Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, John Dixon here. Before we start the episode, I wanted to ask if you could take a few minutes to complete our 2025 Undeceptions listener survey. We've been doing the show for five years, if you can believe that, and our audience has grown significantly, which we are so grateful for.
And we want to get to know you a little more, what you like, what you think we can do better, and the other things you're listening to. Maybe there's stuff we need to learn from them. Plus, if you finish the survey, you'll go into the draw to win a book pack with some of the books of our excellent recent guests. Head to undeceptions.com forward slash survey. It'll really help us out. Thanks so much. An Undeceptions Podcast.
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, here at Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today. Well, Jeepers, you're about to witness the world's first demonstration of fireproof paper. Here is my assistant, Beaker, carrying a lighted blowtorch. He will now show you how impossible it is to ignite the fireproof paper in this basket.
There is no way this paper could burn. With Muppet's fireproof paper, you will always feel secure. Tune in next time and witness Muppet Labs' new answer to the energy crisis, flammable water. That's all for now from Muppet Labs. Oh, dear. What do you suppose they call that? A novelty act? I don't know, but it wasn't too bad. Well, that's a novelty. Ha! Ha!
That was of course the beloved chemists, the Muppets Bunsen and Beaker, creating havoc in their lab. If you didn't pick it up, the fireproof paper didn't work.
Of course, Bunsen and Beaker aren't the most famous TV chemists ever. That title probably goes to Breaking Bad's Walter White, portrayed disturbingly well by Bryan Cranston. But that show freaked me out. Buff and I got to, I think, episode three or four, whatever the one was, you know, with the bathtub scene.
So, for this show, we've opted for the Muppets instead. We love science here at Undeceptions, and if you've listened to our science-themed episodes in the past, you'll know that my kind of scientist is the medieval polymath, writing epic books that combine a love of theology with a love for the natural world.
That's not how most people see scientists. The popular view is usually closer to Bunsen and Beaker, people in white coats and maybe with crazy haircuts blowing stuff up in the lab. In other words, they imagine the stereotypical chemist.
Another trope we've spent loads of podcast hours debunking is the idea that modern scientists are all atheists. Unfortunately, some of the most well-known chemists in the world today do indeed believe that science leaves no room for God. Former Oxford professor of chemistry and renowned atheist Peter Atkins had this to say in his 1995 book, The Second Law.
We are the children of chaos and the deep structure of change is decay. At root there is only corruption and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose, all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the universe.
Well, as it turns out, nearly half of Peter's discipline disagrees. Of all the sciences, chemistry appears to be the one with the highest number of God-believers.
A 2009 survey by Pew Research Center found that 41% of chemists believed in God, by far the highest percentage of any scientific field. Of course, that's in the show notes for you to explore. Granted, that survey was a while ago now, but it was also 2009, which was the height of new atheism, a time when all the pressure was on scientists owning up to disbelieving in the superstition of God.
But chemists really appear to be the outliers. What makes these lab coat wearing nerds so theistic? Well, I've found two brilliant top tier chemists to help us understand more. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions.
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This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special Master Lectures video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the show. Just go to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics individually.
that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth. 20 years ago, I joined faculty in the University of
Martin Luther University, actually. Or if you forgive me saying it with a German accent, a heavy German accent, Martin Luther Universität. Halle Wittenberg. That's Professor Dr. Rerum Naturalium Habilitatus, Peter Emming.
Basically, that title, and that's his real title, is the gold medal of scientific credentials in Germany. Peter is the head of the Department of Pharmaceutical, Medicinal Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacy at, as you just heard, Martin Luther University, Halle Wittenberg in Germany.
Peter is an expert in drug chemistry, and his work has taken him all around the world with stints in Ethiopia, South Korea and China, just to name a few. He's a Christian chemist, but despite working at a university named after one of history's great Christian communicators, he's firmly in the minority among his colleagues at that university when it comes to religious belief.
Some of my listeners might hear the word Martin Luther. Is this a religious university? Surely. No, not at all. Not at all, I'm afraid. Martin Luther was faculty 500 something years ago. Yes, it is a 500 year old university. It is. Yeah, that is true.
But no, we are a state university. We don't have a lot of private universities in Germany, perhaps four or five in all Germany. So it's a state university, secular university, but we do have a faculty of theology. Mm-hmm.
Which is probably the most secular of all the faculties. You don't have to comment. I have some friends in the theology faculty that I can relate very nicely to, since I'm a Christian. I'm a scientist. I'm a Christian. So, yeah, it's good to have that faculty. Are we making advances? Yes, it's a fact.
In Europe, anyway, many theology faculties are made up of people who are very secular. One certainly doesn't need to believe in God to be a professor of theology. These are not like U.S. seminaries or British and Aussie theological colleges. What is the thread of your own specialty? You've told us broadly...
But what are you particularly interested in? I am particularly interested in killing bacteria, to be more specific, mycobacteria. The best known mycobacterium is the causative agent of tuberculosis, consumption,
which according to statistics kills 2,000 people per day worldwide, every day. So it's still a big health issue worldwide, particularly in areas where there is also where HIV is rampant or other infections. So we try to find chemicals, you might say, that are
toxic to mycobacteria, but not toxic to human cells. Yeah. Are we making advances? Are you making advances? Only in big teams. Drug discovery is not anything one person or even one group can do. So we enjoy collaborations with teams in the United States, in Canada, of course in Germany. So we do the chemistry and some of the microbiological assaying.
Whereas these teams do biochemistry and the like. We don't go into a clinic that's actually a totally different business. What drew you into science in the first place? Were you all just always a mathematical nerd, so it was obvious or some other reason? Definitely not a mathematical nerd. I did well at mathematics at school, but chemistry is not mathematics. Chemistry is more like a language actually. I tell my students,
You are now going to learn the language, the language of organic chemistry. So what drew me in it was that chemistry is fun. I had very good high school chemistry teachers. I read a lot of books. I liked to do experiments. One of them actually was not good for the kitchen and my parents' home. But we all survived, don't worry. Obviously, I survived, but also all the rest of the family.
So I always wanted to become a teacher of science, particularly chemistry. And then pharmacy was even more attractive because it's about very active substances that can kill or heal. So it's chemistry on chemistry. Yes, absolutely. Drugs are chemicals, whether they're from nature or made by man.
Peter is part of what you might call Big Pharma. I hope I didn't trigger anyone just then. It's worth touching on this briefly because there's a lot of stuff that's said recently, including by Christians, about the deep state of Big Pharma. In fact, the fastest growing search term on the website Bible Gateway in 2022 was sorcery.
likely due to suspicions surrounding pharmaceutical companies. Jonathan Pedersen, content manager at Bible Gateway, wrote about it at the time and he said, The increase in sorceries is related to heightened interest in the Greek word pharmakeia, which, according to the Mount's concise Greek-English dictionary of the New Testament, means employment of drugs for any purpose, sorcery, magic or enchantment.
Some Christian preachers latched onto this and began claiming that vaccines were forbidden by scripture because they are sorcery. Pharmakeia! Honestly, I am so embarrassed by some of my fellow believers. We're just nuts sometimes.
Big Pharma is actually full of people like PETA working tirelessly to improve life for everyone. And they've recently made some significant advancements. Okay, okay, okay. I will admit that you can critique Big Pharma for sort of political advantage.
and financial decisions. I mean, you can do the same with, I don't know, big mining, right? Big technology. Yeah, because it's made up of humans and they make human mistakes. But this stuff around sorcery,
It's nuts. Tuberculosis, which Peter just mentioned, is the world's leading infectious disease killer. It's a very hard disease to treat and around 1.2 million people die of it annually.
However, thanks to people like Peter, we've made huge improvements in treating it, particularly in the past decade. In fact, a 2023 New York Times article, link in the show notes of course, claimed that ending tuberculosis is within reach. Please, Lord. An extract from the National Library of Medicine, published in 2023, says this.
Tuberculosis is a global health challenge and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In the last decade, the TB treatment landscape has dramatically changed. After long years of stagnation, new compounds entered the market and phase 3 clinical trials have shown promising results towards shortening the duration of treatment for both drug-susceptible and drug-resistant TB.
This is the kind of work being done by Big Pharma. And Peter is in the thick of it all. You're a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. Right. The pharmaceutical industry is controversial today for some. Either the pharmaceutical industry is the hero that saved the day through COVID-19,
or it's the great conspiratorial villain that just stole our money and kept us under control. If we can leave aside the politics of it, for you as a scientist in this, what is the overriding goal of pharmaceutical chemistry? To find drugs that help with medical issues and to find diagnostic agents that help with differential diagnosis.
to perhaps quickly, like as in countries with a less sophisticated health system as in our countries, so that people can quickly find out, why do I have a cough? Do I have tuberculosis? Do I have just some irritation of the lungs? Do I have an allergy? There are so many possibilities. So it's improved medical practice.
diagnosis, and then of course with drugs proper to help with health issues. And if we just go back 200 or let's say 150 years, we have in richer countries, I have to say, or in richer areas of the world, we have people that can do medicine, doctors, pharmacists, and so on. And we have drugs
and operation theaters. If we didn't have that, we would be worse off health-wise. So I think we have a treasure trove of drugs which did not exist 200 years ago. And we should be thankful for that. When I teach pharmaceutical chemistry in my university, I tell my students that we, first of all, should be thankful for what we have.
Compared to even a century ago, people are so much more likely to survive a hospital stay today, thanks to the work of chemists like Peter. Life expectancy has skyrocketed over the last century. A cool article published by Our World in Data goes deeper into this. For example, in 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years.
By 2021, this had more than doubled to 71 years. Of course, many humans through the centuries reached their 70s and 80s. Once you passed childhood, you had every expectation to live into old age. But so many infants died young that it brought the statistical life expectancy down to, as I say, 32.
Saving those kids and shepherding them to adulthood is thanks in significant part to chemistry and its application to medicine. God bless the chemists. Peter also talked to me about the problem of pain, something he's been thinking a lot about recently.
It's a topic we've hit big time in previous episodes. Please go check out episode 67, just titled On Suffering. But if you want to hear Peter's thoughts on this difficult topic, you need to be a Plus subscriber. Sorry. You can sign up online, check out the show notes on our website for that link if you want to hear that part of the interview. For Pluses, well, here's Peter on pain. For the rest of us, here's a break.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academic and their new book, Boy Jesus, Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times, by the wonderful Joan Taylor. The Gospels don't tell us much about Jesus' childhood. They tell us that he was a child of Joseph and
and Mary from the line of King David that he was born in Bethlehem and that after his birth his family fled to Egypt for a period before returning to Judea and settling in the north in the town of Nazareth. With so much of his childhood shrouded in mystery, scholars approach these early stories with some scepticism.
That's where Joan Taylor steps in. In this rich historical analysis, which I've really learned a lot from, Joan fills in the gaps for readers, explaining how the volatile situation in Jesus' homeland, his status as a Jew in Judea of the tribe of Judah, and growing up under Roman occupation, all influenced his outlook and perspective.
She also does a wonderful job of showing why some of the elements of the story that have been traditionally viewed as unlikely by
by some scholars actually deserve to be taken very seriously from a historical perspective. Like Jesus being born in Bethlehem, being born of the line of David, Herod's infamous massacre of the innocents, and so on. Boy Jesus is out now. So head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Don't forget the undeceptions, where you can find discounts, free chapters, and of course, the book itself. ♪
Around 1669, Hamburg resident, Hennig Brandt, believed he might have discovered the fabled philosopher's stone, which could turn lead into gold and open up the secrets of the cosmos. An ex-soldier with experience in making glass, Brandt began with old urine and boiled it up and heated the residue until glowing vapours, white phosphorus, reacting with oxygen, filled his glassware.
Within a few years, Brandt sold his secret and soon phosphorus was well enough known that the secretive alchemist, Isaac Newton, could begin a recipe for it with the instructions: "Take of urine one barrel." From urine to art, another transformation. The moment of discovery was immortalised in the 18th century in a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby.
and recorded again by William Feather in 1775 as "The Discovery of Phosphorus". In this work, the alchemist kneels in awe before the glowing wonder in his alchemical laboratory. Many years later, in 1943, in another transformation, Brant City burned when thousands of pounds of phosphorus fell in the form of bombs.
That's an article published by the UNESCO Courier titled Chemistry, How It All Started. The history of chemistry is basically the story of scientists working to uncover the secrets of nature.
The painting mentioned in the article captures this hunt for hidden knowledge brilliantly. It depicts the scientist Brandt kneeling and gazing in wonder at his glowing experiment, the phosphorus, while his assistant watches on transfixed from the shadows. We'll put a link in the show notes. I love it.
It's fun to imagine those first chemists working deep into the night with different elements and making incredible and sometimes dangerous discoveries. But of course, Brandt wasn't really a chemist in the scientific sense. He was an alchemist, the mysterious precursor to chemistry.
Alchemy was, among other things, focused on the purification of metals. They were trying to turn lead or copper into silver or gold. And things got pretty weird. They would create potions like the elixir of immortality, which would apparently extend life, or a panacea, a remedy that could cure any disease.
It's from alchemy that we derived the legend of the Philosopher's Stone, essentially a super rock capable of both transforming things into gold and extending your life.
The oldest known book on alchemy was written in the 4th century AD by Zosimus of Panopolis, a Greek from Egypt. Alchemy, for Zosimus, wasn't just about metals and elixirs. It was a deeply spiritual pursuit. Among his more unusual beliefs was the idea that alchemy was first taught to women who became wives of the fallen angels, a strange interpretation of the story in Genesis chapter 6.
Why bring up ancient alchemy? Well, because it's what eventually evolved over centuries into modern chemistry during the scientific revolution of the 16th to 18th centuries. A parallel might be the way astrology eventually became a scientific discipline of astronomy.
And while chemistry today is grounded in experiment and reason rather than mysticism, it still operates at the very edge of what we know about the natural world. And it was while working at those edges that my next guest experienced an unexpected shift, not just scientifically, but spiritually, from confident atheism to full-blown Christian faith.
Si, thank you so much for joining us. You're a biochemist, so I think we have to stop and say, what on earth is a biochemist? Well, I guess the best way to put it is that I started out as a chemistry major in college, and so I learned a lot about chemistry, especially organic chemistry.
But then I really liked the study of life. I really liked the science of biology. But not that much because some of biology is just a lot of memorization of the names of organs and things like that. But I love chemistry. So I found out that there's a field called biochemistry, which is all about the chemistry of life. And that's what I decided to do.
That's Sy Garter. He's semi-retired now, which basically means he can write and research to his heart's content.
But during his career, Cy was a tenured professor at New York University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the division director at the Center for Scientific Review of the National Institutes of Health and interim vice president for research at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Cy has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, three scientific monographs, and several books. Man, oh man, that's a productive scholar. His latest book is Beyond Evolution, How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God. It's out August 2025, so if you're listening in the future, go and get it.
We're actually going to feature Psy on a future episode, perhaps next season, that's going to focus on the revolution going on quietly amongst top-tier evolutionary scientists. Forget the blind watchmaker of Richard Dawkins. The evidence is building, and Dawkins himself is beginning to realise it, that blind and random are just not the right words for evolution.
Scientists, including Dawkins' own revered mentor, Dennis Noble, are starting to talk about patterns, agency, even intention in the evolutionary process. Anyway, we're going to be really careful with that episode to bring you the cutting edge research into evolutionary theory. Stay tuned for that. This is not that episode, but I did ask Cy about his provocative book title.
Now you have a new book coming out real soon, I believe, Beyond Evolution. How are chemistry and evolutionary science related? Well, evolutionary science is much more related to straight biology. Many people consider evolution to be the central theory of biological science.
In fact, if you want to major in biology at many universities, most universities these days in the US, your choices are often molecular biology, which is the stuff that I know, biochemistry, or what's called evolutionary biology, which includes everything that used to be straight biology, plants, animals, ecology, all that stuff, is now labeled under evolutionary biology.
I'm not sure that's appropriate, but that's how it is. So evolution is really a central thing in biological science. However, and this is one of the good things about being a biochemist, a biochemist can go into any field of biology they want to because there's always chemistry involved.
So because biology is based on chemistry, life is a branch of chemistry in a way. So, yeah, I got into I got interested in evolution, not immediately, but over a lot of time. And I've been more interested in it even after I retired as an active scientist, as an active research scientist.
Tell us about the chemistry. What are the interesting things they're discovering about chemistry that's driving evolution? Okay, that's a great question. And there's a whole chapter in the book devoted to this. Not so much the chemistry, but a particular part of the chemistry. Here's the thing. If you're talking about evolution, okay, you take it for granted that evolution means that over time, meaning many generations...
You get changes in what we call the allele frequencies, which is just saying we get changes in the genes. The key thing there is that this takes place over generations. So what does that mean? That means that each generation gives rise to a new generation, which is the same, more or less, with slight differences as the earlier one. In other words, all of life self-replicates.
All of life, from the simplest bacteria to us and everybody in between, makes a very accurate copy of itself. That's critical for evolution, because if that didn't happen, you couldn't have evolution. You need that first. And here's the thing. Nothing, and I make this claim and I back it up in the book, nothing outside of life does that. Nothing. Crystals don't do it.
They can make copies, more or less, but they're very inaccurate. Nothing else does it. And so the question is, how does that happen? And we know how it happens. And how it happens, that's where the chemistry comes in.
is unbelievably complex. And I decided to take a risk. And I made one chapter where I actually try to describe how that happens, but in very accessible terms, I hope. I have more detail in an appendix, but that's only for the nerds who really want to go into it.
Psy is about to show his age. Get very retro in this next part, but it's super cool. His
He's about to mention punch cards. These were basically big sheets of paper that people used back in the late 60s and early 70s to feed into computers the information that the computer was meant to do something with. And in my draft script notes here I'm looking at right now, researcher Al has had the cheek to ask if I ever used punch cards myself. LAUGHTER
Al. Oh, geez. I love you, mate. But the answer is no, no, no. Sorry, Sean. I wasn't sure. So young. Al has put a picture of a punch card in the show notes on our website. So you have a better idea of what Cy is talking about. But the chemistry is incredible. Here's, I will just give you an analogy that I use.
Imagine people who are my age, old enough, might remember that way back in the early days of computers, there used to be tapes and punch cards that you would hand fit into a machine. And that would give instructions to the machine and tell it what to do. In every cell, there are little machines called ribosomes. And they are football shaped objects that have a slot.
that goes right through it. And there's a tape that goes into that slot. The tape is called messenger RNA, which is a copy of the genes. And when that tape goes into that slot, a series of incredibly complicated and complex reactions occur where the tape is literally read by several other chemicals, enzymes,
various kinds of RNA, transfer RNA, amino acids are attached. The amino acids get stuck to each other. It's just unbelievable. There is no human machinery that comes close, human-made machinery that comes close to this. It's just remarkable. And it's all chemistry. And we know how it works. We have no clue how that began.
Because it couldn't have evolved because you need that to get evolution. Yeah. So it didn't occur through biological evolution. So we don't, now there are some theories. I know Art Louis has some theories. Nick, lots of people have theories of how you could have ended up with
Not only the machinery, not only the slot and the tape and all the stuff that goes inside the ribosome, but also the instruction manual. Woohoo! Shout out to Ard Louie, multi-time Undeceptions guest, featured in Episode 6, Rational Universe, and 88, Beautiful Science. He's also the Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford, but I'm sure that's lower down in his list on the CV.
Link in the show notes. We are definitely getting him back for the evolution episode because he is at the forefront of the maths of the patterns in mutations. Back to Simon.
When you want to, you know, tell a machine what to do, somebody has to write down, you know, tell it to raise this arm and then bring it down or whatever, and that has to be translated into the dots and all that. But there's an instruction manual, which we also have in life to do this, and that's the genetic code. Where did that come from? Again,
We know how it works. We know what the code is. We don't know how it arose. And there are theories, again, I'm not saying it's impossible, but among those theories is that this was part of the creation of life. And that's not a bad theory, but unfortunately, you know, we cannot, and this is true for all science and faith issues,
We cannot use science to probe the mind of God or the way God works. We can look at the creation and we can make conclusions, but we need science to understand. So my view, which I state in this book quite clearly, is that
there is probably going to be an answer, a scientific answer, as there has always been to this amazingly difficult issue, which is also related to the origin of life, of course. I love this. Psy doesn't have a God of the gaps approach to his work or theology. God of the gaps, you may remember, essentially means proclaiming that God is the answer to every scientific mystery we don't have an answer for yet. God fills the gap in our knowledge.
But if you take that approach, apart from being not very biblical or theological, you basically have to put up with the fact that every time science discovers something new, you erase more space for God. God is pushed out every time something is discovered. Psy's view is way more satisfying and incidentally way more in line with the greatest theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Pannenberg.
What they've said about science and God is far more about the intention built into things, the rationality in things. So every time you discover more rationality about the things, you're seeing the mind of God. The answer is probably out there, Psy reckons, because like anything that's been created, we can keep analyzing it until we find out how it works.
In fact, we should expect to find answers to scientific mysteries and how evolution actually began is one of those big mysteries. And when we find out, it won't be a gap that pushes God out. It will undoubtedly be further evidence of the rationality imprinted into all of nature. And every bit of rationality in the creation points to the mind of the creator. No God of the gaps.
Another question is the ins and outs of how cells work. And that's a theme Peter is working on. You're at the forefront of the question of life because before there were cells, there was chemistry.
I mean, I know cells are chemistry as well, but before there were these animated self-replicating things, there's just chemistry going on. So can you just give us an overview of why the origin of cells is still a riddle for science? Because we don't know how it should have come about. No matter which worldview a person has, unless people step out on a limb, they will admit we have no idea
how the chemicals that are needed for building a cell have come about by themselves, naturally, so to speak. We wouldn't even know how to build a cell, how to start building a cell, even if you would give me all the components or a chemist that is more able than I in this field, because I'm a medicinal chemist, not an original life chemist. Still, we have no idea how this could have come about and how we could even repeat it.
Humans are quite creative, so we've done a lot of things, we've built a lot of things. But I think it was Craig Venter, famous DNA sequence chemist, geneticist, molecular biologist, who said that it's not that hard to build DNA chemically, but the big problem is cells are more complicated in their inner structure than the most complicated building you can imagine.
So they're very well structured. All the parts have to really work together. Everything has to be exactly where it should be. Otherwise, the cells don't work. So how can we build this and make it functional? As in the cells, the cell will replicate, it will produce and consume energy and all the things which we think are typical of life. So it's a big riddle because
We know it's important if we want to understand how life came about on the earth, or we have no clue. If you read in the newspapers that people have a clue, they're heavily exaggerating. Believe me. So then what are the most important current approaches to understanding the origin of cells? Of course, we analyze cells.
I think we know a lot about what cells need to be functional to, like I said, replicate and everything. And there's one key word, replication. DNA, proteins, RNA, some components of the cell and the cell as a whole has to replicate. If a cell does not replicate, it's either dormant, bacterial cells are sometimes dormant, or it's dead. So we need to...
find out how was this replicator formed. It's a molecule called RNA. Most people bet on RNA being first. So one of the big scenarios, people call that sometimes scenarios, talks about how could a first replicator come about. A self-replicating molecule
that must have formed itself, but we don't have a clue how that could have come about. In 2013, The Guardian actually put this question, how did life begin, at number two in a listicle, that's an actual word, titled The 20 Big Questions in Science. Number one, by the way, was what is the universe made of? Here's what they said.
Four billion years ago, something started stirring in the primordial soup. A few simple chemicals got together and made biology. The first molecules capable of replicating themselves appeared. We humans are linked by evolution to those early biological molecules.
But how did the basic chemicals present on early Earth spontaneously arrange themselves into something resembling life? How did we get DNA? What did the first cells look like? More than half a century after the chemist Stanley Miller proposed his primordial soup theory, we still can't agree about what happened.
Some say life began in hot pools near volcanoes. Others, that it was kickstarted by meteorites hitting the sea. And the other scenario is metabolism first. How did this energy-consuming, energy-producing metabolite, as in small molecule processes, how could they have been formed? And again, we don't have a clue. People sometimes find
bits and odds, but they don't add up to how they could have happened consecutively. We won't understand unless we can build it ourselves. I think it was Richard Feynman, famous physicist, Nobel Prize laureate. He wrote on his blackboard, this could have been his last words, "I only understand what I can create."
He was an atheist, at least a self-professed atheist. And that is driving people to try and build cells in order to understand, okay, this is how they could have formed. But then, of course, I would say from a Christian standpoint of view, this is creation. Yes. I mean, because if you need a human to create a cell, you haven't got rid of a creator, have you? No.
It's an engineer's work. Of course, we will never know. I mean, all people admit that, Christians, non-Christians alike. We will never know how it happened in the first place. Perhaps we can find a way how it can happen, but we still don't know.
Was that the way? Was that the way? Yeah. How does all this origin of cells business connect to biological evolution? It precedes biological evolution according to naturalist scenarios. So most people would say, I think all people would say, first we have to somehow find a way to how cells could have come about. And then the cells as replicating entities
that are perhaps able to mutate DNA-wise, RNA protein-wise, they can then change. And if you can create a selection, you can select from the selection. So cells are supposed to be what we need to
understand before the evolutionary process can begin. Some people actually call this origin of life business chemical evolution. Yes. Some people avoid the term. I'm not talking about religious people also. Some people avoid the term chemical evolution because all the
typical features of organisms that allow them to adapt, evolve, that are not yet there. Because replication of cells is the very core of evolution, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. And selection, of course, and genetic drift and all that. So how does a naturalistic approach to how life came about differ from your way of thinking about it as a Christian who is also a scientist? The biggest difference is that I think we have discovered
that cells will form if there was a plan and a purpose. So life is characterized, I think everybody would agree on that, living organisms are characterized by purpose. There is a purpose. When I read purely chemical papers,
Fairly rarely in those papers people would write that this and that chemical mechanism happened so that something. There is no purpose other than the purpose of the person that did the work. But if I read biochemical papers, physiological papers that talk about the chemistry, automatically there is language like this is not just because but for. There is a purpose. There is some function there.
And that is what naturalistic thinking tries to get rid of: plan, design, as some people say, purpose. And that is the biggest difference. Of course, as Christian scientists, we also want to investigate in this. Sometimes we get people tell us, "Oh, you don't even want to know how it came about. You just say this was God." That's not true. We are also interested in how can this happen?
But we think we're on the wrong path if we categorically exclude the possibility of plan and purpose in how it came about and also why it came about. But that's an altogether different question. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.
One of the key differences between the ancient pagan way of thinking of, say, the Egyptians or Babylonians and the Hebrew or biblical worldview is on this question of the orderliness of nature. Pagan creation narratives tended to stress the random, haphazard nature of the physical world.
The classic, the one all scholars talk about, I'm pretty sure I've talked about before on the show, is the Babylonian story Enuma Elish, which is read out every New Year's Day in Babylon. It says that the physical world was an afterthought, fashioned out of the wreckage of a war of the gods. Tiamat and Apsu, the mum and dad of the gods, go to war against their kids because the kids were making too much noise, something Kayleigh knows all about most mornings.
This morning as well, Kayleigh? Yeah. But mum and dad, not Kayleigh, Tiamat and Apsu, ended up losing the war to the young buck warrior god Marduk, who then fashions the universe out of the bits and pieces of the carnage. The story embodies the common pagan idea that creation is haphazard, it's tainted. Matter is alien stuff. It's accidental, unpredictable, possessed even.
If that was your perspective, and then you opened Genesis 1, you'd be immediately struck by all the ways Genesis stresses the beauty and orderliness of physical creation. Pagans thought of creation as a kind of war, but Genesis sees it as a kind of ballet. Calm, patterned, graceful.
Each creative scene in Genesis 1 has this fourfold pattern. One, it commences with a simple command. Two, it tells of the fulfillment of that command.
Three, it elaborates on the command. And four, it concludes with a day formula. There was evening, there was morning. The first paragraph sets up the pattern for the rest of the show. One, the command, and God said, let there be light. And then two, the fulfillment, there was light. And then three, the elaboration, God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And then four, the day formula.
And there was evening and there was morning the first day. And on it goes through the chapter like a carefully choreographed dance. There's a theological point being made here. The universe is not accidental. It's the work of an orderly mind. Then there's the way the days correspond to each other like a canvas to a painting.
Days 1, 2 and 3 are presented as the canvas. Days 4, 5 and 6 are the painting. Now, I know that's hard to picture, so we're going to put an image in the show notes. But basically, day 1 is the canvas to day 4's painting.
Day two is the canvas to day five's painting and day three is the canvas to day six's painting. So it works like this. On day one, light is created.
On day four, the actual lights of the sun and the moon are put in place. On day two, the vault of the sky is created along with its counterpoint, the waters of the sea. And then on day five, the sky is filled with birds and the sea is filled with fish. On day three, the land and the plants are created. Then on the corresponding day six, animals and humans are created to walk on the land and enjoy the produce.
This deliberately leaves day seven hanging as a day of rest to reflect on the newly filled canvas of creation.
Then there's the very interesting comment repeated throughout the Genesis creation account, that God made things according to their kinds. That's the language. And what's more, that God put certain creative powers in things so that they too could produce things according to their kinds. So in Genesis 1.11, to give you an example of it, we read...
Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation." So the land here becomes a co-creator with God?
Now, the point being made is that the genius of the creator is imprinted into physical reality, into nature.
So nature then acts with certain aims to produce certain outcomes that reflect God's intentions.
Now there are tons of other ways Genesis makes this basic point, but the idea is that creation isn't accidental. It's ordered, it's rational, it's a functioning whole that acts according to certain rational ends. It's a remarkable departure from ancient pagan thinking. Now, it's true that the best Greek philosophers came to roughly the same conclusion centuries later.
Aristotle, for example, 900 years after Moses, said the form of things exists within the things themselves. So he would say something like, the form of the oak tree is in the acorn already.
The form of the adult human is already there in the fetus, and so on. And so nature operates in orderly fashion, following the direction, we might say, the equations that are built into matter itself. All things act according to an organizing principle inherent in them, which Aristotle called, you guessed it, logos.
Behind the Logos, he insisted, in Metaphysics Book 12 is the mind of the unmoved mover, the final cause of all motion and purpose: God. What the Jews had been saying for centuries, the Greeks eventually declared by logical deduction. Nature operates according to the principles of rational genius, and the genius behind it all is the mind of God.
And this is why John's Gospel is so happy to employ the Greek philosophical word logos. Now, I know I talked about that in quite some detail in an Undeception single recently. Can't remember what it was called. Either of you guys remember? It's called Became Flesh.
We did actually do this, didn't we? I might be a plus only. Oh, yes. Only for pluses. Okay, so some of you got the detail for that. But my basic point is, John says, in the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God. And the Logos was God. And then he shocks us with the words...
In other words, according to the Gospel of John, the rational genius of the Creator, the same genius that is imprinted on creation, actually became a human being, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Logos. Jesus is the rational principle behind creation. And you know what? John wasn't alone.
Paul says something similar in Colossians 1. He says, "...in Jesus all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. All things have been created through him and for him, and in him all things hold together."
Now it's right to think of Jesus as a first century Galilean Jew, a historical figure we can investigate with the rules of historical inquiry. But from the beginning, from our earliest documents, Christians were saying much, much more about him. They were saying he is the genius by which and through which and for which creation came into being.
And what's more, he is the ongoing principle that, in Paul's words, holds everything together in every moment. This is why the first modern scientists all saw their work as a kind of worship. Because when they understood the mathematics of planetary motion or the chemistry by which certain things happen, they are glimpsing the Logos, who has a historical name.
Jesus. You can press play now. This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Speak Life and their new video-based course, 321, presented by the wonderful Aussie, now living in England...
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The periodic table is instantly recognizable. It's not just in every chemistry lab worldwide. It's found on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and shower curtains. But the periodic table isn't just another trendy icon. It's a massive slab of human genius. Up there with the Taj Mahal, the Mona Lisa, and the ice cream sandwich. That's the start of an amazing video by the TED-Ed YouTube channel on the genius of the periodic table of elements.
Talk of the table might bring back some high school trauma for some. Researcher Al tells me it certainly does for him. But not for me, because I ignored the periodic table at every turn. The table is one of the most important human innovations ever and absolutely on par with other great feats of engineering.
Its creator was the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who in 1869 began categorizing the known properties of elements, basically what distinguishes one element from another, into different groups. Now, he wasn't the first person to categorize the elements, but Dmitri discovered that when he arranged the elements in an order based on their atomic weight,
patterns emerged around which type of elements tended to slot next to one another. By discovering these patterns, he was able to sort the elements into the table that we have today and then leave gaps for undiscovered elements. When he did his work, there were only 63 known elements. Now we have 118 and they fit beautifully into his table.
Element 101 was discovered in 1955 and they named it after him. They've called it Mendeleevium, making Mendeleev one of only 15 scientists to be honoured with an elemental namesake.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that although we credit Mendeleev with the creation of the periodic table, he in fact only created the orderly depiction of the order that is actually there in nature. If we call him genius for creating the table, we have to acknowledge that physical reality itself is the original genius, or perhaps we should say bears the imprint of genius.
The elements all work together. They all have a place. Mendeleev's mother actually famously urged her son in his scientific pursuits with the words, patiently search for divine and scientific truth. I love it.
It's an idea you find in other foundational scientists, like Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the empirical method of experimentation in the 17th century. He famously thought of himself as a priest of God serving in the temple of creation. This wasn't just a metaphor for him. He really thought his science was a form of worship of the mind behind creation.
We've spoken about all of this lots here on Undeceptions in multiple episodes. Can I recommend you check out episode 19, Scientific Theology with Alistair McGrath. Episode 9, Dominus Illuminatio with Sarah Irving Stonebreaker. Episode 74, Medieval Science with Seb Falk. Gosh, that was a good episode. And episode 78, Scientific Imagination with Tom McLeish. Oh man, that was awesome as well.
Mendeleev himself noted that it is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man, social and political, and to the entire universe as a whole.
Both Peter and Cy have spent their entire working lives figuring out the causes that govern this order. But unlike some of their colleagues, they've gone a step further and have come to a place where they trust in the creator behind it all. I asked them why more of their colleagues haven't followed suit. I mean, they can all see the rational genius built into creation, right? Chemistry, like physics...
points to fundamental laws, rationality. You said at the start of the interview, language. It's language. Why do many scientifically minded people just leave it there without asking how is their rationality behind everything and what does it mean? People are different. So I can't give just one answer that will fit all sizes.
With some people, I think they're not the type of person that typically thinks deeply about things. Perhaps sometimes, of course, I don't know. But judging from myself, which is perhaps better, very often I just take things for granted, whether they be good or bad. And I think that's how we need to lead most of our lives. Otherwise, we would become depressive or manic or
something. But for some people, not to ask for the origins of rationality is that perhaps they think we can't find out. This is asking too far. If we want to answer that question, basically, perhaps they think we will just find another set of rules. And then we can again ask, where do those laws come from that were formative for the laws as we see them now?
So what perhaps can help us in this situation, people that think we can't find out or I don't want to think about it, I always hope that bringing across that we think there is a person behind all this, a loving person, a caring person, a person that really knows and has good purposes, this trust. I find that becoming a Christian had so much to do with trust.
Trusting in God, trusting in the future, trusting in what I don't understand, what I understand somehow makes sense. So this step of trusting rather than doubting or shying away from deep questions,
I hope that is helpful for people. So do you find your faith? There's something Kierkegaardian about all this, being okay with uncertainty and taking the dancer's leap into faith. Check out episode 103, Blind Faith, for more about the amazing Kierkegaard.
And why sometimes stepping out without all the answers is actually the most rational thing to do. Anyway, back to Peter. Have you ever found that your science hindered your thinking about a creator? Actually, it didn't even before I became a Christian. I became a Christian at the age of 25. That is when I had finished college.
most of all of my undergraduate studies. So I was a chemist, diploma as we call that in Germany, and I was a pharmacist for professional license. But I always found it completely, I didn't have enough faith, and this is not rhetoric, to believe that this earth and the complexity and
in macroscopic things that we can investigate. I just couldn't make myself believe that this all came about by itself with no plan, no purpose, nobody overseeing it. So I didn't have a problem with that. You say you became a Christian at 25. What drew you
toward Christian belief as opposed to simply theism? I didn't know about theism. I didn't even know the word existed. So maybe I thought about it, but not knowledgeably. I wanted to know if the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, when I read them, is that actually what was written when it was written centuries ago, or was it
fabricated later. And I convinced myself by historical, reading historical stuff, I'm reading what is actually true, what was written. So the next question is, does this relate to me? I mean, it's nice for Jesus to have been resurrected, but what does it have to do with me? And that is something which I can't explain well, because something I acknowledge that God was right and I was not.
I would describe that as my conversion and suddenly I was able to speak to God and discover
what somehow I knew because I was brought up in West Germany so we had religious education and we knew a lot of things. Suddenly I discovered that I could speak to God and sometimes people call that prayer but I don't mean prayer as in asking God for something but speaking to God and discovering Him in the process and that was
Very nice and convinced me actually that something had been going on. So do you find your faith satisfies you as a scientist? Because you see rationality at the chemical level every day of your life. Well, not every day. You don't know what...
Chemicals can do very strange things, John. But they'll always be explainable by mathematics, I assume. By chemistry. Okay. But do you find your Christian faith satisfies that curiosity over the edge of what science can tell you? It gives me a basis.
that I can trust in, but I don't expect to find God by doing chemistry as a person. For that, I need the Bible. Science tells me there must be a plan. That's my conviction. Set aside everything I believe about Jesus and the Bible. But I do need the Bible to know, okay, who is that God?
Does he have ill or bad purposes? Is he interested in me or not at all? The Epicureans believed in gods, but they thought the gods are interesting and they're not stupid enough to be interested in those lowly earthlings. So yeah, it gives me...
a framework for life and for work as a scientist and a personal relationship. Personal relationship, subjectiveness is how we live our lives. I have to be objective as a scientist, but my life as a human being is very subjective. As I said when introducing him, Sy also moved to a deep Christian conviction quite late in life, having initially been a staunch atheist.
He found himself dissatisfied with having just scientific answers. Chemistry was great, but it wasn't quite enough. It was almost as if science pointed beyond itself to things science isn't designed or equipped to answer. Now, if you're a Plus subscriber, you're about to hear the details of Psy's move toward Jesus Christ.
For everyone else, though, I closed my interview by asking Sai to offer a word to listeners who just feel that science does hold all the answers. So I guess the last question I want to ask you is, what would you say to my slightly skeptical listener who's pretty scientifically informed about
for whom that science perspective is a bit of an inhibitor to faith. Yeah. What advice have you got for them? You know, little steps in the right direction sort of thing. Well, I would say two major things. First, if you look at the science carefully, and of course I'm not talking about what young earth creationists or other people say. If you look at, you know, people like Francis Collins, R. Louis, me, many, many other people,
Christians who happen to be scientists, and you look at our science, it's pretty good. I mean, you know, we do real science in a scientific way. And there's nothing in science that actually contradicts Christian belief. Nothing. Yes, it doesn't correspond to the Bible. But if you look at the Bible in the right way, or what I consider to be the right way, and everybody has a different definition of that.
But I read the Bible and I see confirmation of my views, of my scientific views. I just was talking about self-replication being the critical part of biology. Well, what does it say in Genesis? They were made after their kind. The words after their kind is repeated 15 times in Genesis.
What does that mean after they're kind of, that means they self-replicated the way they, you know, the way, so that a sheep only give birth to sheep. I mean, I had a debate with Kent Hoban once where he kept telling me that sheep only give birth to sheep. And I said, yeah, you're right. That's part of evolution. That has to be. He thought I was saying that, you know, a sheep gave birth to a goat or a monkey gave birth to a human. No, that doesn't happen.
So the science is fine. There's nothing in science that goes against the idea of believing in God and a creator. And there are things in science that do point to that. The fact, the fine tuning of the physical constants, the fact that we are here, the fact that there's a creation, there was an origin of the universe and we don't know how that could have been. There are lots of things that are certainly consistent with a biblical Christian view of reality.
But if that doesn't convince you, then you go back to the experiential. And the experiential is one of the big arguments that I hear. Oh, you know, this guy had a, you know, a fantasy or a dream or whatever. But, you know, that never happened with me. And that's not good evidence.
First of all, it is good evidence. If it happens to you, it's great evidence because, believe me, if it happens to you, it's real. Okay. But why don't you have it? Why has that never happened to you? And here's my answer to that. It has. It happened to me several times while I was in the middle of my extreme atheist phase. And what I did was I ignored it. I didn't see it.
I mean, I have some details. It's too long to go into the details. But I know now that at least four or five times in my younger life, the first time when I was 16, I had an amazing experiential... This first one, I actually believed that the resurrection was real for about three minutes. And then I said to myself, it was in a movie, I said to myself, no, that's just the trick of the emotional trick. It's not real.
But I had that experience and I denied it and I rejected it. The other thing that happens is you're about to have an experience or you have an experience and you don't see it. You're doing something else because God doesn't yell at you. The Bible says he spoke in a small, still voice. He's not in the earthquake. He's not in the hurricane. He's in the small voice that you hear barely off in the distance.
Just a very quick story. One time I was driving my car. I was lost. It was raining. It was dark. I was in a strange place. I was in a horrible mood. I was yelling at myself. And I just finally, I had to stop. And I realized I had the radio on. I hadn't realized that I even had the radio on. I was so preoccupied. And I listened and the music was beautiful. Something I had never heard before. And it dawned on me, oh,
That's what happens in life. You're so busy dealing with so many things, you don't see that child across the street smiling at you. You don't realize that that person who looks like a beggar is actually giving money to somebody else. God appears in so many ways that you don't notice because you're too busy not noticing or you're too busy doing something else.
What I say is, if you're really interested in seeing whether or not God might be real, try concentrating. And the way we concentrate is through prayer. I know that sounds crazy because I kind of had a hard time praying the first time. Not just the first time, for years, because I didn't know what it meant. All it means is close your eyes and just say something to God, even if you don't think there's anyone listening. Just say something.
You can say thank you, you can say please, you can say I don't believe in you but here's what I think. You can say anything you want and leave it alone. And then pay attention to things that you don't expect because God's presence is all over the place and you can't predict where it will be. I have one story that's in my second book, Science and Faith in Harmony,
where I heard the voice of God from two dolphins. And if you want to know more, you have to read that story. ♪♪♪
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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Alistair Belling is a writer-researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant, editing by Richard Humwee. Our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love.
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