It's great to be here with you. I'm excited with this whole idea, I don't know about you, but in the scientific community, in the academic community, in the professional community, that segment that works in technology and whatnot, you know, by the greater public, we are considered the elite, right?

That's the word we like to apply to others, but the public would apply it to many of us in the room. It's important to realize that because there's an authority there that the public largely can't engage with. The whole world, the world of science, the name science, the name scientist or the word scientist has an authority that the public can't engage with, and we know what the implications of that have been throughout the world.

So this kind of thing, to get together to actually engage in these issues, these questions, is very important, I think, to then later get out to the public and try to find a way to get a voice, because those of us that are believers in Jesus Christ, our biggest challenge is getting a voice that is heard out there.

I'll say, before I get into my presentation, that over the last several years, with the whole issues of the COVID and the world shutting down and the vaccines and all of that, put a chink in the armor of the authority of science and scientists. It's a great opportunity for us to then step in and clarify.

So see that as an opportunity in your own walks, in your own circles of life. Look for those opportunities to take advantage of that. I mean, even that is in the providence of God. Now, I've been given kind of a broad assignment. I've been asked to talk about space flight, I've been asked to relate to that a little bit, I've been asked to talk about scripture in a biblical worldview, I've been asked to talk about science, I'm going to try to put it a little bit into a historical perspective, and then I've also been asked to give more of a personal testimony of what the Lord has done in my life, particularly in the last two or three decades or so.

So it's a broad assignment. I've never done it exactly this way before, so we'll see how it goes. I'm hoping to leave a little bit of room for questions. I've entitled this presentation Delighting in the Studied Works of Yahweh, or of the Lord, if you're still in the ESV or a version similar to that.

I, of course, being here at TMU, I had to use Yahweh, and many of you know why that is. Those of you that don't understand that little humor, you can seek it out, seek out the answer here in the next couple of days. Who's familiar with Psalm 111 in a way that you recall?

Very good. I don't see a hand in the room. One of my fears is, you guys all have, many of you have advanced degrees beyond what I have in specialty areas, so it's a little bit intimidating speaking to an audience like that in that way. But Psalm 111 is kind of the theme of my presentation, and specifically verse 2, I'll read verse 1 and verse 2.

Verse 1 says, "Praise the Lord, I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in the company of the upright." So right there, there's a praising God in the context of the congregation. So in the context of believers. And then verse 2 says, "Great are the works of the Lord," or of Yahweh, "studied by all who delight in them." Now my assumption is that we're all in business of studying God's works, whether we know it or not, His works of creation, His works of provisioning His creation.

We would expand that to His works of providential governing of His creation. And I would say that we, those of us that are believers in Jesus Christ, see and understand and grow to understand all of those works of God through the lens of being a recipient of His work of redemption.

And that's important for us to realize. We see and we seek to grow in our understanding of the works of God, His works of creation, His works of provisioning, His creation, His works of providence in our life, and of course that transcends to our calling in life, which I'll get into a little bit more in the personal remarks at the end, through our understanding of His work of redemption in Jesus Christ.

Very important. Very important. That's why I want to springboard off Psalm 111 verse 2. If you go back and read it again, it doesn't command us to study. It doesn't command us to delight in the works of the Lord. Those are adjectives. Those are participles. They're modifying. They are saying these are studied works among delighting believers.

So in our work, if we see it through the lens of redemption, we are inclined to be continually studying the works of God, as Ty Dene introduced, you know, to seeing mathematics and seeing just the wondrous truth that is in math that discloses the work of God and His ordering of creation.

They become studied works, and we are delighting believers in that study. So that's the reason. I wanted to preface that with, that's why I put Psalm 111 verse 2 up there. It was known historically, and I'll get into the science in a few minutes, as the scientists' psalm. So I'm going to give you lots of homework challenges here.

That's one of them. Go research that. The scientists' psalm, Psalm 111 verse 2, and we obviously won't have time to go through the whole thing. Now, I said I'm also going to relate it to space flight and relate it to technology. My experience in NASA was, took four flights to space, four opportunities to space.

The first one was in May of 2000. It was on the space shuttle Atlantis. And anybody here see a space shuttle launch? Yes, yeah? If you ever saw a launch, it was amazing to see. The closest you could get was three miles away. So you saw the initial ignition of the solid rocket boosters six seconds after the ignition of the three main engines, and then you saw it lift off.

You saw the flash of bright light, and then, of course, 15 seconds after the initial ignition, that's when the sound hit you, and it shook your whole body. I remember that your chest just shook and vibrated with the energy coming out of that. Think about the technology that was involved in all of the pieces, all of the science, all of the components of science that was involved in putting that together.

From the chemistry of the solid rocket motor, to the structural engineering, to the life support system keeping the crew alive once they left the habitable Earth, to the orbital mechanics to go precisely into an orbit, and then it took less than nine minutes to get into orbit, and then being in an orbit that was predicted well ahead of time to then rendezvous later with something else already in orbit.

Just think about all of that, all of the science involved in that, which is a clear demonstration in countless ways of God's ordering of His creative work. When we lifted off, it was about four and a half million pounds of mass pushed off the launch pad with seven million pounds of thrust.

Most of that mass on the liftoff, as you might imagine, was fuel because it took that much energy just to get out of the gravitational well of Earth, as we like to call it. First two minutes on the solid rocket booster, and the rest of the time on the three main engines.

But very impressive, and when you think about it in the context of what we're talking about here, it's an amazing achievement of mankind to develop something like that to get into orbit. By the way, one other theme I'll try to weave into the talks is the implications of bearing the image of God.

Because we have the provisioned creation, as I introduced, but we also have our ability to extract from that creation. And that's a big thing for us to understand, too. You all bearing the image of God are in the business of subduing God's creation, whether you realize it in that context or not.

I want to read a quote here that kind of illustrates one example of bearing the image of God. "From the rocket we shall see the huge sphere of the planet Earth, like phases of the moon. We shall see how the sphere rotates, and how within a few hours it shows all its sides successively.

By the way, we orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, so 16 times a day. And we shall observe various points on the surface of the Earth for several minutes, and from different sides very closely. This picture is so attractive, majestic, attractive, and infinitely varied, that I wish with all my soul that you and I could see it." That quote was written in 1911 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was a physicist in Russia, later Soviet Union.

He's considered the father of the Soviet space program. He was a theorist, a mathematician. So he calculated theoretically what we were then decades later able to do, which is a clear testimony of bearing the image of God and the capacity that we're given with that image in God's creative work, even in us, even in mankind.

Another one you may be more familiar with, "Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a space station in orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories, and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service." Arthur C.

Clark, a familiar name, wrote that in 1945. My first flight was in 2000, and I returned to space three additional times, in 2006, in 2009, in the fall into the spring of '10, and then most recently in 2016. Each of those times, it was what we call a long-duration expeditionary flight to the International Space Station.

Sorry, we have a little construction going on in the back of the room. Each of those flights lasted about six months. Each of those flights was dedicated to a different phase of building the International Space Station. My first visit in 2000 on the space shuttle was before Expedition 1 launched.

It was two modules. Each of them were about 40 feet in length, and we didn't have the life support systems on board, so it was before the permanent presence. Then months after that, in the fall of 2000, we launched Expedition 1, and that started the permanent presence on board the International Space Station.

And then in 2006, I went back, launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. Again, as I mentioned, for a duration of six months. We were about halfway through building the space station. And then in 2009, I returned in the spring of '10. We completed the assembly of the International Space Station.

Again, that was a launch on a Russian rocket, and a duration of about six months. And then 2016, now the space station's in its full operational mode. Another six-month stay, again launching and returning to Earth from and to Kazakhstan. I'll come to that in a minute. But all those experiences, we ferried material up by rockets.

We constructed a space station in orbit. Every time we launched a crew or launched a supply ship, we returned to the space station, as I described earlier, launching from someplace on Earth at a very precise time, pointing the rocket in a very precise direction, firing the engine at a very precise time, getting into a very precise orbit.

And within 48 hours, 46 hours, and recently is less than six hours, rendezvousing and docking with the space station, going 17,500 miles an hour, docking at 0.1 feet per second, plus or minus about an inch. That's a demonstration of the mathematical order in God's creation and man's ability to predict it and to subdue it, if you will.

We, in the course of those years, built the space station piece by piece. It's provided with living quarters. I had my own little phone boot size crew quarters. And then we had a couple of galleys. We had laboratory modules. We had almost everything needed for the comfort of its crew.

We couldn't get the family up there, and I couldn't beam home on the weekend. That was one of the things I would take out of science fiction. And we were relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. Every few weeks or so, we would have a supply ship show up with everything we needed, to include things like fresh fruit, which had a few days of shelf life, but it was a special treat.

But that's what the space station looks like today. That's what it's looked like since 2010 or so. Amazing achievement. I think it's the most significant technological achievement in history. That's my opinion. When you consider that it was built, the first element launched in 1998, finished in 2010, it continues to fly.

We've had 20, going on 23 years of continuous human presence in space. It's made of components that were manufactured in different parts of the Earth. Different countries. Many of them, of course, in the US, spread around parts from at least 48 states. You recognize you have to have political support to accomplish something like this, so you need something in every district, almost, to get Congress to pass it.

But not only that, there are major components built in Russia, and Ukraine, by the way, that never had the opportunity to be integrated and tested on the ground before launch. It was done with simulators, simulating interfaces, and lots of work in this international engineering team developing that capability, and then launching these elements from either Kazakhstan or the Cape in Florida, or Japan.

Japan contributed some major components. Canada contributed a robotic arm, which was critical to assembling this thing piece by piece. And the European Space Agency also provided a laboratory. And it went together largely successfully. We had a few hiccups along the way we had to work through, but it's been an amazing achievement in that regard.

I pray it never will become a Tower of Babel, and I don't think it has been. Nonetheless, it doesn't take away from the achievement made by this international team, this international partnership. Each person bearing the image of God, given the capacity to do it. One reason I don't think it's a Tower of Babel is there's a lot of humility involved in something like this when you have people on board.

And historically, you've lost lives trying to achieve the goal. We lost the crew of Columbia in the middle of this. When I went back in 2006 for that first long flight, the space shuttle was still grounded, and we had a crew of two on board, one Russian and me.

And our primary mission, we did a lot. We did continue to-- we did some science even. It is an orbiting laboratory. But the primary mission was to keep the space station alive until we got the shuttle flying again. So it brings humility to the entire team here. We know lives are at stake.

We know families are at home waiting on those lives that we're trying to manage the risk so that the crews come back safely. So anyway, amazing orbital laboratory, orbital outpost, now doing lots of science. And I'm not going to cover any of the science. You can go online and get into that bottomless pit of a website searching all the science.

But it covers all of your areas and much more. We're technicians up there. We're really not-- I wouldn't call myself a scientist. We're more like technicians in a laboratory executing the experiments and getting the data back in the ground. As I said, it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes.

We're inclined to the equator at 51.6 degrees. So that means we cross the equator, go up to 51.6 north latitude, cross equator 51.6 south latitude, which means we cover most of the populated Earth. To give you an idea on the map, we go just above the border into Canada.

We don't go quite as north as Moscow. Moscow's above that in latitude. Although you can see Moscow, you can see the Alaskan Range at an oblique angle. For example, as we're crossing British Columbia, we can look north and see all the way up into the Alaskan Range. And I've captured pictures from that distance.

You can see parts of Antarctica when you're flying over Chile, for example. The orbit period is 90 minutes, as I said. You can imagine orbital mechanics. Every orbit, every 90 minutes, the Earth is rotating once every 24 hours. So every time you cross the equator, you cross about 1,500 miles, roughly, to the west of the previous crossing.

So the phasing of day-night cycles allows then, over weeks and months, to pass over the greater portion of the Earth in different lighting conditions, high sun angles, low sun angles, day, night, etc. You watch seasons go by. So it's a great vantage point to study the Earth from that place, and especially looking through the lens of scripture.

And just to give you a couple examples, here's a nighttime view out the window. See the structure of the space station. You see the star field. You can see the Earth down below with some city lights showing there. And then the yellow arc is the atmosphere backlit by the sun on the other side.

Or a daytime view, the globe of the Earth. It's absolutely incredible. We have great photography equipment on board. We've maintained the state-of-the-art Nikon professional cameras and lenses that go from 8mm fisheye to now a 1200mm big lens, which is hard to manage on the ground but very easy to manage up there.

And inertially it stabilizes it very well. So they say I've taken almost a half a million pictures up there, and my primary motivation was to capture the image, to capture the data, to capture the view, to bring it back to the ground and to share with those on the ground.

From a professional, personal point of view, the highlight of the entire experience I would say is doing a spacewalk. And by the way, don't get on your phones now to live stream it, but there's a spacewalk going on right now. They're out there about two and a half hours into what will likely be a six and a half or seven hour EVA, we call it extravehicular activity spacewalk.

There have been, I've lost track of the number, but on the order of 250 or more spacewalks that have been done in the history of the space station, assembling the space station piece by piece. And now today their primary task is to upgrade the solar arrays, which of course captures the sun's energy to provide, to charge batteries and provide electrical power to all the systems on board the space station.

But we, on a spacewalk, we go outside, planned six and a half hours, and it ends up being plus or minus that every time. So it's a long day, takes about six hours just to go out the door, to get the suits ready, to get yourself ready, to get the tools ready, to get in everything, to do a pre-breathe, to wash the nitrogen out of your blood, to go down to the lower pressure.

We're at one atmosphere inside the space station, so 14.7 PSI, we go down to 4.3 PSI, 100% oxygen for a spacewalk. You can imagine inside a pressurized suit, the more pressure you have, the harder it is to just move your arms and your hands. But it is definitely the highlight of the entire experience, the most challenging thing we do physically and mentally, because every minute is choreographed for that six and a half hours.

And we're talking continually to mission control, and they're keeping us on the checklist and we're confirming the steps as we go. But it's one thing to be inside the space station or a spacecraft and look out the window and have this view. It's another thing to be outside, hanging on with just a fingertip control and moving yourself around.

And it's hard to imagine, I know, but no gravitational force. It's only inertial force. So you stabilize yourself, so you learn to move slow, so you can stop as you go. You're tethered 100% of the time, for obvious reasons. Every tool, every piece of equipment, every bag, everything you have is tethered 100% of the time, because you don't want to lose style points and lose something out there.

Occasionally we've lost a wrench or something, but anyway, that's a personal, on the professional side, highlight. As I said before, we, as believers, should grow in our appreciation and appropriation of these truths that we're talking about through the lens of Scripture. So with that in mind, it was a highlight of every day if I was in the window at the time crossing over this part of the world.

And you recognize it, of course, as the Middle East, and in the center of the picture is Israel. That's the Dead Sea right in the dead center there, with the Jordan River Valley and the Sea of Galilee going up and to the right. You got the Sinai Peninsula. You got the Nile River Delta way up in the upper left-hand corner.

So in that one view from this orbital outpost, from our vantage point here, you can see the entire life of Christ, our Lord. Of course, we understand that through the Scriptures, and I'll say it out loud just to impress it on our minds right now, He, that is, Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created in heaven, on earth, visible and invisible, as recorded in Genesis 1.

Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through Him and, by the way, for Him. In our endeavors, we work for Him. He is before all things, that is, He is eternal, and in Him all things hold together. Now, in this audience, I can throw out right now, we know there are four fundamental forces, right, in our observation of the universe.

One of them is gravity. Everybody knows about gravity. Everybody bears the consequences if you ignore gravity, right? The second one is electromagnetic force, which is obvious in life too, I think, in many ways. The third and the fourth one are less obvious to the general public. That's the weak force and the strong force at the atomic level.

Anybody here understand any of those forces? I mean, you understand them, right? You understand how they work, you understand by observation the implications of those forces. We can identify them, but does anybody understand, really, why they exist? I would say no, right? Well, there's a clue, I think, right here.

In Him all things hold together, which gives evidence of His continual involvement, continual power applied to His creation. And when I get into a little bit of the history as to why we are where we are in terms of science and the public perception of it, it has a lot to do with the history of, if you're familiar with theological history, the history of the philosophy of, say, deism.

What was deism? In fact, many of our founding fathers were deist or maybe not actively practicing, but they were influenced by that philosophy. Basically, in a nutshell, it's, okay, I acknowledge that God created all things, but then He kind of wound it up like a clock and let it go on its own.

So He backed off, He's transcendent, but He's not involved in it at all. So then I have to explain everything by natural processes only, right? But that denies the scripture. He is actively involved continually with every detail. I think it was R.C. Sproul that said not a single molecule is out of the control of God at any time.

And it's right there, but in Him all things hold together, and that is the Son of God. It's trinitarian, of course, but it puts an emphasis here on Jesus Christ. It's a humbling thing. Psalm 8 brings humility. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you've set in place, who am I?

What is man that you are mindful of him and the Son of man that you care for him? It's important for us in our day-to-day work to look through this lens and to recalibrate ourselves through this lens as we delight in the studied works of God. We go around the earth every 90 minutes, sunset, sunrise, one of the more spectacular sights that we see continually over and over again.

Everyone is unique because you're seeing it with different weather patterns that are being silhouetted by the sun. It happens very fast. By the way, I'm just throwing in a few examples of pictures. Tydene asked me to show pictures, so that's what I'm doing. If you look historically at science and what we know as the age of science or the scientific revolution, there were three presuppositions, if you could summarize them.

Of course, I'm simplifying things, but three presuppositions that I'd like to highlight for us this weekend. One was it presupposed a rational ordering and creation. We've already talked about that. There's a definite order in creation that is predictable. The laws are discovered and developed, if you will, and established based on the fact that there's a predictable order.

Oh, by the way, the second one there, the order is precise. I've come to believe that the precision in God's ordering of his universe is infinite. It's infinitely precise. We're only limited by our ability to measure that precision. Of course, we oftentimes look at things and we say, "Well, that's not very precise because we see all the noise around it." In that noise, each component that is producing what we perceive as noise is ordered dynamics that are infinitely precise.

I'm convinced of that. We get a little bit of a taste of that. We can predict what we need to do to develop a rocket, to launch, to rendezvous, and dock with the space station, as I described earlier. We do it with a little bit of variation, of course, and a little bit of uncertainty.

We manage the risk that way. In the final analysis, the precision that we're presented with is, I believe, infinite in its ordering. The third presupposition is there's a contingency in creation. What do we mean by that? Well, some of you probably know better than I do, but basically, you can describe it as the laws that govern the universe, the creative work of God, those laws are not intrinsic.

In other words, they're not written in the fine print when we make observation. They're not obvious to us. They have to be searched out. They have to be developed. They have to be discovered. They have to be established. They have to be shown by experimentation. If we think of it in that way, then it makes sense because the creative work was done by a lawgiver, and we see him in the context of his moral law very clearly.

We can read the Old Testament. We see the civil laws given to the nation of Israel. We see the moral law in the Ten Commandments. We understand morality because our conscience, bearing the image of God, tells us right and wrong and all that, so we understand those laws, but the laws of nature are also given by the lawgiver.

So that was a presupposition in the age of science and the scientific revolution that creation was contingent, and we had to search it out to discover that contingency, and that resulted in what we call nature's laws, and I'll touch on that a little bit more. In Jesus Christ, all things hold together, we already talked about.

He upholds the universe by the word of his powers, another example we can draw from Scripture from Hebrews chapter 1. I love that Greek word upholds, and I won't go into it in detail, but the commentaries will tell us that word also has an aspect in its meaning that the upholding has a progress forward toward a goal, and that's pretty amazing.

That's an amazing aspect. Not only is it just sustained now, but it's sustained, it's upheld with a purpose, with a purpose that's still in the future, which I believe will culminate in the return of Jesus Christ, the establishment of the kingdom, and the eternal state. That's the purpose of creation, and that's part of the lens that we look through when we consider our place in our little vapor, our little short period of time as we go through this life on this side of eternity, we are part of that purpose, each of us a little piece in God's overall purpose.

"Bearing his image, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion." It's probably clear in this room that each of us are involved in the subduing of God's creation, as I've already talked about. Let's see. Another example of our vantage point here, just incredible beauty.

Many of you have seen the northern lights, they exist in the south as well, but just incredible beauty, which actually when you think about it, there's that second force of nature, right? At least in part, there's chemistry involved, there's other science involved, there's interactions that we can describe scientifically, but we also look at this and what comes to mind, beauty, harmony, symmetry, all those artsy words, which are also very evident, I think, in scientific world, the scientific world, a reflection of the glory of God in his creative work.

Another example, here's a low sun angle with the sun's reflection on an ocean and then varying layers of clouds. You can think of that in terms of art, the beauty, the awesomeness, by the way, whenever we say awesome, we have to attribute God as the source of that concept of wondrous, awesome.

It is the creative work. But we can also look and we can academically imagine the science involved here too, right? With density and humidity levels and air flows and the weather systems. Here's another example. This was just a fascinating view for me and I got to see it maybe a half a dozen times over the different flights.

They're called noctilucent clouds and they're seen over the poles periodically and I don't know if they exist all the time, but the lighting conditions were required to be able to get a view like this. And those lighting conditions were provided in the summertime in the North Pole and in the wintertime in the South Pole.

So this one was in the summer of 2016, so it was over the North Pole, I think it was December or so, I'm sorry, no, no, no. It was July of 2016. And it's when the atmosphere over the North Pole is backlit by the sun, we're just on the night side of the earth.

And then looking up through the atmosphere, you see this phenomena, which is the research I've, if you research this on the internet, you can find a little bit of data. It's on the order of 80 kilometers and above, so it's above the weather systems that we typically see. It's also in an area of the atmosphere that we don't spend much time on, airplanes don't go that high, spacecraft don't go that low.

We just pass through it on a rocket. So there's not a whole lot of direct data, but the theory is that they're ice crystals carried up into those altitudes. But not only is this just, it brings our curiosity, and it's wondrous in its own state, but it's a clear demonstration of that mathematical order, right.

And just in the currents of the upper atmosphere carrying these things that reflect the light the way they do, or shine the backlit the way that they do, it's a mathematical order in its own right. A wider angle view with its own array of science, this is the island of Cuba in the foreground, the turquoise or coral reefs.

Right left of center coming down from above from the horizon is the Florida Peninsula, which you should recognize, and you got the Florida Keys going off to the left, and all the turquoise to the right are the Bahamas. Just incredibly beautiful. A close-up view at my favorite coral reef in the Bahamas is right here.

And it's a jagged edge there because this is about, I don't know, five or six frames taken just a second apart, overlapping by 50 percent, and then stitched together just to get the detail. But it's incredibly beautiful, and we see a clear ordering of things, even at that scale, even underwater, from a vantage point we don't often see.

Sand dunes, another example. This one's in either the Sahara or the Saudi Peninsula, I can't remember. But we see an ordering there, and we know that's caused by the interaction of the wind and the sand on the ground. This is my favorite picture of sand dunes in this topic.

That's what it is. But it's a very clear illustration of mathematical order. We see the near-orthogonal lines, we see large-scale and small-scale repeating patterns. You mathematicians, you're thinking you're second-order differential equations and multiple of them as we sit here, I know you are. You're thinking calculus. But a clear representation of the ordering of God's creation.

Science, by the way, means what? Anybody know? Remember? Knowledge. Yeah, exactly. It just means knowledge. Proverbs 1:7, you know it? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It goes on, it says, "But fools despise wisdom and instruction." It's simply knowledge. And the Lord has given us a capacity to seek it out and to grow in it because we bear his image.

Talked about the scientific revolution, the age of science. Some examples you can pull, of course, Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Robert Boyle, any scuba divers in here? PV equals NRT, right? And you study that just to get scuba qualified so you don't, you can avoid the bends. More known for chemistry, but we have Boyle's laws.

We talked about it. Isaac Newton, F equals MA. Michael Faraday, electromagnetics. Pasteur, we all have pasteurized milk in our refrigerator at home. James Clerk Maxwell, Maxwell's equations, we've been exposed to those. But in the textbooks as you went through school, I bet none of those textbooks acknowledged that they were all believers.

In fact, they were all theologians first. And they were deeply committed to answering the call and stewarding what the Lord had given them. That was what drove them. And I believe that's what drove, in God's providence, what we call the scientific revolution. Because they saw it through the lens of scripture.

We broadly speaking need to recapture that perspective. We are endeavoring in our callings in life because of what the Lord has done for us and where he has put us to drive us, to give us something that we need to steward and make a contribution in subduing the earth.

Like these guys and others. They were driven by their faith and their sense of moral obligation to answer their call to scientific endeavor. And as I touched on earlier, they presupposed and ordered a coherent and intelligible universe that could be investigated and the laws could be discovered, those contingent laws.

And it was their duty to study it and subdue it. To give you a little bit of a glimpse of some of these guys, Kepler in a letter to his friend, Michael, there in 1595, he's reflecting on his past and he said, "I wanted to become a theologian." So this is earlier in life.

"For a long time I was unhappy." And implied there is prior to him actually dedicating his time to theology. He says, "Now behold, God is praised by my work, even in astronomy." That's a powerful quote, a personal quote, because it's from a personal letter. Later there was a found prayer, "If I have been enticed into brashness by the wonderful beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work destined for your glory, gently and mercifully pardon me." This is a confession of sin, right?

And finally, "Deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that, amen." That's a very powerful prayer. It gives us a very valuable insight into his perspective. And this is Kepler, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, which we're all familiar with, driven by his faith.

Or another one, and Maxwell's my favorite. He was very young when he was charged with the design and construction of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. And so that was done and had big wooden entrance doors, and over those doors he had carved in Latin, Psalm 111 verse 2, "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them." This written prayer was found after his death, "Almighty God, who created man in thine own image and made him a living soul that he might seek after thee and have dominion over thy creatures, teach us to study the works of thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use and strengthen the reason for thy service, and so to receive thy blessed word that we may believe on him who thou hast sent to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of sins, all of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ our Lord." Oh, that we would capture such a vision in our work, in our work in academia, in our work in science, in our work in industry.

Another picture. This one, I'll pause here. We call that the Terminator, which is the line that separates the lit part of the earth from the night part of the earth. The technical term, as I said, is Terminator. This is a view out the window. I was always trying to capture a good picture of the Terminator, and this is one of the better ones.

I'm going to pause here because this gives a great demonstration of the authority of scripture. In Job 26, which is considered the oldest book in the Bible, written before the Pentateuch. Nobody knows exactly, but it's very old. In Job 26, I'll just read verse 10, "He," that is God, and it's talking about the wondrous works of God, "He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness." Describing this picture.

Describing the view we see from the vantage point that's off the planet. You know, anybody on the planet would not have described it that way. That gives testimony to the author of scripture. All of this brings the obvious question. Why is this perceived conflict between science and scripture? Does anybody here ever get the question from somebody in the public, "How can you be a believer and work in the field that you work in?" You get that?

We're all very familiar with this perception that's out there. Why the hostility? And the hostility comes from the scientific community, right? The biggest public voices out there in science will direct much of their energy against Christianity specifically. The church. Theology. The Bible. Where did it come from? How did we get here?

Well, let me, and I, there's a lot of words on this picture coming up here. To me, and some of this may be a refresher on you, but we're all familiar with Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin right there in the middle. So look at the underlines here where you see some names.

And I just threw out some few words on each one of them because this gives us a little bit of a glimpse into historic timeline, which I think is very helpful. The bottom line is this was a very successful propaganda campaign in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.

I think it's the most significant propaganda campaign, successful propaganda campaign in modern history. There's a guy by the name of James Hutton in the 1700s is when he lived. He was, I put in there, largely immoral because he never got married. He was very active with women. He was very active with alcohol.

Deist, as I mentioned earlier, Deist in those days was a developing theology that said, okay, God created everything, but then he just backed off and let it unwind itself. He thought religion is contrived. He wasn't very public in it because in those days you drew a lot of attention to yourself if you actively spoke against Christianity or the Bible.

Remember the clergy had a big power in civil life in those days. So it wasn't just the Bible itself, but it was the authority of the church. In large cases, the state church. This was in Great Britain, by the way. He promoted the idea that the earth was millions of years old.

He also suggested continuous evolution. He was friends with evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, who did actually a lot of work in his own lifetime as a precursor to his grandson, Charles. Charles Lyell came around a generation or more later, geologist, also an antagonist with religion, greatly influenced by James Hutton, and he's the one that is credited with popularizing the theory of uniformitarianism, which undermines primarily the flood account in the Bible and says that everything happened over millions of years, hundreds of millions of years.

And if you notice, historically, the evolution of evolution, pun intended, the timescales get longer and longer and longer because the more science that's disclosed, that's developed, that's discovered, it refutes the age. So okay, well, let's just add more years to the timescale because then maybe it increases the probability that the evolution could actually have happened or the change in structure could actually happen.

Lyell's goal was not science. It was to undermine the Bible, specifically the first 11 chapters, and he didn't do it actively. He did it passively or he did it indirectly, did not do it directly, just by introducing these theories of science, and science at this time was gaining an authority in the public side.

So Lyell has a big place in this historical story here. Lyell was a friend of Darwin, and he actually pushed Darwin to publish the origins of the species. Darwin, it turns out, was a little bit timid to go public, a little bit timid to even publish, but so he was pushed in part by his friend Lyell.

Thomas Huxley, you've probably heard, a philosopher, greatly also influenced by Hutton. He was dubbed the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog" and "Evolution's High Priest." He was very active publicly, very much out there. He's kind of like some of our public figures we see if you watch the news. They're on the news all the time.

You know, whenever they have a microphone in front of them, they're talking to us. Darwin was kind of the same way. He was very aggressive. He didn't really buy into Darwin's theories, but it was a convenient tool to use to propagate his philosophy, that is, to get religion and specifically get the authority of the clergy out of the public square.

He portrayed theology and the clergy as enemies of science. So you can see this is being developed, and it's not based on science. It's not based on a contradiction. It's based on a philosophical presupposition. His major accomplishment, one of them, was getting "evolution" as a word to be classified as science, even though it had no clear, relevant scientific evidence and still doesn't.

John Dewey, I just threw in here, I didn't have him in there originally, but I threw him in there because he also was a follower of Huxley, greatly influenced by all of these things. He was a Darwinist. And of course, he's known as what, the founder of the modern American educational system.

So he applied all of these things to that, and he was successful in that development of his, what's referred to as the vision for a progressive welfare state and the secularization of America. So this is kind of key to our understanding, and it's probably mostly familiar to many of you.

There's another part of that thread of history, though, that I wasn't aware of up until a few years ago, and this is very interesting. There's two guys, and you can find, you can easily research this history. John William Draper, born in America, so American at birth. Andrew Dixon White, if I recall, was born in the UK and then immigrated early in life, so considered also an American.

They were American scientists, educators, highly influenced by Huxley. And others in this close circle that had its center in Oxford, Cambridge, that area, the academia world in the UK, circle of British atheists, or agnostic, as Huxley coined that word. Draper published a book in 1874 entitled A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.

And in that, he posited the progressive power of science juxtaposed against the repressive and regressive power of religion. Have you ever heard somebody tell you that? Well, Christianity is regressive. This is where it came from, in part, anyway. That was 1874. About a decade later or more, I guess it was two decades later, White published a book, and I'll jump back up in the middle there.

He was the founding president of Cornell University. Cornell, if you go back, it's one of the Ivy League schools, right? Nobody here's from Cornell. It was all of the other Ivy League schools, in general, anyway, were founded as Christian academies. And most of us are aware of that. And then they gradually threw out the Bible, and now they're very much at the other end of the spectrum.

Cornell was founded with the mission to be, as White described, an asylum for science. In other words, it was going to be separated from the influence of religion, Christianity specific. It was not going to be stretched or cut exactly to fit revealed religion. Let's set it aside, and let's establish it based on these presuppositions that were evolving from Darwin and the others before him, and Thomas Huxley specifically.

And in 1896, he published this 800, more than 800 pages, tome entitled "A History of the Warfare Between Science with Theology in Christendom," with that thesis, that Christianity had always been at war with science, always been regressive, always held it back. That's, by the way, where you get the term "the dark ages," which, it turns out, were not really dark.

There was advances made during that period of time, driven, again, by a biblical worldview, but has largely been kind of slipped into the shadows by the greater history world. The problem with both these things, and they were published as works of history, as documented works of history, and they're well documented, if you look at the bibliography, it's extensive.

But then later, the history community, the academic community, examining these works a little bit closer, found out that it was all fabricated or distorted. In other words, the history was made up, and it was made up to propagate this goal to get religion out of the picture, and to present it in the public's eye as antagonistic, so juxtaposed against science.

Fabricated works of history, widely rejected, especially most recently in the 1980s. There's been some work done to re-examine it. And that's the conclusion, rejected, not works of history, fallacies. But that war image, as we all have witnessed in life, continues to be prevalent in the public eye. So it goes back to my earlier comment.

This is an opportunity, since there's a chink in the armor of the authority of science, this is our opportunity to speak into it. And it takes courage and discernment and wisdom in doing that. But it's a great historic opportunity, ultimately for the gospel. We know this. "Men who, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth," Romans 1, I encourage you to go back and read the whole chapter.

"Scoffers will come in the last days," from 2 Peter, "with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, 'Where is the promise of his coming?' For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation." Scripture predicts all of this, right?

Paul writes to Timothy, "Avoid the irreverent babble and contradiction of what is falsely called knowledge." Knowledge means science. I think it's the King James that says what is falsely called science. Scripture addresses these things. The theory of evolution became the fact of evolution. When I was a child, it was still called a theory, still acknowledged.

But I don't think the word is used in the greater public eye anymore. The church was not equipped to answer this assumed authority. I don't have time to go into that history. But the church was ill-equipped. We in the scientific community should be equipping ourselves to be driven by the theology that's in God's word, to be able to address these things as we're given opportunity.

Talked about John Dewey, the Bible was pushed out of education, public square, pushed out of civic discourse, pushed out of science, the Bible's authorities eclipsed by the authority of human reason. The church weakened in its power to be salt and light, and the Christian faith lost its public commitment and began to retreat to private individual belief.

And we know that history. But where shall wisdom be found? And I don't have time to go into it today and too much, but this is a profound question. Where's the place of understanding? One that we should review in our own minds devotionally every day, to reground us back into the Scriptures, to reestablish the reason that we see our life as a calling, given a mission.

It's a stewardship of opportunity of what God has given. Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding. By the way, Psalm 111 concludes with the same idea. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Just as a refresher, if you follow the theme of wisdom, you see wisdom personified in Proverbs chapter 8 as beside God in the delighting in the works of God.

Some attribute Proverbs 8 to be a glimpse into the person of Christ. It's a personified wisdom, but it certainly gives us insight into Christ and his work with the Father in the Trinitarian work of provisioning his creation and in the works of providence as well. And then you go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, and you see that Christ is the fulfillment of wisdom.

Or you go to Colossians 2, all wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ. So it's all pointing back to Christ. It starts with Christ and it points to Christ. And devotionally, that's where we need to continually reestablish ourselves in our mission with what we've been given in life. Stephen Charnock, anybody know that name?

He was a 17th century Puritan. The Existence and Attributes of God is a big, thick book on my shelf at home, which is probably the most well-known work of his. All things in the world, one way or another, center in the usefulness for man, some to feed him, some to clothe him, some to delight him, some to instruct him, some to exercise his wit or his intelligence, and others his strength.

He saw this. He saw this in a biblical worldview that God's creative work is provisioned for our benefit and for his glory. And a major component of that provision is the ordering of God's creation. Okay, now, Titania asked me to get a little bit more personal. So I'll try to do that.

And if I miss something, she'll have the first question. In this, I became a believer prior to being accepted or picked by NASA for this job in the late '80s. And since we're here at Master's University, I'll start by saying I came to faith primarily after several months of studying the Gospel of John and the letter to the Romans.

And it was after my wife came to faith, in a moment, after a witness of the Gospel to her, after over a period of days. For me, it took several months. Like many of you, I'm more analytical. I wanted to understand what this was. So it took me several months.

And the Lord in his graciousness brought me to faith through that process, through primarily those two books of the Bible. I quickly became, I just wanted to study and learn everything I could. So I discovered Christian radio. I was listening to it continually until I discovered Grace to You.

And then eventually, everything else kind of started falling into lower priority. So John really taught me the Bible through the late '80s, through the '90s. It was our practice to have our young, in those days, young boys in bed by 8.30. And Grace to You came on in Houston at 9 o'clock.

And so we would be in bed with the Bible on the lap, a notebook, and a pencil, and listen to Grace to You. So he really taught me the Bible. So when I was selected by NASA in 1996 for this job, I was fairly well established in my faith, and also had a good perspective on, hey, this is a, if I get this opportunity, this is a stewardship that's unique.

And I need to steward what the Lord gives me, whatever it is, that included. So I went into this job with this perspective, and I could go into more detail. There were some disappointments along the way. I didn't get selected in the earlier years and whatnot, but I trusted in the providence of God.

One of the books that had a big influence on me was The Mystery of Providence by John Flavel, written also in the late 1600s. And that just opened my eyes to the awe and wonder of God's providential work for every detail in every one of our lives, as is affirmed in the Scripture.

So I trusted in him through disappointments, through opportunities, and also had this growing acute sense of the responsibility to steward the opportunities that he gave me. So I talked already about the spaceflights and the participation in the assembly and operation of the International Space Station. Now I'm involved, although I'm threatening to retire here soon from NASA, I'm involved in the development of the lunar program.

We're going to go back to the moon. But all of that is through the lens of understanding of stewarding what God has given me. Now, back story, a little bit of a back story. And I saw the unfolding providence of God in this, and I had no idea where it was going to end up.

And I still don't know where it's going to end up in the future from now. But I started out, I spent 27 years active in Army, Army aviation. And our first assignment was in West Germany in the Cold War in the early '80s, '81 to '84. So my focus was largely on the Soviet Union as an enemy, as a potential hot war enemy, studying all their tactics, their weapon systems, their people.

We went to Berlin from West Germany a couple of times where you had to go through Soviet checkpoints with official orders and whatnot. So that was my exposure to Russia. Then I get into this job, my first flights to the space station. We are partners with Russia. So in the late '90s, I got sent to Russia.

As an active Army colonel with free time on weekends, walking around Moscow with a camera, taking pictures. Notice the irony there. I thought I would fly three or four shuttle flights and maybe go long duration on station. But after the first flight, long story, but I got pulled off a shuttle flight and said, "Hey, I need you to go to Russia to start training for Soyuz." And I thought, "Oh, okay." Just followed orders, saluted, and went on.

I've been to Russia 60 times, roughly, accumulated more than six years of time over those many trips. Lots of time away from Anna Marie, in addition to being off the planet, as she likes to say. I had to learn the language. I was a math and science guy. I didn't want that foreign language stuff, this humanity stuff, but I was forced to learn the language.

Кто-то здесь говорит по-русски, или нет? Да? Отлично. I had to learn, I was forced to learn the language. I've been studying it for over 20 years. I still have a lesson once a week. And over the course of time in Moscow in the mid-2000s or late-2000s, I can't remember, I got involved with the Russian evangelical community there in Moscow and had some ministry opportunities with them.

And I was actually in Moscow when the MacArthur Study Bible in Russian was released. So I went to the last session, the Q&A session with John and the staff that were over there. That was an exciting milestone, and that opened doors there. And then in about 2014 or so, I discovered through a YouTube channel a ministry in Washington State, a Slavic immigrant community up there, a church, a Bible church, Word of Grace Bible Church, по-русски, Слово Благодати, pastored by a guy by the name of Alexei Kolomiantsev, who went to TMS, graduated in 2002.

Turned out, in hindsight, we went back and traced, I was the graduation banquet speaker. We didn't meet each other, but the Lord crossed our paths from a little distance there. In 2014, Anna-Marie and I got invited out here to go to a GMI, a Grace Mission International retreat. So all of the missionaries from Grace Community Church were called back from their places in the world.

We were out in Oxnard at a beach resort there for four or five days. They had asked me to speak, and for some reason, Alexei still doesn't know, they invited he and his wife down from Washington to join that retreat. And I had just discovered the YouTube video of his interview, which was done in Germany, as I recall.

And I thought, "Wow, I gotta meet this guy." Here in America, we got this guy with this, I'll talk a little bit about the ministry reach here in a second. So within two or three weeks, we're in Oxnard at this retreat, and I gave my talk, and we still mingled, and we knew some of the missionaries from Italy and elsewhere, and so we were just having a great time of fellowship.

They asked me to do a book signing, which I agreed to, and so I'm going through people one at a time, visiting with them. Alexei and his wife, Tanya, show up in that line, and he introduces himself, and I said, "I know who you are." And we had this great conversation, and he said at the end of the conversation, "Would you be willing or interested in coming up and speaking at our church?" I said, "Absolutely." Tanya, previous to that, had said, "Let's invite Jeff to our church, let's invite him to our church." And Alexei said, "No, no, no, he's too big, he's too important, he's too busy." Tanya, his wife, insisted, and of course, I was eager to do that.

That started a relationship. We would go up there average once a year from 2014 on. We took our family up there in 2019, I think, for a family vacation. And our older son, we have two sons, and his wife and family were so blown away by not only the beauty of the environment, but especially the congregational life, that we started talking when we got back to Houston, and we decided as a family, let's move to Washington.

I was going to retire, we were going to move. Then the world shut down with COVID. We all learned how to work remotely. My boss said, "Hey, would you be willing to not retire? Just go to Manhattan, move to Washington, and work from up there." I said, "Yeah, then I can qualify for my mortgage." So we did, and now we've been up there going on three years, and it's an amazing place.

Word of Grace Bible Church and the preaching ministry of Alexei Kolomiotsev is exactly the same mold, if you will, and parallel to Grace Community Church and Grace to You in the Russian-speaking world. I call them the John MacArthur of the Russian-speaking world. We get about two million downloads a month via the internet, mostly YouTube, but other platforms as well.

So the Lord is doing amazing things there. I could go into more detail, but I wanted to say that, based on your request, as a testimony to what I've been talking about, that in the providence of God, we are called to our stations of life, and we are to steward what we're given in those stations, however it is, however significant or insignificant we consider it to be.

It's a stewardship. My story is amazing in and of itself, but it's really amazing in its illustration, and it can impact any of us. It should impact all of us who trust and believe in Jesus Christ. Hallelujah.