Transcript
Welcome to the Kindlings Muse Podcast, an intelligent, imaginative, hospitable exploration of ideas that matter in contemporary life. And now here's your host, Dick Staub. Well, good evening, everybody. This is Dick Staub, your host, and I want to thank you for joining us tonight. I want to welcome you to the Kindlings Muse at Earl Palmer Ministries. This event is taped for podcasts in front of a live and lively audience at Burke Museum Cafe on the campus of
the University of Washington. And each month, Reverend Earl Palmer selects a book every person ought to read. And tonight, it's an amazing book by Francis Collins. The book is titled The Language of God, a Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. And Francis Collins is a pioneering medical geneticist who headed up the Human Genome Project. He's the most amazing guy and has really done some serious thinking about the harmonization and intersection of faith and science. And so we're
looking forward to a great conversation. Please join me in welcoming Earl Palmer with his overview of The Language of God. [Palmer] Yeah, this is a marvelous book. And Francis Collins, who's now the actually the director of NIH, National Institute of Health, United States, and probably the has more influence on what research is being done in modern medicine today than any other person in America. And he and he is a quite a remarkable man. When he wrote
this book, he tells his own journey of faith how he was raised in a home that was a non-believing home and did both his M.D. and Ph.D. in medicine. And then he had an amazing experience. He tells about it here where he had a patient, an older lady who was dying. And she had such an outlook on life that it was just totally engaging. This young atheist, and that's what Francis Collins
was. And she witnessed to him and said, Dr. Collins, you believe in God, don't you? Because he was commenting how much how optimistic she was about her life and all. And she said, Well, I believe in God and you believe in God, don't you? And he didn't. But it was interesting when she said that he couldn't say he didn't. He didn't know what to say. And he was so he just silent and he was stunned. And
after that, he tells that he was walking down the street near Johns Hopkins, where and he saw a Methodist church. He just off the wall walked into this Methodist church and to see if the pastor was there. And the pastor was there. And the pastor suggested he read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And then he tells of the tremendous impact of that journey with Lewis's questions and all as he came to have Christian faith. And
then then comes the book and he tells his own journey of science and makes the case for a Christian and taking the view that science is our friend. It's not our foe. And so I titled tonight Christianity and Science with the Christian Faith and Science Friends After All. And because we've wondered down through the years if we're friends, after all, we are friends after all. And this man has helped very much for Christians, serious believing Christians,
to see science as our friend and not our foe. Now, I'm going to read two quotes from Francis Collins and then jump into this theme. First, he says this. If you're a believer in God who picked up this book because of concerns that science is eroding faith by promoting an atheistic worldview, I hope you are reassured by the potential for harmony between faith and science. If God is the creator of all the universe, if God had
a plan for the arrival of humankind on the scene, and if he had a desire for personal fellowship with humans, into whom he had instilled the moral law as a signpost toward himself, by the way, a C.S. Lewis idea that we spoke on last month in Lewis in Wartime. Remember, that was his whole wartime speeches, good and evil, as a right and wrong, as a clue to the meaning of the universe. And that's what we
talked on last month up at Seattle Pacific University. And that became the book, Mere Christianity. And so he's borrowed that idea from Lewis that there is a signpost that's actually built into us. And it is the signpost installed where this sense of right and wrong we have. And then if that's the case, that he can hardly be threatened, a Christian, by the efforts of our, of God, can hardly be threatened by the efforts of our minds to
understand the grandeur of his creation. And Francis Collins takes the same position as the American Scientific Affiliation Christians, who are a bunch of scholars, scientists who are Christians, who said, God did it, let's figure out how. And that's what we get to do as scientists. And as in science, try to figure out how. But God did it, God created it. Let's see if we can figure out how. Then he has a second paragraph here. On the
other hand, if you are one who trusts the methods of science, but remains skeptical about faith, this would be a good moment to ask yourself, what barriers lie in your way towards seeking a harmony between these worldviews? Have you been concerned that belief in God requires a descent into irrationality or a compromise of logic or even intellectual suicide? It is hoped that the arguments presented within this book will provide at least a partial anecdote to that
view. Well, I love those two paragraphs that he puts in. They're bold and he's boldly endeavoring in this book to make that case. It's unfortunate in a way that a misunderstanding, a strain and misunderstanding should happen between science and biblical faith. And it has. And it is also that this strain or misunderstanding between science and Christian faith should focus on the Book of Genesis in the creation epic accounts of the opening chapters of Genesis, where it
seems to be most of the misunderstanding and most of the strain has occurred in how to understand the opening saga, epic account in Moses opening of Genesis. And I think the main misunderstanding has to do with the intent of Genesis 1 through 3. Understanding what is the intent? First, the intent of the author Moses himself. I have no reason to doubt the Mosaic authorship of Genesis. As you know, in the 19th century, a number of German
scholars felt of course that the Book of Genesis was written way later in its various strands, four strands, a documentary hypothesis. So four different strands to understand the Pentateuch, the first books of the Bible. And then because some of those interpreters at that time didn't believe that even handwriting, form of handwriting, like the Hebrew script would have been available to people at 1200 BC because we know that Moses came from Egypt and the Egyptians had not
developed handwriting. The Egyptians are a pictographic language that's hieroglyphic. It's not a vocabulary language. That's why the poetry of Egypt is highly, it's very, it doesn't have language. It is just pictures. But then the Hammurabi Code was found. The Sumerian Cylinder was found in 2012 BC. And we know that handwriting was existent in ancient Babylon. And Abraham in 1200, 1800 BC, Abraham comes from ancient Babylon. He comes from a literate culture. And that was a huge
breakthrough for the study of the Old Testament, to realize that Abraham was not right out of a cave. He wasn't a Bedouin out of a cave who couldn't read or write. Abraham himself, the father of the Jews, could read and write. And we could prove that because we found the Babylonian Cylinder that showed writing. And ancient Hebrew is an alphabet language, an amazing alphabet language that produced an amazing body of material that we call the Old
Testament. The Psalms of the Old Testament are sort of without parallel in antiquity in terms of their beauty because of that language. So Abraham could read and write. Moses, 1200 BC, when he comes out of Egypt with the children of the Israelites, come out of Egypt, Moses can read and write. So it makes the Mosaic authorship at the Pentateuch far more understandable. So then the question is, what was on Moses' mind? But also, since we believe
in the inspiration of Scripture, that Scripture is the book God wants us to have. I like that understanding of the integrity of Scripture. It's the book he wants us to have. I don't like us to make the wrong kinds of claims about Scripture. I don't want us to make certain claims for Scripture that aren't fair to it. For instance, I don't want us to make claims about Scripture that in a way that don't allow the Scriptural
writers to be poetic, that don't allow them to use imagery, that don't allow them to use strong, vast saga language. Otherwise, you can't make sense out of the parables of Jesus. You can't make sense out of a great number of the imagery of the Bible because the Jews used marvelous imagery and they loved it. So you've got to ask the right questions of the ancient texts. So a lot of strain has occurred with regard to those
opening chapters of Genesis to wonder what was Moses' intent? What is the intent? What is the actual teaching of the opening chapters? And that's what I think is worth looking at first. Notice the major themes that are present in the opening. Right in the middle, in Genesis 1, right in the middle of the creation narrative that in the beginning God created, the heavens and the earth, this creation epic account. Right in the middle of that epic
account, a word appears that is a very interesting word. It is the word, said, in the middle of it all. In fact, verse 3, right at the very beginning, God said, let there be light. And that will dominate all the rest of this epic account as you move through the days of creation, day one, day two, day three, which are written, in my opinion, in epic form. They're not written in chronological form. So let's say, oh,
that means in 12 days, in 24 hours, this happened in 24 hours. I think that's the wrong question to put to the Genesis account. Let the Genesis account write in these broad epic sweeps like Moses does. Otherwise, we set Moses up to a lot of misunderstanding. For example, when we have the creation of man-woman, and then in chapter 3, where one of the sons of Adam and Eve, named Cain, has a wife. But in the
narrative, Moses hasn't provided for a wife. He hasn't provided for a girl yet. And what does he do? Marry his own sister. That would break Jewish law. That would be incest. Would contaminate the genetic pool. No, it shows you there that Moses is not writing. He knows somebody's going to raise their hand in the campfire and say, just second, Moses, you haven't provided for a girl yet. Where does she come from? Moses isn't interested in that.
He's interested in showing how, not how, but who and what and why. And he makes that clear. And it's interesting that the first word that appears there in the Genesis narrative of the creation epic is the word, said. Now, I don't want to overdo this, but I think it's quite interesting that, that said is information. At the beginning of the creation account, information happens. And if you know modern physics, right now with quantum mechanics and the
subatomic particles where it was actually Einstein has a quote when he was kind of objecting against quantum mechanics. And he says, with quantum mechanics, if you take it too far, you have information being shared between these sub particles and they could be billions of miles apart. Einstein saw that. He saw it, it made him bothered. And that's why he didn't like quantum mechanics because he said, and he called them crazy quirks. You have these crazy quirks,
entanglement, where particles, if they're split and two subatomic particles, one goes in one direction and the other goes in another direction and they could be billions of miles apart and they could share information. Because if one is spinning this way, billions of miles away, the other one would spin the same way. And Einstein saw that. By the way, the CERN accelerator in Geneva right now that Einstein didn't even know would be built is trying to prove
that. And of course, then Einstein said, but of course, that information can be shared, it can't exceed the speed of light because that's the absolute speed of the universe. And maybe Einstein is right, maybe he's wrong there. In fact, in Entanglement theory now they're wondering if information may exceed the speed of light. Now that would throw everything in classical physics into a tremendous quandary. And that's why quantum mechanics has created such a stir. And that's why
Einstein was having trouble with it because he saw that information is being communicated. Well, you know something, folks, that's the Genesis one account. In the beginning, God said, let there be light. He said, let there be a dome in the middle of the night. And he said, let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place. And he said, let the lights shine the night and the lights in the day. And then he said, let
us make man, the word is Adam, in our own image. And male and female, he created them, plural. So Adam is male-female. That's Genesis one, all because God said it. He said it, information is first. It's so ironic that we would come all the way around back to quantum mechanics in the Genesis account. I'm not going to make that as a case, but it is interesting because that's the quantum mechanics entanglement insight that information is
shared with these sub particles. And Genesis said it. So there is this amazing, I'm going to do the way Barth does. In the beginning was the decision of God, information. And that's an information. God decided, God said. Okay, then the second insight from the opening Genesis account is that man-woman are created by God's decision. He said, let us make man. And male, female, he made man. Of the earth, he made man. That becomes clear in
the second Genesis account, chapter 2, of the creation, the epic account. Man is made of the earth. But in the chapter 1, man is made in the sixth day of creation. Each day, day one has an ending, day two. Oh, and by the way, at the end of each day, God said it is good. Towb, that's the beginning of the love vocabulary of the Bible. It's interesting, or to use Lewis's right and wrong, good and evil.
At the very beginning of the Genesis account, the meaning of it all is an imprint is put on the meaning of everything, and it's the imprint good. Good. Not just real, not just reality, but good reality. So day one, good. Day two, good. Day three, good. Then we get to the important day for us in a way, day six. In day six, the entire created order now comes into being. And animal, all the animal life comes
into being. And at the end of the sixth day, but within the sixth day, the day that has an ending, see all the days have an ending. In that sixth day, God said, let us make man in our image, male, female, he made him. And then we're discovering in chapter 2 that, that is the decision of God. Oh, by the way, at that point in the Genesis account, after he saw making man, he said, and that
was very good. Good gets an accelerator there. It's very good. God called it very good. And, okay, that's the decision of God. That man-woman made from the earth, but given an imprint of good. But not only man-woman given the imprint of good, the whole created order is given the imprint of good. So if you want to make the theological case for protecting the whales, or protecting any animal, it's because God called it good. He
put an imprint upon it. All right, that's the second insight from the Genesis account. The third, notice these are meaning insights. They're not on trying to calculate, is it 12 hours? Is it 24 hours in our time? Which is the wrong question to ask. Ask the question, what does it all mean? That's what Moses is doing. And then the third, that man-woman are granted dominion, freedom. That's the beginning of the freedom vocabulary of the Bible.
Notice we're getting in the Genesis 1 account, the beginning of the love vocabulary of the Bible, the beginning of the truth vocabulary of the Bible, God said truth, and the beginning of the freedom vocabulary of the Bible, dominion. Man-woman are given dominion. And it's interesting to me that the first proof of the dominion is that man-woman is given the right to name the animals. Do you know if you're an Aristotelian, that's the beginning of
biology. That's why biology should not be the class that your kids should be scared to take. Because we were given the right to name the animals. And it's interesting to me that God said, let us make man, but man named the animals, not God. And God calls the animals what we call them. So like look at Job, when Job is given a tour by God and says, now look at that fish, that hippopotamus, that leviathan, those
giant whales. Those are very hard to catch. But God calls the fish what Job called it, leviathan. We name the fish. We name the animals. We get to name the bacteria. We get to name the viruses. And that's how we control viruses and bacteria, by naming them. Knowing whether something's a virus or bacteria makes all the difference in how you're treated for a disease. So there's the third great insight that God has given us freedom, dominion
within a mandate to name the animals, to care for the animals, to care for the whole created order. There's the doctrine of ecology right there in the Genesis 3 account. By the way, also notice that man-woman is in the day of creation when all the other animals are. And that means we, now this is the part that bothers some people. Don't let it bother you. We have a continuity. Francis Collins will help you so much.
We have so much continuity with the chimpanzees that all but one DNA marker, were identical to the chimpanzees, except for one marker. Well, or is it two markers? But anyway, the point is we have a continuity with the whole created order. The whole created order. Therefore, a pig's heart is so much like our heart that you can take a pig valve and put it into a human heart. And some people have had their hearts saved from
heart attacks by putting a pig valve in a human heart. And young doctors can learn how to do surgery on a dog's heart and a pig's heart and practice surgery rather than to do it on human beings that they're practicing on. We have a continuity with the created order. That's the Genesis account. Made of the earth, the sixth day of creation, we didn't get a day to ourselves. You know, this has always bothered us. In fact,
according to Augustine, that's the first sin. The first sin when we didn't trust God was because we weren't in the seventh day. We wanted to be in the seventh day without an ending. You see, we get to eat the tree of life and have no ending. But no, we're in the day with an ending. The sixth day has an ending and it's still called good. Then, all right. The fourth insight that comes to the Genesis account
is that God calls all this good. And that's the beginning of love and the goodness vocabulary of the Bible. And then the fifth insight is crisis. Within the Genesis account, chapter 3, crisis occurs. And the crisis occurs with... It's almost like reading Tolkien in the Silmarillion. The crisis occurs in Middle Earth when Melkor chooses against the will of God, the will of Om, who is the creator. So that it's a choice against the goodness of God
or distrust of the goodness of God, distrust of his faithfulness. And that's the whole Garden of Eden epic account of the tree, the temptation by the man-woman, by the snake, and all the rest. But still, even after that bad choice, which leads us into danger, the story's not over. And it's interesting that that begins the whole rest of the epic account of the Old Testament, that God is not finished with us. He is still not
disarmed by our sin. And St. Paul puts it probably the most dramatically in Romans 5, where sin increased and sin does increase. Evil gets cumulatively powerful. There is a power in evil. You cannot miss it. There is. But where sin increased, the grace of God increased more. The grace of God was able to out-distance human sin. And that's the good news. That's the gospel. Okay, now, that's only hinted at in Genesis, but it's there in
the whole biblical account. All right. Now, the God who spoke in creation speaks for himself in grace as well, and that's the rest of the biblical account. So now, as for us and for science and faith, we shouldn't ask the wrong questions. I think some of the, unfortunately, I think some of the chronological questions that we've asked, are these six literal days or seven literal days? Is the whole creation of the world done? Is it a
young earth that, so the whole earth was just created 7,000 years ago or 8,000 years ago? That's the wrong question to ask. Or is it just one Adam and one Eve to begin everything? Again, it may be the wrong question to ask. The question is that God, by his decision, has made us. And by his decision, he's given us freedom. And by his decision, he's called it good. And the story's not over. And I
think that enables us then to embrace science as it tries to figure out how all of this happens. And that's why we owe a lot to Francis Collins. And read the middle part of this Language of God, and he'll show you that whole genetic story of how we are tracing genetically this whole created order. Now, one last thing I wanted to share, and then we'll dialogue. And that is that a friend of mine, Marty Folsom, who's
right here in this room today, he wrote an article that appeared in Crux magazine, that's Regent College magazine, a little magazine called Crux. And he wrote what I thought was a really wonderful article on the two metaphors. He makes the point that down through the ages, Christians have looked at the metaphor of two books. And this is one way to understand the world and understand God's revelation. We look at the whole created order, and we look
at the story of redemption as two books. First, the book of creation itself can be read. We're encouraged to read that book, and we learn a lot about God from that book. We don't, but we don't learn about his loving character and redeeming character just from creation. No, in creation, we see his power, and we see the splendor and the beauty. But to discover his love, we have to hear him speak for himself. And that's the
second book. The second book is God's speech for himself when he makes himself known in sending his Son and preparing us for the radical intervention in human history of Jesus Christ himself. And that's the second book. And we need both books. The one book, the book of creation, we study it to understand how all this took place. But in order to understand the meaning of it all, we need the second book. By the way, when I
was in Oxford a couple of years ago, I heard John Polkinghorne give a great speech at Oxford. And listen to how Polkinghorne puts it. He is, by the way, a physicist at Cambridge University who also is an Anglican priest. But John Polkinghorne said this. Science is never the end of the story. See, this is the first book. Because science cannot tell humans what they most need to know, the meaning of life and how to value it.
Mary Anne Anderson, who used to be at the University of Washington and wrote, she's a Pulitzer Prize winner for her book, Home. Gideon, Gilead and House, Good Housekeeping, these marvelous. She wrote in The Death of Adam that the problem with the first book, just the book of creation, is you don't have a reason for valuing the life of a dog, the life of a child, more than the life of a dog. It's just, it's his life. And
that's science by itself can become very cruel. Unless it has another book that gives meaning. And that's what Polkinghorne is saying here. Science can, science says, science is never an end of the story because science cannot tell humans what they most need to know, the meaning of life and how to value it. Science only gives us, know how without knowing whether. Where we should go, what we should do with the stewardship. We're given the right to
name the animals. We're given a tremendous power in that, but we need to know what to do with that. And we discover that in the second book when we read what Christ has revealed to us of his love and his love for us. And I love the way Marty, so Marty, I'm going to read what you wrote here at the end of your article, which is very good. He comes to and says to us then, we
must then work toward good science and good theology. I offer the following suggestions. First, let us affirm that the task of the church and the Christian is to seriously scientifically investigate, is a scientific investigation of knowing and being known by the triune God. We stand within the task of the one book. By scientific investigation or study, I mean that we know that the subject of our study, we respectfully remain in that humble stance, but we need
to study. And so he first calls us to serious scientific investigation. Secondly, knowing God as the creator means we acknowledge that all creation is within the scope of God's care. Again, we saw this in Genesis 1 through 3, the whole of creation is in the scope of God's care. Science appropriately studies the objects of the world, but it must not dismiss the interpretive worldviews that make a claim on origins and intentions. We need to know the
meanings. That's a Polkinghorne quote. And then third, the church, the Christians now, must acknowledge that the Bible affirms both personal growth and material decay. We are within the sixth day. Therefore, we cannot become idolatrous. The biological life cycle ends in death and separation. Our bodies grow old, families move out and away. We can't depend on the world to sustain us forever. We need again to know God's decision that is beyond just our ordinary physical life. And
then fourth, we must remember that science is not objective, it's the work of persons who have faith commitments. In other words, every scientist himself or herself has... It's interesting to me, when I read the great book on Einstein, Einstein makes an interesting point that if you don't have a confidence in the harmony and in the meaning of it all, you can't really do science. There is a meaning that I can study. And so I have to
have a faith stance. And so he is now, Marty is saying that we need to know what our faith stance is when we come. Some scientists acknowledge that it's impossible to fully accomplish the attempt to create an exhaustive book of knowledge entirely free from subjectivity. And that's true. You're never free of subjectivity. That means you always have to test and figure out what you're studying. And then he has five. Finally, both the Christian and the scientist
live as communities of faith seeking understanding for the purpose of serving God. Here now as a Christian scientist, I want to serve God and humanity. We are not to live in fear confined to dwell in Christian ghettos of ignorance, unwilling to talk about controversial aspects of life. And so therefore in science, we don't live. We want to study and learn. We don't want to live in fear of all the things that need to be learned. We
need to learn everything we can. And that's his fifth sort of comment. One last quote is from Pope John Paul. I love this quote from Paul, John Paul. He says, science can purify religion from air and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider field, a world in which both can flourish. And it's interesting that the Roman Catholic Pontiff would say this because Copernicus, who was at
first opposed by the church when he said that we were not the center of the universe. But that was not against us. It was for us. That was a science that gave us a truth that helped us. It didn't hurt our faith. And it's interesting that Pope John Paul would be the one that would say that. That science has played that role of helping to clear our eyes, too. And then we have a role to keep
us from idolatry, which science has to always be warded against. [Staub] This is Dick Staub. We're going to be back with more of Earl Palmer talking about Francis Collins' book, The Language of God. Don't go away. We'll be right back. [Music Break] Welcome back, everybody. This is Dick Staub. And we're visiting with Earl Palmer tonight about Francis Collins' book, The Language of God. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project. And this is a most amazing blend
in this book, The Language of God. Of his own personal journey, he was not raised in religious backgrounds. I considered himself an agnostic. I realized that for him, agnosticism wasn't that he didn't necessarily know. It's that he didn't really want to know. At an amazing encounter when he decided to switch his degree from chemistry to medicine, and while treating an aging woman was taken with her faith, and she turned to him and asked him a question
about what he believed, and he realized he didn't really know what he believed, and he hadn't really been honest about exploring it. It's a wonderful story. And the other amazing thing about his decision to move out of chemistry into medicine was it was the point where, I mean, he was a brilliant guy. I mean, I think he graduated from... He was homeschooled, graduated when he was 16, finished his Ph.D. by the time he was 21 or
20, and then went to medical school and just fast-tracked, very bright guy. But he wasn't connected to people. He was connected to ideas and concept, and he had this experience where he started to think about people, and he decided he wanted to move into medicine because if he was able to research and discover things that were useful, it would help humans, and that became important to him. And that was really kind of an interesting development
because he moved from simply the view that all nature is equal, of equal importance, to some intuitive sense that there was something special about humans. It's an amazing story, and it's told in the language of God. But he also gets into what he learned as a scientist in exploring the human genome and understanding DNA and so forth. And he, in this book, which, because of the limitation of time, Earl hasn't been able to explore, but he
has four chapters where he basically, first of all, says, here's your options if you're trying to harmonize faith and science. Number one, you can choose to be an atheist or an agnostic. Number two, you can become a six-day literal creationist, and that's where basically it's taking, quote, God's story in the Bible and imposing it on science. And he points out that 45% of Americans basically hold to a six-day literal creation view. Despite the
fact, he says, that they've had scientific education. You know, the third position he explores is intelligent design, and he goes through what he sees as the problems with intelligent design are. And then he ends up at his own position, which is theistic evolution. And he explains why he feels that it's the best way to bridge this conversation between faith and science. And he gets into some explanations as to why he feels that conversation isn't very effective.
And I have to say, as a broadcaster, I was always really interested in this intersection of faith and science, and I've interviewed John Polkinghorne. And for those of you listening to the podcast, if you put in the search engine Polkinghorne's name, you can find a couple of interviews that I've done with John Polkinghorne. But I also interviewed the neurologist Oliver Sacks and in his book, Uncle Tungsten, where he explains why he's an atheist. We got in
this line of peripheral discussion about intelligent design, and he just became apoplectic with what he viewed as the complete idiocy of this position. And we started talking about the dialogue between the faith community and scientific community, and he basically confessed that he was not in that dialogue, that he really wasn't that interested in what theologians had to say about this question. And he also kind of seemed unaware that there was a scientific community that were theistic
evolutionists. And I told him about Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne, and it's one of the points that Collins makes in his book, is that one of the reasons he says theistic evolution doesn't have advocates is that it has had so few advocates from within the scientific community of people of faith who are willing to speak out passionately about it. And he says in the theological community, there are not enough theologians that have a language of vocabulary
for understanding science. And so it's this huge gap. So I want to kind of bring this down from 30,000 feet to you. How did this become such an important issue to you? I mean, you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this, working through the issue. You've come to some conclusions about how to understand Genesis literally and not just literally, which, of course, scripture should be read literally. We both agree on that. But why
did this issue become such an important one for you? [Palmer] Well, I think as a pastor, you're always with people that are genuinely struggling with how to make sense out of, we'll take, for instance, Genesis accounts, how to make sense of accounts that you see, narratives. And what do you do with it? And it just seems to me that the most important thing you can do is always to give, first of all, the questions of intent. What
was the intent of the author? What is the goal? And of course, we believe that this is the book God wants us to have. And I believe in the plenary inspiration of scripture that the whole of it is what God wants us to have. But what does he want us to have? And these people that write these accounts, like St. Paul, because I love St. Paul and I loved the New Testament writers, and I just felt
that it was very important to honor Moses and realize that he's not a fool, that he's a very smart man. And he is writing this narrative to help us understand these large, huge themes. And I saw them there. And that's why I went through that little journey. There are large themes here. And these key words, like God said, and you've got to realize in the Hebrew language, the word, davar, for word and this word for said,
speak, are so important. And also the word for obedience in the Hebrew is here, Hear O Israel, listen, and that we need to listen, and we need to learn, and this importance of learning. So I wanted to how do you rightly learn? What is the intent of the Genesis 1 through 3 account? And when I started doing that, I realized it helped people that were maybe bogged down. [Staub/Palmer] Now, were you interested in the sciences when you were
at Berkeley? [Palmer] No, I was I was in the liberal in the liberal arts. I had all these friends that were scientists and they and yeah, I love it, but I love it as an outsider. [Staub] C.P. Snow talked about two cultures and he talked about languages of two cultures, the scientific culture and the humanities culture. And you obviously came up through a humanities education and theology, but you got somewhere along the line interested in
the language of science enough to try to understand it. I mean, when you were talking about, you know, splitting an atom and moving billions of miles apart and I mean, you were as passionate as you are about the gospel. So, I mean, you obviously have wrapped your mind around scientific language and concepts. How did that happen? Who helped you do that? [Palmer] Well, I think I like biography and it is true that Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein
was just a very, very influential book for me. And Einstein's own journey, his journey, his discovery of what he felt was harmony. There had to be meaning. This is close to intelligent design. This is what I really think intelligent design is all about. I think the mistakes were made there perhaps in the feeling that it should be taught over against evolution or over against, that was wrong. Just put it in alongside because Einstein does that. And
that was very inspirational to me to see great scientists and then Francis Collins's book, but to see great scientists struggling to try to find out meaning. In fact, you know, there was an Einstein quote that I wanted to read and I didn't read it, but let me read it to you. It's from his book. He says, but science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source
of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. Now he's making this that that's why he calls it a faith. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational. That is, they're comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without a profound faith. And he calls it this is he said this is close to faith that I get. But that is faith. In
other words, I believe that if I study this truth, it will make sense. And of course, that's what bothered him about quantum mechanics in his great argument with quantum mechanics. It didn't make sense to him in terms of space and time. But now maybe it would now with the work that's been done since his death, he probably would be able to better understand quantum mechanics because he's the one that predicted that it was going to be
transfer of information he predicted that. [Staub] Now on these on these four options that we have. Collins is, and he basically sets out to pick apart atheism and agnosticism. He picks apart six-day literal creation. He makes the comment that if young earth claims were actually true, it would lead to the complete and irreversible collapse of the sciences of physics, chemistry, cosmology, geology and biology, etc. On intelligent design, he calls it when science needs divine
help. And he says that the problem with intelligent design is it fails in a fundamental way to qualify as a scientific theory. Major cracks are beginning to appear, particularly in the area of irreducible complexity. And he says it's failing to hold up. And it falls into the God of the gaps theory that and he says that he fears that they are confusing what is unexplainable from what hasn't yet been explained and so forth. So he ends
up at theistic evolution and he kind of takes a hard position. As a matter of fact, he's very critical in his language. He makes comments like any serious biologist would conclude that six-day literal creationist can't be true. He makes the same comment about young earth creationism. He says theistic evolution is a dominant position of serious biologists who are also serious believers, and he uses that in dismissing intelligent design. The reason I'm saying that is
that he does not see a harmonization between these positions. In other words, he believes if you're going to take science seriously and faith seriously, in his view, the only conclusion is theistic evolution. Now, where do you come down on that? How have you resolved all of that? [Palmer] Yeah, of course, I think you got to be very careful and not to put the baggage of young earth theology or young earth
geology on top of the intelligent design group. They wouldn't. Nobody intelligent design that I know would hold to young earth because that means that everything is just seven or eight thousand years old. How do you handle a Grand Canyon with that? And I think that in a way, if Francis Collins should would be faulted at all, it's he needs to have a little more a little more malleability in those positions, seeing that, it's a little bit
like you can see that there's a part of truth and a part of insight in each part of the journey. And you want to get all those parts of the journey together in dialogue. [Staub] So what I'm hearing you say is that you find it personally easy to dismiss the kind of six-day creation, but you think that within the intelligent design movement, there are some concepts that are worth embracing that you see can be harmonized with
theistic. [Palmer] Oh, yes, I do. In other words, I want to be careful. I don't want to make fun of people with the young earth or six-day literal, six-day creation or people who get completely, in my opinion, completely entrapped into one Adam and one Eve as the beginning of all human life. I don't think that's the right question to ask. I think you have to ask the right question. And even in the Mosaic account, let
us make man, man, Adam. That sounds singular, doesn't it? In our image, male, female, he created them, them. Now, suddenly it's plural. It's not just Adam. It's male, female, Adam and Eve. They need each other in order to complete each other. And then, of course, you get the family, Abel, and then you get Cain, and then you get the growth of the family. And so, in other words, as I made a little joke about it earlier,
Moses himself is no fool. He knows that people are going to ask those kinds of questions. So he is giving you a signal that he is using a vast language scheme to talk about something bigger. And that is why is creation here? Because God said so and he decided it. I love that. Who is here? And then, where do we fit? We do fit within the sixth day. We do fit within the day that has an
ending. So in a sense, there's that humble view of who we are. We're not gods. We were never intended to be gods. And the first sin is our attempt to be God. And that is so profound in terms of the Ten Commandments and all. And so, in other words, you have to allow Moses to use this broad and wonderful language. And that doesn't mean we're making fun of his language. We're just understanding that it's used in
a vast way. Our Lord, by the way, had to cope with that. In the final scene of Jesus with the disciples in Acts 1, when they saw him, they worshiped him. And then they said, will you now restore the kingdom to Israel? And Jesus, imagine, they're still thinking of kingdom in terms of a geography. And after all that our Lord has been with them. And like Bonhoeffer says, kingdom in the New Testament is the kingly reign
of Christ. It's our relationship with Christ. And yet, they're still saying, OK, now, Jesus, we're so grateful for your resurrection. We're so grateful for your victory over sin and death. But will you now give us our property? Will you restore the kingdom to Israel? And our Lord's answer is not to mock them, but to put it into a larger framework than they ever imagined. He said, it's not for you to know the, kairos, or the chronos.
Boy, that one sentence alone is so important for all understanding. It's not for you to know the, kairos, which is the critical moment, or the, chronos, the chronological time frame. But you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth. Notice, everything is put into a new framework. You're going to be witnessing to my grace. And I think it's that same sort of language. I'm very interested in language. I got
that. That's one thing from Lewis. Lewis's gift is that he is, first of all, a literary critic. And Lewis always wanted to say, what does the text say? And what does it mean in its own terms? In its own terms. And that's what I was doing with Genesis 1 through 3. And I felt that in doing that for students and in doing it for myself, I got this expansive understanding of Genesis 1 through 3, which, frankly,
that's the battleground. It mainly is in Genesis 1 through 3. [Staub] A lot of these conversations, if you look at someone like Hugh Ross or others, has to do with finding a path for taking scripture seriously without taking it literally. Trying to find a way to really understand, as you said, what the intent is. But I want to get back. I heard you being very pastoral. But I want to take it literally. [Palmer] Yes, In the
sense of literary, like Lewis says, literally means what did the writer intend? And when Jesus said that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, that is not scientifically correct. There are smaller seeds. But don't trivialize what Jesus is saying. He's saying, as far as you're concerned, it's the smallest seed. OK. And look at it. It makes a huge branch, a huge tree. But now if you say, see, Jesus is scientifically not
accurate. I'm going to discount everything Jesus says. That's ridiculous. [Staub] I want to get back to the you're a pastor. And so we started out by talking about six-day literal creation, and intelligent design and theistic evolution. And you showed your own kind of intellectual progression has been towards seeing some harmonization of intelligent design and theistic evolution. Not so much with six-day literal creation. But then like a good pastor, and also recognizing that 45% of
Americans, which means in our room tonight and in your church, there are people who are six-day literal creationists. So you wanted to show respect for that. And that's the way I operate, too. I'm a bridge builder. But Collins is saying there's something really serious at stake here. He says, number one, there's a whole generation of young kids that are being raised with a chasm between what they're learning in their science class and what they're told
their faith demands of them. And he said, we can lose a generation and look foolish if we don't take the science more seriously. ...That's right. ...But he also puts this in the context of Galileo. And he said, you know, there was a time when the church rejected the scientific data and kind of forced people to renounce what was scientifically true. And he views this conversation the same way. He says, in a certain sense, I hear Collins
saying, it's great to be pastoral and be in a church with each other and say, yeah, you believe this and you believe this and you believe this, but can't we all just get along? And if it's true that this is like Galileo, he's saying there's something really serious at stake here. It is either true that evolutionary theory is true or it's not. And if it is, it has implications for these views. How do you deal with
that? [Palmer] I think that that's how you, again, you teach, you invite, love that line from Bruce Metzger. He said, invite people into a larger hope. Invite them into a larger hope rather than, and the larger hope is that in the sixth day of creation epic account, we have a continuity with the rest of the animals. Why not teach that continuity and make a person then able to see that if you deny that continuity by having such
a rigid doctrine, an anti-evolution doctrine that you don't want that continuity, then how are your kids going to study medicine? How are they going to learn how to do surgery on a human heart? The human heart is just like a pig's heart. Thank God for that. We should be grateful for that. That's the way God did it. And instead of saying, I don't think he did it. I don't want him to think he did that.
I don't want to think that I resemble the apes. You know, it was Pascal that said, be careful when you show man how closely he resembles the apes, also show him how closely he resembles the angels. But notice, he's not an angel and he's not an ape. He is something unique. But yet we resemble and we have a continuity and that continuity, which is what evolutionary theory is trying to help us understand and trying to work
with that continuity is vital. And we I agree with you. Don't raise up a youngster in the high school, in a church group to get him ready when he goes to a biology class that's going to earnestly try to understand this connectedness, that he then cannot understand this and therefore has to only major in some subject that's never going to contradict this. And he's got his head in the sand and it's not good. Now, thank God
for the Catholic Church that they repented of the assault on Galileo and the church can learn. And that's why I read Pope John Paul's quote. He thanks God that science helped the church and helps the Christian. And I think that's the way to look at understanding the continuity we have with the created order. And rather than to make fun of other positions, just invite into a larger hope. [Staub] In his book, Collins points out that the late
biologist Stephen J. Gould advocated that science and faith should operate separate in separate non-overlapping magisteria. And Collins says science domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind and the soul. And the mind must find a way to embrace both realms. If God exists, then he must be outside the natural world.
And therefore, the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about him. Is that your position that there are OK, that there are not overlaps of these? [Palmer] Well, I want to be careful. There is. I do appreciate the natural theology of Lewis in Mere Christianity, where he is saying that built into, and Francis Collins also said that, built into the warp and woof of who we are is an awareness of right and
wrong. And we believe that is a that is a God gift that's been given. That's built in. OK, but God, to learn about God, we have to we have to listen to him speak for himself. And that speech for himself when the word becomes flesh is what gives us the meaning to our life. And that's what, and that's the good news. The good news is the decision God made. But notice it all ties into
Genesis 1. God made a decision to create us. And we learn a lot from the created order about the decision God made when he made us and all that continuity and all that stuff we just talked about. But he made a decision in the midst of our crisis to find us and to and to give us life and to give us hope and to give us redemption. And he made that decision in Jesus Christ. And that
decision is not anti science. It actually enriches our science because we now have a means of worth that's been granted to us by God's decision. And I think that is the larger that's the larger context in which we operate. [Staub] Well, it's fascinating, I happened to be in Chapel Hill when this book came out and I was meeting with an old friend of mine. Charlie is his name, won't give his last name. And he's in
a reading group and each person gets to choose a book and he chose this book. And in his reading group of four retired academics was one of Colin's professors in medical school who was sorely vexed when Collins read Mere Christianity and was apoplectic when he read this book because of the influence that C.S. Lewis had, had on Collins. And Charlie had a photocopy of the letter that this professor had sent to
Francis Collins trying to plead with him to get back on the right path, to not let Lewis influence him. But for those of you that haven't read the book, this book is another great example of how the intellect of C.S. Lewis engaged a mind and the idea that right and wrong is a clue to the meaning of the universe. That really, really stuck with Collins and led to a lot of the way he unfolds
his arguments in this book. It's a fascinating book, which we had more time to talk. We do, though. We're going to be going next to questions from our live audience. We'll be back with more of Earl Palmer. The subject is The Language of God, Francis Collins, with a little detour through the biography of Einstein and a little look at at Egyptian culture as well. We're back with more. This is Dick Staub. Don't go away. [Music Break] Well, this
is Dick Staub back with you, thanking you for joining me at the Kinley's Muse at Earl Palmer Ministries tonight at the Burke Museum Cafe, where we've had a really interesting conversation about Francis Collins book, The Language of God. And Collins, as we mentioned, is weaving into this book his own journey spiritually as a scientist and also trying to create a conversation around the right and best approaches to take in the relationship between faith and science. And
we're going to get out to some questions that we have in our live audience tonight. And I'm going to start with Marty. And what's your question? [Marty] The question is, can theology again become the queen of the sciences or even a partner in the university? [Palmer] Yeah, you know, it's wonderful. Theology, we have the color red in academic gowns, the best color. I love that color, and it's the cardinal color. And because all the great universities really
started around theology and then the other disciplines joined. I don't know. I'm not sure I like the phrase queen of the sciences. I kind of like the fact that we're one of them and that we're a player. And I think I'd rather have us a player on a level field where we have to make our case, where we can't assume that we have a privileged place to make the case. I really feel we have to make
the case. And so that the challenge is on us to teach the truth and win a hearing for the truth. And I like, this is the way I see St. Paul in the first century. He doesn't have a privileged place, but he wants to see the whites of their eyes. He wants to be in as close as possible to the people that are his, you might say, those who are foes as well as those that are
potentially friends. But he treats everybody as a potential friend. And you know the thing I always love about St. Paul is that he was able to make friends across this broad cross-section. So you see Roman centurions befriending him like Julius on the ship, the prison ship. He writes to the Philippians that those in Caesar's households send their greetings. I mean the guy is winning guards in the prison where he's at because he was able to
make his case. Not because he had a privileged place to make it. And so here's an irony. I think we've done better when we don't have power. Power has not been helpful to the Christian church. When we get the power of the state on our side, when we get favoritism on our side, I don't think that we have thrived under that. Remember the famous line about the Holy Roman Empire? It was neither holy nor Roman nor
an empire. But it certainly wasn't holy. And I think that we do better when we have to nail up The 95 Theses. We do better when we have to make the case. Like during this century of enlightenment and the century of science now and quantum mechanics, we just have to weigh in and try to make the case. And I think that is more exciting. So I want to see theology a player, but I think we have
to earn the right always to be a player. [Staub] Interesting. Thank you, Earl. Chris, what's your question? [Chris] Earl, I'm generally okay with thinking about the Genesis account as something more than just a scientific textbook on creation. I read Colin's book and I enjoyed it. My fundamental challenge with his model and maybe others in his ilk is essentially around how death entered God's good, and I put parenthetically here, perfect creation. Because the Genesis narrative really makes it plain
that death was a result of sin. Colin's treatment, while scientifically compelling, I thought, still leaves me with a big hole here. I think he kind of deals potentially with the question of man being made out of dust and the earth, but maybe not so much with what actually happened in Eden and was there a time when it was perfect and then there was a time when there wasn't? I struggle with that. Be curious if you have
any advice on how you deal with this question. [Palmer] Yeah, well now, the wage of sin is death from Romans. I think that's referring to spiritual death. 100 % of us die, and that is a part of our life cycle, from dust to dust. Now, I'll give you a great Karl Barth quote. Barth says, from dust to dust, the minute you say more about man than that, you are now talking about the covenant of God's grace toward
us that gives us more than from dust to dust. And so, again, come back to the Genesis account. Man-woman, is created in the day that has an ending, the sixth day. Augustine made a big point of that. The seventh day, the day without an ending, belongs to God. That's the seventh day, rest, the day of fulfillment. But that's in God's hands. And so, eternal life and for us to live beyond the appointed time of our
existence, that now has to do with God's covenant with us and his promise of redemption and everlasting life. But death is a part of the sixth day. And interestingly enough, at the end of the sixth day, God called it good. But that's a day with an ending, just like everything else. See, the Earth is not created as eternal. It's created as boundaried. And in fact, in Romans, when Paul talks about that the whole created order was
subjected to boundaries, Romans 8. And, you know, we expect him to say, because we know this wages as sin as death. This is now, that's in earlier Romans. We now expect Paul to say, in Romans 8, the whole created order was subjected to boundaries. And we expect him to say, because of our sinfulness. But instead, he says, the whole created order was subjected to, the RSV translates as futility. No, no, boundary or termination. The whole created
order was submitted to boundary in hope, he says, of the fact that God has more in store. And waiting for the children of God to come into view. So it's, there is, that is the eternal hope. Not that there's something built into us that's eternal. We're not eternal. We never were eternal. The first sin is our attempt to be eternal. And not trust God's decision about us. [Staub] How does that fit with, with Lewis', you've never met
a mere mortal. In other words, Lewis kind of has this elevated view of humans that we have souls, that we were made for immortality. Is that an improper reading of Lewis? [Palmer] Well, no, but now again, he back to Barth. The minute you say more about from dust to dust, than from dust to dust, you are now talking about the covenant of God's decision about us beyond. And that is good news. That's gospel. And that gospel we
enjoy and we are thrilled about. But it is God's promise that won for us in Jesus Christ. But I think still Lewis is right. No human being is, should be seen apart from the fact that God, even in Genesis, pronounced, towb, good on that person. And worth was pronounced on that person. And I think that's what Lewis is getting at. There's a worth marker on us. And that's on every one of us, even those that
don't know yet Christ's love. Because even in judgment, we're taken seriously. Our worth is still being preserved, even that we're taking that seriously, that God judges us. [Staub] Yes, what's your question? [Anonymous] Given that we view texts such as Genesis as literary accounts of truth, does this have an effect on the way we view dialogue with other religions, that also claim to show truth about the character of God in that there are also people who are earnestly trying
to explain who God is and making sense of the world? Palmer] Wow. In fact, I think it's very important in relating to other religious journeys and other journeys of faith to listen to their narrative and hear what they're observing. And it may well be that what they're observing is an accurate understanding of even the way God has designed the created order. It may be accurate understanding of good and evil. In fact, Bonhoeffer helped me a lot on
this. He says that when you see goodness, and he wrote this in a prison camp where certain of the prison guards were the ones that enabled Bonhoeffer to smuggle out a lot of his, in fact, most of his manuscript on ethics was actually, you might say illegally smuggled out of German concentration camps by friendly guards. But he makes an interesting point that when you see people who are humane and people who are kind, and they're not
necessarily believers, and maybe they don't come from the Christian stance or understanding, but they're showing love, he calls that the restrainer force. And he says, we thank God for that when we see it. When we see it, we thank God for it. And now I believe that Lewis' insight that when that goodness, he has this in his Weight of Glory. When you see goodness in the world and they come from one religious system, like we've had
so many things in common with Confucianism, for instance, in its treasuring of the family, in its treasuring of honor. And we see that honor being portrayed. Lewis would say that that is a stream down the stream, but there is a source for that sense of honor and sense of love that is further up. And we need to track it up and find it. And that very honorable portrayal may make that person more ready and more prepared
to hear the good news of the Lord of that honor, the source of that honor, which is Christ's love. And so I think as Christians, we shouldn't put ourselves in a position that we can't learn from other faith journeys. I would rather be in the position that we can learn from other faith journeys, especially, of course, our sister faith, Islam, which holds most of the Old Testament in common with us and has a high view of
Jesus Christ, so it doesn't understand Christ as Messiah, but honors him and treasures Jesus Christ. As you know in the Koran, Jesus Christ is seen as the final judge of the earth. That's a true insight. He is the final judge, but they don't understand that in Jesus Christ, God humiliated himself because Islam cannot understand God humiliating himself. And when that discovery can be made, it'd be a great breakthrough for Islam. But there's so much of the
teaching in the Koran that we can dialogue with and we can learn from. And the same thing, of course, with our Old Testament roots. And the same thing would be true with, I think, in China. I know that people that were raised in Confucian Taoism were very much more open to Christianity than those from certain other religious systems. So, yes, I think we should have that dialogue and be thankful for insights that we see. But still,
we want to hear God speak for himself. And in that sense, it's important that we don't see Christianity as Christianity. We don't believe in Christianity. We believe in Jesus Christ. It's Jesus Christ, which is sort of anti-religious. It's beyond religion. Jesus Christ has spoken for himself and has made himself known to us. And that love that has been made known to us in Christ is what wins us. Not that we found the Christian religion winning
us. And I don't like the kinds of dialogue where we're talking about Christian religion holds this and then you hold this. No, I would rather come at it fresh. This is what I've discovered about Jesus Christ and his love. Now, I want to hear what you've discovered. And you may have many more commonalities than we imagined. [Staub] Mike, your question. [Mike] OK, well, I'm a 45 percenter, so here we go. I got a problem with theistic evolution. I
think, you know, intelligent design, I really I like that idea. I mean, that's pretty obvious to anybody that wants to take a good look at it. Did God have to keep creating until man finally arrived? I mean, you know, if we really came from the apes, where is the evidence in the Bible for this? And then finally, how do we know really what truth is? What, you know, how do we know? For me, it's the word
of God, the Bible. That's how I know. I mean, I'm not a sophisticated theologian or scientist. I just take God at his word. [Palmer] And I think that and I think that you you'd be, that would be accepted by the bio-logist Christians, that are in Francis Collins' group. Yeah, he doesn't believe in kind of a progressive a re-creation all the time that God, he believes in the one mighty act that God has done in Jesus
Christ that gives meaning to it all. It's just that it all has meaning because of what God's decided. And and I think that's where I don't think he's that far away from the intelligent design people. The where he got upset with the intelligent design movement was that it felt that it needed to to have warfare so much against evolution teaching because and they were rightly, and my friend Phil Johnson's one of the great members of he
wrote the Darwin on trial. He's a great man. I love him dearly. And the thing that Phil was bothered by, and I am bothered by it too is that pure evolutionary theory when it becomes moral teaching, when it becomes the basis of your philosophy, then it's the survival of the fittest. It's the survival of the tiger over against the other animal. It's a survival of the strongest. And as we know, horrific moral decisions were made, especially
during the Nazi regime were made on the basis of that logic. And therefore, there has to be a greater design, a greater reality that governs. And Francis Collins agrees with that too. There has to be a greater truth. But I think that in the in being outraged at that dangerous moral side of what social Darwinism is what Phil Johnson calls it. And I am too. But in a way, then I think in my opinion, I told
Phil himself this with the Darwin on trial. He wrote one too many chapters in that book. When he got into microbiology, he was out of his field. He should not have written that chapter. Because he then said things that I don't think were helpful because he made statements that in a way were not as scientific accurate because the dialogue with the continuity we have with the Creator order doesn't have to be positive on survival of the
fittest only. It's just also that we're trying to understand how all these things come together and how God fashions them. [Staub] Hey, that's good, Mike. Well, this has been another fascinating discussion. And for some reason tonight, more than many nights, I am taking back to my years as a college student when I was trying to sort out what this faith was. And I would go and sit at Berkeley Presbyterian and hear this young pastor articulating complex ideas
in understandable ways. I remember after attending church with a friend one time, I said the thing that amazed me about this guy is that he can communicate a concept that is simple enough for a child to understand but complex enough for all of these Berkeley Ph.D.s to wrap their arms around. And I was telling Earl earlier tonight, it's a real gift to be able to walk into complex ideas and try to communicate them in a way that
we can all understand. And I also love your pastor's heart, this keen mind that rests on this heart that has a desire to draw us into a conversation that takes us all to a higher place rather than focusing on our disagreements and attacking other ideas. And it's a real gift to us. And we've got a lot to learn about it. And there's a huge gap in the conversation between the scientific community and the faith community. And
we've got to be concerned about it. And I think that's obviously why Francis Collins wrote this book. Do you have any final comments that you want to make as we wrap up our time tonight? [Palmer] The one last thing that wasn't brought up is that we could have had a quote, too, from G.K. Chesterton where in The Everlasting Man, he starts out identifying us, and when he identifies us, he says that the best way to
understand man in the cave, he goes to the French limestone caves, is when you looked in those caves, which are probably the oldest marker, archaeologically, of man, and what you see is man, the artist, drawing deer and doing it with beauty and sense, that sense of art. And I was so struck with that. I almost was going to use that quote. And Einstein himself used it where, listen to this, the most beautiful emotion we can experience
is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and all science. It's interesting, the artistic, the sense of the beauty of it all, the sense of the wonder. And you know, whatever you say about Einstein, he was totally taken by the wonder of creation. And that's why he said, I'm a true believer. And it's in that passage where he says, in that sense, I am a devoutly religious man.
In that sense of the mystery of it all. And I guess it's nice that keeps us in dialogue with not only the scientist, but the artist. And the artist should be in this dialogue as well as the scientist. And in a way, that's what Moses is. Moses is really an artist in Genesis 1 through 3. [Staub] Fascinating. Another interesting evening, traveling through the inner thoughts of Earl Palmer, finding out what's in that head. Thank you so much,
Earl. This is Dick Staub. Join us again next time for the Kindlings Muse at Earl Palmer Ministries. Be sure to go and check out the website for Earl Palmer Ministries to find out all the kinds of things that Earl's involved in. I will look forward to seeing you again next time.