does anybody know, is it Raphael? It's a school of Athens, it's called, and you've got
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Plato on the left pointing upward, saying truth is to be found in the universals, the forms.
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And you have his student Aristotle on the right pointing his palm downward, saying the truth is to be found in the particulars, the data that we find around us.
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So there's a lot of philosophy in that one painting, let me tell you. Middle Ages were great for that. So also biblical passages, as we said, align with how we view the world.
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I mean, does it feel like you're moving at 1 ,000 miles an hour right now? Not to me. Maybe your mind's going that fast, but not your body.
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Theological questions. There was a uniqueness of the earth and man. So how do we square that with if heaven and earth are made of the same stuff?
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Finally, historical developments, the rise of modern science, and the Protestant Reformation. That had a huge impact on how this whole era played out.
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So philosophical commitments required for understanding the world. This is from R .C. Sproul. In one of his series,
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I believe it's the history of ideas, perhaps, or apologetics.
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But the first law, philosophical commitments shared by everybody, scientists, theologians, is first of all, the law of cause and effect.
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And we don't have time to go any deeper, this is where you are skimming the surface of philosophical thought, okay?
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Every effect, this is the law of cause and effect, every effect has an antecedent cause, or a preceding cause.
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People will say, Bertrand Russell was famous, the atheist said, well, what about God? If everything has a cause, then wasn't
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God caused? Who's caused God? Well, the error in that, of course, it says every effect has a cause.
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God is the uncaused cause, or as Aristotle used to call him, the unmoved mover. He is the first cause of everything.
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So he is not an effect, but every effect that we observe around us has a cause. Secondly, the law of non -contradiction.
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Something cannot be one thing and another in the same sense and in the same relationship. My two boys,
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Christopher and David, I am a father to them. I cannot also be a son to them. I can be a son to my father, so I can be two things, but not in the same sense and the same relationship.
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So you can't contradict, your logic can't contradict itself. And thirdly, generally reliable sense perception.
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Our senses can be relied upon generally to give us true information about the world. So when you're dealing with theology and science, you have these kind of philosophical grounding principles.
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So we're at the fourth issue. If you remember the first one, the first issue we ran in of the eight, we're now at four, is the cosmos eternal or finite?
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Did the stuff of the universe have a beginning or not? Earth's structure, is it spherical or flat?
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And then thirdly, is the population of the world people, global, or just regional? Here, structure of the heavens, the view of Aristotle was that the heavens were made up of different material than the earthly realm.
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If you remember from ancient history, in Greek thought, there were four main elements of the world, earth, air, fire, and water.
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Those are the basic four in basic science of antiquity.
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But Aristotle postulated there was a fifth element or a quintessence, also called ether, that comprised the stuff of the heavens.
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So all the heavenly bodies moved in this special substance. You can picture it like a gel or a fluid or something like that.
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But we don't have that on earth. That's God's realm. And finally, the heavenly realm expressed the perfection of deity.
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So heavenly movement must be in the perfect form of a circle. So the church, whether they realized it or not, and some people did, and most people just intuitively took this information, accepted it as truth.
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Okay, heavens are made of different stuff and there have to be perfect circular orbits. Well, when you have planets, how do you get perfectly circular orbits?
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So that is the problem they were trying to solve. Ptolemy's model around 300 AD, the earth was at the center of the universe and everything orbited around it.
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It explained things very well. You had really, you had the sphere of the earth, then the sphere of the starry realm, and the planets more or less moved in perfect circles with the earth centered.
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And again, the only anomaly was the planets. How do we explain this? So let's talk about sensory experience and biblical texts.
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So in normal human experience, it seems to confirm the earth is stationary and the heavenly bodies move in the sky.
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Biblical passages, even historical books describe the phenomena exactly the same way. Earth is static, heaven's moving.
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I've got four verses here. Can I have folks look up these four verses just to see what we're dealing with for the biblical data?
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Joshua 10, if anybody can look that one up. Mark, Joshua 10, please.
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First Chronicles 16, Jonathan. Ecclesiastes 1, 4,
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Mark. And Psalm 93, 1. And Bill, please, thank you. All right, Joshua 10, could you read loudly, please?
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All right, the last one was Psalm 93, 1.
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Okay, Joshua 10, please. Okay, so we have the account there in Joshua 10 of the sun standing still, the sun and the moon standing still.
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And the timeframe for the sun being up and in the sky was much longer than about an extra day.
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That's what it says, right? So that from a simple, plain reading would, again, support the idea of a stationary earth and a moving sun.
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The second one we have is First Chronicles 16, 30. Okay, that's a short one, but it's pretty much saying the earth does not move.
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Again, just taking it at face value. Ecclesiastes 1, Mark. Okay, so that's, again, he's speaking about how it appears to the human author.
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The sun rises, the sun sets, it's universal. Everybody understands that. We should be familiar with that. We're in Ecclesiastes recently.
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So Pastor Mike read through that. But again, it would seem to support the model of cosmology that Ptolemy promoted.
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Bill, Psalm 93. So the earth shall not be moved. That's, again, these are pretty standard passages.
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And you'll read it. If you go online today and you look for geocentrists, there's a couple of people that are big geocentrists and they will cite these passages and support.
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So just something to keep in mind is that they didn't just pull this out of thin air. It wasn't just philosophy. It was also scripture that seemed to support the concept.
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So here's Ptolemy's, the P is silent, like pterodactyl.
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Ptolemy's geocentric cosmic model. I know you can't read any of this, but the earth is at the center.
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Then the next circle out is orbit of the moon, then orbit of Mercury, orbit of Venus, then orbit of the sun, orbit of Mars, orbit of Jupiter, orbit of Saturn.
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These are the only heavenly bodies in our solar system visible to the naked eye. And then the stars were an outer realm.
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So when we talk about the two spheres, the first inner sphere, at least conceptually in the outer sphere of the stars and all the planets in between, it's, again, not to scale.
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They weren't exactly spaced like this. You'll see different ones in a minute. But the idea, and sometimes the order of the sun might be inside Venus and Mercury, but it's, again, the same general concept.
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So this is the model that people had in their minds of the solar system. Let's back up just a second and talk about how we know what we know.
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Remember we talked last week about epistemology? It's actually the study of how we know what we know. And there's a two -books metaphor that the church, ever since the time of Augustine, relied upon to understand this relationship between faith and science.
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First one is, the idea is there's two books of God's revelation, special revelation in Scripture and general revelation in nature.
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Each realm deals with, each book deals with a separate realm of experience and enables human knowledge of God and the world, though incomplete.
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When properly understood, the two books never conflict, but are complementary sources of knowledge and truth.
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So we'll talk a little bit more later, I think it might be later slides, about the warfare or the conflict metaphor.
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Faith and science are at odds with each other. That idea was foreign, not only to the early church fathers, but also to these folks in the
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Middle Ages, Calvin, Luther. That was a foreign concept of this warfare. That's a late 19th century addition to philosophical thought and revisionist history.
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And finally, the idea of natural theology is derived from biblical texts, Psalm 19, Romans 1, and special revelation, of course, from Timothy 3 .16.
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And did I get 1 Timothy 3? It is 1 Timothy 3 .16, correct? All scriptures God breathe. Sometimes I mix up my ones and twos,
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I apologize. So the rise of empirical science. So now we're dealing with how did we, how did the data come in?
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And so, understand that the Christian worldview was critical to the rise of empirical science.
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So in the Christian worldview, only the Christian worldview has the basic assumptions that can properly justify the scientific enterprise.
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The universe is not to be worshiped, but as a proper realm of human inquiry.
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Second, the universe is real. It's an objective reality, which can be studied. The third worldview assumption, this is all theistic worldview assumptions.
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The laws of nature exhibit uniformity, order, and patterns, and regularity.
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That's very important. Not everything is always uniform, but there's a general uniformity.
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And pattern, and regularity. Fourthly, men are created with a rational capacity to study and understand it, okay?
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If there's a code there, God equipped us. Not only did God, in his own mind, create the code, have the code there, not only did he put it in what he created, but he created us with the ability to then read that code.
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That's very, very important to the, other religions don't have that. Other religions don't have that belief.
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Nature is random, okay? You don't have the belief, and the rational capacity, and the rationality built into the cosmos, then you're not gonna bother to study it, because there's gonna be no point, right?
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So you guys, and finally, the truth is a unity, since God is the author of all truth, right? God created the universe,
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God created his word, and there's an idea of the correspondence theory of truth or concordance.
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These are all ideas that came from modern science, from a
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Christian worldview, yes? Right, so Corey's point, for those who didn't hear, was that it's the character of God that really determines all of this, right?
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God's nature, and his actually attributes, are really contribute to this model, and other faith, and other religions don't have that same concept of God.
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So as we're looking at that, just one comment I wanted to make. So we, in our family, in our refrigerator, everybody has a refrigerator with stuff on it, right?
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Our stuff tends to be, when we go places, and we grab a refrigerator magnet, okay?
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And between my sons and I, we've been to all 50, lower 48 states. We don't have all the magnets, but we have a bunch of them.
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And generally, I just put them on there, whatever. So my son David's at school, he comes home, and he's looking at the refrigerator for a minute, staring at it going, hey, those magnets are arranged geographically.
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And we have a cat who's a little bit on the heavy side, and we have this little thing from the vet that says how to tell if your cat is fat.
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And for some reason, we had a blank spot in like Alabama, Mississippi. I don't know why, but I put it there.
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He thought it was intent, not, okay, the most obese people statistically in the world, but in the
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United States. So, but the important thing is this, I had put them, arranged them in that order without telling him.
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And I didn't say, hey, look at that, what do you notice? He just started looking at it, noticed the pattern. So the pattern was built into the refrigerator door.
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I had put it there with the intent of making that pattern, and my son recognized that pattern. So that kind of tells you the correspondence you kind of need between God's mind, nature, and our minds to recognize that.
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That's what lets us do modern science. So we got a lot of slides. I apologize for zipping through these, and not everything is on your handouts, but some things are, and I'll try to draw your attention to that.
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By the way, if anybody wants anything from the PowerPoints or the handouts on anything, you miss anything, just send me an email, redoneitcharter .net,
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I'll be glad to send it to you. Rise of modern empirical science. Data collected from the world is interpreted and theories and models are proposed to explain why things appear the way they do.
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All parties in the pre -enlightenment era, and the enlightenment is the era where it's sort of, let's deform
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God and let's just work out of our own minds and out of the world and see what we can come up with. That's kind of the enlightenment, man being the measure of all things.
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In the pre -enlightenment era, all these folks here were committed to basic theistic presuppositions with a desire to study the ordered creation produced by a rational divine being that rational human beings could understand.
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Thirdly, both scientists and theologians had to wrestle with how to deal with the paradoxical nature, paradoxical data sometimes from scripture and nature.
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Technological advancements in the area of optics and travel enabled natural philosophers, as they were called back then, we call them scientists today, to gather more data in order to produce better theories and models of the world.
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The Reformation and Roman Catholic authorities both appealed to the scripture to justify any interpretations of nature.
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A false dichotomy in biblical hermeneutics of either literal or figurative meaning was expanded to account for phenomenal language or how things appear to the senses.
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So they made that sort of a category because to kind of reconcile these two realms.
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The theological concerns. A literal reading of scripture should not be abandoned without, quote, clear and convincing proofs from the study of nature.
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This was a principle developed by Augustine back when there wasn't nearly as much data. But his concept is, look, if the data from nature is convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, we need to revisit our interpretation because interpretation is also a human application of reason and we can make mistakes.
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So his advocating of needing clear and convincing proofs is a pretty high bar, right?
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You can't just have a few little bits and pieces. It's got to be pretty clear. Copernicus wrote, this is, again, the watershed moment.
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Copernicus wrote on the revolutions, of course, back then all the titles were super long. This is an abbreviated version.
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In 1543, which proposed a new model of the heavens with the sun at the center rather than the earth.
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This is known as heliocentrism, which conflicted with a face value reading of scripture. So now we've got, this is how the conflict develops.
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The traditional interpretation of passages describing the sun and the earth for 1500 years plus held they described the literal physical realities in the cosmic order.
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We're going to introduce you to a few people. We call them the Fab Five astronomers. These are the biggies. These are the best, they're not the only ones, but they are the key people who advanced the science of astronomy.
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Copernicus, Brahe, also known as Tycho. His first name was Tycho, his last name was Brahe. His system's known as Tychonic, so you'll see the two put together.
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Johannes Kepler, who was a reformed Calvinist. Galileo, who was
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Roman Catholic, and Newton, who was British and had some interesting...
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Newton was interesting. He wrote on theology apparently later in life more than he did in astronomy. So he had a lot of thoughts.
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We're not going to critique any of those today, but he was very interested in this topic. So Copernicus' book published posthumously, means after he was dead, openly contradicted the cosmic model of Ptolemy and challenged traditional understandings of the cosmos in the biblical text.
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The Tychonic system, I'll show you him in a minute, proposed a hybrid geo -heliocentric model to preserve the ideas of the centrality of the earth and perfect circularities, okay?
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So you had the idea that the earth has to be in the center and we've got to move the heavenly stuff in perfect circles. How do you do that based on observations and make them match up?
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Johannes Kepler proposed the idea of elliptical orbits or more of an oval -shaped order. You guys who are mathematicians and really good at this, forgive my,
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I'm trying to make it simple for people like me, okay? But elliptical orbits, instead of a perfect circle, you're stretching the circle out more or less.
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So it's squeezed in on one side and wider on the other, that's an ellipse. And that's what
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Kepler proposed. He proposed elliptical orbits within the heliocentric solar system to explain planetary motion.
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And the math actually worked better and it fixed the model. So you had these two competing models, ultimately when they realized, hey, this
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Ptolemaic system isn't going to cut it, we've got to do better. You had these two competing, the Ticonic system and the
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Copernican system that were kind of competing with one another. Here's Nicholas Copernicus on the left,
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Polish astronomer. You have Tycho Brahe in the middle and Kepler on the right.
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Brahe actually lost part of his nose in a duel. So he actually had a partial nose made, this is a little trivia for fun.
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Had a little nose made of precious metals, a little tip of his nose. So it's kind of a different thing to remember about Tycho.
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Neat guy, neat guy. So here it's pictures of the two systems. You had the geocentric system on the left.
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You have this earth in the center, the moon going around that and the sun a little after that. Again, whether the
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Mercury and Venus are inside or outside, it is variable. And on the right, you have heliocentrism with the sun at the center.
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This is the one we accept today as being real and true. And then you have Venus -Mercury around the sun pretty close.
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You have the earth and the moon with the moon orbiting the earth as it goes around and the rest of the planets and stars outside of that.
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So let me give you a few quotes, whether you can read them or not. I apologize if you can't,
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I'll just read them to you. But I think this really gives us a good picture of where they were coming from. So this is from Kenneth Howell's book called
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God's Two Books. Kenneth Howell's an interesting guy. He taught at Notre Dame University until recently.
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He was Presbyterian, I think, most of his life, converted to Roman Catholicism, church historian, very interesting book.
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It's called Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science. Kenneth J.
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Howell. It was actually my understanding from what I can read online. He was released a little while ago because he dared to answer a student as to the scriptural answer for human sexuality.
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And he was summarily let go after that. So tell people the truth from scripture in an academic setting doesn't always work.
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That's Kenneth Howell. So out of Kenneth Howell, he studied how these reformers and astronomers, again, they shared the same worldview and they shared the same idea of the cosmos as reflecting, can be studied for the reasons we discussed and a high view of scripture and a theistic worldview.
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So he's talking about Tycho and he says, the use of phenomenal language in the Bible did not imply that its authority was limited, only that its information was not complete.
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And another quote, Howell says, this hermeneutic stands between an attempt to settle questions of natural philosophy or science by simple appeals to a literal meaning of the
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Bible and a dismissal of, or a biblical dismissal, dismissal of biblical relevance based on an argument from accommodation.
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And what that is that the biblical authors kind of dumb things down, or they made them comport with the false ideas of the day.
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That's a false way to look at it. But he said that this hermeneutic that Tycho used kind of tried to bridge that gap and say, okay, there's phenomenal language here.
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Tycho attempted to call from the Bible any information that might have bearing on the problems he faced, but he did so without any illusion that he could found a total cosmology on biblical texts.
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And here's Tycho's system or the Tychonic geo heliocentric model I mentioned. In this one, again, it's kind of hard to see that blue dotted one is the outer realm of the stars, which was conceived of as just a solid sphere, or sorry, a hollow sphere, if you will.
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And then the center, you can see the sun at the center, but it's not really centered. It's earth at that inner circle, the lighter circle with the moon going around it.
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And the sun is adjusted upward and it has all the other planets going around it while it simultaneously orbits the earth.
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Neat, huh? What a very creative solution. But that's called the geo heliocentric model.
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And that's what Tycho Brahe come up with because he was still kind of married to these ideas of perfect circularity of orbits and the heavenly stuff.
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And it actually worked really well, calculations, because the way you could tell is, okay, let's assume this model is correct.
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Let's do the math and the geometry and see where things end up and let's predict that. And he was actually, this is really close, but it wasn't quite there.
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It wasn't until Kepler did his thing and used the heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, and that was even better, that fit the data even better.
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So Johannes Kepler, as I mentioned, these are long quotes, let me read them, just bear with me. But again,
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Kenneth Howell says, "'Kepler sought to read the book of nature "'in the language they were written, "'in the language of geometry.
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"'Kepler must plumb the depths "'of the divine will of the cosmos "'by using the appropriate tools of interpretation.
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"'God can be known in each realm, "'but this knowledge comes by its own unique language. "'Due to a commitment to sola scriptura like Melanchthon, "'he believed the
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Bible had priority "'in questions of theology. "'He saw his exegesis of the universe as a worshipful act.
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"'And he said, truth could not be truth "'if it were not unified.'" It's another way of saying this is all truth meets at the top, all truth meets at God.
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No matter what the truth is, it's gonna cohere once you get to God. "'Kepler said, those laws of nature "'are within the grasp of the human mind.
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"'God wanted us to recognize them "'by creating us after his own image "'so that we could share his own thoughts.'"
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Again, these were the commitments of the people operating both in science and theology at this time.
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"'Kepler then understood his astronomy "'explicitly in terms of Christian theology, "'a background that shaped his view of the goal of science, "'a unified truth of the physical universe, "'and its ultimate purpose, to glorify
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God. "'Kepler firmly believed in the integrity "'of both books of God, scripture and nature, "'but he was always careful to distinguish "'the languages in which each one was written.'"
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And another quote, perhaps more than any other early modern astronomer, "'Kepler saw himself as an exegete of nature, "'a theologian whose task lay "'in opening up the book of nature.
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"'Theology as a formal discipline "'was distinct from astronomy in his mind, "'but theology as a set of beliefs "'provided the metaphysical grounding "'for a true cosmology.'"
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I love that because I think that's, you know, he's found the right starting point, and he's also balanced it out by saying we need to ultimately check all things theologically to make sure they fit.
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Here's Galileo and Newton. Galileo and Newton were kind of the end of this whole. Now, so you had
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Copernicus develop the heliocentric system. You had
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Brahe who tried to make another model that would preserve kind of a little of both. You had Kepler who adjusted that.
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He came up with three laws of planetary motion, which we still observe today, more or less.
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And then you had Galileo and you had Newton, and we don't have time to go too much into this, but you had, that's
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Galileo on the left, later in life, and Newton, artist renderings.
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So, Galileo was the first natural philosopher to make use of modern technology to empirically study the heavenly bodies.
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Galileo found that, he looked at the moon more closely, he found that there are craters. Again, following the law of cause and effect, what caused those craters?
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Potentially meteorites hitting them, but it wasn't that perfect heavenly stuff. It, the craters were formed and that there were mountains on the moon.
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People didn't know that until the telescope. They also found out that Jupiter had moons.
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We didn't know Jupiter had moons. Well, if Jupiter had moons, just like we have moons, you know, it's kind of like, okay, maybe the heavenly stuff is kind of the same as our stuff, you know?
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And maybe Earth is another planet, like the others. They started to come around to this way of thinking.
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There's one of the phases of Venus was another one. Venus had phases like the moon and that kind of indicated the model worked better with the
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Copernican model. Galileo, however, overstated the strength of his evidence. The evidence wasn't quite as convincing when
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Galileo did his advocacy of the Copernican model.
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He really jumped the gun and he also challenged the Roman Catholic Church. Now, remember 1543 is when
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Copernicus wrote his book, right? We showed you that. When did the Protestant Reformation happen? When were the 95 theses nailed to the church door?
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1519? So Protestant Reformation is already ongoing here when you've got
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Copernicus writing his book. So the reformers were able to comment on it. And so you had the
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Roman Catholic Church reacting to that. So when Galileo comes up, a Roman Catholic, and tells the church, your interpretation of scripture is wrong, how do you think that went over?
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Not too good. Especially when they knew he didn't have all the evidence he needed to prove it.
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But he was convinced and that's really what got him into trouble, especially the way he handled it. His personality was, he was convinced he was gonna let you know he was right.
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His famous quote, the third one there, scripture tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
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And there's a lot of truth in that, right? The primary purpose of scripture, I would agree with that, tells us how to go to heaven.
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But that doesn't only tell us how to go to heaven. But, and it doesn't necessarily not tell us things about nature.
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That's kind of the implications. He was more of an advocate of this separation idea. So he was, he didn't think the
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Bible was really relevant in doing cosmology. And he lived his last years under house arrest. He was forced to recant by the
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Roman Catholic Church. And his book was banned by the Roman Catholic Church until 1835.
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So you take the whole scope of this, it took about 300 years for this whole thing to really nail itself down.
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You know what I mean? Seems intuitive to us because we grew up in school learning sun's the center of the solar system.
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Here's how it works. So we get the model as little kids. So to us, it's obvious how this all works out.
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Finally, Newton proposed a theory of universal gravitation, explaining why the heavenly bodies on earth move the way they do.
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So if you don't need this outside quintessence, by the way, if somebody says, it's a quintessential this, right?
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That's where that word comes from. It's like this extra special stuff. It's the best. It's really the quintessential anything.
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But we don't need that if you have gravity, right? If you have gravity, you don't need this ether stuff to move the heavenly bodies around, okay?
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You have gravity to kind of keep things moving the way it should. So that really clinched the deal, but that was 1700s by the time that happened.
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I'll read you a couple of brief quotes and we'll have some discussion. I don't wanna go. How many more slides do
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I have? Yeah. I'll just take one from Calvin. Calvin said, since it's manifest that men, the men whom the scriptures term natural are so acute and clear sighted in their investigation of inferior things, their example should teach us how many gifts the
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Lord has left in possession of human nature, notwithstanding of its having been despoiled of the true good.
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This thing Calvin's Institutes, direct quotes, another one, therefore in reading profane authors, including the natural philosophers, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its creator.
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If we reflect that the spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful as we would avoid offering insult to them.
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Not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the giver.
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So in summary, the Copernican question contained many more outside issues than prior faith science questions.
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There's a lot of new data available. The debate was further complicated by the reformation and the cultural baggage that was part of the background of the debate.
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There was the issue of the authority of the church and proper hermeneutics. The matter took a couple of centuries to resolve and empirical evidence was decisive in settling the dispute.
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And the interpretive principles learned during the debate may be applied in making models of the world. And I have a couple more quotes by theologians.
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We're gonna, oh, I may have skipped them. Okay. So in the end, we come up with three approaches.
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Sorry, let me back up a second. Yeah. So we really come up with three approaches to deal with faith science issues during this era.
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The first one was the, and these are in your handout, the idea of separation or accommodation, separate realms of inquiry with little or no overlap.
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And again, Galileo was pretty clear on this. I think Calvin to a certain extent advocated this a little bit.
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Not the accommodation as much, although he did say God speaks to us in baby talk, right? When God talks of all these things of nature, he's talking in simple childlike terms to us.
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But he thought there was some overlap between the two, Galileo less so. Second is the
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Bible first approach, scientific models derived from the biblical texts. You'll find the theologians tended towards this,
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Luther, Melanchthon, and Bellarmine. That's Cardinal Bellarmine. He's the one who really checked Galileo. Actually was part of the
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Inquisition that kind of condemned him and forced him into house arrest. It was on the coast of Italy, I think.
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I don't know, under the Tuscan sun. So Galileo never went to prison, just so you know.
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Science first approach, where scientific models are derived from empirical study and then they are checked by theology.
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That was the view of Kepler, Brahe, and Newton. I did want to see if I could find real quick one quote from, let me give you one from Luther, his first reaction.
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This is actually kind of cool. Luther's first reaction, this is a famous quote, and he's talking to some students.
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It's called his table talk. He said, and so it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem.
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He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow, or this fool, depending on which quote you accept, does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down.
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Even in these things that are thrown into disorder, I believe the holy scriptures for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.
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And remember, he's writing about a new theory, and he's not a scientist, but he's reacting to it, and this is his honest reaction.
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And you've got Melancthon, who had a very similar kind of skepticism about the new science and the new model.
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And we'll skip through that. If you want any of these quotes, just email me and we'll get them to you. But this is a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine to Foscarini, who a guy who's writing about Galileo and his deal.
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Said, however, it is different to want to affirm that in reality, the sun is at the center of the universe and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth is in the third heaven and revolves with great speed around the sun.
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This is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the holy faith by rendering holy scripture false.
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Then he says, I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth is in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth, but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the scriptures that appear contrary.
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And I say, rather, that we do not understand them than what is demonstrated is false.
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But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration until it is shown me. So this is where things are at, and this is why the church reacted the way it did.
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Said, show me, I need more proof. But if it is shown convincingly, clear and convincingly, then we need to revisit our interpretation.
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The Roman Catholic Church had a very high view of scripture. I'd say it still does in many ways. It just kind of subverts it a little bit by church tradition.
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But that's, again, an example of the sort of Bible -first approach that Luther Melanchthon and Bellarmine came up with.
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And this is something I want to have you take away from this presentation is, you know, you have three real, the process from data to model, you have three distinct steps.
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First is collecting your data. There's two books. Book one is special revelation. Book two is general revelation.
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The scriptures, the process to get that data out is called exegesis. You're getting the data from the scriptures.
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What does it say? And that results in theology. We interpret it, and we develop our theology.
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Down below, book two, general revelation. We study nature. It's empirical study. We study what is, and we develop that into science, scientific theories, scientific hypotheses.
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And then at the end, if you follow the model we talked about with Kepler, Brahe, ultimately the church at large, you come into synthesis and model.
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So when we're talking about if we disagree with someone's model, we may have issues with their theology or their science, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're rejecting their data.
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Does that make sense? You get that distinction? So we can question a model or theology or science without necessarily saying you're a science denier, or you're denying the word of God, right?
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Do you get the difference? So we're operating at this level. That's the level of discussion we're gonna have next week about models and how they are derived from these two sources of data.
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Finally, that's what we think, not to scale, what the solar system really looks like, okay?
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Not in 3D, but that's what I grabbed off the web. So there we are, the third rock from the sun, and then all the rest, you have
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Uranus or Uranus and Neptune at the end, and poor little Pluto is not in the picture, so.
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I'm with you, Andrew. I want Pluto to be a planet, too. So in the end, here's a couple of quotes, one from Isaac Newton.
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The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being,
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Isaac Newton. And the wisdom of the Lord is infinite, as are also his glory and his power.
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Ye heavens, sing his praises, sun, moon, and planets, glorify him in your ineffable language,
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Johannes Kepler. And that's all I have for slides and a presentation at this point.
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Any question on anything we've discussed today? I want tough ones from Dan Woodward. I know
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Dan's just, he's gonna grow me. Yes, any questions, comments, critiques, anything?
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Yeah, none of the scientists did what some scientists and philosophers do today.
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They never thought the scriptures were irrelevant to these questions. They thought proper interpretation of those was critical, and they believed that the
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Bible was inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient for all it intends to teach.
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The question is, is the Bible intending to teach us, as Galileo said, how the heavens go?
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Is this gonna enable us, this description in the Bible, going to let us produce a true model of the physical operation of the universe?
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That was really the question at stake, and that's why I kind of wanted to, again, to separate the models from, you know, you're dealing with the model, you're dealing with a theory at the end of it all.
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And they were able to put together a model and a theory without doing violence to either science and theology.
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And when they did do that, when they violated the scriptures, they never really did, because what they said was, okay, you got an earthbound observer standing on the earth, telling people what things look like to him.
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That's literally what he's describing. The intent is not to say, I'm gonna step back and just take a look at the whole solar system and the whole cosmos and tell you how it really works.
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That was not the goal of the authors of scripture. And they reasoned through that, and they said, well, maybe our assumption that they were trying to allow us to make a model was not true.
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So again, that's really a level of application. And that's something we miss in a lot of these debates. Okay? By the way, no matter what your scientific issue is, nobody really, whether you're talking about, you know, cosmic history, you know, the age of the earth, you're talking about evolution next week, we're gonna talk about both of those things.
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Nobody really disputes the data and from either scripture or nature.
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Okay? The earth really looks the way it looks. The solar system really looks like it operates that way.
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I mean, nobody really questions the data per se. People question how you interpret that data, right? Because that comes from your worldview and your theology or how you do science, but then you're gonna develop a model.
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And so you can talk all day about your model, whether you like your, you know, it's a creationist model or anything.
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We can talk about those things without, you know, violating the literal meaning of scripture.
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Okay? Remember that phenomenal level of description is important to understand. And if we lose that, then we've got a chance of making mistakes in theology interpretation.
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So, but what I want you to take away again is just keep this in mind when you think through these debates, think about, am
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I disputing or am I worrying about a model? Or am I worrying about my theology?
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Am I worrying about, you know, the actual words of scripture? Are we, you know? So there's always a literal meaning of scripture, but that literal meaning might be, that's exactly how it looked to Joshua.
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Yes. Or seems that, this is what I want to point out. It's a paradox. So it's an apparent contradiction, but it never really is.
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Right? It's important. Right. And so God's creation is still good. I have no verse in the
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Bible that tells me God calls it not good. Or now my creation's bad. My creation's warped.
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I mean, I never read that. So if your theory depends on a warping of nature, well, show me from scripture.
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Okay, Romans eight. All right, let's talk about Romans eight. But is that, so you've got a basic commitment to the goodness and the order in nature.
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Has that order been skewed by the fall, for example? We're not gonna address that in this course, or this class, or these
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Sundays, but, you know, that's something to think through. Or is my model telling me that has to be true kind of thing?
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Or not. You know, evolution seems to be proven to some people. Okay, well, that's part of your model, but what does it do to your theology?
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Okay? That's the kind of stuff we're gonna talk about next week. If that's, hopefully it's helpful. Because look, we live in a modern world.
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We live in a world where people are convinced, most of our culture is convinced that if we believe anything besides what you're gonna learn in a college science classroom about science, period, and the
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Bible seems to maybe check that, that's just pushed out. But it's imperative on us to reconcile and work through these things so we can appraise them rightly.
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As all of these theologians, all of these scientists, that's why I think this is like the golden age, because you didn't have the enlightenment yet.
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You know, you didn't have Darwinism. You didn't have a lot of atheistic worldviews that are now prominent in the world.
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So you can do science, you can do theology, so how these folks looked at science and theology, how they interacted, is critical, because you have kind of like this control.
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You know, if we're scientists, you want this controlled experiment. We have a historical controlled experiment during this era of history where everybody was committed to a high view of scripture.
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Everybody defaulted to a literal interpretation first before you had to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt before they even budge off of that.
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And you had the ideas of nature, all the things we talked about. Nature is intelligible, our rational mind can comprehend it, but ultimately it meets in theology, right?
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And it can violate the known theological principles. Next week, we're gonna talk about what some of those principles are in relation to origins earth history.
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Next week is week three. We're gonna tie this all together, special creation and historical science.
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And I think if people, I have these in my cube at work. I have a science, I work as a science applied scientist for the government.
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And so I have these quotes plus a couple more in my cube right below Richard Dawkins, a couple of other atheists about how things are pointless and, you know, there is no order, there is no, you know, created, it's all this stuff.
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And it's a great dichotomy. And, you know, right next to this is my father's world, you know, nobody bothers me, nobody cares, but nobody goes into the office anymore anyway.
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But even when they did, you know, they respect Newton, they respect Kepler, they know they're great scientists and to know they had this theological orientation at the core as did
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Galileo and everybody else on both sides. That's eye opening to a lot of people, you know?
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So when we do tell them about the Lord and we do share the gospel with them, we understand history, we have some context, we have some perspective on the current issues that we wouldn't otherwise have because we're locked into our current debate or our current models and things.
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But then we say, wow, these guys had a broader perspective and they had everything in the right order and they had their, and they made sure of things before they just, you know, ran with them.
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And again, they were all committed to the fundamentals of the faith, especially
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I think Kepler is one of my new heroes, I just want to say, he's, I mean, he had great science and he did it for the right reasons and his theology was squared up as well.
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So I really appreciate what I, you know, learning through this. So again, Howell's book, God's Two Books, if you want to really get into this and see some of the hermeneutical kind of process that both church,
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Catholic and Protestant churches went through in the early days. And this is a book called Unbelievable by Michael Newton Keyes, Seven Myths About the
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History and Future of Science and Religion. Came out a couple of years ago, I've heard him speak on YouTube, he's really good.
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He's with, I think the Discovery Institute, which the intelligent design folks and I think
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Ratio Christie speaks on college campuses, really good historian of science, so. Any other questions?
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Thank you for those comments and questions. If not, we'll conclude. Let's pray.
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Lord God, thank you for this day. Thank you that you have created your word, which is not a mystery to us that we can understand and apply to our lives and apply to real world situations.
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Lord, thank you also for the abilities you've given us. Thank you that we're made in your image. Thank you that you've given us rational capacity to understand the world and that you've made a world that we can understand.
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Lord, thank you for men that came before us. Like Calvin and Luther and Kepler and Tycho.
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And Lord, I pray that the lessons you've given us to learn that we would be able to apply them.
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In these debates we deal with sometimes very contentiously today, Lord. But I pray that you'd help us in learning of these things and bring clarity, bring wisdom, and bring graciousness and love toward others in all that we learn and express to them.
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And Lord, today for the sermon, for Pastor Mike, for the worship music, for everything we do today, Lord, we glorify you as these men did so long ago.