The first video, “10 Questions with Katherine Hayhoe”, introduces the scientist in a brief and lighthearted interview. Hayhoe is presented with 10 questions concerning her personal life and beliefs. When asked, she explains that one thing people should know about Christianity is that having a relationship with the God of the universe is one of the most incredible experiences that a person can have. As the video unfolds, the viewer quickly begins to realize that, despite her unique profession of two seemingly incompatible beliefs, Hayhoe is a remarkably sane and “normal” individual. Her role model, she explains, is her father-- the person who first introduced her to science and showed her that it could be “really cool”. On a more serious note, the scientist admits that being both a scientist and a Christian can be difficult. The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

In the second video, “Climate Change Evangelist”, Katharine Hayhoe delves into deeper discussion of the perceived conflict between climate change and Christian faith. She explains that admitting her identity as a Christian scientist can be uncomfortable. Since evangelicals are the targets of much disinformation concerning science in general -- and specifically the science surrounding climate change -- many people in the church have a misguided view of the subject and do not look kindly at her career choice. One woman encountered by Hayhoe at a church in Texas, for example, believed that global warming was a lie taught in schools to mislead her children. In an effort to realign misguided views like these, Katharine Hayhoe and her husband wrote a book addressing the deep-rooted emotions often associated with climate change. People fear that addressing the climate issue will bring forth changes in the economy and uproot their way of life. However, Hayhoe encourages her viewers to act out of love, as the Bible calls us to do, rather than out of fear. Acting out of love inspires us to consider the poor and disadvantaged people around the globe when we respond to the reality of a changing climate.

In the final segment of this three part video montage, Hayhoe addresses the question of what climate change means. Specifically, she is concerned about how global warming affects people on a personal level. While global warming generally brings to mind melting ice caps and polar bears, its implications are far more widespread, affecting the lives of everyone around the world- from cotton farmers in Texas to public health workers in Chicago. If nothing is done to change current emission levels, the number of days per year which exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, will begin to increase dramatically, and if emissions are increased, many areas will even develop extreme conditions like those seen currently in Death Valley. Hayhoe’s goal is to demonstrate clearly that the only way to preserve the world for future generations is to significantly reduce dependence on inefficient means of getting energy and instead transition to cleaner renewable energy sources.

Editor's Note: These videos first appeared on the Nova program "The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers".

Ultimately, however, Finch remarks that "science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God." To him, those who proselytize atheism under the banner of "science" do a disservice to science. The goal of scientists is to understand the physical world around us, and most scientists go into their labs to discover something wonderful about the world, rather than to comment on the existence of God.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures, and features theologian Alister McGrath.

In today's video, theologian Alister McGrath discusses how we can make sense of the world in light of a fallen creation. One way, he notes, is to look for evidence from as many sources as possible, as science does. Certainly, the scientific community does change it's mind on things, but this does not mean we should stop asking, "What seems to be the best way of making sense of things?"

McGrath feels we need to "recalibrate" the science and faith debate. For young scientists who are excited about their faith as well, McGrath has these words: "We need you... because if you don't get into [science], the future is going to be dominated by those who use science as a weapon against faith. Scientists should be willing to follow the evidence where it leads."

Vox Balaenae, or “Voice of the Whale,” was composed by American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) and was first performed by the New York Camerata in 1971. It was only four years before that, in 1967, that biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that humpback whales “sing” and published recordings of the whales’ complex vocalizations, after which “whale song” quickly entered the popular consciousness and helped propel the “save the whales” environmental movement forward. (In 1970, Folk singer Judy Collins even put out a version of the traditional melody "Farewell To Tarwathie" over a background of recorded humpback whale songs.) For many, the fact that the massive creatures might share the human capacity and desire to engage in music as a social activity only made their wholesale destruction at our hands more egregious.

Though he was himself inspired by hearing those early whale song recordings, Crumb’s work does not utilize tapes of real whales or attempt merely to reproduce the effect in the context of an ordinary musical form. Instead, he asks three chamber musicians with modified and electrically amplified instruments (piano, flute and cello) to create sounds that evoke the entire natural history of the sea. The piano is played and strummed from inside the case and with a glass rod or plate on the strings, the cello part emphasizes a string’s abilities to produce high harmonic tones, and the flautist sings into her instrument as she plays. Many of these effects are intended to suggest natural sounds—as in the cello’s "seagull effect" (audible at 5:59 in the video linked blow), and the whale-like beginning cadenza by the flute—but not always in a direct way. In addition, all three players perform wearing half-masks, which, according to Crumb help “effac[e] the sense of human projection,” especially when they play under blue stage lighting as he envisioned. (Most of these features can be seen and heard in this April 2011 performance in Montreal by Philippe Prud'homme, piano; Stephane Tetreault, cello

; and Camille Lambert-Chan, flute, though it omits the blue stage lighting.)

In this multi-sensory impressionistic scene, the whales become representatives of a natural world that predates humanity, yet whose fate is inextricably bound up with the will of mankind. Indeed, the tension between the measured vastness of geologic time and the “Age of Man” is written into the score, as an opening prologue is followed by variations on the initial “Sea Theme” (beginning at 4:20), each named after geologic epochs: Archeozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and finally, the Cenozoic. It is in this last age—when mankind arrives on the scene—that the sometimes atonal and harsh combinations of sound reach a dissonant climax that the score indicates should be played as “dramatic, with a feeling of imminent destiny” (beginning at 11:26). Finally, the piece moves towards its conclusion with a haunting restatement and renewal of the Sea Theme (at just after 13:00), with the musicians gradually playing more and more quietly until ending with a pantomime, as if creating sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. Again, the sense of resolution in the music is named by Crumb in the score’s instructions to the players: “serene, pure, transfigured.”

So what do we make of this musical narrative and what Crumb seems to be saying about both whales (standing—or swimming—for the natural world) and humankind? Is it truly an anti-human statement, a “whales vs. people” image in response to environmental damage we were only really beginning to understand (via science) at the time the piece was written? There is certainly a skepticism here about human hubris, made explicit at the end of the prologue section by a “parody” of the opening phrase of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra (at 2:40). Contemporary listeners then and now will likely recognize that borrowed theme as the music from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but before that it was a musical homage to Nietzsche’s view of ascendant Man. In this ironic re-use of Strauss’ work, Crumb seems to say that against the span of geologic time and a vast (musical) world previously unknown to human ears, our claims of knowledge and technological mastery seem laughable.

Yet there are several clues that that sort of reading misses the mark, or that it is, at best, incomplete—beginning with the experience of playing and hearing it in person. I first heard Vox Balaenae in about 2002 with my then 6-year-old son. It was played in a small hall (under blue lights) at our local art museum by the Quadrivium Players, a group that included my friend Mary Boodell on the flute. While the masks were surprising at first, they did, indeed, de-emphasize the personality of the players as individuals, while emphasizing the atmospheric, world-creating power of art-forms, especially music.

Rather than a symbolic effacement of the human presence in the world (in keeping with the anti-Nietzschian not above), the effect was to move away from the ritualized performative aspect of modern chamber music and bridge the divide between players and observers, creating a more participatory community. Because of the piece’s distinctive, impressionistic kind of narrativity, one isn’t so much as “carried away by” the music as submerged and suspended in the world created by it, and Boodell describes the effect (especially at the end of the piece) of feeling like the audience is holding it’s breath to hear the silences Crumb has written into the score.

But Boodell also recounts the story of being drawn into the conceptual frame of the piece in a very physical, way when she found herself alone in a swimming pool in the weeks leading up to a performance. Though hesitantly at first, she couldn’t help but wonder how the sounds she made in Vox Balaenae would sound underwater, and so went under in the pool to find out. While the image makes one smile and probably reminds most of us of similar, less technically-proficient underwater experiments of our own, it also suggests how the piece helps hearers make a connection in addition to that between player and listener—that between humanity and the rest of the natural world. If the unexpected flow and soundscape created by Crumb helps audience and players achieve the kind of connection music scholar Jeff Warren has elsewhere on this site discussed as “entrainment,” it is also an invitation to a similarly compassionate state with the rest of creation, based on the new-found knowledge that other creatures have complex, even musical relationships with each other, and that we are privileged to discover and begin to understand them.

Clearly, then, Crumb’s Vox Balaenae touches on scientific knowledge of the world both in its genesis in recordings of whale songs and its structure keyed to geologic, evolutionary ages. But does it have more to say to us here than that we should avoid killing whales because they sing? While we can recognize that the biblical call to have dominion over the earth guides us towards cultivation and care for its creatures and remember that Jesus exemplified such a shepherding role, we should also remember his priestly one, and ours. For just as he remains the High Priest of heaven, holding our prayers in the presence of the Father, we have similar joy in being between heaven and earth, “a little lower than the angels.” Thus we can hold up the great whales (and their songs) as monuments to the depth of God’s creative activity in and through nature—and even revel in our musical, creaturely fellowship with them—without denying the special place of humanity. On the contrary, we affirm that special place when we humble ourselves to listen, seek to understand the native tongues of creation, and then, through Christ, present its songs before the throne of the Almighty Creator and King.

Today's video features Dr. Michael Loyd, Tutor in Theology at St. Paul's Theological Center, and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Rev. Dr. Michael Lloyd talks about how being created in the Image of God transcends survival of the fittest and how what we believe (or don't believe) as Christians speaks volumes about our worldview and it's ability to be expanded.

Transcript

I actually think that though evolution is often seen as the enemy of religious faith, and the Christian faith in particular, that actually, in a number of ways, it points beyond itself. And it’s much more than, not less than, but more than a survival capacity.

Something quite remarkable has happened and that suggests to me, in itself, that evolution is not hopeless. The cellist in Sarajevo who, at the heart of the troubles, used to go out into the old Olympic area with his cello and play unaccompanied Bach cello suites to say to the people of violence “That’s not what’s real. This is what’s real. This is what matters. This is what human beings are for.” And I find it meshes suspiciously well with human beings being made in the Image of a God who is the creator, and therefore creative, and that is just who we are that is just part of our being.

I think one needs to tend very carefully to the things that one wants to be true, and wants not to be true, both for a positive and a negative reason. The things we want, and don’t want to be true, tell us a very great deal about ourselves. Now some of that is really good. On the other hand, sometimes when we hang on to those things in the face of evidence, in the face of arguments, that may tell us something negative about ourselves. It may tell us that we are refusing to allow our worldview to be expanded. It’s limiting me because we are growing and, therefore, we need to get bigger clothes as well.

And it’s often the niggling, annoying things, the things we actually want to deny and shut out, that are things that can actually improve, [and] enlarge our worldview. Now as a Christian, I obviously believe that my worldview is incredibly finite. That the truth is always going to be bigger than we are aware of, than we are able to encompass, that we will ever grasp. And if that’s the case, if life is partly about getting a bigger and bigger view of the world and of life and of God, then anything that niggles us into a bigger view has got to be good, so we need to attend to that.

The dangers of getting trapped in ones old way of seeing are huge. And actually the awkward annoying things that we don’t want to believe, that we don’t want to accept, are our friends because they will crack open an unsatisfactory inadequate view of life and give us a slightly less inadequate one.

This week we feature the next clip from the documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

"History of a Worldview" Transcript

Bishop N.T. Wright: “The debate such as has happened between so-called science and so-called faith, has a lot of quite murky roots. In the 18th century in my country, for instance, one person I happen to know a little bit about is Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, because I once lived in Litchfield, which is where he lived. Litchfield, in the eighteenth century was one of the small, buzzy, intellectual centers of Britain, and those guys were already exploring their scientific experiments within basically, what I have called, an Epicurean universe and it says in Epicureanism, ‘God and the world or the gods and the world are a long way apart, God is not involved in the world—if there is a God—and so we just have to explore the world as it is.’ That goes with the philosophy called Deism where you have an absentee landlord God.

The 18th century was a way of simplifying certain questions: ‘Alright, God is out of the mix, now we can just do our experiments…but, as we do our experiments, if God is out of the mix, then when we observe change going on in the world, it must be a change which has happened from within the processes of the world. When Charles Darwin went on his boat off to the Galapagos and studied these things and those things and finches and turtles and goodness knows what, that was fantastic and extraordinary and mind blowing, but the philosophical framework within which he interpreted that was one that his grandfather had been working on two generations before (and so had lots of other people): the idea that God was out of the picture and that what you had was evolution [and] development of an explicitly godless kind, a God-out-of-the-picture kind. The problem is that in America even more than Britain—and it was quite true in Britain as well in the 19th century—the Deism of people like Thomas Jefferson, had split off God from the world for political reasons because once God is out of the picture, then we are free to develop whatever sort of empire, whatever sort of power we want. Sadly, the church colluded with this because the church basically treated Christianity as a sort of escape from this world off to this distant God, and you have that in spirituality which is not anchored and earthed in social reality…

And you have it in a soteriology, a theory of how you get saved, which is that you leave this world, and you go off to be with that God; neither of those is actually Biblical. In the Bible, God and the world, heaven and earth kind of mesh together, and you find Jesus in the middle of that, and the Bible in the middle of that, and you should find yourself in the middle of that. Part of the point of being a Christian is that we are meant to be living at those strange, overlap points of heaven and earth—that is what prayer is all about, that is what the sacraments are all about, that is actually what ministering to the poor in Jesus’ name is all about. As Jesus himself said, ‘If you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.’ There is a sense of overlap and that actually makes life much more complicated.

It seems to me you need to unpick all of that, you need to understand how we got where we got before you even get to Scopes and monkeys and, you know, court cases, and so on, because those court cases are just misunderstood before they even start because of all that worldview baggage that is coming to us from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. We need to relocate the question as between devout Christians here and eager scientists there. We need to relocate that question within this much larger understanding of where our culture has been [and] where it might now be going. Otherwise, it will become a dialogue of the deaf or a battle in the dark, as it were.”

In November 2010, a small group of leading pastors, scholars, scientists, public intellectuals, and informed laypersons gathered in New York City to consider several pressing questions at the interface of science and faith (see summary statement ). Three papers, each addressing a different question, provided the framework for our discussions at the meeting. These were presented by Faraday Institute Director Denis Alexander (see paper), Oxford theoretical biophysicist Ard Louis (see paper), and MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson. Hutchinson's paper addresses the question of how to engage arguments put forward by the New Atheists by offering a critique of scientism, the assumption that scientific knowledge is all the real knowledge there is.

Editor's Note: After some discussion surrounding the use of the world "militant" in the last video from Ian Hutchinson, we've asked him to clarify his use of the word in the accompanying paper. He responds in this video:

What do I mean by Militant? Nothing different from what the dictionary says. 'Vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause' (Free Online Dictionary). The Pocket Oxford Dictionary says 'engaged in warfare (Church militant, Christians on earth), combative,' So this ephithet has not historically been considered an insult and is not intended by me as one. Militant atheists is a factual description of those who are active and aggressive in support of their atheist cause. If they wish to return the compliment by referring to militant Christians, they will have some historical precedent and I shall not complain, but I am personally less aggressive, even if perhaps not less vigorous, than the likes of those who are often called New Atheists!

For more, see Ian Hutchinson's full paper Engaging Today's Militant Atheist Arguments

In this video, Denis Alexander discusses the need to restore a traditional creation theology to the discussion of science and faith. One way to do this, argues Alexander, is to discourage investing evolution with an atheistic narrative, and instead allow it to do the job it is meant to fulfill: to explain the origins of biological diversity.

To argue that evolution is inherently atheistic, however, is an error, notes Alexander, as it takes the scientific theory and imposes one’s personal ideology upon it.

“We don’t have to choose between creation and evolution because they are two complementary narratives,” says Alexander. “You need both accounts to do justice to the complexity of the world around us.”

Alexander notes that while the biological theory of evolution is not itself an ideology, it has been used for ideological purposes since 1859 to defend everything from eugenics to capitalism to racism to atheism. The reason, he asserts, is not because of any true support, but rather because people often try to use the popular scientific theories of the day to support all sorts of ideologies.

He also notes that the phrase "survival of the fittest", often tied to Darwin and stated as a core part of evolution, was in fact coined by science popularizer Herbert Spencer, and that the phrase is in fact a poor description of the complicated processes involved in evolution. Unfortunately, the phrase was picked up during the World War I-era as a way to support the "might makes right" mentality, and the misunderstanding was used to justify all sorts of failed ideologies.

Similarly, Alexander notes that the fact that evolution admits there are variations between people in regards to genetics has been used to justify racist ideology. However, once again, this is a case of ideology using something for its own agenda; the biological process of evolution itself does not in any way justify such racist thinking, and in fact diversity is beneficial to populations.

For more on the supposed links between racism and eugenics, see Michael Zimmerman's post "Social Darwinism: A Bad Idea with a Worse Name" and Karl Giberson's post "Who Cares About Darwin?"

UPDATE: Michael Zimmerman has just posted another article on the topic. You can find it here.

In this brief video Conversation, Os Guinness addresses the problem of holding a purely naturalistic worldview—one that does not coincide with many basic human concepts.

For example, Guinness notes that there are certain things very important to human beings including freedom, justice, purpose in the universe, moral intuition, and altruism, which are either nonexistent or else devalued when viewed through a naturalistic lens.

When these things are filtered through the lens of a Judeo-Christian perspective, however, they make sense. One is able to recognize that regardless of individual circumstance (physical limitations, poverty, etc.) all people made in the image of God have a precious dignity.

The naturalists cannot say the same—so there is a bleakness to their dogma that we do not see with Christianity.