In my line of work it is legitimate to talk about multiple reasons or multiple causes for an event. For example I might claim that God, as creator of all things, is responsible for creating the Hawaiian Islands, but also claim that they came about through natural causes involving plate tectonics. One of those claims being true does not mean that the other is false. They are simply explaining different aspects of the event. Different philosophers have developed different terminology for this, like primary and secondary causes, or efficient and final causes, or different levels of explanation. Having some sort of understanding of this goes a long way toward reducing (or even eliminating) the perceived conflict between science and religion. Just because science can explain something, that doesn’t mean that God had nothing to do with it.
There was an event in Cambridge last night which was the primary reason for the trip I now find myself on (though not quite in the sense of primary causation!). One of the funders of the podcast I host thought it would be nice to encourage more audience interaction for the podcast, and so included in the activities of the grant they gave us that we would hold a couple of live events per year. At these, we record a conversation with a guest or two in front of a live studio audience, and then have some time for questions from the audience (instead of me being the only one who gets to ask questions). We did the first of these at the BioLogos conference in San Diego last March with the artist Makoto Fujimura, and you can find the video of that on the BioLogos YouTube channel (and the audio in our regular podcast feed).
Ever since we heard that we were required to do these live events, my producer Colin and I have been scheming how to do one in the UK. Lots of the academic work in science and religion has come from the UK, and we thought there might lots of interesting interviews we could do here. Then COVID happened, but we were eventually able to get those plans going again and schedule this trip to coincide with the beginning of my sabbatical. So last night we held a live event in a very cool pub in the middle of Cambridge, talking to Bethany Sollereder and Nick Spencer about the perceived conflict between science and religion. That was lots of fun, and a good number of people came out and were very engaged with the topic, thus enabling us to meet this requirement of audience participation (and keep a funder happy!).
Having that official business completed, things shift to the another reason for my trip (which is not at all in conflict with the primary reason!): going to see a bunch of cool, old things that humans have done or made. The first leg of that has us four BioLogians (or is it BioLogicians?) currently on a train from Cambridge to London’s Gatwick airport, where we’ll get on a plane to fly to Aberdeen, where we’ll get on a boat to sail to the Orkney Islands, where we’ll rent a car to drive around the island to see some old things. I’m hoping there is a way to work in a few other modes of transportation.
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