Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, everyone, Mark Clark here. Welcome to the Mark Clark podcast. I am super excited about this episode and the eight week series that we are starting today based on my book, the problem of God. This is all about skepticism and confirming and affirming your faith if you're already christian. So we are tackling today some of the biggest questions that skeptics have about Christianity. And so we're going to explore the intersection in this episode of faith and science, debunk the myth that belief in God and science are totally incompatible, and share some personal stories about my own journey from skepticism to faith. So this is a thought provoking discussion that might just challenge your own assumptions. So this is all part of the Thrive podcast Network, a family of great podcasts.
Mark Clark [00:00:42]:
And if you're listening to mine, you're going to love another podcast on our network called am I doing this right? The two hosts are awesome. Super fun. So go over and check that one out on the thrive podcast network. All right, let's get into this question about science and faith. Let's do it.
Mark Clark [00:00:56]:
The next eight weeks, we are exploring the deepest questions that we have as human beings that skeptics really ask against christians. Questions of evil and suffering, science, God's existence, sex, hell, the exclusivity of Christianity. So really glad that you're here. We have a lot to jump into. A special welcome to Calgary. This is your first Sunday, the newest location of village church. So a special welcome to you. We are glad to have you guys, Vin and Laura.
Mark Clark [00:01:24]:
Vin's just an amazing pastor and we're really excited about that launch. You got a great team in Calgary. So really excited to have you. And if you're new at any of our campuses, any of our locations, good to have you. And maybe you're here as a skeptic exploring the big questions of Christianity, the big questions of faith and God with us. Really glad that you're here. That was my upbringing. And so as we tackle these questions, I really hope that it's helpful for you on the journey again, for many of you know, but for those of you who are new, I was raised in an atheistic home, very atheist.
Mark Clark [00:01:57]:
So atheistic that my father actually was such an ardent atheist that he named. So I have an older brother named Matthew, four years older than me, and he refused to spell his name with two t's. And he told my mom was because he didn't want it to be spelled the same as the bible spells it, the gospel of Matthew. He said, I don't want anything to do with the Bible so he spelled my brother's name with one t. And then four years later, they had me and named me Mark. So clearly he didn't see the irony of what it was like to, like, literally have a brother. And there's, oh, name is Luke. I like the name Luke.
Mark Clark [00:02:26]:
And then John, little John running around. And so literally, the guy never opened a bible before. I have a clue what's going on in the world and was against christianity, was against faith. I had no bible in my life, no prayer, no God, no church, never walked till I was 19. So these massive questions were actually part of my life and continue to be part of my life. So I'm a skeptic and so we can be friends and hopefully that you're, you know, when I was first presented with the idea of Christianity, the DSPH, I actually laughed at it because in my mind, in my upbringing, the stereotype of somebody who believed in God where people, you had smart people and then you had dumb people. You had people who dealt with science and reason and rationale, and then you had people who believed in God and had faith and went to church, and it was a crutch. So there were smart people and dumb people.
Mark Clark [00:03:11]:
In my upbringing, I had the stereotype of, you had smart people who went to university, had science degrees, who actually knew mathematics and history and literary things and philosophy and psychology, and then you had people who believed in God. And in my mind, that was just some, you know, an old lady and a dead long denim dress down to the floor, probably made her own butter, believed the earth was 1000 years old, and we ran around with dinosaurs. And I was like, okay, you had smart people and dumb people. And so my world was like, I don't want to be a dumb person. And then Christianity got presented to me, and I actually started investigating it from a scientific perspective. I started investigating it from a historical perspective, a psychological, philosophical. And I began to realize that it was more rash. See, here's what happened to me.
Mark Clark [00:03:55]:
I literally went from somebody who, when I started studying Christianity, became a Christian. I gave my life to Jesus. Then I went back into the world that I grew up in, and I started to share with them, and they were all convinced, my family, my friends, that I was part of a cult. And so I would sit around the dinner table and they'd say, you know, you're part of a cult. And I talk about, I'm not part of a cult. What'd you do at church today? I drank the blood and ate the flesh of a dead man. All right, but it's not a cult, I swear. All right? And so what I began realizing is almost overnight, as I started to explore Christianity, it began to make rational, reasonable sense to me as I studied the philosophy and the science and the history.
Mark Clark [00:04:33]:
And what I began to realize was I went from smoking weed on Friday night with all my buddies in a big garage to few Friday nights later, having to stand in front of those 30 or 40 friends actually defending Christianity, showing them why it was rational, legitimate, philosophical, historical. And so it was smoking weed one night to defending Christianity. And, I mean, I was still, you know, getting hungry for potato chips because the smoke was flying out the garage. But I was able to defend Christianity from a rational, reasonable standpoint and show them that you don't have to abandon your mind in order to be a Christian. You don't have to abandon your mind in order to be a theist, someone who believes in God. And so there's all these massive questions that arise in life. There's all these issues that come about and all these massive things. And so the first thing I want to do is address this problem of science and talk about and confront the myth that you're either a scientific person or you're someone who believes in faith or someone who believes in God, someone who believes.
Mark Clark [00:05:27]:
And what I began to realize is the first thing to understand, to push against the myth and the metanarrative of culture that tells you that people who believe in God don't believe in science. The first thing to say is you have to understand, across all the disciplines, and even in a university, the deeper people are delving into science, into philosophy, into psychology, the evidence is actually rising to point more toward God, not away from him, which is why people, sociologists talk about the idea of the myth of the secular society. A guy named Leslie Newbegin talked about this. He said, way back in the day, we all thought that as technology deepened, as science got deeper, as cosmology went deeper, as biology went deeper, that faith would be abandoned. No one would have faith. By the end of the 20th century, no one would be a Christian anymore. And what we've seen is robust, orthodox faith is flourishing all over the world. And it surprised everybody because the secular culture is actually a myth.
Mark Clark [00:06:23]:
People are spiritual, all right? Jim Carrey, Howard Stern, Jerry Seinfeld. These guys meditate. I'm not going to lie to you. I never thought Ace Ventura would talk about meditating. This guy's spiritual, all right? He's like, z, I'm going to connect to something in the universe. There's something going on in the world where the deeper science has gone, it hasn't created, necessarily a purely secular culture. I'm going to say sexual culture. It's probably created that secular culture, and we'll deal with that in a few weeks.
Mark Clark [00:06:54]:
But a secular culture, it didn't actually do that. So what we've begin, we're going to find is that people are actually exploring Christianity and becoming theists. Quentin Smith, who is an ardent atheist, he's against Christianity. He started to bemoan. He's a philosopher. He started to bemoan the fact that philosophy departments across the US actually started to get taken over recently, over the last 20 years, by people who believe in God. Quentin Smith wrote this in a magazine called Philo. He said, the field of philosophy is being de secularized across universities in America.
Mark Clark [00:07:29]:
One quarter to one third of the philosophy departments now consists of theists. Those are people who believe in God, generally christians. And he bemoans it. And he says, the reason this has happened is because basically, of one philosopher, his name is Alvin Plantiga, he is recognized as the greatest living philosopher in the world, and he's a Christian. And Quinton Smith cannot understand this. And so he says, I don't like the fact that philosophy is being de secularized. And actually, so what we've begun to realize is, people, this Christianity is not for, like, in my brain. It was that guy in the swamp, all right? Who lives in the swamp, you know, wears a t shirt, I love Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:08:07]:
If you don't love Jesus, I'll stab you. And thinks Oprah's the Antichrist. That's what I thought a Christian was. That's what I thought you have to do to believe in God. And what we're recognizing is it's not that. It's John Polkinghorne and John Lennox, philosophers and PhDs of mathematics at Oxford. It's Francis Collins who was given the job to map out the entire human genome in regard to DNA, and then ends up writing a book called the language of God. As he delved deeper into science, he began realizing the evidence is not pointing away from God, but it's actually pointing toward him.
Mark Clark [00:08:43]:
And this is what we've got to begin to understand as a culture. David Bentley Arp, who's a philosopher, says this. I do not regard true philosophical atheism as an intellectually valid or even cogent position. In fact, I see it as a fundamentally irrational view of reality, which can be sustained only by a tragic absence of curiosity or a fervently resolute will to believe the absurd. The case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief, that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition. People are beginning to recognize that atheism itself, the tenants of it, don't even make sense. So let me talk about a few reasons why. The first is, if you're an atheist here, if you're an agnostic here, if you're someone who's just exploring, that was my upbringing.
Mark Clark [00:09:31]:
That's what I had to deal with in my life for years and years and years before I wrestled this stuff to the ground. The first thing you've got to recognize is have the self awareness and the humility enough to recognize that you too have a faith position. You too, actually. You don't come to life and evidence as a blank slate. I know you think you do. You think that people who are christians kind of, they already have this idea of God, and so they just take the evidence and they put it in there. They're already coming at it with a worldview. So it's spoiled.
Mark Clark [00:09:57]:
But the reality is every single one of us is spoiled because every single one of us has a worldview. You're not a blank slate of information. You actually come at this with things you hold on to. So as you're gauging information, it's through a filter that has an agenda. And let me explain what I mean by this. There's a guy named Richard Lewontin. He's a Harvard biologist, and he wrote this years ago in a New York book review. He actually talked about the idea that he preferred naturalism, and this is what he meant as a scientist.
Mark Clark [00:10:23]:
He says we have a prior commitment to materialism, meaning the scientific community. It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence two material causes for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door. So literally what he's saying is we like naturalistic explanations for the science we do. So we can't come up with, we will not come up with supernatural ones. Listen, here's what's driving his science, and this is what is scary. What's driving his science is not facts, but philosophy. He's already come up with a philosophy that I can't come up with supernatural explanations for the universe. I will only come up with non theistic ones.
Mark Clark [00:11:11]:
This is a problem. So what we all begin need to be very self aware of is that you already come with an agenda. And every single one of us has a faith commitment at some level. Stuff that you believe that you can't absolutely prove 100%. Now, here's what I mean by this. I was reading a story recently of a nurse who works at a hospital, and she works at a hospital with all these doctors, and they were dealing with this patient who is sick, and they were trying to figure out whether to take them off life support. And the doctors always told her, you're a person of faith, and you should never let your faith commitments inform the way that you're a nurse. And so they all talked about whether they should take this man off life support, and they finally did.
Mark Clark [00:11:50]:
And the four doctors and three nurses gathered around and they said, you know, I'm glad he's off life support now because he's not suffering anymore. And they all walked away. And what dawned on the nurse was in that moment, they just made a faith comment. They actually made a metaphysical statement about the afterlife. They said that he's not suffering anymore. And to her she said, how do you know this? How do you know that he's not suffering more? What is it about your evidence that shows you definitively that this person isn't somewhere else? How do you know, in that moment, a group of people just made a metaphysical faith statement and didn't even know it? And that's the scary thing. All of us need to be so self aware that at every moment, listen, this isn't a question of one faith commitment versus people who don't have faith. Everyone has it.
Mark Clark [00:12:47]:
So the question becomes, how do you and I actually work through it? How do we get to a place in our life where we say, what are the best ideas? Because you're coming. If you're an agnostic or an atheist, and you're holding on to, you know, when Copernicus in the 15 hundreds came out with this heliocentric view of the world, and he said, hey, listen, here's what I've recognized. The sun ain't revolving around the earth. The earth is actually revolving around the sun. Do you know who were the biggest opponents to Copernicus conclusion? Not the church. Church didn't care. It was science. The scientific community pushed against Copernicus.
Mark Clark [00:13:20]:
Why? Because they'd been teaching that the sun revolved around the earth for thousands of years. So now an agenda was being challenged when Edwin Hubble looked through his telescope in the 1920s and thirties and realized that the big Bang was the beginning of the universe. Do you know who pushed against it? It wasn't the church. It was the scientific community, because they said the idea that the universe began in a single moment. All space, time, matter, energy came into existence in a single moment, reeked of religion. And so the scientific community rejected it because it kind of called out for something to exist before that happened, right? Because when something happened, when something, you know, a cause happens, you need an effect for a cause. And so it began to raise these massive questions. I was sitting there this morning.
Mark Clark [00:14:16]:
Every morning when I'm preaching, I get up and kind of sit on my couch and get a pot of coffee and sit, just kind of read over my notes and pray and think about what I'm going to be talking about. And this morning, I was sitting there on my couch, and we have this new dog that we've got a couple months ago. So we have this little string, and it has all these bells on it, and it's attached to my door. And so anytime you open the door, it rings, right? So I'm in. I'm in our house, and I'm sitting there reading my notes, and it's dead silent in my house. And all that I heard were these bells. And I looked over, and there was no one there. And I'm like, what's going on right now? And I kind of went, okay, I'm going to ignore this now.
Mark Clark [00:15:03]:
Now I'm freaking out because I think, oh, my gosh, I got a ghost in my house, right? Because here's what the explanation for those bells ringing can't be. It's not nothing, right? We agree with that. It can't be nothing. There has to be some explanation whether there's an earthquake happening right now, whether my kids are crawling around trying to scare me, ringing it, whether there's an actual ghost in my house ringing the bell to get my. I don't know, but there has to be. It can't be nothing. So I went to the door and I opened the lap. I'm, like, looking out.
Mark Clark [00:15:36]:
And then I opened the door and I went outside, and my father in law, who's visiting right now, is sitting out on the deck reading. He's like, oh, sorry. I was trying to get in there. I'm like, I thought you were a ghost. Freaking me out, man. When are you leaving? Now, here's what I now remember. You and I are trying to be rational, reasonable, logical people. It would not suffice to say here was this effect that happened, but there was no cause.
Mark Clark [00:16:06]:
Let's just not investigate it. Don't worry about it. Sure, something rang, something banged, energy, matter, everything came in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's not talk about what actually caused it. What caused it was nothing. That's not the most. Remember what we're trying to be rational, reasonable explanation for the actual evidence.
Mark Clark [00:16:27]:
We want to follow the evidence. Now, secondly, we have to make a distinction. Oftentimes people come against theism and talk about scientific realities and say, and we got to make a distinction between operational science and origin science. And what I mean by that is operational science is the stuff that is about present reality and their regularities. So there are things that happen all the time. We know that water boils at this temperature, we know that water turns to ice at this temperature. We can do those hypothesis verification, experiment, do it all over and over and over and over again, same result. Those are called regularities.
Mark Clark [00:17:06]:
That's operational science. We can do it. Now. The problem is, is when we're talking about these kind of things, cosmology, origin science, it's, it's not present, it's about a past event, and it's a singularity. It only happened once. You can't redo it. And so there's different ideas about how to approach this. It's forensic science.
Mark Clark [00:17:23]:
It's like walking on a murder scene. You can't reproduce the murder, right? Operational science is stuff that just goes, you can do, every time you can do an experiment, it'll be the same every time because that's the way the universe works. I remember when I was a student, I was grade eight, they said, okay, your science experiment is due Wednesday, remember about you going the gym and you'd like make a big Bristol board thing? And it was like, here's my science experiment. It was always like, soil and like, I don't know. And so I was like, oh man, it's Tuesday night, I don't know what to do for my science experiment. So I took, I looked, I'm like, what am I gonna do? And I took two cups of water and I put them like this, and I went to my kitchen, I grabbed a paper towel and I wrapped it up like this, and I just put one thing in the water and then this cup was empty. And I just watched the water climb up the paper towel and drip into the cup. That was my science experiment.
Mark Clark [00:18:13]:
I thought I was from Francis Bacon, all right? I literally, I thought I was a man, all right? Because now that's going to happen. Every time you do it, that water is going to climb up that paper towel and drip in there. That's operational science, you can test it. It's present, it's irregularity, problem with origin science, it's about a singularity, it's about an event that you can't create. Again, it's a past event. And so what you got to do is you realize in that context, the evidence overwhelmingly keeps pointing to the existence of a mind that began things. Now, thirdly, I've got to address very quickly the issue of evolution, because, of course, in regard to science, most people today will say, I don't need God because we know the scientific conclusions of evolution. Ergo, we don't need God.
Mark Clark [00:18:57]:
Evolution has given us the answer for origin, meaning, morality, destiny. We don't need God anymore and we carry on. Here's a few problems with that. First, you have to actually prove why evolution would equal there not being a God. That is a massive assumption. Even if you say you're a naturalistic evolutionary thinker, here's the problem. You actually have to prove some stuff, which is how does the conclusion that evolution is true actually end you with, ergo, there can't be a goddess. There's a thousand things you have to fill in, right? You have to understand that.
Mark Clark [00:19:34]:
You can't just say, look, and this is what Dawkins tends to. Richard Dawkins tends to do. An evolutionary thinker. He writes the selfish gene and the blind watchmaker, and he says, ergo, because I've proven evolution is true, ergo, there is no God. And most scientists look and say, stop saying these dumb things, Richard Dawkins, because there's 100 proofs that you have to do between this and this. You can't just jump from one to the other. You actually have to prove stuff. Now, secondly, there's reasons why evolution by itself, in the classic form, is not accepted across disciplines.
Mark Clark [00:20:10]:
Like the big bang is, for instance, accepted by most people. And the reason is because it has a lot some stuff to prove. The evidence isn't all there. First cause hasn't been proven. The complexity of the human eye hasn't been proven. The fossil record is a problem. The cambrian explosion, the fact that all these fossils end up fully formed and there's no transitional forms to be found. There's no half whale, half horse fossils that are found anywhere.
Mark Clark [00:20:36]:
There's a horse, there's a whale, there's a chicken, there's a zebra. There's not these half formed fossils to be found anywhere. And so what people have found is that the reality is that evolution by itself needs to do a whole bunch of inference. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould says this. Who was the, the most celebrated evolutionary thinker, paleontologist, darwinian thinker of the past generation? Very atheistic guy. Here's what Stephen Jay Gould admits. He says the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary tree that adorns our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches.
Mark Clark [00:21:24]:
The rest is inference, meaning we have to build it in. Think about that for a second. We've built an entire worldview and faith commitment on inferences. On. We have the tips. And now let's just work backwards from there and assume, assume, assume, assume all the way back. That's a problem. Now, thirdly, because I'm not a biologist or an archaeologist or a paleontologist, there's another issue with evolution that's more of a philosophical problem.
Mark Clark [00:21:53]:
And if you have trouble following what I'm about to say, you can go back and listen to it again, because I think it's really important. But the logic to follow is very important here. Philosophers basically come to show that evolution by itself is a contradictory worldview to hold. And here's why. What you and I sit here and believe right now about the world, about your experience, about the people around you, from an evolutionary naturalistic perspective, you think the thoughts that you think your cognitive faculties function because, not because they're connected to anything. That's true about the universe. That's not the issue in regard to evolution. It's only what helped you survive.
Mark Clark [00:22:33]:
And it's only to get your genes into the next gene pool. That's the only thing you think about. That's the only thing you do. And over hundreds of thousands of years, humankind has come up with moral constructs and deductions about the universe and their experience in the world only because it's what's useful for survival. All right? That's basically all we do. That's what your cognitive faculties are. Those are the conclusions that your brain has drawn untrue beliefs through years of adaptive choices. Here's the problem then.
Mark Clark [00:23:02]:
We can't trust our belief forming faculties because all they've done is told us what is needed for survival. They have not told us what's actually true. And this is a problem. See, people look and they say the only reason there's some God consciousness in the experience of humankind, not because God's out there and it connects to some kind of truth. It's only because you needed that nice feeling and crutch at a really bad time for hundreds of thousands of years when you were suffering as a, you know, in your caveman days. And so you needed to come up with something that gave you hope, and that's why you believe it. Here's the problem then. If you can't trust your rational, reasonable cognitive faculties to tell you the truth about anything, including God, then the problem is, is you can't actually trust him to tell you the truth.
Mark Clark [00:23:50]:
Science either, or the evolutionary theory. Because what you've got yourself into is you can't trust rational, reasonable thinking because it's not giving you truth, it's only giving you what you need to survive. And so cs Lewis, facing this problem, said, unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. What's happening is you're. The minute you say that everything I believe, only I believe it, is because of adaptive choices, not because of truth, you're cutting off the branch that you want to sit on. So Mitch Stokes points this out.
Mark Clark [00:24:38]:
He said, atheists then have a reason to doubt whether evolution would result result in cognitive faculties that produce mostly true beliefs, and if so, then they have a reason to withhold judgment on the reliability of their cognitive faculties. This ignorance would atheists, if they're consistent, spread to all of their other beliefs, including atheism and evolution. There's no telling whether unguided evolution would fashion our cognitive faculties to produce mostly true beliefs. Thus, atheists who believe the standard evolutionary story must reserve judgment about whether any of their beliefs produced by these faculties are true. This includes the belief in the evolutionary story. Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it. Mind blown. You can't.
Mark Clark [00:25:29]:
If that's actually your worldview, you can't trust your worldview. And Darwin knew it. And this has been called Darwin's doubt. Listen to these haunting words that Darwin himself wrote within me. The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind? If there are any convictions in such a mind, he knew it. If what I'm saying is true, I can't trust what I'm saying is true. And so these are a few reasons why present day, there's a lot of scholars and discipline that are pushing against the evolutionary narrative.
Mark Clark [00:26:27]:
Now, why isn't science a problem for Christianity? There's a bunch of reasons. The biggest is basically a false dichotomy, because the deeper the idea that faith wouldn't equal science, science wouldn't equal faith. The deeper science goes, the more it's actually making legitimate proof of the existence of God, or at least evidences for it. We have to understand that Darwin was doing observational science. He was looking at bones and wings and outside things and trying to track it in turtles. What we got to understand is that now we're delving into DNA stuff. We're getting into the idea of the difference between nature and higher forms. Meaning if you look at the Grand Canyon, the Grand Canyon, you'd walk up to it and go, this is nature got carved out over millions of years.
Mark Clark [00:27:12]:
Awesome. If you walk up to Mount Rushmore, what are you going to conclude? That it got there through time by chance? Just kind of. If you wait long enough, George Washington's face going to pop out of a mountain, probably not going to happen. The minute you see Mount Rushmore, you start to think something different than when you see the Grand Canyon. You say, there was a mine here, here, that crafted this, that threw some dynamite at it. There was a plan. When my wife and I moved across from Toronto to here, we drove for four and a half days. Our air conditioner run out in the middle of Montana.
Mark Clark [00:27:43]:
We were soaking wet in the middle of July. We had to take our dirty socks and dip them in freezing cold water and put them on our face just to stay cold. Don't tell her I told you. We got. We said we should get off the highway and go visit Mount Rushmore. So we went down there, looked at it, and she went, is that it? I'm like, gah. But here's this beautiful, intelligent mind crafted this with a plant. If you look at a rock on the ground and the water's going over it, you go, okay, nature, you find an arrowhead, you go, brain.
Mark Clark [00:28:19]:
Something crafted this. There was a plan here. There was a reason for this. So over and over again, we got to understand even scientists, you know, you watch the movie contact, based on Carl Sagan's work, where they're putting their radio waves out there to hear back any kind of coded information that might come from space. And immediately they say, okay, that's actual proof that there's intelligent life out there. That's actually what they're looking for. And so as we've delved deeper into science, what we began to realize is there's nothing science has proven that says air goes, there is no God. But what they are finding are things that are pointing to evidences to make us go, maybe there is a God.
Mark Clark [00:28:57]:
For instance, let's take two disciplines, biology, cosmology, biology. We've started delving in way beyond observational science. We've mapped out the human genome. There's code in every living cell. There's detailed information, code in a single cell organism like an amoeba. Richard Dawkins points out of there is enough coded genetic, legitimate, logical information to fill a thousand sets of encyclopedias. And how do we. Isn't that more Rushmore than Grand Canyon? That makes us look at it and go, my gosh, there's an actual code here to the point where Francis Collins ended up believing in God and writing a book about it, calling it the language of God, going, I can't believe this.
Mark Clark [00:29:39]:
We're mapping out an actual genetic code on every living organism has this. Where did it come from? See, here's the issue. The minute you have information like that that is all planned out and detailed, you begin to go, I think there was something behind this, maybe a mind. Which is why if you don't want to be a theist, here are your other options. There is actually a whole movement of people who believe. And don't laugh at this. It's not a joke, but you can totally laugh at it, that there's aliens. And the aliens are what created human life.
Mark Clark [00:30:12]:
So if you want the most popular version of this, go watch the movie Prometheus. In the opening scene of Prometheus, some of you watching, you're like, I have no idea what that scene was about. Some white faced dude with a big forehead who looks like a worm threw some stuff in the water. What that is is it's a theory that's very popular among people who don't want to believe in God, which is aliens actually encoded DNA information, put it on earth. They were the first cause that created evolution to move forward. And that's why we find genetic code in biology. See, the minute you find that kind of information, it causes a question, who did this? What kind? And of course, then the theist goes, all right, there's aliens. Who created them? And then we're back to the beginning of the argument, right? Shoot another race of aliens.
Mark Clark [00:31:02]:
All right, who created them? So now, then there's the world of cosmology, where people have begun to look at the stars and time and energy and space and the balance of the universe and the laws of physics, and we've begun realizing this, actually points toward God, to the point where celebrated astronomer Robert Jastrow, who's agnostic, he says this. We now see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origins of the world, that the chain of events leading to humankind commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy. The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all except theologians. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact. And so Alan Rex Sandez, said to be the greatest observational cosmologist of all time, said the same thing, science. That drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. And so here's what we begin to realize. The science goes deeper.
Mark Clark [00:32:10]:
It starts to actually point to the evidences of God, and it cannot actually point to the question of God's non existence. That's very important. There is a limitation in science, and here's why a guy named Stephen Jay Gould again talked about him earlier, very celebrated Harvard University professor of zoology, is dead now. Here's what he said about the limits of science. He says, nature just is in all her complexity and diversity, in all her sublime indifference to our desires. Therefore, we cannot use nature for our moral instruction or for answering any question within the magisterium of religion to say it. For my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time, science simply cannot, by its legitimate methods, adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendent of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it.
Mark Clark [00:32:58]:
We simply cannot comment on it as scientists. That's the limitation. It cannot say by everything we just found, ergo, there is no God, because science deals with what's called physics. They look at the world and the stars and soil and physical things. That's the world of physics. The question of God is what's called a metaphysical question. The word meta is a greek word after or beyond. Once the physics comes to an end, then you've got deeper questions about what happens after physics ends.
Mark Clark [00:33:29]:
And that question cannot be answered by science at all. It can't even speak to it. We can use science to point us towards certain evidences of the reality. And this is why, listen, this is why the mythology of it really is a 19th century propaganda piece that there was this some kind of history of the church versus science. The church has never liked science. Listen, that is not true. Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano, Bruno, all these guys, as they were coming to conclusions, there were times when the church pushed back. Yes.
Mark Clark [00:34:00]:
You know, people point out, oh, Bruno, look at Gionardo Bruno. He was actually persecuted. He was burned at the stake. You know why he was burned at the stake? It wasn't for scientific conclusions. They didn't care about that. It was because he had a bad view of the Trinity. Now, I'm not saying that's a good thing. Oh, they burned him out? The stake from the Trinity.
Mark Clark [00:34:16]:
Oh, praise goddess. All right, that's not what I'm saying. The church still is a messed up past and we'll talk about that in the week on hypocrisy. All right, they're burning witches, they're doing crazy stuff. What's that about? How could we actually be part of this thing? But they didn't burn them at the stake for scientific conclusions. Galileo, hang with the pope. Copernicus, these guys, people. Oh, no.
Mark Clark [00:34:37]:
The church thought the earth was flat because in the psalms it says he set up corners. No one thought the earth, earth was flat. All this is they could see the hull of a ship would disappear before the mast when it went out. They could see the reflection of the earth on the moon during an eclipse. They weren't dumb. It wasn't some flat reflection. Way back at the time of the Greeks, everyone knew the earth was round the church. The idea that the church was against this has now been.
Mark Clark [00:35:03]:
Alistair McGrath points this out. Professor at Oxford, he says the idea that science and religion are in perpetual conflict is no longer taken seriously by any major historian of science. One of the last remaining bastions of atheism survives only at the popular level, namely the myth that an atheistic, fact based religion is permanently at war with a faith based religion. It's not. Fact based science permanently at war. Faith based religion, it's not. The reality, actually, is that the thing we call modern science grew out of the garden and the matrix of Christianity, it couldn't. The thing we call modern science could never have actually came out of the worldviews that existed, existed at the time.
Mark Clark [00:35:42]:
Animism believes that there's divine beings in everything in the world, and so they're in the rocks and the trees, you know, that kind of philosophy. So you don't test it, you can't poke and prod it because there's gods in there, right? Polytheism believed, you know, all these different gods and they're out there and they're. And there's, you know, you ask, how did this hurricane happen? Christianity comes and goes. Let's look at what God created. The systems, the temperature of the water, the wind systems. God has set up a world where you can do a test, and it's organized and it's complex, but it's structured and there's design. If you drop an apple seed, an apple tree comes up, not an orange tree. God did this other religious know.
Mark Clark [00:36:22]:
Why is the, why is there a hurricane? Poseidon's angry. He's stirring up the water. Well, that's not going to breed science. They're just going to go, oh, shoot, better sacrifice my kid. But Christianity comes along and goes, no, no, let's figure out the system. That's why. Listen, the furthest thing from the truth is that Christianity doesn't like logic and reason and rationale the great heroes of Christianity. So you look at other religions and it's more about jurisprudence, it's study of law.
Mark Clark [00:36:53]:
But all through Christianity, it's Augustine, it's Aquinas, it's Jonathan Edwards, it's John Calvin, it's philosophy, it's theology, it's. The university was a 12th century christian invention. Christians wanted to do that. Brown, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, northwestern, all of these were founded on Christianity because they wanted unity in the midst of diversity to answer the question of God. So the university was born. How do we answer theological questions? Through the arts, through literature, through biology, through history. How do we bring those things together? Christianity has never run from rationale in reason and science. It moves toward it.
Mark Clark [00:37:39]:
It asks the question, what is actually true about the world? Which is, I want to end with the apostle Paul in the book of Romans. In the Bible, he says this, for what can be known about God is plain to them, meaning us, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made so that they are without excuse. Here's what Christianity says. Every day God is preaching to us, wooing us, telling us he loves us in creation, and he wants us to delve into it. He wants us to get better at cosmology. He wants us to get better at biology. He wants us to keep going.
Mark Clark [00:38:25]:
He's not afraid of it. The church shouldn't be afraid of it, because what has been made tells us about him. The physics tells us about the metaphysics. And he says, go into it because I'm waiting for you. And then Jesus, of course, shows up as the one who says, hey, I know it's invisible. Let me make him visible. Let me come into your context. Let me die the death you should have died.
Mark Clark [00:38:46]:
Let me rise again from death to give you life. And this is part of what we'll study in this series too, over the next eight weeks. The historicity of this. Why is it legitimate not only to believe in the scientific realm, but the historical realm, the philosophical realm of evil and suffering and the question of sex. As many people go, I don't want anything to do with Christianity. And it ain't because of some scientific conclusions. They're not sitting around reading Descartes and Isaac Newton. It's because I want to be able to sleep with whoever I want.
Mark Clark [00:39:13]:
But I can tell you that over coffee. They're going to cite some, you know, philosophical reason. But the reality is they're like, I don't want to, you know, what about the sexual thing? And what we're going to show is you probably got the whole sexual ethic of Christianity wrong because you probably think God's anti sex and he just wants, you know, hey, just have sex with procreation and then leave it alone. We're gonna find out. No, he's the most pro sex person in the universe. Evil and suffering, how we wrestle with that as we see it around the world, we're gonna see that it's not a proof against the existence of God. It actually cries out for the fact that you hate evil and you hate suffering is actually a pointer to him. Next week we're gonna delve into why.
Mark Clark [00:39:47]:
What are the arguments that God even exists? These are all things that we all wrestle with. And my hope is, honestly that you would doubt your doubts enough. Be skeptical about your own skepticism enough to actually lean in to the controversy a bit. If it disrupts you, that's okay. You got to lean into it to grow. Let me just pray for us. Father, we are grateful that you give us a day breath. We woke up today able to think.
Mark Clark [00:40:13]:
You give us minds to use to hunt you down because you love us, you woo us, you've given us creation in order to study it and find you. And I pray that we just do that. We actually lean into it, lean into our doubts, lean into our skepticism because you're not afraid of it. And I just pray that we wouldn't, we would have the actual courage to doubt our doubts and lean into our questions and hopefully find you at the end of those questions. I just pray for your grace and that you'd speak to us and we'd have the courage to listen. In Jesus great name, we pray. Amen. Okay, guys, thanks so much for being with us today.
Mark Clark [00:40:48]:
Have a great day, and we will see you next week for the question and the problem of God's existence. Thanks for being here.