Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Good morning, everyone.
Just when you thought we were past the rain. No, we're not.
Don't let the beauty of the last couple days fool you. More rain.
Good morning. You are here. There is going to be wild storms the rest of the day, but you are here this morning. So welcome. I'm Thais Carter. I'm a member of the Adult Ed Community Committee and we're starting a smidge early because we have many announcements this morning.
So I would be remiss if I did not remind you we all need to sign up for small groups. And we are so thrilled that our small groups are going to be built in part around Dan Migliori's book, Faith Seeking Understanding. Now, it is important for you to know you do not have to buy this book. This is not required reading. You will have a fabulous small group experience even if you do not buy this book. But it is a great book that we highly recommend and do not be intimidated by the size. It is broken down in really helpful segments and will provide a lot of additional texture and layers to the small group experience. But again, is not required.
Today we are going to be hearing from Christopher Zamidi and once you hear from him and you're like, well, he sounds amazing and his book sounds amazing, you should know that there is information about pre ordering the book that is in the attendance folder. So while normally you might just be like writing without looking, pay attention because you're going to want to know how to pre order Christopher's book. And so I need you all to know that there is the formal bio about Christopher here, that he is a scholar of religion and history and is a candidate for ordination in the PC usa. He's published several articles and book reviews and is the author of two books, Shadows and Solid A History of Religion and Archaeology and Inside A Very Great Story, the Faith and Wonder of JRR Tolkien. So what I need you to know is that the first time I met Chris was on Zoom, when he was actually wrapping up his doctoral work at George Mason University and was applying to come to Princeton Theological Seminary. And you can imagine my question being like, bro, you don't have to do this. You are wrapping up a very significant degree. Why would you come to Princeton Seminary? And I can tell you that in this wonderful conversation that we had on when I was writing up my notes about my interview with him, I said that we would be so lucky if he would come here, that he is somebody who has a deep sense of call, he is curious and kind and I think a very good scholar, but more importantly, a really good person. And so I am thrilled for us to welcome him here today and in order to kind of set him up best, let's begin with a word of prayer.
God, we are so grateful for all the people that you bring into conversation with us here at Nassau Presbyterian Church.
We pray, God, that you would help us to be good listeners today, that this conversation would be rich and that, God, that you would be with those who are in the way of the hurricane that is kind of making its way through the south. And that even today, God, as we are in rain, but ultimately safe, that we would be in our minds and our hearts close to those who are not as safe. Because, God, we know that you are with them. So, God, we pray that you would give us attention and focus both on the words that we're going to hear today and to the things that are happening around us. In your name we pray. Amen.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Amen.
Thank you so much, Thais. That was very sweet and I hope I can live up to those words.
Well, thank you all for having me. Thank you to Lynn, to Isabella, to the education committee.
It is such a pleasure to be with you all this morning. After I started here at Princeton, this is where I was worshiping for the first year or so until I started feel dead. And it has just been a joy to get to be a part of your community and now to be sharing with you some of the stories that fuel my imagination and are near and dear to my heart.
As you've hopefully seen, this series will actually be a story in two parts. Today we are going to be looking at the story of religion versus spirit science.
And next week we will turn to the story of religion in science, which, spoiler alert, I think is a better story.
And so if you're left with questions and curiosities today, I hope that you will come back next week. And speaking of questions and curiosities, if you have any of them as we are going along, I invite you to take out your phone, jot them down, write them on a piece of paper, and we will have plenty of time to talk about them. And at the end, so without further ado, the story of religion versus Science.
Only sophomores could do theology, or that was at least the belief of my undergrad institution as a university of the Church of the Nazarene. Everyone was required to take Intro to Theology, but students could only take that class as a sophomore. And when it was finally my turn, my class got more than we bargained for because the semester I took intro to theology was the same semester that the university fired a tenure professor because of his beliefs.
Specifically, he was fired after several years of attempting to convince the Church of the Nazarene that people could be faithful Christians and also open to science and evolution.
For the Church of the Nazarene, it was a principle worth defending, worth firing someone over that the Bible was an inerrant source of historical truth.
The Bible was the preeminent glimpse of the first ages of the world. Such was its sacred worth.
And for many of us, this story probably brings up the conflict between science and religion.
That the issue came down between this university and professor, between the Bible and evolution, seems to pit rational science and reason against those who read the Bible as history, meaning that they read it literally, believing that what was recorded on the page was a trustworthy depiction of something that happened in our real world.
And in the long history of the relationship between religion and science, there are actually a lot of stories like this.
And so the first thing we need to do this morning is to get acquainted with some of the flashpoints of this history and also with some of the larger themes that these moments in time bring up. And so I want to give you three of the kind of key moments in this story of religion versus science, and I'm going to describe them to you. And if you know what they are at the end of it, shout it out. If you think what they know, and I'll tell you when to shout it out.
Flashpoint number one.
Rome, 22 June 1633.
A 69 year old man is forced to kneel before an assembly of religious judges. He looks frail and broken by months of interrogation. He holds a lit candle in one hand and in the other a pre papa text. The statement denies his life's work and compels him to quote, abjure, curse and detest a scientific theory that he has spent 30 years promoting and that he knows to be true.
Failure to comply will result in torture.
Reluctantly, he reads the statement in full. And then, as he struggles to his feet and leaves the room, mutters under his breath.
Still it moves.
Sin eper si muove. Still it moves.
Does anyone know what this moment is? Shout it out if you do.
[00:07:55] Speaker C: Galileo.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Galileo. There you go. This is the trial of Galileo Galilee before the Inquisition in 1633. Nice job.
Flash point number two.
October 30th 30th June 1860.
Nearly 800 people are crammed into a cavernous but stuffy library, having sat through a tedious lecture. They are fractious, anticipating A lively exchange between two eminent Victorians concerning the scientific theory of the moment. They are not disappointed after his introductory remarks. One of them, a prince of the established church, a bishop, makes a jibe about whether his opponent would prefer ape ancestry on his grandmother or grandfather's side.
To which the other, a pugnacious scientist, not cowed by episcopal condescension, whispers to a friend, the Lord hath delivered him into mine hands, before replying that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.
The crowd is outraged, elated. Either way, there is uproar. One woman faints.
Does anyone know what this moment is?
[00:09:12] Speaker C: Darwin.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: It is about Darwin, but it's actually the debate between the biologist Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce who are invited to debate the legitimacy of Darwin's theory of evolution.
All right, our final one for today.
Dayton, Tennessee.
July 20, 1925. 3,000 people stand in front of a courtroom. The nation is listening on the radio and millions will read about the proceedings in the following day's newspapers. They are watching two men play intellectual cat and mouse on a temporary stage erected on the court lawn. One, a 65 year old politician, perhaps the most famous in the country, is answering questions about the Bible.
Or rather, he is trying to.
The other, three years older. And the country's most famous lawyer is inching closer to his prey.
He starts. Do you believe the story of Noah's flood is literally true? To which the politician says, yes, sir. When was that flood? I would not attempt to fix a date. About 4004 BC. That is the accepted estimate.
Don't you know?
I never made a calculation.
What do you think?
I do not think about things I do not think about.
And then the killer line.
Do you think about things you do think about?
The courtroom and the nation erupt into laughter. And the politician on the stand withers in the heat and humiliation.
And we all know what this one is. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, pitting William Jennings Bryan, the politician, against Clarence Darrow, one of the famous lawyers for the newly minted American Civil Liberties Union.
And what I want you to do now is, as we're thinking about the story of science versus religion. I want you to take two minutes, turn to your neighbor. If you don't know them, introduce yourself and share one thing that pops into your mind when you think about science versus religion. Ready?
[00:11:19] Speaker D: Go.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: All right, let's come back together.
Sounds like there's interesting things going on. If you want to continue those stories, take coffee hour and find your neighbor and finish Talking about them.
Now, the point of all this is to say that this is an ongoing story. This did not stop in 1925. I'm sure you all. It sounds like, from what I was eavesdropping, that you all are also part of this story. And we could stretch it back in time to the 5th century or even further to more recent history. History and talk about things like the anti vaccination movement that we largely associate with the evangelical far right or even with the rise of AI and the way that that brings up questions about religiosity and souls and spirituality.
But what I want to point out here is that for many scholars, all of these flashpoints, all of these moments, from Galileo to AI touch upon two interlocking themes, themes that actually run through all of these stories, and those are authority and humanity.
Authority meaning who gets to decide what is real, what is true, and then for humanity, what is a human, who is a human, and who gets to decide who or what a human is.
So often when we think about science versus religion, what we are actually sensing is a larger conflict that is really not about the things we call science and religion, even if it engages those things.
Perhaps one of the reasons we tend to think about religion and science being in conflict is because we have yet to settle the questions of authority and humanity. And as long as those are open questions, it will remain an open question of what the relationship between science and religion is.
But these are not the only tributaries in the river of science and religion. There are two other streams that make for some particularly choppy waters for Christians who may just wish to keep science and religion at safe and comfortable distances.
And so we have to dive into what specifically makes this an ongoing story for us, because for us Christians and for a few other traditions. But for the sake of today, we're going to talk about Presbyterians.
We have things called scriptures and sacraments.
Sacraments are sacred things.
Literally, they are things of this world that people do or make that are considered especially graced or holy.
They are physical encounters with God's presence. We Presbyterians are particularly radical in our Book of Order, where we say things like, because God created the world and called it good, we use material gifts in worship. The Old Testament tells of various things that were used in the worship of God. The ark, linens and vessels, oil and incense, musical instruments, grain, fruit and animals.
We say we believe that ordinary things are taken up into extraordinary purposes.
The Lord's Supper connects us with God's saving power and providential care. As we are drawn into Christ's true and active presence.
And as the reference to the Old Testament makes clear, we also have the sacredness of Scriptures.
We call these texts the Word of God, whatever that means.
These are the sacred stories that not only explore and share the long history of God's relationship with humanity and the world, but in doing so, they seem to lay claim to our particular historical status. In fact, the way we read them and use them in our community often invokes things like memory and precedent.
I want to bring up a couple of examples here.
For example, in the Psalms and the prophets who repeatedly invoke precedent when they encourage God's people to call on God's name, make known his deeds among the peoples. He brought Israel out of Egypt and there was no one among their tribes who stumbled.
I brought you up out of the land of Egypt and led you 40 years in the wilderness. God reminds God's people in Amos.
Is it not indeed so, O people of Israel?
And in the New Testament we are told to do these things in remembrance of me.
All of this has implied for Christians throughout history that these things and people actually existed and unfolded within time and space.
And so what does that mean for science and religion?
And I actually think it means a whole awful lot. Oh, I didn't give you this other one. There we go.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Go.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Because it's not just about this world of science and that world of religion.
In scriptures and sacraments, we confess that that world has actually touched this world, that the supernatural not just infused, but has taken up the natural. That divinity has time and again left marks on materiality.
We know God is faithful now because God was faithful then in the past. It is a matter of history.
This is one of the reasons why I have not, and I will not give you a nice definition of what science and religion are.
Many people like to say that science is about.
This is a tough word for this morning, methodical investigation of the natural. Whereas religion is connected with the faithful adherence to the supernatural.
Others say that science is about facts and inquiry and religion is about meaning and morality.
But I hope that what you are getting a sense for is that for most people, especially I think those in this room, it's a lot messier than that.
This messiness has fostered a very particular and prevalent sense of expectations that have invited Christians throughout time to locate the divine in this world.
And the simplest way to do that for these folks is to search for the history that they saw in the pages of their sacred story.
These ancient texts inspired people to go look for them in their world. In a very literal way. And so I want to show you some of my favorite examples from the early modern world.
These are maps and timelines. This map comes to us from 1750, and it's just one example of many. I could show you where people got really into the specifics of mapping the ancient stories of scripture on our world. So if you look really closely and at the end, I'll pull this up so you can see it, it not only has illustrations of different Bible stories, like the Expulsion of Eden here, but then it has its location for you, and then the Bible verse you can turn to in order to read the story. The same thing for Noah's Ark up here, the Tower of Babel over here. I think it's fascinating, but again, this map is a product of expectations that we could map and locate these stories in our physical world, and not only in maps, but we could do it in timelines. In the 18th century, people got really obsessed with taking all of their ancient texts and. And mapping it as a tree or a river of time. And I noticed that I'm going to enlarge it here. But these things are huge.
But what they are is that they're a way to take all of the biblical and the Greek and the Roman and the Egyptian stories that they have and put all of the names of the people going from Noah's three sons. If you continue up all the way to the kings and queens of the 19th century, and you can see this again, I love this one. This one has so much going on. But just to give you a flavor of the way people are equating these stories as a single historical testimony to reality, I love this one. That in the year 816, the rape of Helen, which gave rise to the Trojan War, Troy is taken. At the same time, Samuel anoints Saul king over Israel about 1095.
Again, these expectations that not only arise from the belief that Scripture is his history, but then by doing this, fuels even more, and it invites even more curiosity of where we could turn to locate these real stories.
So these expectations and inspirations took on a new life in the 18th century, during a series of enlightenments that increasingly brought together religion and science.
So much so that it soon gave rise to what one historian has called evidential Christianity, which was a growing conviction that theology should be a science grounded in the same inductive methods that marked the other sciences.
By and large, this evidential Christianity was set with the task of proving empirically that the Christian Bible was inherently rational and scientific.
In doing so, evidential Christianity would engage science in order to do away with what it considered mystical exegesis that could not actually be controlled or pinned down.
And so this evidential Christianity brings us to our final act of today.
Evidential Christianity impacted many sciences of the early modern world. But for this series this week and next, we are going to focus in on one in particular. Archaeology.
Archaeology was a relatively new science that only began to take form form in the 18th century.
Many of the earliest archaeologists were adherents to evidential Christianity who took seriously the historical implications of Scripture and set out to definitively locate those places in the world.
For if they could find these mythic remains, they could show that it was entirely rational to trust Scripture.
Any supposed conflict between science and religion could be laid to rest through empirical and evidential investigation.
One of these early archaeologists is this dashing man right here, Claudius James Rich, who was an official of the British Empire in Baghdad in the early 19th century. Rich spent most of his life searching for the remains of Babylon, but more specifically the remains for the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11, of which this, until the late 19th century, was the most popular illustration of.
In 1811, he set off in the first of many attempts to locate this biblical tower, and it was the first of many times he did not find it.
He concluded that literalists had gotten out of hand.
He complained that many of his contemporaries had held the ancients accountable for much more than they ever drank themselves.
This ultimately led Claudius to the archaeological argument that when the writings of ancient texts do not accord with what we now see, it is much safer to say that they were mistaken than to attempt forcing a resemblance. It would require a separate memoir, he complained, to prosecute this subject to the extent which would be necessary to show the various causes of error and the ways people have been too literal about reading their Bibles.
And Claudius James Rich was not the only one to engage science and be met with absence.
By the end of the 19th century. Charles Augustus Briggs at the Still Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary also surveyed the scientific landscape around him and saw nothing.
After compiling the science from archaeology, philology, history and biblical criticism, Briggs announced that not only was the Old Testament not literal history, but that the figures of Moses and the prophet Isaiah were entirely mythical, meaning they were not real.
He had this quote in his introductory address.
If such errors destroy the authority of the Bible, it is already destroyed. For historians, as you might imagine, this endeared him to many people.
It did not. His denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the usa, was horrified.
Briggs was tried and convicted for heresy in 1892 and defrocked.
In response, Union Theological Seminary in New York left the Presbyterian Presbyterian Church in defense of Briggs.
Two years later, several powerful and wealthy Presbyterians gathered together to support the publication of Cyrus I. Scofield's reference Bible, which soon became a foundational text for many in the fundamentalist movement. In fact, by the early 20th century, these same Presbyterian leaders gave over $150,000 to the Testimony Publishing Company to support the ongoing publication of the Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth.
The series of volumes not only cemented many of the ideas of fundamentalism, but actually gave the movement its name.
These essays sought to firmly root the stories of scripture in the sands of history.
Yet not even the power of fundamentalism could save Christians who were confronted by absence.
In 2007, the Biblical Archaeology Society in its magazine, hosted a panel of four scholars to respond to a single question.
What effect does scholarship have on faith?
Two of the participants who you see here were themselves professional archaeologists who went looking for their sacred students stories only to be met with disappointment.
The first, William F. Strange, had tried his hardest to separate faith and science, yet he found it difficult to keep the two apart, especially during excavations.
He admitted that, and I quote, I get the same existentialist thrill out of touching the dirt when I'm excavating as I do holding my wife's hand hand.
The interviewer pushed him to clarify this love.
Does that have anything to do with your faith? Maybe, the archaeologist responded, it has something to do with the center of my being.
I grew up in East Texas, he admitted, where the choices were. You believed in the Bible literally or you didn't believe in the Bible literally. That was it. I didn't.
His fellow archaeologist, William G. Dever, knew exactly what he was talking about in his own words. His father was a fire breathing fundamentalist, and all of his subsequent education and ministry experience brought him back to what he called the Protestant conundrum. It's all true, or none of it is.
As an archaeologist, this former Christian could not easily counter his growing uncertainty about the historicity of the Bible, which he said ultimately meant that was the end for me.
From Galileo to the Biblical Archaeology Society, science and religion seem locked in a zero sum game in which science will inevitably win and religion will inevitably lose.
Or so the story goes.
This season of NASA Adult Ed is called Ways of Of Seeing.
It is a time set aside to confront the ways that faith invites us to look again at the world around us, at the church we share, at the stories we inherit, and at possibilities we have yet to Imagine.
And what we need to confront as we wrap up this first week together is that the stories we tell impact not just the ways we see, but what we see.
And the story of religion versus science is just that, a story that both science and religion tell about themselves and most often about the other one.
Now, this does not mean that it isn't true. Please hear me. Story does not equal lie.
All of the events we just explored are historical. And there are often deep tensions between science and religion.
But what we do with these tensions and how we understand and interpret the meaning of these historical encounters is what gives us our story.
And this story of religion versus science frequently leaves out important context.
And so let's go back and look again at the three flashpoints we began with the first one, Galileo's Trial. It is easy to see Galileo before the Inquisition and say that this is about science.
But the problem was less Galileo's heliocentrism, meaning the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, instead of the Earth being the center of the universe.
The problem was the fact that if that was true, it would challenge the entire theology the Catholic Church had built on Aristotle, which meant they would have to rethink their understanding of the Eucharist, which was only a problem because in 1633 the Reformation was only 16 years old. And the one thing the Catholic Church is not going to do in that moment is reconsider its entire theological foundation.
Especially when given all accounts, Galileo was a bit of a jerk.
And the last person they're going to try to accommodate in this moment is someone who has not done his due diligence, according to Inquisition, of trying to play well with them.
And so that there's a bigger story going on, which I think is the same for evolution.
Many historians have actually now shown that huge swaths of Christians and the Church in the late 19th and early 20th century didn't have a problem with Darwin or evolution and actually became pretty amenable to it.
The problem was the ways evolution had been taken up in into the eugenics movement. And just to give you one example, the textbook that is behind the Scopes Monkey trial is G.W. hunter's a civic Biology, which we tend to think about. The problem here is the fact that it introduced evolution as a viable scientific theory.
But when you go back, historians show that the problematic section of that textbook was not evolution, it was this one. And I quote, after describing certain undesirable families who were a drain on society and only belonged in the asylum and poorhouses, quote, if such people Were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this. But we do have the remedies separating the sexes in asylums or other places, and in various ways preventing intermarriage in the population possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
The problem was not the literal reading of Genesis. The problem was the Sermon on the Mount, which did not make it a question of literalism, religion and science, or even evolution. It was about eugenics and what we do with this new morality.
So the story of religion versus science not only obscures the ways we see the past, but the ways we see the present.
The history of science versus religion has shaped some potent and lasting postures that I still sense in my own self sometimes, and that I do see whenever I am working in our churches.
If we take the verses narrative from for granted, we often don't see the assumptions that come with it about religion, about science, and about the relationship between them. So to wrap up today, I want to give you and point out the three assumptions that this narrative has that I think we have deeply ingrained if we adhere to the story of science versus religion. And I want to realize that this may not be the best pedagogical move to not give you the better story. You'll have to come back next week for that.
But this narrative of science versus religion, the fact that you all still know the Scopes Monkey trial, is so deeply ingrained in us that I think it is worth sitting with the ways it has shaped our imagination and has shaping the ways that we engage with the church across the street or down the road with folks in our own families or circles who maybe still adhere to a literal reading of the Bible.
So the first thing that this story of religion versus science assumes is that science is inherently disenchanting.
And science is disenchanting because it is primarily a story of absence.
Scientists find nothing religious in the world, and therefore the absence destroys whatever presence individuals had hoped to encounter or feel.
We then tell ourselves that science is dangerous because it is disenchanting.
And if this is the case, it either leaves us with an incredibly defensive posture towards science, or if we are part of the enlightened who have been disenchanted, it can leave us deeply jaded in our posture.
This defensive and jaded posture then influences the ways we engage with one another and the larger church.
The second assumption that science versus Religion leaves us with is the one that is the most obvious for today. It assumes that the only form the relationship between religion and science can take is inevitable conflict.
Scripture says one thing, science says the other. Religion requires one set of belief that science shows is baseless. According to this story, science not only results in unbelief, but unbelief is something that happens to religion rather than something that can come from religion or out of religion.
The verses story pits science and religion against each other, which makes their relationship primarily about sexual settling scores.
And if we assume conflict, conflict will be the form we take in our relationships and our only goal will be to win.
Which brings us to the last assumption for today.
The way of seeing that is called science versus religion leaves us with lenses that see religion, especially things like religious literalism and as fundamentally irrational and unscientific.
This is especially evident in things like the heresy case of Charles Briggs and the rise of fundamentalism. It's easy to see that as a reaction that there is nothing rational about what's going on. They are just simply reacting to the forces that are too strong for them and are choosing to close their eyes at things that are too uncomfortable.
Which means that if this were true, literalism is something that is done in spite of science.
Which means if we haven't already given up on literalists as ignorant, our solution is to scientifically disenchant people so we can get along.
Our hope is that we can amass enough science to catch others in their ignorance.
Because what is at stake here is being right.
And what I want to say is that this is not only not the full story of religion and science, but it actually does not prepare us for what is actually at stake for those who read the Bible literally.
And as long as we don't fully understand the stakes involved, we will not only keep misrepresenting other Christians, but we will never actually see them fully enough to move forward into anything new.
And so what if the story was the opposite of this? What if science was actually enchanting?
What if science and religion were not in conflict? What would happen if the two actually kissed?
And what if actually we found the stories we were looking for?
That's the story for next week,
[00:37:28] Speaker E: And
[00:37:28] Speaker A: we've got time for questions.
Virginia, if you want to take this. I'll take this.
Without getting too deep into it, could
[00:37:37] Speaker B: you expound a little bit on the
[00:37:39] Speaker A: heliocentricity and the Eucharist idea? Conflict.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: I can't get too deep into it, no.
The basis being that since the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Renaissance, the Catholic Church, especially like in the form of Thomas Aquinas, ends up readjusting all of its theology around how do we understand real presence and what is happening metaphysically in the celebration of the Mass?
They restructured their entire theology in order to align with Aristotle's premise. And so what heliocentrism did was kind of the final nail in the coffin of Aristotle's whole, whole system of thought, which if that were true, we need to go back to the drawing board and what's happening in the Mass and whatnot.
It's an all or nothing thing. You're right. Exactly. Which I want to say, to be fair to the Catholic Church, like 50 years later, Trent, down the road like this reimagining and retroacting happens. But in 1633, things are so fresh that I am deeply sympathetic to all that the Vatican and the different schools are trying to juggle that Galileo doing this and doing it in a pretty flippant and shady way was not a welcome sight.
Good question.
[00:39:03] Speaker C: Thank you.
Gosh, I love this. I am very interested in visiting religious archaeological sites. Unfortunately today, because of the turmoils, plural, you know, not able to do so. I did have an opportunity to visit Israel a while ago. And when you do go to a particular site, they always say, this is where we think we believe. But it's not 100% sure that, you know, the crucifixion happened here or so on and so forth, which I think is fairly reasonable.
However, skipping that, I wanted to ask you, have you been to any of these biblical sites in the Middle East?
[00:39:45] Speaker B: I have not, actually.
[00:39:46] Speaker C: Would you like to go?
[00:39:48] Speaker B: I would love to go to Egypt.
I would love to go. If you read the book, one of the early chapters is about Herculaneum and about the search for Homer. So if you all are big Odyssey fans after the movie. So much of this story is also about the literal search for Homer's stories. I would love to go to. To Troy and to this and the different places that are.
[00:40:09] Speaker C: I have been to Troy and it's interesting.
I remember it being a pile of rocks, which is what obviously these places are, Right. You're not going to see a full blown edifice. But I just find this subject to be so. So I'm very passionate about it. And I hope one day to get to Iraq. Iraq and Iran and see.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And see the Babylonian. I love that too. Well, I would love to go. And maybe we go together.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: Maybe the church can sponsor, get Dr.
[00:40:39] Speaker A: James taking notes thank you.
[00:40:42] Speaker C: Appreciate it.
[00:40:53] Speaker D: Would you be willing to share a bit about your personal story? I mean, you arrive at an undergraduate college which. Which is in the process of firing somebody for believing in evolution.
And my guess is that when we hear next week that we're going to hear that. But I'm just wondering if you'd share a little bit about when and how that may have happened, given whatever your personal family background was.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I will share more about this next week for sure, but I think so. I think I came out of a lot of circles. It sounds eavesdropping on your all's conversation. It sounds like many of you who maybe came out of more fundamentalist evangelical families and churches who still read the Bible very literally. I'll bring something for you to see next week, which I think is so cool, but it's just part of this culture.
And so I absolutely believe them. And so if I'm honest with you, when that was going down, it made total sense to me that a university would fire this professor.
And I think that that not only gave me, that fueled this project, but then accounted for a lot of the surprises in the writing, which I will get to next week in that when I went to this project, I went with a posture of obviously the story is about science versus religion, because this is just conflict through and through.
And that's not what I ended up finding.
And so that was as I was writing this, that was a growth process for me that by the time I started my PhD program, I was no longer part of that church or that culture. I was kind of in between churches and cultures. I had not yet had the grace of finding the Presbyterians.
And I think that this project did a lot for helping me unpack where this story came from, how it impacted my own life and reading of the Scriptures, but then also gave me an imagination for why I value the Bible and why I value scriptures and sacraments that maybe are not tied to archaeology, even though I am still admittedly enchanted by archaeology.
Does that answer your question? Kathy,
[00:43:06] Speaker E: Wonderful talk. Thank you.
My question about religion and science came in different colors and different flavors over many years. And the latest question that came to my mind was one thing that we probably could agree on, that God is the power behind things, how they work, how the world works to establish some rules. But then when you look at the New Testament, at the miracles, those rules would be broken by the people who are in line with God. So that is my latest conflict.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah. No. And I think that these two other ways that could be part of our story is that since Galileo and especially since Newton, people will try to get around this conflict by saying not only that God is the first mover, but people like Newton. Newton is very enchanted by the idea of like, what if God is just great gravity? That like, that is how he described. That's how he imagines God. It's like this. That's how God is making this all possible, because God is literally holding us all together.
But I think it's very imaginative. And then even a lot of the theologians in the church of the 19th century try to end up making peace with evolution because they're like, well, God can still. God still started this whole thing.
And even if God isn't actively involved, at least God is still all powerful and began it. That gets us into other theological murky waters that are not our story. Then the other thing that you brought up that I think is really important is that even for people who then are amenable, what do you do with miracles? Especially if miracles are a breaking of whatever scientific laws and the answers to that are vast. If you're people like Thomas Jefferson, you take a pair of scissors to your Bible and you cut out the sections that are miraculous and voila, like, there's no problem.
But I think that. But this going back to our initial point of like, this is an ongoing story because we believe in things that make this messy, that make these two spheres that we would like to keep separate, nicely overlapped sometimes, which can be disenchanting. But I also think can be very enchanting. So I love. Those were great thoughts.
[00:45:28] Speaker A: Can we get a round of applause and I hope that many of you, you come back next week for part two. The more interesting part, apparently, I mean, tall order and just a reminder, so small group signups are in the back. We have multiple faith seeking understanding groups. What a great topic for anyone. If you hear the title Adventures in Bart. Wow, there's one of those. And then we've got three through our Art of Faithfulness group. So I really hope that you would check those out. We also have one on AI in the church that is going to be looking at the podcast Pope's Encyclical.
So anyway, lots of great options. Please, please don't hesitate to go grab one of these. Signups are in the back. Book sales. Lauren, wave for the group. Lauren is back there ready, ready to sell you a book, friends. Thanks and have a great rest of your day.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Thank you all.
