Jeffrey Williams | “Delighting in the Studied Works of Yahweh” | Math3ma Symposium 2023
00:00:00.000 | It's great to be here with you.
00:00:07.520 | I'm excited with this whole idea, I don't know about you, but in the scientific community,
00:00:13.280 | in the academic community, in the professional community, that segment that works in technology
00:00:21.880 | and whatnot, you know, by the greater public, we are considered the elite, right?
00:00:28.120 | That's the word we like to apply to others, but the public would apply it to many of us
00:00:35.540 | in the room.
00:00:36.920 | It's important to realize that because there's an authority there that the public largely
00:00:44.240 | can't engage with.
00:00:50.240 | The whole world, the world of science, the name science, the name scientist or the word
00:00:54.720 | scientist has an authority that the public can't engage with, and we know what the implications
00:00:59.540 | of that have been throughout the world.
00:01:04.840 | So this kind of thing, to get together to actually engage in these issues, these questions,
00:01:09.880 | is very important, I think, to then later get out to the public and try to find a way
00:01:15.400 | to get a voice, because those of us that are believers in Jesus Christ, our biggest challenge
00:01:20.140 | is getting a voice that is heard out there.
00:01:23.960 | I'll say, before I get into my presentation, that over the last several years, with the
00:01:29.120 | whole issues of the COVID and the world shutting down and the vaccines and all of that, put
00:01:35.000 | a chink in the armor of the authority of science and scientists.
00:01:40.200 | It's a great opportunity for us to then step in and clarify.
00:01:45.360 | So see that as an opportunity in your own walks, in your own circles of life.
00:01:53.460 | Look for those opportunities to take advantage of that.
00:01:56.960 | I mean, even that is in the providence of God.
00:02:00.280 | Now, I've been given kind of a broad assignment.
00:02:03.080 | I've been asked to talk about space flight, I've been asked to relate to that a little
00:02:08.000 | bit, I've been asked to talk about scripture in a biblical worldview, I've been asked to
00:02:12.680 | talk about science, I'm going to try to put it a little bit into a historical perspective,
00:02:21.600 | and then I've also been asked to give more of a personal testimony of what the Lord has
00:02:26.900 | done in my life, particularly in the last two or three decades or so.
00:02:34.280 | So it's a broad assignment.
00:02:35.400 | I've never done it exactly this way before, so we'll see how it goes.
00:02:39.440 | I'm hoping to leave a little bit of room for questions.
00:02:43.620 | I've entitled this presentation Delighting in the Studied Works of Yahweh, or of the
00:02:51.100 | Lord, if you're still in the ESV or a version similar to that.
00:02:56.020 | I, of course, being here at TMU, I had to use Yahweh, and many of you know why that
00:03:05.540 | is.
00:03:06.540 | Those of you that don't understand that little humor, you can seek it out, seek out the answer
00:03:13.180 | here in the next couple of days.
00:03:17.820 | Who's familiar with Psalm 111 in a way that you recall?
00:03:23.380 | Very good.
00:03:24.380 | I don't see a hand in the room.
00:03:27.660 | One of my fears is, you guys all have, many of you have advanced degrees beyond what I
00:03:33.360 | have in specialty areas, so it's a little bit intimidating speaking to an audience like
00:03:38.300 | that in that way.
00:03:40.740 | But Psalm 111 is kind of the theme of my presentation, and specifically verse 2, I'll read verse
00:03:48.660 | 1 and verse 2.
00:03:49.780 | Verse 1 says, "Praise the Lord, I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in
00:03:55.420 | the company of the upright."
00:03:58.140 | So right there, there's a praising God in the context of the congregation.
00:04:05.380 | So in the context of believers.
00:04:09.300 | And then verse 2 says, "Great are the works of the Lord," or of Yahweh, "studied by all
00:04:18.900 | who delight in them."
00:04:21.420 | Now my assumption is that we're all in business of studying God's works, whether we know it
00:04:29.980 | or not, His works of creation, His works of provisioning His creation.
00:04:36.580 | We would expand that to His works of providential governing of His creation.
00:04:44.060 | And I would say that we, those of us that are believers in Jesus Christ, see and understand
00:04:51.380 | and grow to understand all of those works of God through the lens of being a recipient
00:04:56.980 | of His work of redemption.
00:04:59.460 | And that's important for us to realize.
00:05:04.380 | We see and we seek to grow in our understanding of the works of God, His works of creation,
00:05:11.060 | His works of provisioning, His creation, His works of providence in our life, and of course
00:05:14.980 | that transcends to our calling in life, which I'll get into a little bit more in the personal
00:05:18.980 | remarks at the end, through our understanding of His work of redemption in Jesus Christ.
00:05:24.460 | Very important.
00:05:25.460 | Very important.
00:05:27.300 | That's why I want to springboard off Psalm 111 verse 2.
00:05:32.340 | If you go back and read it again, it doesn't command us to study.
00:05:36.980 | It doesn't command us to delight in the works of the Lord.
00:05:41.740 | Those are adjectives.
00:05:43.600 | Those are participles.
00:05:45.180 | They're modifying.
00:05:46.180 | They are saying these are studied works among delighting believers.
00:05:52.980 | So in our work, if we see it through the lens of redemption, we are inclined to be continually
00:06:01.700 | studying the works of God, as Ty Dene introduced, you know, to seeing mathematics and seeing
00:06:06.260 | just the wondrous truth that is in math that discloses the work of God and His ordering
00:06:13.260 | of creation.
00:06:15.460 | They become studied works, and we are delighting believers in that study.
00:06:22.060 | So that's the reason.
00:06:23.060 | I wanted to preface that with, that's why I put Psalm 111 verse 2 up there.
00:06:29.560 | It was known historically, and I'll get into the science in a few minutes, as the scientists'
00:06:36.060 | psalm.
00:06:40.140 | So I'm going to give you lots of homework challenges here.
00:06:42.700 | That's one of them.
00:06:43.700 | Go research that.
00:06:44.700 | The scientists' psalm, Psalm 111 verse 2, and we obviously won't have time to go through
00:06:48.780 | the whole thing.
00:06:49.780 | Now, I said I'm also going to relate it to space flight and relate it to technology.
00:06:55.660 | My experience in NASA was, took four flights to space, four opportunities to space.
00:07:03.300 | The first one was in May of 2000.
00:07:06.700 | It was on the space shuttle Atlantis.
00:07:09.260 | And anybody here see a space shuttle launch?
00:07:13.020 | Yes, yeah?
00:07:16.100 | If you ever saw a launch, it was amazing to see.
00:07:18.660 | The closest you could get was three miles away.
00:07:21.340 | So you saw the initial ignition of the solid rocket boosters six seconds after the ignition
00:07:28.540 | of the three main engines, and then you saw it lift off.
00:07:32.060 | You saw the flash of bright light, and then, of course, 15 seconds after the initial ignition,
00:07:38.820 | that's when the sound hit you, and it shook your whole body.
00:07:41.780 | I remember that your chest just shook and vibrated with the energy coming out of that.
00:07:47.340 | Think about the technology that was involved in all of the pieces, all of the science,
00:07:54.460 | all of the components of science that was involved in putting that together.
00:07:57.900 | From the chemistry of the solid rocket motor, to the structural engineering, to the life
00:08:04.900 | support system keeping the crew alive once they left the habitable Earth, to the orbital
00:08:11.860 | mechanics to go precisely into an orbit, and then it took less than nine minutes to
00:08:18.100 | get into orbit, and then being in an orbit that was predicted well ahead of time to then
00:08:23.180 | rendezvous later with something else already in orbit.
00:08:27.020 | Just think about all of that, all of the science involved in that, which is a clear demonstration
00:08:31.500 | in countless ways of God's ordering of His creative work.
00:08:37.300 | When we lifted off, it was about four and a half million pounds of mass pushed off the
00:08:44.140 | launch pad with seven million pounds of thrust.
00:09:01.400 | Most of that mass on the liftoff, as you might imagine, was fuel because it took that much
00:09:06.100 | energy just to get out of the gravitational well of Earth, as we like to call it.
00:09:13.740 | First two minutes on the solid rocket booster, and the rest of the time on the three main
00:09:19.060 | engines.
00:09:20.100 | But very impressive, and when you think about it in the context of what we're talking about
00:09:23.540 | here, it's an amazing achievement of mankind to develop something like that to get into
00:09:29.860 | orbit.
00:09:32.380 | By the way, one other theme I'll try to weave into the talks is the implications of bearing
00:09:37.380 | the image of God.
00:09:39.980 | Because we have the provisioned creation, as I introduced, but we also have our ability
00:09:46.120 | to extract from that creation.
00:09:48.780 | And that's a big thing for us to understand, too.
00:09:51.680 | You all bearing the image of God are in the business of subduing God's creation, whether
00:09:57.520 | you realize it in that context or not.
00:10:00.420 | I want to read a quote here that kind of illustrates one example of bearing the image of God.
00:10:10.260 | "From the rocket we shall see the huge sphere of the planet Earth, like phases of the moon.
00:10:17.460 | We shall see how the sphere rotates, and how within a few hours it shows all its sides
00:10:22.860 | successively.
00:10:23.860 | By the way, we orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, so 16 times a day.
00:10:28.920 | And we shall observe various points on the surface of the Earth for several minutes,
00:10:32.660 | and from different sides very closely.
00:10:35.340 | This picture is so attractive, majestic, attractive, and infinitely varied, that I wish with all
00:10:41.700 | my soul that you and I could see it."
00:10:46.780 | That quote was written in 1911 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was a physicist in Russia,
00:10:55.740 | later Soviet Union.
00:10:56.860 | He's considered the father of the Soviet space program.
00:11:00.820 | He was a theorist, a mathematician.
00:11:04.800 | So he calculated theoretically what we were then decades later able to do, which is a
00:11:11.500 | clear testimony of bearing the image of God and the capacity that we're given with that
00:11:17.180 | image in God's creative work, even in us, even in mankind.
00:11:23.200 | Another one you may be more familiar with, "Using material ferried up by rockets, it
00:11:29.160 | would be possible to construct a space station in orbit.
00:11:32.800 | The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories, and everything needed
00:11:37.000 | for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket
00:11:42.320 | service."
00:11:43.640 | Arthur C. Clark, a familiar name, wrote that in 1945.
00:11:48.760 | My first flight was in 2000, and I returned to space three additional times, in 2006,
00:11:55.760 | in 2009, in the fall into the spring of '10, and then most recently in 2016.
00:12:03.520 | Each of those times, it was what we call a long-duration expeditionary flight to the
00:12:09.960 | International Space Station.
00:12:12.120 | Sorry, we have a little construction going on in the back of the room.
00:12:19.440 | Each of those flights lasted about six months.
00:12:24.700 | Each of those flights was dedicated to a different phase of building the International Space
00:12:30.300 | Station.
00:12:31.300 | My first visit in 2000 on the space shuttle was before Expedition 1 launched.
00:12:37.460 | It was two modules.
00:12:38.720 | Each of them were about 40 feet in length, and we didn't have the life support systems
00:12:43.800 | on board, so it was before the permanent presence.
00:12:47.480 | Then months after that, in the fall of 2000, we launched Expedition 1, and that started
00:12:51.880 | the permanent presence on board the International Space Station.
00:12:57.800 | And then in 2006, I went back, launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan.
00:13:03.760 | Again, as I mentioned, for a duration of six months.
00:13:07.040 | We were about halfway through building the space station.
00:13:12.040 | And then in 2009, I returned in the spring of '10.
00:13:17.720 | We completed the assembly of the International Space Station.
00:13:21.520 | Again, that was a launch on a Russian rocket, and a duration of about six months.
00:13:27.640 | And then 2016, now the space station's in its full operational mode.
00:13:32.800 | Another six-month stay, again launching and returning to Earth from and to Kazakhstan.
00:13:38.360 | I'll come to that in a minute.
00:13:41.760 | But all those experiences, we ferried material up by rockets.
00:13:48.740 | We constructed a space station in orbit.
00:13:52.820 | Every time we launched a crew or launched a supply ship, we returned to the space station,
00:13:57.840 | as I described earlier, launching from someplace on Earth at a very precise time, pointing
00:14:04.600 | the rocket in a very precise direction, firing the engine at a very precise time, getting
00:14:09.800 | into a very precise orbit.
00:14:11.920 | And within 48 hours, 46 hours, and recently is less than six hours, rendezvousing and
00:14:17.920 | docking with the space station, going 17,500 miles an hour, docking at 0.1 feet per second,
00:14:26.760 | plus or minus about an inch.
00:14:29.960 | That's a demonstration of the mathematical order in God's creation and man's ability
00:14:33.680 | to predict it and to subdue it, if you will.
00:14:39.320 | We, in the course of those years, built the space station piece by piece.
00:14:44.640 | It's provided with living quarters.
00:14:46.120 | I had my own little phone boot size crew quarters.
00:14:50.560 | And then we had a couple of galleys.
00:14:52.240 | We had laboratory modules.
00:14:54.560 | We had almost everything needed for the comfort of its crew.
00:14:57.560 | We couldn't get the family up there, and I couldn't beam home on the weekend.
00:15:01.160 | That was one of the things I would take out of science fiction.
00:15:05.560 | And we were relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service.
00:15:08.900 | Every few weeks or so, we would have a supply ship show up with everything we needed, to
00:15:16.080 | include things like fresh fruit, which had a few days of shelf life, but it was a special
00:15:23.280 | treat.
00:15:24.280 | But that's what the space station looks like today.
00:15:27.840 | That's what it's looked like since 2010 or so.
00:15:33.600 | Amazing achievement.
00:15:35.720 | I think it's the most significant technological achievement in history.
00:15:40.420 | That's my opinion.
00:15:41.720 | When you consider that it was built, the first element launched in 1998, finished in 2010,
00:15:47.440 | it continues to fly.
00:15:49.520 | We've had 20, going on 23 years of continuous human presence in space.
00:15:56.200 | It's made of components that were manufactured in different parts of the Earth.
00:16:00.540 | Different countries.
00:16:02.200 | Many of them, of course, in the US, spread around parts from at least 48 states.
00:16:08.760 | You recognize you have to have political support to accomplish something like this, so you
00:16:12.280 | need something in every district, almost, to get Congress to pass it.
00:16:17.480 | But not only that, there are major components built in Russia, and Ukraine, by the way,
00:16:25.040 | that never had the opportunity to be integrated and tested on the ground before launch.
00:16:31.400 | It was done with simulators, simulating interfaces, and lots of work in this international engineering
00:16:38.320 | team developing that capability, and then launching these elements from either Kazakhstan
00:16:44.380 | or the Cape in Florida, or Japan.
00:16:47.200 | Japan contributed some major components.
00:16:50.320 | Canada contributed a robotic arm, which was critical to assembling this thing piece by
00:16:55.000 | piece.
00:16:56.460 | And the European Space Agency also provided a laboratory.
00:16:59.840 | And it went together largely successfully.
00:17:02.720 | We had a few hiccups along the way we had to work through, but it's been an amazing
00:17:08.480 | achievement in that regard.
00:17:10.720 | I pray it never will become a Tower of Babel, and I don't think it has been.
00:17:19.440 | Nonetheless, it doesn't take away from the achievement made by this international team,
00:17:26.780 | this international partnership.
00:17:29.740 | Each person bearing the image of God, given the capacity to do it.
00:17:35.420 | One reason I don't think it's a Tower of Babel is there's a lot of humility involved in something
00:17:39.860 | like this when you have people on board.
00:17:42.260 | And historically, you've lost lives trying to achieve the goal.
00:17:50.140 | We lost the crew of Columbia in the middle of this.
00:17:56.280 | When I went back in 2006 for that first long flight, the space shuttle was still grounded,
00:18:02.100 | and we had a crew of two on board, one Russian and me.
00:18:08.220 | And our primary mission, we did a lot.
00:18:10.500 | We did continue to-- we did some science even.
00:18:14.820 | It is an orbiting laboratory.
00:18:16.180 | But the primary mission was to keep the space station alive until we got the shuttle flying
00:18:19.940 | again.
00:18:21.180 | So it brings humility to the entire team here.
00:18:24.980 | We know lives are at stake.
00:18:26.180 | We know families are at home waiting on those lives that we're trying to manage the risk
00:18:33.340 | so that the crews come back safely.
00:18:36.660 | So anyway, amazing orbital laboratory, orbital outpost, now doing lots of science.
00:18:44.860 | And I'm not going to cover any of the science.
00:18:46.620 | You can go online and get into that bottomless pit of a website searching all the science.
00:18:52.820 | But it covers all of your areas and much more.
00:18:56.700 | We're technicians up there.
00:18:57.900 | We're really not-- I wouldn't call myself a scientist.
00:19:00.380 | We're more like technicians in a laboratory executing the experiments and getting the
00:19:04.620 | data back in the ground.
00:19:06.340 | As I said, it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes.
00:19:08.780 | We're inclined to the equator at 51.6 degrees.
00:19:12.100 | So that means we cross the equator, go up to 51.6 north latitude, cross equator 51.6
00:19:17.580 | south latitude, which means we cover most of the populated Earth.
00:19:22.540 | To give you an idea on the map, we go just above the border into Canada.
00:19:27.560 | We don't go quite as north as Moscow.
00:19:29.900 | Moscow's above that in latitude.
00:19:31.940 | Although you can see Moscow, you can see the Alaskan Range at an oblique angle.
00:19:38.500 | For example, as we're crossing British Columbia, we can look north and see all the way up into
00:19:46.500 | the Alaskan Range.
00:19:47.500 | And I've captured pictures from that distance.
00:19:49.960 | You can see parts of Antarctica when you're flying over Chile, for example.
00:19:56.940 | The orbit period is 90 minutes, as I said.
00:20:04.280 | You can imagine orbital mechanics.
00:20:05.980 | Every orbit, every 90 minutes, the Earth is rotating once every 24 hours.
00:20:10.420 | So every time you cross the equator, you cross about 1,500 miles, roughly, to the west of
00:20:15.420 | the previous crossing.
00:20:17.380 | So the phasing of day-night cycles allows then, over weeks and months, to pass over
00:20:24.680 | the greater portion of the Earth in different lighting conditions, high sun angles, low
00:20:29.120 | sun angles, day, night, etc.
00:20:31.580 | You watch seasons go by.
00:20:32.880 | So it's a great vantage point to study the Earth from that place, and especially looking
00:20:40.180 | through the lens of scripture.
00:20:42.300 | And just to give you a couple examples, here's a nighttime view out the window.
00:20:46.720 | See the structure of the space station.
00:20:48.340 | You see the star field.
00:20:49.340 | You can see the Earth down below with some city lights showing there.
00:20:53.220 | And then the yellow arc is the atmosphere backlit by the sun on the other side.
00:21:01.140 | Or a daytime view, the globe of the Earth.
00:21:06.520 | It's absolutely incredible.
00:21:07.840 | We have great photography equipment on board.
00:21:12.040 | We've maintained the state-of-the-art Nikon professional cameras and lenses that go from
00:21:18.000 | 8mm fisheye to now a 1200mm big lens, which is hard to manage on the ground but very easy
00:21:24.920 | to manage up there.
00:21:25.920 | And inertially it stabilizes it very well.
00:21:28.520 | So they say I've taken almost a half a million pictures up there, and my primary motivation
00:21:34.560 | was to capture the image, to capture the data, to capture the view, to bring it back to the
00:21:41.340 | ground and to share with those on the ground.
00:21:47.920 | From a professional, personal point of view, the highlight of the entire experience I would
00:21:52.720 | say is doing a spacewalk.
00:21:55.400 | And by the way, don't get on your phones now to live stream it, but there's a spacewalk
00:21:59.560 | going on right now.
00:22:01.920 | They're out there about two and a half hours into what will likely be a six and a half
00:22:06.840 | or seven hour EVA, we call it extravehicular activity spacewalk.
00:22:13.840 | There have been, I've lost track of the number, but on the order of 250 or more spacewalks
00:22:18.520 | that have been done in the history of the space station, assembling the space station
00:22:23.000 | piece by piece.
00:22:24.880 | And now today their primary task is to upgrade the solar arrays, which of course captures
00:22:30.460 | the sun's energy to provide, to charge batteries and provide electrical power to all the systems
00:22:35.960 | on board the space station.
00:22:37.960 | But we, on a spacewalk, we go outside, planned six and a half hours, and it ends up being
00:22:43.680 | plus or minus that every time.
00:22:46.920 | So it's a long day, takes about six hours just to go out the door, to get the suits
00:22:51.080 | ready, to get yourself ready, to get the tools ready, to get in everything, to do a pre-breathe,
00:22:55.760 | to wash the nitrogen out of your blood, to go down to the lower pressure.
00:22:59.520 | We're at one atmosphere inside the space station, so 14.7 PSI, we go down to 4.3 PSI, 100% oxygen
00:23:07.360 | for a spacewalk.
00:23:09.280 | You can imagine inside a pressurized suit, the more pressure you have, the harder it
00:23:13.120 | is to just move your arms and your hands.
00:23:17.520 | But it is definitely the highlight of the entire experience, the most challenging thing
00:23:21.700 | we do physically and mentally, because every minute is choreographed for that six and a
00:23:26.920 | half hours.
00:23:27.920 | And we're talking continually to mission control, and they're keeping us on the checklist and
00:23:33.040 | we're confirming the steps as we go.
00:23:36.560 | But it's one thing to be inside the space station or a spacecraft and look out the window
00:23:41.480 | and have this view.
00:23:42.560 | It's another thing to be outside, hanging on with just a fingertip control and moving
00:23:49.160 | yourself around.
00:23:51.160 | And it's hard to imagine, I know, but no gravitational force.
00:23:54.200 | It's only inertial force.
00:23:56.040 | So you stabilize yourself, so you learn to move slow, so you can stop as you go.
00:24:03.600 | You're tethered 100% of the time, for obvious reasons.
00:24:07.720 | Every tool, every piece of equipment, every bag, everything you have is tethered 100%
00:24:13.560 | of the time, because you don't want to lose style points and lose something out there.
00:24:20.080 | Occasionally we've lost a wrench or something, but anyway, that's a personal, on the professional
00:24:28.980 | side, highlight.
00:24:31.040 | As I said before, we, as believers, should grow in our appreciation and appropriation
00:24:39.720 | of these truths that we're talking about through the lens of Scripture.
00:24:43.800 | So with that in mind, it was a highlight of every day if I was in the window at the time
00:24:47.920 | crossing over this part of the world.
00:24:50.280 | And you recognize it, of course, as the Middle East, and in the center of the picture is
00:24:54.200 | Israel.
00:24:55.640 | That's the Dead Sea right in the dead center there, with the Jordan River Valley and the
00:25:00.160 | Sea of Galilee going up and to the right.
00:25:03.040 | You got the Sinai Peninsula.
00:25:05.040 | You got the Nile River Delta way up in the upper left-hand corner.
00:25:09.680 | So in that one view from this orbital outpost, from our vantage point here, you can see the
00:25:15.040 | entire life of Christ, our Lord.
00:25:19.720 | Of course, we understand that through the Scriptures, and I'll say it out loud just
00:25:27.840 | to impress it on our minds right now, He, that is, Christ, is the image of the invisible
00:25:35.240 | God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created in heaven, on
00:25:41.480 | earth, visible and invisible, as recorded in Genesis 1.
00:25:47.440 | Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through
00:25:51.360 | Him and, by the way, for Him.
00:25:55.680 | In our endeavors, we work for Him.
00:26:00.880 | He is before all things, that is, He is eternal, and in Him all things hold together.
00:26:06.200 | Now, in this audience, I can throw out right now, we know there are four fundamental forces,
00:26:12.920 | right, in our observation of the universe.
00:26:16.340 | One of them is gravity.
00:26:18.240 | Everybody knows about gravity.
00:26:20.660 | Everybody bears the consequences if you ignore gravity, right?
00:26:24.820 | The second one is electromagnetic force, which is obvious in life too, I think, in many ways.
00:26:32.960 | The third and the fourth one are less obvious to the general public.
00:26:35.920 | That's the weak force and the strong force at the atomic level.
00:26:42.360 | Anybody here understand any of those forces?
00:26:44.600 | I mean, you understand them, right?
00:26:47.400 | You understand how they work, you understand by observation the implications of those forces.
00:26:54.300 | We can identify them, but does anybody understand, really, why they exist?
00:27:00.880 | I would say no, right?
00:27:02.560 | Well, there's a clue, I think, right here.
00:27:05.500 | In Him all things hold together, which gives evidence of His continual involvement, continual
00:27:13.040 | power applied to His creation.
00:27:17.160 | And when I get into a little bit of the history as to why we are where we are in terms of
00:27:21.200 | science and the public perception of it, it has a lot to do with the history of, if you're
00:27:29.220 | familiar with theological history, the history of the philosophy of, say, deism.
00:27:34.840 | What was deism?
00:27:35.840 | In fact, many of our founding fathers were deist or maybe not actively practicing, but
00:27:41.520 | they were influenced by that philosophy.
00:27:43.480 | Basically, in a nutshell, it's, okay, I acknowledge that God created all things, but then He kind
00:27:50.200 | of wound it up like a clock and let it go on its own.
00:27:53.640 | So He backed off, He's transcendent, but He's not involved in it at all.
00:27:58.920 | So then I have to explain everything by natural processes only, right?
00:28:05.900 | But that denies the scripture.
00:28:08.960 | He is actively involved continually with every detail.
00:28:11.960 | I think it was R.C. Sproul that said not a single molecule is out of the control of God
00:28:17.540 | at any time.
00:28:19.840 | And it's right there, but in Him all things hold together, and that is the Son of God.
00:28:25.240 | It's trinitarian, of course, but it puts an emphasis here on Jesus Christ.
00:28:31.460 | It's a humbling thing.
00:28:32.460 | Psalm 8 brings humility.
00:28:34.720 | When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you've
00:28:39.040 | set in place, who am I?
00:28:42.860 | What is man that you are mindful of him and the Son of man that you care for him?
00:28:47.880 | It's important for us in our day-to-day work to look through this lens and to recalibrate
00:28:53.080 | ourselves through this lens as we delight in the studied works of God.
00:29:01.880 | We go around the earth every 90 minutes, sunset, sunrise, one of the more spectacular sights
00:29:08.600 | that we see continually over and over again.
00:29:12.080 | Everyone is unique because you're seeing it with different weather patterns that are being
00:29:17.280 | silhouetted by the sun.
00:29:19.240 | It happens very fast.
00:29:21.920 | By the way, I'm just throwing in a few examples of pictures.
00:29:24.760 | Tydene asked me to show pictures, so that's what I'm doing.
00:29:29.740 | If you look historically at science and what we know as the age of science or the scientific
00:29:36.680 | revolution, there were three presuppositions, if you could summarize them.
00:29:43.200 | Of course, I'm simplifying things, but three presuppositions that I'd like to highlight
00:29:48.120 | for us this weekend.
00:29:51.020 | One was it presupposed a rational ordering and creation.
00:29:54.980 | We've already talked about that.
00:29:56.680 | There's a definite order in creation that is predictable.
00:30:02.440 | The laws are discovered and developed, if you will, and established based on the fact
00:30:13.680 | that there's a predictable order.
00:30:15.880 | Oh, by the way, the second one there, the order is precise.
00:30:19.880 | I've come to believe that the precision in God's ordering of his universe is infinite.
00:30:25.800 | It's infinitely precise.
00:30:28.520 | We're only limited by our ability to measure that precision.
00:30:32.280 | Of course, we oftentimes look at things and we say, "Well, that's not very precise because
00:30:37.200 | we see all the noise around it."
00:30:39.920 | In that noise, each component that is producing what we perceive as noise is ordered dynamics
00:30:49.200 | that are infinitely precise.
00:30:50.720 | I'm convinced of that.
00:30:53.680 | We get a little bit of a taste of that.
00:30:55.040 | We can predict what we need to do to develop a rocket, to launch, to rendezvous, and dock
00:30:59.360 | with the space station, as I described earlier.
00:31:02.500 | We do it with a little bit of variation, of course, and a little bit of uncertainty.
00:31:06.320 | We manage the risk that way.
00:31:08.760 | In the final analysis, the precision that we're presented with is, I believe, infinite
00:31:14.960 | in its ordering.
00:31:16.800 | The third presupposition is there's a contingency in creation.
00:31:23.600 | What do we mean by that?
00:31:24.840 | Well, some of you probably know better than I do, but basically, you can describe it as
00:31:30.480 | the laws that govern the universe, the creative work of God, those laws are not intrinsic.
00:31:43.040 | In other words, they're not written in the fine print when we make observation.
00:31:49.860 | They're not obvious to us.
00:31:51.760 | They have to be searched out.
00:31:54.280 | They have to be developed.
00:31:56.440 | They have to be discovered.
00:31:57.440 | They have to be established.
00:31:59.960 | They have to be shown by experimentation.
00:32:04.800 | If we think of it in that way, then it makes sense because the creative work was done by
00:32:11.080 | a lawgiver, and we see him in the context of his moral law very clearly.
00:32:16.880 | We can read the Old Testament.
00:32:18.080 | We see the civil laws given to the nation of Israel.
00:32:21.940 | We see the moral law in the Ten Commandments.
00:32:23.960 | We understand morality because our conscience, bearing the image of God, tells us right and
00:32:30.200 | wrong and all that, so we understand those laws, but the laws of nature are also given
00:32:36.900 | by the lawgiver.
00:32:39.160 | So that was a presupposition in the age of science and the scientific revolution that
00:32:45.520 | creation was contingent, and we had to search it out to discover that contingency, and that
00:32:53.620 | resulted in what we call nature's laws, and I'll touch on that a little bit more.
00:33:01.240 | In Jesus Christ, all things hold together, we already talked about.
00:33:04.680 | He upholds the universe by the word of his powers, another example we can draw from Scripture
00:33:09.240 | from Hebrews chapter 1.
00:33:11.160 | I love that Greek word upholds, and I won't go into it in detail, but the commentaries
00:33:19.280 | will tell us that word also has an aspect in its meaning that the upholding has a progress
00:33:29.640 | forward toward a goal, and that's pretty amazing.
00:33:34.680 | That's an amazing aspect.
00:33:36.320 | Not only is it just sustained now, but it's sustained, it's upheld with a purpose, with
00:33:43.360 | a purpose that's still in the future, which I believe will culminate in the return of
00:33:49.600 | Jesus Christ, the establishment of the kingdom, and the eternal state.
00:33:54.820 | That's the purpose of creation, and that's part of the lens that we look through when
00:33:59.300 | we consider our place in our little vapor, our little short period of time as we go through
00:34:08.980 | this life on this side of eternity, we are part of that purpose, each of us a little
00:34:15.060 | piece in God's overall purpose.
00:34:18.980 | "Bearing his image, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have
00:34:26.700 | dominion."
00:34:27.700 | It's probably clear in this room that each of us are involved in the subduing of God's
00:34:32.800 | creation, as I've already talked about.
00:34:38.100 | Let's see.
00:34:45.680 | Another example of our vantage point here, just incredible beauty.
00:34:49.980 | Many of you have seen the northern lights, they exist in the south as well, but just
00:34:56.860 | incredible beauty, which actually when you think about it, there's that second force
00:35:03.940 | of nature, right?
00:35:04.940 | At least in part, there's chemistry involved, there's other science involved, there's interactions
00:35:12.420 | that we can describe scientifically, but we also look at this and what comes to mind,
00:35:17.940 | beauty, harmony, symmetry, all those artsy words, which are also very evident, I think,
00:35:26.380 | in scientific world, the scientific world, a reflection of the glory of God in his creative
00:35:34.820 | work.
00:35:36.060 | Another example, here's a low sun angle with the sun's reflection on an ocean and then
00:35:42.380 | varying layers of clouds.
00:35:45.100 | You can think of that in terms of art, the beauty, the awesomeness, by the way, whenever
00:35:50.620 | we say awesome, we have to attribute God as the source of that concept of wondrous, awesome.
00:36:02.700 | It is the creative work.
00:36:04.740 | But we can also look and we can academically imagine the science involved here too, right?
00:36:10.380 | With density and humidity levels and air flows and the weather systems.
00:36:18.600 | Here's another example.
00:36:20.540 | This was just a fascinating view for me and I got to see it maybe a half a dozen times
00:36:26.380 | over the different flights.
00:36:28.060 | They're called noctilucent clouds and they're seen over the poles periodically and I don't
00:36:34.300 | know if they exist all the time, but the lighting conditions were required to be able to get
00:36:39.180 | a view like this.
00:36:40.700 | And those lighting conditions were provided in the summertime in the North Pole and in
00:36:45.860 | the wintertime in the South Pole.
00:36:49.460 | So this one was in the summer of 2016, so it was over the North Pole, I think it was
00:36:55.200 | December or so, I'm sorry, no, no, no.
00:36:59.460 | It was July of 2016.
00:37:03.600 | And it's when the atmosphere over the North Pole is backlit by the sun, we're just on
00:37:10.020 | the night side of the earth.
00:37:12.380 | And then looking up through the atmosphere, you see this phenomena, which is the research
00:37:20.060 | I've, if you research this on the internet, you can find a little bit of data.
00:37:27.420 | It's on the order of 80 kilometers and above, so it's above the weather systems that we
00:37:32.740 | typically see.
00:37:34.680 | It's also in an area of the atmosphere that we don't spend much time on, airplanes don't
00:37:38.660 | go that high, spacecraft don't go that low.
00:37:41.900 | We just pass through it on a rocket.
00:37:44.020 | So there's not a whole lot of direct data, but the theory is that they're ice crystals
00:37:48.060 | carried up into those altitudes.
00:37:52.620 | But not only is this just, it brings our curiosity, and it's wondrous in its own state, but it's
00:38:01.620 | a clear demonstration of that mathematical order, right.
00:38:05.300 | And just in the currents of the upper atmosphere carrying these things that reflect the light
00:38:11.580 | the way they do, or shine the backlit the way that they do, it's a mathematical order
00:38:18.660 | in its own right.
00:38:20.860 | A wider angle view with its own array of science, this is the island of Cuba in the foreground,
00:38:29.700 | the turquoise or coral reefs.
00:38:33.420 | Right left of center coming down from above from the horizon is the Florida Peninsula,
00:38:40.460 | which you should recognize, and you got the Florida Keys going off to the left, and all
00:38:44.860 | the turquoise to the right are the Bahamas.
00:38:49.020 | Just incredibly beautiful.
00:38:51.180 | A close-up view at my favorite coral reef in the Bahamas is right here.
00:38:57.940 | And it's a jagged edge there because this is about, I don't know, five or six frames
00:39:03.460 | taken just a second apart, overlapping by 50 percent, and then stitched together just
00:39:09.180 | to get the detail.
00:39:12.700 | But it's incredibly beautiful, and we see a clear ordering of things, even at that scale,
00:39:19.540 | even underwater, from a vantage point we don't often see.
00:39:25.500 | Sand dunes, another example.
00:39:27.020 | This one's in either the Sahara or the Saudi Peninsula, I can't remember.
00:39:32.380 | But we see an ordering there, and we know that's caused by the interaction of the wind
00:39:38.340 | and the sand on the ground.
00:39:41.040 | This is my favorite picture of sand dunes in this topic.
00:39:47.980 | That's what it is.
00:39:49.620 | But it's a very clear illustration of mathematical order.
00:39:54.700 | We see the near-orthogonal lines, we see large-scale and small-scale repeating patterns.
00:40:00.660 | You mathematicians, you're thinking you're second-order differential equations and multiple
00:40:06.300 | of them as we sit here, I know you are.
00:40:10.300 | You're thinking calculus.
00:40:12.700 | But a clear representation of the ordering of God's creation.
00:40:19.780 | Science, by the way, means what?
00:40:25.580 | Anybody know?
00:40:27.940 | Remember?
00:40:28.940 | Knowledge.
00:40:29.940 | Yeah, exactly.
00:40:30.940 | It just means knowledge.
00:40:36.260 | Proverbs 1:7, you know it?
00:40:39.820 | The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
00:40:44.940 | It goes on, it says, "But fools despise wisdom and instruction."
00:40:51.140 | It's simply knowledge.
00:40:53.260 | And the Lord has given us a capacity to seek it out and to grow in it because we bear his
00:40:59.780 | image.
00:41:01.000 | Talked about the scientific revolution, the age of science.
00:41:05.980 | Some examples you can pull, of course, Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
00:41:14.380 | Robert Boyle, any scuba divers in here?
00:41:18.180 | PV equals NRT, right?
00:41:20.620 | And you study that just to get scuba qualified so you don't, you can avoid the bends.
00:41:28.760 | More known for chemistry, but we have Boyle's laws.
00:41:32.020 | We talked about it.
00:41:33.020 | Isaac Newton, F equals MA.
00:41:36.260 | Michael Faraday, electromagnetics.
00:41:38.340 | Pasteur, we all have pasteurized milk in our refrigerator at home.
00:41:43.860 | James Clerk Maxwell, Maxwell's equations, we've been exposed to those.
00:41:49.140 | But in the textbooks as you went through school, I bet none of those textbooks acknowledged
00:41:53.620 | that they were all believers.
00:41:56.620 | In fact, they were all theologians first.
00:42:01.580 | And they were deeply committed to answering the call and stewarding what the Lord had
00:42:06.500 | given them.
00:42:07.860 | That was what drove them.
00:42:10.160 | And I believe that's what drove, in God's providence, what we call the scientific revolution.
00:42:16.740 | Because they saw it through the lens of scripture.
00:42:20.060 | We broadly speaking need to recapture that perspective.
00:42:25.260 | We are endeavoring in our callings in life because of what the Lord has done for us and
00:42:33.340 | where he has put us to drive us, to give us something that we need to steward and make
00:42:40.740 | a contribution in subduing the earth.
00:42:43.980 | Like these guys and others.
00:42:45.580 | They were driven by their faith and their sense of moral obligation to answer their
00:42:49.740 | call to scientific endeavor.
00:42:52.940 | And as I touched on earlier, they presupposed and ordered a coherent and intelligible universe
00:43:01.540 | that could be investigated and the laws could be discovered, those contingent laws.
00:43:08.020 | And it was their duty to study it and subdue it.
00:43:14.120 | To give you a little bit of a glimpse of some of these guys, Kepler in a letter to his friend,
00:43:22.260 | Michael, there in 1595, he's reflecting on his past and he said, "I wanted to become
00:43:28.700 | a theologian."
00:43:30.300 | So this is earlier in life.
00:43:32.020 | "For a long time I was unhappy."
00:43:34.820 | And implied there is prior to him actually dedicating his time to theology.
00:43:41.500 | He says, "Now behold, God is praised by my work, even in astronomy."
00:43:48.300 | That's a powerful quote, a personal quote, because it's from a personal letter.
00:43:54.360 | Later there was a found prayer, "If I have been enticed into brashness by the wonderful
00:44:00.100 | beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work
00:44:06.580 | destined for your glory, gently and mercifully pardon me."
00:44:10.940 | This is a confession of sin, right?
00:44:14.100 | And finally, "Deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory
00:44:20.220 | and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that, amen."
00:44:26.920 | That's a very powerful prayer.
00:44:28.780 | It gives us a very valuable insight into his perspective.
00:44:33.900 | And this is Kepler, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, which we're all familiar with, driven
00:44:42.560 | by his faith.
00:44:44.460 | Or another one, and Maxwell's my favorite.
00:44:47.780 | He was very young when he was charged with the design and construction of the Cavendish
00:44:54.020 | Laboratory at Cambridge.
00:44:58.020 | And so that was done and had big wooden entrance doors, and over those doors he had carved
00:45:06.020 | in Latin, Psalm 111 verse 2, "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight
00:45:13.620 | in them."
00:45:16.020 | This written prayer was found after his death, "Almighty God, who created man in thine own
00:45:21.320 | image and made him a living soul that he might seek after thee and have dominion over thy
00:45:27.780 | creatures, teach us to study the works of thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to
00:45:33.500 | our use and strengthen the reason for thy service, and so to receive thy blessed word
00:45:40.220 | that we may believe on him who thou hast sent to give us the knowledge of salvation and
00:45:46.420 | the remission of sins, all of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ our Lord."
00:45:53.580 | Oh, that we would capture such a vision in our work, in our work in academia, in our
00:46:00.020 | work in science, in our work in industry.
00:46:05.860 | Another picture.
00:46:06.860 | This one, I'll pause here.
00:46:11.700 | We call that the Terminator, which is the line that separates the lit part of the earth
00:46:18.980 | from the night part of the earth.
00:46:21.460 | The technical term, as I said, is Terminator.
00:46:25.620 | This is a view out the window.
00:46:26.820 | I was always trying to capture a good picture of the Terminator, and this is one of the
00:46:33.420 | better ones.
00:46:34.420 | I'm going to pause here because this gives a great demonstration of the authority of
00:46:42.300 | scripture.
00:46:43.300 | In Job 26, which is considered the oldest book in the Bible, written before the Pentateuch.
00:46:51.940 | Nobody knows exactly, but it's very old.
00:46:54.580 | In Job 26, I'll just read verse 10, "He," that is God, and it's talking about the wondrous
00:47:00.060 | works of God, "He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between
00:47:06.660 | light and darkness."
00:47:10.380 | Describing this picture.
00:47:12.540 | Describing the view we see from the vantage point that's off the planet.
00:47:18.780 | You know, anybody on the planet would not have described it that way.
00:47:22.940 | That gives testimony to the author of scripture.
00:47:29.780 | All of this brings the obvious question.
00:47:34.260 | Why is this perceived conflict between science and scripture?
00:47:37.500 | Does anybody here ever get the question from somebody in the public, "How can you be a
00:47:41.220 | believer and work in the field that you work in?"
00:47:44.140 | You get that?
00:47:46.620 | We're all very familiar with this perception that's out there.
00:47:51.620 | Why the hostility?
00:47:52.760 | And the hostility comes from the scientific community, right?
00:47:55.780 | The biggest public voices out there in science will direct much of their energy against Christianity
00:48:03.020 | specifically.
00:48:04.900 | The church.
00:48:05.900 | Theology.
00:48:06.900 | The Bible.
00:48:07.900 | Where did it come from?
00:48:09.700 | How did we get here?
00:48:11.580 | Well, let me, and I, there's a lot of words on this picture coming up here.
00:48:19.620 | To me, and some of this may be a refresher on you, but we're all familiar with Charles
00:48:24.260 | Darwin.
00:48:25.260 | Charles Darwin right there in the middle.
00:48:26.260 | So look at the underlines here where you see some names.
00:48:29.300 | And I just threw out some few words on each one of them because this gives us a little
00:48:34.480 | bit of a glimpse into historic timeline, which I think is very helpful.
00:48:38.980 | The bottom line is this was a very successful propaganda campaign in the late 1800s and
00:48:45.740 | into the 1900s.
00:48:47.820 | I think it's the most significant propaganda campaign, successful propaganda campaign in
00:48:52.820 | modern history.
00:48:53.820 | There's a guy by the name of James Hutton in the 1700s is when he lived.
00:48:58.420 | He was, I put in there, largely immoral because he never got married.
00:49:03.380 | He was very active with women.
00:49:04.900 | He was very active with alcohol.
00:49:07.740 | Deist, as I mentioned earlier, Deist in those days was a developing theology that said,
00:49:16.540 | okay, God created everything, but then he just backed off and let it unwind itself.
00:49:22.740 | He thought religion is contrived.
00:49:24.740 | He wasn't very public in it because in those days you drew a lot of attention to yourself
00:49:28.900 | if you actively spoke against Christianity or the Bible.
00:49:33.860 | Remember the clergy had a big power in civil life in those days.
00:49:38.100 | So it wasn't just the Bible itself, but it was the authority of the church.
00:49:43.140 | In large cases, the state church.
00:49:45.600 | This was in Great Britain, by the way.
00:49:47.660 | He promoted the idea that the earth was millions of years old.
00:49:52.180 | He also suggested continuous evolution.
00:49:55.900 | He was friends with evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, who
00:50:01.660 | did actually a lot of work in his own lifetime as a precursor to his grandson, Charles.
00:50:10.420 | Charles Lyell came around a generation or more later, geologist, also an antagonist
00:50:18.320 | with religion, greatly influenced by James Hutton, and he's the one that is credited
00:50:24.640 | with popularizing the theory of uniformitarianism, which undermines primarily the flood account
00:50:33.760 | in the Bible and says that everything happened over millions of years, hundreds of millions
00:50:38.840 | of years.
00:50:39.840 | And if you notice, historically, the evolution of evolution, pun intended, the timescales
00:50:47.040 | get longer and longer and longer because the more science that's disclosed, that's developed,
00:50:52.680 | that's discovered, it refutes the age.
00:50:56.560 | So okay, well, let's just add more years to the timescale because then maybe it increases
00:51:04.560 | the probability that the evolution could actually have happened or the change in structure could
00:51:10.280 | actually happen.
00:51:13.440 | Lyell's goal was not science.
00:51:16.560 | It was to undermine the Bible, specifically the first 11 chapters, and he didn't do it
00:51:21.800 | actively.
00:51:22.800 | He did it passively or he did it indirectly, did not do it directly, just by introducing
00:51:27.360 | these theories of science, and science at this time was gaining an authority in the
00:51:33.720 | public side.
00:51:35.960 | So Lyell has a big place in this historical story here.
00:51:43.240 | Lyell was a friend of Darwin, and he actually pushed Darwin to publish the origins of the
00:51:50.400 | species.
00:51:51.400 | Darwin, it turns out, was a little bit timid to go public, a little bit timid to even publish,
00:51:57.280 | but so he was pushed in part by his friend Lyell.
00:52:00.920 | Thomas Huxley, you've probably heard, a philosopher, greatly also influenced by Hutton.
00:52:08.280 | He was dubbed the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog" and "Evolution's High Priest."
00:52:15.340 | He was very active publicly, very much out there.
00:52:18.360 | He's kind of like some of our public figures we see if you watch the news.
00:52:22.800 | They're on the news all the time.
00:52:24.760 | You know, whenever they have a microphone in front of them, they're talking to us.
00:52:29.600 | Darwin was kind of the same way.
00:52:31.360 | He was very aggressive.
00:52:32.900 | He didn't really buy into Darwin's theories, but it was a convenient tool to use to propagate
00:52:39.000 | his philosophy, that is, to get religion and specifically get the authority of the clergy
00:52:44.740 | out of the public square.
00:52:49.140 | He portrayed theology and the clergy as enemies of science.
00:52:52.440 | So you can see this is being developed, and it's not based on science.
00:52:56.880 | It's not based on a contradiction.
00:52:59.080 | It's based on a philosophical presupposition.
00:53:04.440 | His major accomplishment, one of them, was getting "evolution" as a word to be classified
00:53:09.020 | as science, even though it had no clear, relevant scientific evidence and still doesn't.
00:53:15.920 | John Dewey, I just threw in here, I didn't have him in there originally, but I threw
00:53:19.920 | him in there because he also was a follower of Huxley, greatly influenced by all of these
00:53:26.480 | things.
00:53:27.480 | He was a Darwinist.
00:53:28.480 | And of course, he's known as what, the founder of the modern American educational system.
00:53:35.560 | So he applied all of these things to that, and he was successful in that development
00:53:41.880 | of his, what's referred to as the vision for a progressive welfare state and the secularization
00:53:48.880 | of America.
00:53:50.360 | So this is kind of key to our understanding, and it's probably mostly familiar to many
00:53:54.800 | of you.
00:53:57.020 | There's another part of that thread of history, though, that I wasn't aware of up until a
00:54:03.000 | few years ago, and this is very interesting.
00:54:05.760 | There's two guys, and you can find, you can easily research this history.
00:54:11.760 | John William Draper, born in America, so American at birth.
00:54:18.280 | Andrew Dixon White, if I recall, was born in the UK and then immigrated early in life,
00:54:23.960 | so considered also an American.
00:54:25.920 | They were American scientists, educators, highly influenced by Huxley.
00:54:33.040 | And others in this close circle that had its center in Oxford, Cambridge, that area, the
00:54:39.400 | academia world in the UK, circle of British atheists, or agnostic, as Huxley coined that
00:54:48.680 | word.
00:54:50.320 | Draper published a book in 1874 entitled A History of the Conflict Between Religion and
00:54:57.360 | Science.
00:54:58.880 | And in that, he posited the progressive power of science juxtaposed against the repressive
00:55:07.320 | and regressive power of religion.
00:55:11.400 | Have you ever heard somebody tell you that?
00:55:12.920 | Well, Christianity is regressive.
00:55:15.200 | This is where it came from, in part, anyway.
00:55:20.040 | That was 1874.
00:55:21.680 | About a decade later or more, I guess it was two decades later, White published a book,
00:55:29.240 | and I'll jump back up in the middle there.
00:55:30.680 | He was the founding president of Cornell University.
00:55:33.960 | Cornell, if you go back, it's one of the Ivy League schools, right?
00:55:38.880 | Nobody here's from Cornell.
00:55:41.160 | It was all of the other Ivy League schools, in general, anyway, were founded as Christian
00:55:48.280 | academies.
00:55:49.280 | And most of us are aware of that.
00:55:51.120 | And then they gradually threw out the Bible, and now they're very much at the other end
00:55:55.200 | of the spectrum.
00:55:56.480 | Cornell was founded with the mission to be, as White described, an asylum for science.
00:56:05.120 | In other words, it was going to be separated from the influence of religion, Christianity
00:56:09.920 | specific.
00:56:10.920 | It was not going to be stretched or cut exactly to fit revealed religion.
00:56:15.180 | Let's set it aside, and let's establish it based on these presuppositions that were evolving
00:56:21.720 | from Darwin and the others before him, and Thomas Huxley specifically.
00:56:28.640 | And in 1896, he published this 800, more than 800 pages, tome entitled "A History of the
00:56:36.000 | Warfare Between Science with Theology in Christendom," with that thesis, that Christianity had always
00:56:43.440 | been at war with science, always been regressive, always held it back.
00:56:46.960 | That's, by the way, where you get the term "the dark ages," which, it turns out, were
00:56:51.520 | not really dark.
00:56:53.500 | There was advances made during that period of time, driven, again, by a biblical worldview,
00:56:58.960 | but has largely been kind of slipped into the shadows by the greater history world.
00:57:06.140 | The problem with both these things, and they were published as works of history, as documented
00:57:11.960 | works of history, and they're well documented, if you look at the bibliography, it's extensive.
00:57:18.340 | But then later, the history community, the academic community, examining these works
00:57:27.500 | a little bit closer, found out that it was all fabricated or distorted.
00:57:32.640 | In other words, the history was made up, and it was made up to propagate this goal to get
00:57:41.260 | religion out of the picture, and to present it in the public's eye as antagonistic, so
00:57:51.220 | juxtaposed against science.
00:57:55.180 | Fabricated works of history, widely rejected, especially most recently in the 1980s.
00:58:01.180 | There's been some work done to re-examine it.
00:58:04.500 | And that's the conclusion, rejected, not works of history, fallacies.
00:58:11.660 | But that war image, as we all have witnessed in life, continues to be prevalent in the
00:58:18.180 | public eye.
00:58:20.320 | So it goes back to my earlier comment.
00:58:21.900 | This is an opportunity, since there's a chink in the armor of the authority of science,
00:58:27.220 | this is our opportunity to speak into it.
00:58:30.300 | And it takes courage and discernment and wisdom in doing that.
00:58:35.460 | But it's a great historic opportunity, ultimately for the gospel.
00:58:49.340 | We know this.
00:58:50.340 | "Men who, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth," Romans 1, I encourage you to go
00:58:54.820 | back and read the whole chapter.
00:58:57.060 | "Scoffers will come in the last days," from 2 Peter, "with scoffing, following their own
00:59:01.500 | sinful desires.
00:59:03.500 | They will say, 'Where is the promise of his coming?'
00:59:05.660 | For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the
00:59:09.700 | beginning of creation."
00:59:11.200 | Scripture predicts all of this, right?
00:59:15.560 | Paul writes to Timothy, "Avoid the irreverent babble and contradiction of what is falsely
00:59:20.720 | called knowledge."
00:59:22.620 | Knowledge means science.
00:59:23.980 | I think it's the King James that says what is falsely called science.
00:59:29.140 | Scripture addresses these things.
00:59:30.860 | The theory of evolution became the fact of evolution.
00:59:33.540 | When I was a child, it was still called a theory, still acknowledged.
00:59:37.580 | But I don't think the word is used in the greater public eye anymore.
00:59:42.020 | The church was not equipped to answer this assumed authority.
00:59:46.380 | I don't have time to go into that history.
00:59:48.460 | But the church was ill-equipped.
00:59:53.180 | We in the scientific community should be equipping ourselves to be driven by the theology that's
01:00:00.620 | in God's word, to be able to address these things as we're given opportunity.
01:00:08.180 | Talked about John Dewey, the Bible was pushed out of education, public square, pushed out
01:00:12.220 | of civic discourse, pushed out of science, the Bible's authorities eclipsed by the authority
01:00:19.420 | of human reason.
01:00:21.540 | The church weakened in its power to be salt and light, and the Christian faith lost its
01:00:26.580 | public commitment and began to retreat to private individual belief.
01:00:32.140 | And we know that history.
01:00:36.340 | But where shall wisdom be found?
01:00:38.120 | And I don't have time to go into it today and too much, but this is a profound question.
01:00:46.140 | Where's the place of understanding?
01:00:48.380 | One that we should review in our own minds devotionally every day, to reground us back
01:00:54.980 | into the Scriptures, to reestablish the reason that we see our life as a calling, given a
01:01:03.940 | mission.
01:01:05.980 | It's a stewardship of opportunity of what God has given.
01:01:10.660 | Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding.
01:01:15.140 | By the way, Psalm 111 concludes with the same idea.
01:01:20.420 | The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
01:01:24.140 | Just as a refresher, if you follow the theme of wisdom, you see wisdom personified in Proverbs
01:01:30.220 | chapter 8 as beside God in the delighting in the works of God.
01:01:40.860 | Some attribute Proverbs 8 to be a glimpse into the person of Christ.
01:01:48.380 | It's a personified wisdom, but it certainly gives us insight into Christ and his work
01:01:53.300 | with the Father in the Trinitarian work of provisioning his creation and in the works
01:02:01.500 | of providence as well.
01:02:04.020 | And then you go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, and you see that Christ is the fulfillment
01:02:10.640 | of wisdom.
01:02:12.260 | Or you go to Colossians 2, all wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ.
01:02:17.460 | So it's all pointing back to Christ.
01:02:19.300 | It starts with Christ and it points to Christ.
01:02:22.900 | And devotionally, that's where we need to continually reestablish ourselves in our mission
01:02:29.300 | with what we've been given in life.
01:02:33.860 | Stephen Charnock, anybody know that name?
01:02:35.980 | He was a 17th century Puritan.
01:02:39.660 | The Existence and Attributes of God is a big, thick book on my shelf at home, which is probably
01:02:47.860 | the most well-known work of his.
01:02:51.460 | All things in the world, one way or another, center in the usefulness for man, some to
01:02:56.260 | feed him, some to clothe him, some to delight him, some to instruct him, some to exercise
01:03:03.260 | his wit or his intelligence, and others his strength.
01:03:08.580 | He saw this.
01:03:09.860 | He saw this in a biblical worldview that God's creative work is provisioned for our benefit
01:03:17.980 | and for his glory.
01:03:19.820 | And a major component of that provision is the ordering of God's creation.
01:03:25.740 | Okay, now, Titania asked me to get a little bit more personal.
01:03:32.540 | So I'll try to do that.
01:03:33.540 | And if I miss something, she'll have the first question.
01:03:39.380 | In this, I became a believer prior to being accepted or picked by NASA for this job in
01:03:47.220 | the late '80s.
01:03:49.780 | And since we're here at Master's University, I'll start by saying I came to faith primarily
01:03:59.180 | after several months of studying the Gospel of John and the letter to the Romans.
01:04:04.180 | And it was after my wife came to faith, in a moment, after a witness of the Gospel to
01:04:11.220 | her, after over a period of days.
01:04:13.980 | For me, it took several months.
01:04:15.740 | Like many of you, I'm more analytical.
01:04:17.420 | I wanted to understand what this was.
01:04:20.000 | So it took me several months.
01:04:22.300 | And the Lord in his graciousness brought me to faith through that process, through primarily
01:04:26.500 | those two books of the Bible.
01:04:28.780 | I quickly became, I just wanted to study and learn everything I could.
01:04:32.540 | So I discovered Christian radio.
01:04:34.340 | I was listening to it continually until I discovered Grace to You.
01:04:40.540 | And then eventually, everything else kind of started falling into lower priority.
01:04:45.140 | So John really taught me the Bible through the late '80s, through the '90s.
01:04:49.060 | It was our practice to have our young, in those days, young boys in bed by 8.30.
01:04:54.340 | And Grace to You came on in Houston at 9 o'clock.
01:04:57.440 | And so we would be in bed with the Bible on the lap, a notebook, and a pencil, and listen
01:05:03.940 | to Grace to You.
01:05:05.020 | So he really taught me the Bible.
01:05:06.780 | So when I was selected by NASA in 1996 for this job, I was fairly well established in
01:05:13.900 | my faith, and also had a good perspective on, hey, this is a, if I get this opportunity,
01:05:21.380 | this is a stewardship that's unique.
01:05:24.500 | And I need to steward what the Lord gives me, whatever it is, that included.
01:05:32.160 | So I went into this job with this perspective, and I could go into more detail.
01:05:40.260 | There were some disappointments along the way.
01:05:41.820 | I didn't get selected in the earlier years and whatnot, but I trusted in the providence
01:05:46.340 | of God.
01:05:47.340 | One of the books that had a big influence on me was The Mystery of Providence by John
01:05:52.820 | Flavel, written also in the late 1600s.
01:05:56.180 | And that just opened my eyes to the awe and wonder of God's providential work for every
01:06:01.260 | detail in every one of our lives, as is affirmed in the Scripture.
01:06:07.400 | So I trusted in him through disappointments, through opportunities, and also had this growing
01:06:14.140 | acute sense of the responsibility to steward the opportunities that he gave me.
01:06:20.440 | So I talked already about the spaceflights and the participation in the assembly and
01:06:25.200 | operation of the International Space Station.
01:06:29.200 | Now I'm involved, although I'm threatening to retire here soon from NASA, I'm involved
01:06:32.960 | in the development of the lunar program.
01:06:35.880 | We're going to go back to the moon.
01:06:38.020 | But all of that is through the lens of understanding of stewarding what God has given me.
01:06:44.600 | Now, back story, a little bit of a back story.
01:06:47.680 | And I saw the unfolding providence of God in this, and I had no idea where it was going
01:06:52.120 | to end up.
01:06:53.120 | And I still don't know where it's going to end up in the future from now.
01:06:57.160 | But I started out, I spent 27 years active in Army, Army aviation.
01:07:04.480 | And our first assignment was in West Germany in the Cold War in the early '80s, '81 to
01:07:12.000 | '84.
01:07:13.000 | So my focus was largely on the Soviet Union as an enemy, as a potential hot war enemy,
01:07:20.640 | studying all their tactics, their weapon systems, their people.
01:07:24.340 | We went to Berlin from West Germany a couple of times where you had to go through Soviet
01:07:29.200 | checkpoints with official orders and whatnot.
01:07:34.460 | So that was my exposure to Russia.
01:07:39.280 | Then I get into this job, my first flights to the space station.
01:07:43.620 | We are partners with Russia.
01:07:48.000 | So in the late '90s, I got sent to Russia.
01:07:52.200 | As an active Army colonel with free time on weekends, walking around Moscow with a camera,
01:07:58.560 | taking pictures.
01:08:00.360 | Notice the irony there.
01:08:03.040 | I thought I would fly three or four shuttle flights and maybe go long duration on station.
01:08:07.360 | But after the first flight, long story, but I got pulled off a shuttle flight and said,
01:08:13.760 | "Hey, I need you to go to Russia to start training for Soyuz."
01:08:17.400 | And I thought, "Oh, okay."
01:08:20.840 | Just followed orders, saluted, and went on.
01:08:23.760 | I've been to Russia 60 times, roughly, accumulated more than six years of time over those many
01:08:32.480 | trips.
01:08:33.480 | Lots of time away from Anna Marie, in addition to being off the planet, as she likes to say.
01:08:40.400 | I had to learn the language.
01:08:41.680 | I was a math and science guy.
01:08:43.120 | I didn't want that foreign language stuff, this humanity stuff, but I was forced to learn
01:08:47.040 | the language.
01:08:48.040 | Кто-то здесь говорит по-русски, или нет?
01:08:51.800 | Да?
01:08:52.800 | Отлично.
01:08:53.800 | I had to learn, I was forced to learn the language.
01:08:58.660 | I've been studying it for over 20 years.
01:09:00.520 | I still have a lesson once a week.
01:09:05.040 | And over the course of time in Moscow in the mid-2000s or late-2000s, I can't remember,
01:09:11.880 | I got involved with the Russian evangelical community there in Moscow and had some ministry
01:09:18.400 | opportunities with them.
01:09:21.640 | And I was actually in Moscow when the MacArthur Study Bible in Russian was released.
01:09:25.740 | So I went to the last session, the Q&A session with John and the staff that were over there.
01:09:29.880 | That was an exciting milestone, and that opened doors there.
01:09:34.160 | And then in about 2014 or so, I discovered through a YouTube channel a ministry in Washington
01:09:43.680 | State, a Slavic immigrant community up there, a church, a Bible church, Word of Grace Bible
01:09:50.600 | Church, по-русски, Слово Благодати, pastored by a guy by the name of Alexei Kolomiantsev,
01:09:59.320 | who went to TMS, graduated in 2002.
01:10:03.120 | Turned out, in hindsight, we went back and traced, I was the graduation banquet speaker.
01:10:08.240 | We didn't meet each other, but the Lord crossed our paths from a little distance there.
01:10:13.520 | In 2014, Anna-Marie and I got invited out here to go to a GMI, a Grace Mission International
01:10:19.480 | retreat.
01:10:20.480 | So all of the missionaries from Grace Community Church were called back from their places
01:10:25.440 | in the world.
01:10:26.720 | We were out in Oxnard at a beach resort there for four or five days.
01:10:32.560 | They had asked me to speak, and for some reason, Alexei still doesn't know, they invited he
01:10:39.000 | and his wife down from Washington to join that retreat.
01:10:43.160 | And I had just discovered the YouTube video of his interview, which was done in Germany,
01:10:46.920 | as I recall.
01:10:47.920 | And I thought, "Wow, I gotta meet this guy."
01:10:51.080 | Here in America, we got this guy with this, I'll talk a little bit about the ministry
01:10:57.080 | reach here in a second.
01:10:59.780 | So within two or three weeks, we're in Oxnard at this retreat, and I gave my talk, and we
01:11:04.360 | still mingled, and we knew some of the missionaries from Italy and elsewhere, and so we were just
01:11:09.280 | having a great time of fellowship.
01:11:11.300 | They asked me to do a book signing, which I agreed to, and so I'm going through people
01:11:14.600 | one at a time, visiting with them.
01:11:16.880 | Alexei and his wife, Tanya, show up in that line, and he introduces himself, and I said,
01:11:21.720 | "I know who you are."
01:11:23.240 | And we had this great conversation, and he said at the end of the conversation, "Would
01:11:28.840 | you be willing or interested in coming up and speaking at our church?"
01:11:31.640 | I said, "Absolutely."
01:11:33.640 | Tanya, previous to that, had said, "Let's invite Jeff to our church, let's invite him
01:11:38.120 | to our church."
01:11:39.560 | And Alexei said, "No, no, no, he's too big, he's too important, he's too busy."
01:11:43.720 | Tanya, his wife, insisted, and of course, I was eager to do that.
01:11:49.040 | That started a relationship.
01:11:50.360 | We would go up there average once a year from 2014 on.
01:11:54.180 | We took our family up there in 2019, I think, for a family vacation.
01:12:00.260 | And our older son, we have two sons, and his wife and family were so blown away by not
01:12:05.860 | only the beauty of the environment, but especially the congregational life, that we started talking
01:12:12.140 | when we got back to Houston, and we decided as a family, let's move to Washington.
01:12:17.300 | I was going to retire, we were going to move.
01:12:20.300 | Then the world shut down with COVID.
01:12:22.540 | We all learned how to work remotely.
01:12:24.740 | My boss said, "Hey, would you be willing to not retire?
01:12:27.700 | Just go to Manhattan, move to Washington, and work from up there."
01:12:29.940 | I said, "Yeah, then I can qualify for my mortgage."
01:12:35.460 | So we did, and now we've been up there going on three years, and it's an amazing place.
01:12:40.860 | Word of Grace Bible Church and the preaching ministry of Alexei Kolomiotsev is exactly
01:12:48.580 | the same mold, if you will, and parallel to Grace Community Church and Grace to You in
01:12:55.980 | the Russian-speaking world.
01:12:57.820 | I call them the John MacArthur of the Russian-speaking world.
01:13:01.100 | We get about two million downloads a month via the internet, mostly YouTube, but other
01:13:07.740 | platforms as well.
01:13:09.860 | So the Lord is doing amazing things there.
01:13:13.500 | I could go into more detail, but I wanted to say that, based on your request, as a testimony
01:13:24.180 | to what I've been talking about, that in the providence of God, we are called to our stations
01:13:31.860 | of life, and we are to steward what we're given in those stations, however it is, however
01:13:39.580 | significant or insignificant we consider it to be.
01:13:42.660 | It's a stewardship.
01:13:43.660 | My story is amazing in and of itself, but it's really amazing in its illustration, and
01:13:44.660 | it can impact any of us.
01:13:45.660 | It should impact all of us who trust and believe in Jesus Christ.
01:13:46.660 | Hallelujah.
01:13:46.660 | [Applause]
01:13:57.660 | [Applause]
01:14:07.660 | [BLANK_AUDIO]