Science and
Apologetics?
by Ard Louis
Dept. of Chemistry
Cambridge University
www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/urbana/
Biological self-assembly


QuickTime™ and a
YUV420 codec decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
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Biology is soft--matter
come alive
Self-assembly of multicomponent structures
What hope for the
modeller?
Protein folding: Positive design and
Negative design for folded state & pathway
Levinthal Paradox:
resolution relies on
negative design in
pathway.
Another Paradox:
Sequence space:
20^150 = more
atoms than exist in
the universe
C.M. Dobson, Nature 426, 884 (2003)
Reversible self-assembly



Reversible self-assembly of one-component structures from individual sub-units:
Virus self-assembly in-vivo (Fraenkel-Contrat&Williams 1955- TMV)
Clathrin
Positive and Negative Design for Virus
Self-Assembly
Model: petagonal bi-pyramids
negative and positive design
Iain Johnston: reversible
self-assembly
D.J. Wales, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A, 363, 357-377 (2005)
Positive and Negative Design for Virus
Self-Assembly
gas of monomers

Fear?
Science has proven:
There is no God
OUTLINE
What does the Bible say about the
natural world?
 Using science in apologetics
 Witnessing to scientists
 The Origins debate ...

God reveals himself through
nature

Romans 1:18
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven
against all the godlessness and wickedness of men
who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since
what may be known about God is plain to them,
because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since
the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his
eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly
seen, being understood from what has been made,
so that men are without excuse.
God reveals himself through
nature

Psalm 19:
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies
proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after
night they display knowledge.
God reveals himself through
nature

Psalm 8:
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
God reveals himself through
nature

Austrian Alps
“It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation
around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”
-- Francis Collins on his conversion.
God reveals himself through
nature
Francis Collins
[Director, National Human
Genome Research Institute, USA]
“The work of a scientist in this project, particularly a scientist who has
the joy of also being a Christian, is a work of discovery which can also
be a form of worship. As a scientist, one of the most exhilarating
experiences is to learn something….that no human has understood before.
To have a chance to see the glory of creation, the intricacy of it, the
beauty of it, is really an experience not to be matched. Scientists who
do not have a personal faith in God also undoubtedly experience the
exhilaration of discovery. But to have that joy of discovery, mixed
together with the joy of worship, is truly a powerful moment for a
Christian who is also a scientist”
God created and sustains
the world




“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth” Gen 1:1
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness
was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of
God was hovering over the waters.” Gen 1:2
“For by him [Christ] all things were created … and in
him all things hold together” Col 1:16,17
“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory … sustaining
all things by his powerful word” Heb 1:3
God sustains the universe

Psalm 104 (praising God’s creation)
– “ He makes springs pour water into
ravines; it flows between the mountains;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst’’ v10,11
– “Natural” processes are described both as
divine and non-divine actions
– 2 perspectives on the same natural world
‘Science’ studies the
“Customs of the Creator”

If God were to stop “sustaining all things” the
world would stop existing
– Donald MacKay, The Clockwork Image, IVP

“An act of God is so marvelous that only the
daily doing takes off the admiration”
– John Donne (Eighty Sermons, #22 published in 1640)

“Miracles” are not God “intervening in the
laws of nature”: they are God working in less
customary ways
Interpreting the Bible
What kind of language?
 What kind of literature?
 What kind of audience?
 What kind of context?


All truth is God’s truth, so, properly
interpreted, science and the Bible
cannot contradict
Bible is not a science textbook

Moses wrote in a popular style things
which, without instruction, all ordinary
persons, endued with common sense,
are able to understand; but astronomers
investigate with great labour whatever
the sagacity of the human mind can
comprehend ... this study is not to be
reprobated, nor this science condemned
... (men) ought not to neglect this kind of
exercise ... since the Spirit of God here
(i.e. Genesis) opens a common school
for all, it is not surprising that he should
chiefly choose those subjects which
would be intelligible to all ... Moses
therefore, rather adapts his discourse to
common usage. -- Commentary on
Gen 1:16
John Calvin
1509-1564
Bible is not a science textbook

The whole point of scripture is to bring
us to a knowledge of Christ --- and
having come to know him (and all that
this implies), we should come to a halt
and not expect to learn more. Scripture
provides us with spectacles through
which we may view the world as God’s
creation and self-expression; it does
not, and was never intended, to provide
us with an infallible repository of
astronomical and medical information.
The natural sciences are thus effectively
emancipated from theological
restrictions
John Calvin
1509-1564
OUTLINE
What does the Bible say about the
natural world?
 Using science in apologetics
 Witnessing to scientists
 The Origins debate ...

Science/Religion and the
conflict metaphor?
“Science and religion cannot be
reconciled ... Religion has failed, and its
failures should be exposed. Science,
with its currently successful pursuit of
universal competence … should be
acknowledged the king”
--Prof Peter Atkins, Oxford U, in 1995
Science/Religion and the
conflict metaphor?
“I don’t know any historian of science, of any
religious persuasion or none, who would hold
to the theory that conflict is the name of the
game between science and religion, it simply
isn’t true.”
--Prof Colin Russell, Open University, UK
Science/Religion and the
conflict metaphor?

Pervasive myth (Emperor has no clothes)
 Scientists are about as religious as the
general population
 Galileo example far more complex
– Really about Aristotle/Greek cosmology
– “Galilieo Connection”, Prof Charles Hummel, IVP
(1986)
Christian origins of science

Science has deeply Christian roots.
–
–
–
–

Uniformity
Rationality
Intelligibility
See e.g. books by Stanley Jaki; R. Hooykaas; e.g.
China
Royal Society, the word’s first scientific society.
Founded in London July 15, 1662, many were
Puritans
Founders of Royal Society
“This most beautiful
system of the sun,
planets and comets
could only proceed
from the counsel
and dominion of an
intelligent being.”
 Sir Isaac Newton

Founders of Royal Society


Wrote “The Wisdom of
God Manifested in
Works of Creation”,
governor of the
“Corporation for the
Spread of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ in New
England
Sir Robert Boyle(16271691)
Mechanism v.s. Meaning

Conflating mechanism and meaning is origin
of most confusion
why is the water boiling?
Nothing Buttery
humans are collections of chemicals:
enough P for 2000 matches
enough Cl to disinfect
a swimming pool
enough Fe for 1 nail
enough fat to make
10 bars of soap
Scientism
“The cosmos is all there is or ever was
or ever will be” Carl Sagan
 “The most important questions in life are not

susceptible to solution by the scientific
method” Prof. Bill Newsome, Stanford U.
God of the gaps



Science can’t understand it => it must be God.
often a reaction to mechanism& meaning or nothing
buttery
“When we come to the scientifically unknown, our
correct policy is not to rejoice because we have found
God; it is to become better scientists”
Prof.
Charles Coulson, Oxford U
God of the gaps

It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian,
while presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, taking
nonsense. We should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing
situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and
laugh it to scorn .... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they
themselves know well, and hear him maintain his foolish opinions about
the Scriptures, how then are they going to believe those Scriptures in
matters concerning the resurrection of the dead
– St. Augustine
Newton and the planets
“This most beautiful
system of the sun,
planets and comets
could only proceed
from the counsel
and dominion of an
intelligent being.”
 Sir Isaac Newton

Newton and the planets
18th century Orrery from a
London coffee house, used to
show the perfection of the
orbits, which reflect God’s
perfection
Leibnitz objects
“For, as Leibniz
objected, if God had to
remedy the defects of
his creation, this was
surely to demean his
craftmanship”
John
Hedley Brooke,
Science and Religion,
CUP 1991, p147
Laplace and Napoleon

Mécanique Céleste
(1799-1825)
 Napoleon: Why
have you not
mentioned the
creator?
 "Je n'avais pas
besoin de cette
hypothèse-là.”
Chaos and the planets


Our understanding of the Solar System has been
revolutionized over the past decade by the finding that the
orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic. In extreme cases,
chaotic motions can change the relative positions of the planets
around stars, and even eject a planet from a system.
The role of chaotic resonances in the Solar System, N.
Murray and M. Holman, Nature 410, 773-779 (12 April 2001)
Arguments from science:

Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
 Fine-tuning in cosmology
Unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics
Quantum Mechanics + Relativity = Antimatter
Schrödinger equation (Quantum Mechanics)
+
Energy-Momentum (Special Relativity)
=
Dirac Equation (1928)
Electrons
Positrons (antimatter) discovered 1932
Fine Tuning and the Anthropic
Principle
 “The universe is the way it is, because we are here”


– Prof. Stephen Hawking, Cambridge U
If the [fine structure constant] were changed by 1%,
the sun would immediately explode Prof. Max
Tegmark, U. Penn
“Just Six Numbers” by Sir Martin Rees
We are made of Stardust
He
C via a resonance

Sir Fred Hoyle,
Cambridge U
“A common sense
interpretation of the
facts suggests that a
superintellect has
monkeyed with
physics .. and biology”
 His atheism was
“deeply shaken”

Fine Tuning and the Anthropic
Principle

Fine tuning is not a proof of God, but seems
more consistent with theism than atheism
 Note the difference with “God of the gaps”

We seem to have three choices'... We can dismiss it as
happenstance, we can acclaim it as the workings of providence,
or (my preference) we can conjecture that our universe is a
specially favoured domain in a still vaster multiverse.’ If this
multiverse contained every possible set of laws and conditions,
then the existence of our own world with its particular
characteristics would be inevitable.”
– Sir Martin Rees --

John Leslie firing squad argument
Using science in apologetics

Key issues are philosophy/worldview
–
–
–
–

conflict metaphor
meaning v.s. mechanism
nothing buttery
scientism
Arguments based on science:
– watch out for “God of the Gaps” or the argument
from personal incredulity
– Fine tuning, the unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics and other arguments in the spirit of
Ps 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God...”
OUTLINE
What does the Bible say about the
natural world?
 Using science in apologetics
 Witnessing to scientists
 The Origins debate ...

Engaging with Scientists




I.m.h.e. more open than arts/humanities students
Often looking for a higher cause to which to dedicate
their lives; idealists
Receptive to truth
Still rarely become Christians through intellectual
argument alone
Science as a calling ?

Good Scientific praxis resonates well with Christian
principles
 Called not driven; makes better scientists
 in Christian community
 Science and its derivatives will,through globalisation,
have an increasingly large influence on thinking in the
2/3 world. Impact on missions.
 Christians are needed
Summary

The Bible:
– God created the world
– Nature attests to God’s qualities (Rom 1, Psalms)
– God sustains the universe
– Biblical language of Divine action (God sent the rain)
– Bible is not a science textbook
• world has a beginning
• stars, sun, and moon are not Gods etc...
Summary

Science and apologetics
– main issues are worldview/philosophy
– best to use arguments based on non-controversial science

Scientists
– to first order no different from anyone else
– Could you be called to science?
Origins
Controversial -- where we come from
determines identity, meaning, destiny
 4 views:

– 1) Young earth creation science (YECS)
– 2) Progressive creationism
– 3) Intelligent Design
old earth
– 4) Theistic evolution
Advice from Augustine
In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in
the Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very
different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In
such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our
stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth
justly undermines our position, we too fall with it. We should not
battle for our own interpretation but for the teaching of Holy
Scripture. We should not wish to conform the meaning of Holy
Scripture to our interpretation, but our interpretation to the meaning
of Holy Scripture.
Advice from C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may
have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of
plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of the process lasting from the
first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet for an organism fit to
receive spiritual as well as biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing.
Both are denying the same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power
inherent in itself has produced spirituality.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal radically different
beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For what they agree on is the
substance, and what they differ about is the shadow. When one imagines his God seated in a
local heaven above a flat earth, where another sees God and creation in terms of Professor
[Albert North] Whitehead’s philosoph[loosely, process theology], this difference touches precisely
what does not matter.
Advice from Schaefer

We must take ample time, and sometimes this will
mean a long time, to consider whether the apparent
clash between science and revelation means that the
theory set forth by science is wrong or whether we
must reconsider what we thought the Bible says.

Francis Schaefer
Advice from Westminster
Theological Seminary
The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes hand in hand with
its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that not all parts of the Scriptures are
equally clear or full. Here we must follow Calvin's great motto that where God makes an end of
teaching, we should make an end of trying to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J. Young, the
revered teacher of our senior faculty members, we recognize that the exegetical question of the
length of the days of Genesis 1 may be an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended
by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously close to
demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow upon us, and
responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons that are not crafted from the words
which have proceeded out of the mouth of God..
http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html
Advice from Billy Graham
"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today
and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the
Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures
say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made
a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is
not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and
of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did
create the universe. I believe that God created man, and
whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain
point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or
not, does not change the fact that God did create man. ...
whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is
and man's relationship to God.”

- Billy Graham quoted by David Frost

Source: Book - Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (1997, p. 7274)
YECS
easiest
to rationalise with Genesis
Motivated by desire to uphold scripture
– Either the Bible is true, or evolution is true (HM Morris:
Science and the Bible)
– This can lead to heated rhetoric
But can't we be Christian evolutionists, they say. Yes, no doubt it is possible to be a
Christian and an evolutionist. Likewise, one can be a Christian thief, or a Christian
adulterer, or a Christian liar! Christians can be inconsistent and illogical about many
things, but that doesn't make them right.
-- HM Morris, 1980, King of Creation, pp.83-84
Conflict
metaphor
Defining Evolution


Evolution as Natural History
–the earth is old (4.5 Billion years)
–more complex life forms followed from simpler life forms
Evolution as a mechanism for the emergence of biological complexity
–generated by mutations and natural selection
(note: God created this mechanism)

Evolution as a “big picture” worldview
George Gaylord Simpson:
"Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him
in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of
animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of
life and indeed to all that is material."
or Richard Dawkins:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Is the earth old?
Science is a tapestry -- you can pick at a few strings, but that
doesn’t break the whole cloth
•Radiometric dating (many overlapping isotopes)
•ice cores:
up to 8000 years -- volcanoes like Vesuvius
up to 740,000 years
•Milankovitch cycles
•Tree rings
•All these methods (when used properly) agree.
There is no scientific controversy
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
Church fathers

"Now what man of intelligence will believe that the
first and the second and the third day … existed
without the sun and moon and stars?”

Origen 185 - 254
Calvin on using science

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Galileo had any direct knowledge of Calvin's writings. Nevertheless his
understanding of the nature of the language used by the Bible when referring to the natural world is the same as Calvin's as the
following quotations from the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina show.

B1. These propositions set down by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to
accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. (p. 181)

B2. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which
appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. (p. 182)

B3. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary
demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which
may have some different meaning beneath their words. (p. 182f)

B4. ...having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in the true exposition of
the Bible and in the investigation of those meanings which are necessarily contained therein, for these must be concordant with
demonstrated truths. (p. 183)

The first two quotations express the same 'accommodation' understanding of biblical language as Calvin adopted. The third
recognises that, as a result of this, the literal sense of the biblical text may sometimes be at variance with the scientific
understanding of the natural phenomenon described. In the final quotation Galileo makes the point made by Prof. McKay that one
reason why biblical interpreters should take scientific knowledge into account is that it will help them to recognise when the
biblical writers are using the language of appearance or cultural idioms, and so help them avoid the kind of misinterpretation
made by those who condemned Galileo.
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/lucas/lecture.html
le
1: Isis. 2000 Jun;91(2):283-304.
B. B. Warfield (1851-1921). A biblical inerrantist as evolutionist.
 Livingstone DN, Noll MA.
 School of Geosciences, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern
Ireland.


The theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the intellectual basis for modern
creation science. Yet Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of Princeton Theological
Seminary, the theologian who more than any other defined modern biblical
inerrancy, was throughout his life open to the possibility of evolution and at some
points an advocate of the theory. Throughout a long career Warfield published a
number of major papers on these subjects, including studies of Darwin's religious
life, on the theological importance of the age of humanity (none) and the unity of
the human species (much), and on Calvin's understanding of creation as protoevolutionary. He also was an engaged reviewer of many of his era's important
books by scientists, theologians, and historians who wrote on scientific research in
relation to traditional Christianity. Exploration of Warfield's writing on science
generally and evolution in particular retrieves for historical consideration an
important defender of mediating positions in the supposed war between science
and religion.
James Orr

One of the original “Fundamentalists”

There is not a word in the Bible to indicate that in its view death
entered the animal world as a consequence of the Sin of man.
When you say there is the “six days” and the question whether
those days are meant to be measured by the twenty-four hours
of the sun’s revolution around the earth -- I speak of these things
popularly. It is difficult to see how they should be so measured
when the sun that is to measure them is not introduced until the
fourth day. Do not think that this larger reading of the days is a
new speculation. You find Augustine in early times declaring
that it is hard or altogether impossible to say what fashion these
days are, and Thomas Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaving the
matter an open question.

C.S. Lewis
When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image,
he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child
makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think
of the process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final
appearance on this planet for an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as
biological life. Both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the
same thing -- the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself
has produced spirituality.
(C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock Eerdmans (1970), p 46)
Does this mean that Christians on different levels of general education conceal
radically different beliefs under an identical form of worlds? Certainly not. For waht
they agree on is the substance, and what they differ about is the shadow. When
one imagines his God seated in a local heaven above a flat earth, where another
sees God and creation in terms of Professor [Albert North] Whitehead’s
philosoph[loosely, process theology], this difference touches precisely what does not
matter.
Westminster Theological Seminary
http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html
The Westminster Confession's doctrine of the clarity of Scripture (1:7) goes hand
in hand with its inspiration, infallibility, and authority. Yet it implies that not all
parts of the Scriptures are equally clear or full. Here we must follow Calvin's great
motto that where God makes an end of teaching, we should make an end of trying
to be wise.(11) With Augustine and E. J. Young, the revered teacher of our senior
faculty members, we recognize that the exegetical question of the length of the
days of Genesis 1 may be an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended
by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes
dangerously close to demanding from God revelation which he has not been
pleased to bestow upon us, and responding to a threat to the biblical world view
with weapons that are not crafted from the words which have proceeded out of the
mouth of God.
Theistic evolution

Did God create by stochastic mechanism?
 Dominant view amongst Christian academic
scientists and theologians
Tapestry arguments in biology:
common descent of human & chimp?
Divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages occurred about 6 million years ago; the times of lineage divergence are not to scale
News & Views: The chimpanzee and us, Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, Nature 437, 50-51 (1September 2005) .
tapestry arguments in biology:
chromosomal banding:
Humans have 46 (2 X 23)
chromosomes
Apes have 48 (2 X 24)
chromosomes
The origin of man: a chromosomal pictorial legacy. J.J Yunis and O. Prakash,
Science 215, 1525 (1982)
tapestry arguments in biology:
chromosomal banding:
Humans have 46 (2 X 23)
chromosomes
Apes have 48 (2 X 24)
chromosomes
Chromosome 2: Humans, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Orang-utans.
tapestry arguments in biology: fusion
of chromosome 2
Chromosome 2: Humans, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Orang-utans.
tapestry arguments in biology: evidence
from the human genome
Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having
emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric
chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise
fusion site has been located in 2q13−2q14.1 (ref. 2;
hg16:114455823−114455838), where our analysis confirmed the
presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5,
8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A).
During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two
centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the
centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric
structure quickly deterioriated [42].
Generation and annotation of the DNA sequences of human
chromosomes 2 and 4, L.W. Hillier et al., Nature 434, 724 (2005).
tapestry arguments in biology: more
threads of evidence
•Genetic threads
•SINEs (Alu )
•LINEs
•Retroviral insertions
•pseudo genes
•chromosomal inversions
•Phenotypal similarities
•Fossils
•The tapestry for: do humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor?
seems to me almost unbreakably strong
•See Graeme Finlay booklets “Gods Books: Genetics&Genesis (on sale)
for physicists, mathematicians and engineers
-- these arguments may still seem foreign and vague; where is the
“proof”?, how do you know? --- communities talk past each other
tapestry arguments in biology
“But others [biologists], I soon came to realize, regarded logical arguments as suspect.
To them, experimental evidence, fallible as it might be, provided a far surer avenue to
truth than did mathematical reasoning. .... Their implicit assumption seemed to be:
How could one know one’s assumptions were correct? Where, in a purely deductive
argument, was there room for the surprises that nature might offer, for mechanisms
that might depart altogether from those imagined in our initial assumptions? Indeed
for some biologists, the gap between empirical and logical necessity loomed so large
as to make the latter seem effectively irrelevant.
•Evelyn Fox Keller, in “Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development
with Models, Metaphors, and Machines, HUP, (2002)
You can’t ask those kinds of questions!!!!
(Biologist to AAL at “Protein-Protein Interaction Conf”, June 2004)
“Where are the equations” -- a physicist might ask
Tapestry arguments

Basic scientific principles are shared across fields

But what is considered “necessary” or “sufficient” for a (selforganised) tapestry varies from field to field (often unwritten)
– cultural iceberg, above and below waterline
– evidence: grant or paper review
– demarkation problem

mathematics->physics->chemistry->biology->medicine>engineering

Differences --in spite of apparent epistemic laxity ... it still works!
Recommended Books, see also:
www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/urbana/

Science and Christianity: Conflict or
Coherence?, Henry F. Schaefer, III (Apollos,
2003)
 Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, John
Polkinghorne (Triangle, 1994)
 Science & Its Limits, Del Ratzsch (IVP 2000)
 Rebuilding the Matrix, Denis Alexander (Lion
2001)
Recommended Books, see also:
www-louis.ch.cam.ac.uk/urbana/
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,
Mark Noll (IVP, 1994)
 Battle for the Beginnings, Del Ratzsch
(IVP, 1996)
