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EPISODE 20: Loving God with Your Mind

Stan Wallace has explored the life of the mind for decades. He's interacted with Christian professors in a wide range of academic fields for a long time, and he helps them live out their callings in secular universities. The lessons he’s learned along the way apply to all believers in all callings.

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https://global-scholars.org

Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul.

By J.P. Moreland

Christian Book Distributors

Transcript


Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today I'm delighted to have my friend Stan Wallace as my conversation partner. Stan, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks, Randy. It’s so good to be here.

What Does It Mean to Love God with All Our Mind?

Stan and I have known each other for quite a while. Stan is the president and CEO of Global Scholars. I'll let him tell you a little bit more about that in a second. Global Scholars equips Christian professors all around the world. It's a wonderful ministry of connecting and linking Christians to have a redemptive influence in the academic world. He has both a master's and a doctorate degree from Talbot School of Theology. And the question we're going to explore today is what does it mean to love God with all our mind? But, Stan, why don't you just do a little bit of an introduction about Global Scholars? Because I'd love for our listeners to know and to appreciate this great ministry.

Sure. Global Scholars has been around about 30 years, and we work in about 75 countries with professors at public universities, as well as secular private universities, connecting them to one another and providing resources and training to help them fulfill their call as Christian professors, amongst their students, their colleagues, and their academic disciplines, to truly see the truth, grace, mercy, shalom of the gospel penetrate every sector and every aspect of higher education.

I love it. I love it. I've had the privilege of speaking for you at a couple of conferences, and I'm always so encouraged how God has raised up really, really brilliant brothers and sisters, brilliant in their academic field, and yet also giving them a heart for mission, a heart for the kingdom of God. And so isn't some of it like they’re tent maker missionaries? They're in their academic world, teaching at universities, but they're inviting students over, and they're meeting with students in their offices, and they're engaging in great gospel conversations in parts of the world where it's pretty difficult for missionaries to go. Am I describing it?

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. As well as right here in the US. I just had a great interview on my podcast, College Faith, with a professor at the University of Virginia who was really a role model in this. And it's so exciting and encouraging to see how God has raised up men and women around the world to be His ambassadors in our universities.

I love it. I love it. Well, for many years, you and I were together with Campus Crusade's faculty ministry for a number of years, and we got to know Christian professors in a pretty wide range of academic disciplines. It's really quite encouraging. And I think for a lot of people outside of the academic world, Christians, it's kind of surprising. When I’ve told people I was with a Christian ministry that works with university professors who are Christians, people would cross their eyes like, “There are Christian professors in the university?” Yes. So tell us a little bit more about what you've seen as far as just the kinds of people that God has raised up in this academic world.

Well, there's a long history to this conversation. Of course, the universities in the US, by and large, were founded as places where Christian thought was central to the discussion, and a desire to integrate that with all other knowledge from other areas of study. But that changed through a number of factors in the 1800s, early 1900s. So yeah, the early part of the 20th century, the university was very, very secular in almost every discipline. And actually, in about the ‘50s, a group of men and women who were believers had a sense that God was calling them to do top-drawer PhDs and teach in top-flight institutions and make a difference and change the landscape. And they all were actually in probably the most secular field, the field of philosophy, the field I've studied in. And they went and got their PhDs and got into teaching positions, and quite frankly, they have, in many ways, renewed and reinvigorated the discipline from a Christian perspective.

Probably the leading Christian scholar in this field is Alvin Plantinga, and he has done so much work that now you really can't go through at least a graduate-level program of study, and in a lot of cases an undergraduate study in philosophy, without reading his material, which is explicitly Christian in its orientation. I was actually sitting with a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin who was a believer a number of years ago, who was telling me how his discipline is very secular. There's no room for God or other biblical truth in general and historically. But he said, “I’m seeing what's happening over in philosophy, and that gives me hope that maybe there is a future for our discipline that reengages biblical truth as part of the conversation.” And that was 15 years ago or so. Now, that's certainly true of history and other disciplines, so it is exciting to see what God's done. And I think, because there have been some people who blazed the trail, there are others now in probably every discipline who have said as believers, “My call is to integrate biblical truth, what God reveals in the Scriptures, with the truths I find in my field, in my discipline. And help the university again be a university, where there's a true unity of knowledge from all disciplines.”

Yeah. Well said. All right, so let's use that as a transition, because these people you're talking about, the people that you get to know, they're talking about integrating or exploring the integral nature of what God has revealed in his scriptures and what God has revealed in general revelation through nature and… So tell us what comes to your mind when you hear this phrase of “loving God with all your mind”? What are some of the things that believers need to really push into and explore as they seek to love God with all their mind?

Wow, such a good question, but a really broad question. I first think of Romans 12:2, which I think is the central passage on spiritual formation and growth in Christ. It says, “Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you can prove what the will of God is.” And Paul could have said a lot of things there, but he focused on, first and foremost, how we think as central to how we grow in Christ and how we engage the world in redemptive ways, prove what God's will is, to see all things come under His lordship. And so there is a direct connection that that passage and so many others make. And Proverbs, I think, really illustrates between thinking well, understanding reality, and living well. I love the way Dallas Willard puts it. He says, “Reality is the thing you run into when you're wrong.”

So, in as far as we understand what reality is, the way things really are, the better we can live accordingly, and by living accordingly, we flourish, and those around us flourish. And this, again, is all through Proverbs, illustrated here in so many ways.

Nice. Okay, but I'm sitting here a little bit, and I'm thinking, “Perhaps some of our listeners may be resistant to this, because there is a significant amount of resistance, at least in the American Evangelical Christian world. There’s a suspicion of academia and the life of the mind. So how do we respond? Well, maybe we'll dig into this in a little bit, but there is a history, whether we like it or not, of some anti-intellectualism within the Christian church. So how do we push back against that or help people see that it doesn't have to be destructive to our spiritual growth to pursue the life of the mind?

Right. Well… and I will answer that, but I’m going to, if you don't mind, make a plug for my podcast.

Yeah, yeah, go, go. Sure.

Because I have been in a conversation with J.P. Moreland, who I do a podcast with, who's a Christian philosopher that I've studied under, and we've spent now three sessions, three podcast episodes, talking about just this issue. So there's a lot more to say than I'll summarize here, and that's Thinking Christianly, the podcast, if the listeners are interested.

Good.

But having said that, I think we have made a false dichotomy between head and heart, and there's interesting historical reasons for it, but we have, at the end of the day, just said, “If we emphasize knowledge and thought and ideas, we become cold and uncaring and unloving.” And we know from I Corinthians 13 that ultimately, if we have all knowledge and have not love, we're like a clanging gong and a crashing cymbal. We don't want that. So we have tended to go the other direction, to the other extreme, and said, “It's about love, it's all about love. It’s all about the heart. It’s all about our experience of God. It's not about what we know at all.” And it's just a false dichotomy. Scripture is clear that it's a both/and, and like most things, we can go to one extreme or the other. And when we see one extreme, and I think there are extremes of those who've got all their doctrine nailed down and all their apologetic arguments figured out, and they're the most uncaring, unloving people in the world. And we don't want to be like them.

But the answer isn't to go to the other extreme. The answer is to find the biblical balance that allows us to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, as the greatest commandment puts it.

Good. Yeah. You mentioned the history of this, and I think it's important for our listeners to explore that and dig into that, but I don't think we'll do that on this podcast. I mean, there were some things that happened in the beginning, toward the beginning of the 20th century, that caused this anti-intellectualism…. Or didn't cause it. It kind of brought it to the surface, I think. And we've been kind of struggling, I think, since then. But there are a lot of really, really encouraging things happening, of people who are really gifted by God to be very, very brilliant and intelligent historians or anthropologists or you name the, and they find that it's this wonderful intersection of loving God, studying the Scriptures, growing spiritually, and also studying whatever the field is.

I knew one professor, when he got this vision, it was in his undergraduate days, that he could study science to the glory of God, and he decided to go into the world of geology. He regularly says, “I study dirt to the glory of God.” And he really delighted in it. He was an elder at his church, and so he loved theology and loved preaching, but he also loved dirt, and he loved helping students understand this physical planet that we're on. And to watch his face light up when he would talk about either topic. We'd have a Bible study together with some professors, and he’d get very enthused about the Scriptures. And then somebody would say, “How are things going with your work?” He would bring students to these different conferences, or competitions basically. I never really understood it, but he would come back, and he would say things like, “Our dirt won!” I love it.

Yeah. I remember speaking at an InterVarsity conference. It was the Urbana Student Mission Conference, and I did a session on following God's call into the university for undergraduate students who might be thinking about going on and getting a PhD and serving God as professors. And it was a full house. And after I finished speaking, I had a lot of students come up afterwards, but one student I remember in particular, she had tears streaming down her face, and she said, “I love my studies.” I think she was actually in Russian literature. “I love Russian literature. But I've always thought God wanted me” or “… the important thing to do for God would be to be a missionary, and so I thought I had to leave my first love, my academic love. And I realized that I can love God and serve God now, from what you’ve said, by studying this field and finding truth and helping to teach what is true and good and beautiful through Russian literature.”

And she was just thrilled, and I was thrilled that she had discovered that. That's the lost theology of vocation that we have slipped back into, that we had rediscovered in the Reformation, that all work is valuable to God, and there's not this sacred/secular dichotomy. But we’ve slipped back into that, and it was nice to see her recapture that sense that, “I can serve God by loving the things that he has given me a love for and studying them, and through that, make a difference for Christ, even though I'm not a ‘missionary’ going to Russia per se.”

How Do We Love God with All Our Minds?

I love it. I love it. Okay, but let's pivot a little bit, because I'm sure that plenty of people listening to this podcast are not called to go get a PhD and to become an academic. But all of us are called to love God with our mind. So how do Christians who are called to a whole bunch of other different fields or whatever, and not to the academic world, how do we love God with all our minds? What are some ways people can explore that?

Well, there are so many more ways to do that now than even five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. It used to be you had to go somewhere to study with somebody, like you said, seminary degree, or you had to at least find some books that were written by somebody and read them. But today we've got podcasts, we've got YouTube channels, we've got Audible books, we’ve got great books being written by Christians who are thinking about these issues that are just wonderful to read.

And so my suggestion just is find something you're interested in. It could be some issue in growing in Christ. It could be some apologetic question that you're struggling with. It could be some theological issue that comes up either in your devotional time or maybe in a sermon. And find a good book on it and read it or listen to a good podcast on it. And what I find is that always sparks more questions. So I want to read something else or listen to some other podcast, or I find somebody I really like, either an author or somebody who's done a podcast or a YouTube video, and I want to hear more of what they have to say on maybe another topic, and it just goes on and on and on.

But the bottom line is, don't think you've got to sit down with a 1200-page theological text and start slogging through it. No. Find something you're interested in, that you just want to know a little bit more about, and find good Christian thinkers who've thought about it a little bit more than you have and have done something, in terms of either podcasts or books or whatnot.

And I will say this also: It's also, I think, very important to be part of a community of others who are also interested in loving God with the mind. And it's probably in your church, maybe at work, maybe other contexts, but there's always a number of people who are asking the same kind of questions you're asking and would like to think about these things. Well, read some things together or share with one another what you're reading. I've found, in churches, and I've moved around a lot, so I've been in quite a few churches. I've taught Sunday school classes or adult Bible fellowship classes on these type of topics, and I always find there's probably 10% or 15% of the people in the church who love to start to explore some of these issues and really press into loving God with their mind more. And it's great.

Often they feel marginalized in their churches. A recent Barna study has shown that the majority of people who leave their church do so because of intellectual reasons. They aren't having their questions answered. They’re not able to engage at the next level and really be seriously thinking about certain issues. And so finding a group of people in your church who want to do that, it's helpful to you, but it's also helpful to them, and sometimes it keeps people a part of the community who otherwise might just leave.

We at the C.S. Lewis are wondering what are you reading now? And what's on your summer reading list? We're hoping that you'll be inspired by true stories of faithful Christ followers, that you'll maybe travel back in history and around the globe, grow deeper in your own walk with Christ, and gain tools to understand and engage today's world, and toward that end, we've pulled together a recommended reading list for the summer, and I hope you'll check it out. You can see it at cslewisinstitute.org. Here's the full address: cslewisinstitute.org/recommended_reading. Let me do that again: cslewisinstitute.org/recommended_reading.

As you're talking, so many ideas are popping into my mind. One thought I have is I think it's really important for us to try to challenge ourselves and read books that are specifically difficult for us to read. Now, we need to read plenty of things that we can grab onto and really, really enjoy and dig into, but on a pretty regular basis, we should try to read some things that are going to be difficult for us. And in fact, if they are difficult and we're tempted to quit, which is always the case, we say, “No, I'm going to do this, so that I stretch those intellectual muscles,” if I can talk that way. I’ve also really enjoyed so much the Great Courses. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but you can get them from the library, or you can purchase them pretty cheaply. But my wife and I are watching a series now on the life and writings of Jane Austen, and it's a fairly academic set of lectures, but it's just enhancing our appreciation of those novels that Jane Austen wrote. But every so often, as I'm watching these lectures, it kind of strikes me of, “Oh, you know, this isn't the typical television fare.” I mean, we're watching it on television, but television by nature is short attention span. Let's make things only 15 seconds, so you don't have to think for too long. And this woman who's lecturing, I mean, she's a scholar in English literature, well, she challenges us to pay attention for more than 15 seconds. So I'm also thinking we need to also recognize when we're exposing ourselves to things that have the potential to do just the opposite, to make us stupid. There's some things I'll watch every so often, and after a few minutes I think, “If I keep watching this, my IQ is going to plummet.” I could see the score going down. So we have to kind of push back against an entire culture that doesn't really like to think all that deeply.

Let's see. Where do we go next? What are some of your favorite books to introduce people to this idea of the life of the mind? You mentioned J.P. Moreland, and he's got that great book, Loving God with All Your Mind, I think is the title. Who else should we-

Right. Well, actually, let me answer that by way of what I found really helpful with my son as he was coming up through really high school. He's now a sophomore in college. But I was asking this question about what would I want to have him read to prepare to go off to college, to really love God with his mind and think well about the issues he will engage. And I assumed he was heading toward a public university, and he is, in fact, at a public university. And we read four books together. We read them slowly, bite-sized chunks, and then we talk about them together out over a shake or around a fire out in our backyard. But we started with the book you just mentioned, J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind, subtitled The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul, to give a really nice foundation for why it's important to love God with your mind.

And then we read a series of books, two books by Paul Little. First was Know What You Believe, which is just a very good, basic introduction to the biblical truths laid out in Scripture, the doctrines of the faith, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and so on and so forth. At a very introductory level, which is what he needed, but it was really, really good. And then the other book is Know Why You Believe, so it’s a basic primer or Introduction to Apologetics, the questions of how do we know these things are true? How do we know Jesus was God, that the Bible is true, that God exists, that Jesus rose from the dead, that God is existing as a good God even though there's evil in the world? All of these type of questions. And that was a really good book to read.

And then the last one was a book by James Sire entitled The Universe Next Door.

Yeah, yeah. A great book. Great.

Yeah. The subtitle is A Basic Worldview Catalog, and it goes through the other views out there, worldviews, ways of seeing the world. Like pantheism. God is in all and is all, but it's not a person, it's just a force. It's the Star Wars theology. Or naturalism, which I knew he would get in the sciences, which is, “All that exists is what we can see or touch or smell or hear, just the physical world.” Or postmodernism, the relativization of all truth and knowledge, and so on and so forth. So as we read through that and talked about that, it really helped him develop his understanding of alternative ideas that he will encounter and is in fact now encountering. And I think Jim does a great job in the book of responding to those, saying, “Now, how do we think Christianly about these ideas, these objections, these alternative views? And it really was helpful to talk that through with him and helped him, I think, start a lifelong journey of loving God with his mind, as well as his heart.

Science and Faith Are Not Antagonistic

Oh, that's great. That's really, really great. And I love that you're doing this father/son connection. By the way, for those of you are listening who may take things rather literally, when Stan mentioned about a fire in his backyard, they have a fire pit. I've seen it. So it wasn't just like the backyard was on fire, because that would not be a good setting, I don't think, but maybe that's just me.

Anyway, also I want to underline your recommendation about James Sire’s book, because he's written quite a few, and I just think he's such an amazing resource for us today. I think of him in a similar way that I think C. S. Lewis thought about himself. He called himself a translator. And Sire, I think, is this brilliant translator. He connects to the academic world of philosophy and other places, but he writes at a level that people without academic training in those fields can really grasp. And I've benefited from his stuff so very, very much. So he's someone for people to check out.

I don't know if you'll be able to answer this, so here, I'm going to put you on the spot while we're recording. Maybe we'll have to do some fancy editing, but I know that, in my years in faculty ministry, I began to see so many of the professors I knew were in the sciences, the hard sciences, and when I told Christians outside the academic world that, they were surprised. They thought you would find Christians in the social sciences, psychology and religion, and actually those were tougher places, but the harder the science, so physics…. We knew quite a few professors who are Christians in physics. But I do think that there's this whole kind of challenge to the Christian faith today about science, and we need to find ways to articulate that science and faith are not antagonistic. In fact, they're amazingly supportive and encouraging of each other. But what are some resources for our listeners about this whole thing about science and faith? And do they conflict? And if not, how do I express that?

Great question. The short answer I would give is you're absolutely right. They don't inherently conflict. They may conflict in different issues, because both science and scripture do speak to time-space realities, and so there's a possibility of conflict when two different answers are given to the same question. But there's also the possibility of convergence or support from one to the other. And examples can be given in both cases.

But the point is that it's like any other two academic disciplines or areas of knowledge. Chemistry and physics, for that matter, have areas where they support one another and areas where they would have different ideas or different theorems or postulates. And then the question as well, are these ultimately simpatico? Do they go together ultimately? We just have to understand better how they go together. Or is one of these disciplines wrong that needs to be corrected by data from the other discipline? The same is true between theology and science, let's say, or theology and psychology. One discipline may be right and the other wrong on an issue if they are in conflict. Or they might just be saying the same things in different ways. And it's the role of the Christian who is seeking to think God's thoughts after Him to drill into that and say, “Okay, where is the truth of the matter?”

Now, see, this assumes something very important that I do want to highlight. This assumes that biblical knowledge—I'll call it theology—is actually a field of study and of knowledge. And the view that we have adopted, again for interesting historical reasons, is that theology is really not an area of knowledge. It's just an area of belief. It's more like the flavor of ice cream you prefer to the nature of the DNA molecule. It's not something you have knowledge of, that you could be right or wrong about, that might give you information that you didn't have before studying it. It's simply a belief that you have that's personal, that’s fine for you to have, but you are certainly not to assume it's true for everyone.

Now, that's just wrong. And, again, I don't think we have time to go into all the reasons why. I've tried to address this in my podcast a bit and in my writing. But ultimately, if theology is a field of study, if it gives us knowledge, then we need to ask what knowledge do we have from this field? What knowledge do we have from science? Whatever field in science you want to pick. And where do they complement one another? And where is there a conflict or a contradiction? And when there's a contradiction, which is right? Maybe we're misinterpreting scripture. And we need to better understand scripture in light of what the data from science is telling us. For instance, an exegetical case was made for many, many years, decades, centuries arguably, that the earth was flat because the angels were dispatched to the four corners of the earth. Well, we got data that the earth was not flat from science, from astronomy, and that helped us understand that, no, that's not the only or best interpretation of that text.

And so we allowed the second book of nature, of God's revelation through the created order, to help us understand and interpret what the text was saying. On the other hand, if the text is crystal clear on something, like, for instance—and there's a lot of nuance when you get into the creation account and how it is to be interpreted, but it seems clear to me that God created us as unique beings, us as humans, and that that's in conflict with the naturalistic evolutionary model. Now, there are Christians who take a theistic evolutionary model, where God used that process. I'm not going to get into all that, but the point is that it can't be true that God was involved in the process somehow and God was not involved in the process somehow. One or the other has got to be right, and we need to work on that. And scripture is clear that God was involved in the process somehow, so then our work is to figure out what that role was, how he was involved in that process. So those are the ways that I think theological truth and scientific truth can help one another, can challenge one another, can inform one another, can support one another, or can critique one another.

This summer, we have renewed our commitment to prayer, and our hope is that you'll join us. There have been times in history when God has led his people to fall on their knees in prayer and to seek His path and power in a concerted way. We're always called to pray at all times, but there are seasons when the circumstances are such that more intense prayer, more times of fasting and prayer are needed. And at the C.S. Lewis, we've prepared a number of resources. We have a collection of articles, videos, recommended books, all gathered in one place, and you can find them at cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer. Did you catch that? www.cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer.

Oh, that's well done. Thanks. Yes. Yeah, I love that. We need to see that theology is indeed a field of knowledge, just as other fields of knowledge. And then the other thing of them complementing each other, going about answering different questions, but about the same reality. We had John Lennox come and do some speaking for us, and he just was delightful. And I would recommend those recordings to our listeners. We have them on our website. He was so very winsome and calm about it. Sometimes these debates can get kind of agitated. But he sort of delighted in both. He delighted in theology, and he delighted in mathematics, his field, and he would have this great big smile on his face about both.

And I don't think he necessarily said it, but when I read in this area, very often people use this illustration: The illustration is that science can answer certain questions, but it doesn't answer certain questions. And then there are other ways for us to ascertain different answers. So the illustration people very often look at they look at; they look at a tea kettle boiling water on the stove, and someone asks the question, “Why is the water boiling?” Well, from a scientific standpoint, they would say, well, there's heat coming up from the stove, and the fact that the tea kettle is made out of metal, this kind of metal is a conductor of heat, and so that heat transfers to the water. And when water, because of its molecules, reaches a certain level of heat of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it boils. Right? Good? Nobody would disagree with that. But somebody else might look at it, and to the question of why is the water boiling, they might say, “Because I wanted to make some tea.” Are those both good answers? Yes. And are they answering the same question? Well, yes, but from very different vantage points. And that helps me with… science is a great thing and it answers a lot of very, very important questions, especially when you have health problems, and the answer is, “Take this medicine, and you won't die.” I like that aspect of science.

Well, and this actually illustrates something very important. And I'm going to reference C.S. Lewis, since this is the C.S. Lewis Institute.

You have to, you have to.

I had to do that. You can check that off.

Right.

But he's got this great piece he wrote on reading old books, and it basically argues that we need to be reading people who are of different times, and I'd say different places as well, because they have thoughts that we just can't think because of our cultural milieu or our time in history. And this is a great example because, in the foundation of science and the first two—well, I guess my history isn't exactly right, but up until the Enlightenment, from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, the idea of science was answering all four of the why-type questions. So Aristotle had four answers to any why question.

I'll give you another example:  You see a house, and you say, “Why is this house here? What caused this house?” Well, you can answer it by, “There's bricks and wood,” and that truly is a cause. If there were no bricks and wood and PVC and whatever else, no materials, there would be no house. It's called material cost. But workers showed up on the job, and they assembled those together. So there was energy. There what’s called an efficient cause. There were people who actually structured it in a certain way. But there's also a formal cause. That is the blueprint. There's a sort of a structure that the workers have to put it into that's predetermined, which isn't the house, but it makes the house what it is, a formal cause. And then there's a final cause. Somebody wanted a home. Somebody hired an architect and a builder and built himself a home. So all four answers are right: Material, efficient, formal, and final. And that was what science was until the Enlightenment, was answering all four of those questions. But Francis Bacon came along in the Enlightenment and said, “You know what? We don't really need those last two explanations, because they're kind of mysterious. You can't see them. We understand matter and energy. We can't understand these other things. And in fact, we're not even sure there's anything beyond the material realm. So let's just get rid of those as causes and explain everything by only material and efficient causes.”

And so science became pretty emasculated, I think, in trying to give a true representation of the world. Now, by the way, that was because science was shifting to really a focus on developing technology, as opposed to some of the deeper visions of science that came from Aristotle, of a full explanation of all reality. So by lopping those off, you could develop technology and pretty phenomena just fine. But it tells us that we live in a day and age where we don't even think of those questions anymore as scientific, and we can call them whatever we want to, and that's fine if we don't call them scientific questions, and we call them philosophical questions. That’s fine. But the point is, if you really want a full explanation of anything, you've got to answer things in terms of all four causes. And somebody wanting a cup of tea or somebody wanting a house is equally true and equally causal to the boiling of the water or the construction of the material elements of the house.

That is helpful. That's really good. And once again, I am so grateful for your training in philosophy. I don't have training in philosophy, as I regularly remind you, particularly when you use words that I don't understand. But I carry my phone with the dictionary app open when I'm talking to you. And I really appreciate that, but no, you've shown a light on an aspect of this science and faith and philosophy issue that's really crucial for us. Well, we need to draw this to a close.

Actually, let me just mention, science as we know it is post Bacon, really a new phenomenon. It was natural philosophy before that. It was a part of philosophy that just asked about the physical world. So even our way we divide up these disciplines is enlightenment and post Baconian, which I think is problematic, because I think, if I'm studying something, I want to know all the causes and all the reasons for it and fully understand it, not just understand the efficient and material causes.

Well, let me just say we're never going to have Francis Bacon on this show, because he's the bad guy, and, well, there's probably other reasons, but that would… never mind. Anyway, so we need to draw this to a close. Stan Wallace, it's been a delight to have you on Questions That Matter. Any final thoughts for our listeners about loving God with all your mind?

Well, I'll just mention this, and this is part of the answer to your earlier question in terms of resources. You'd asked about the faith and science question, but let me broaden it. I have written a couple of hundred articles that are on my website that might be helpful, including one that's called “Faith and Science or Faith or Science,” where I try to draw out a number of issues related to this broader discussion. That's at stanwallace.org. And then I've also got a podcast your listeners might be interested in if they've got students heading off to college, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. It's called College Faith, where we talk about and I interview people who really can help answer the questions about, “How do I flourish both as a Christian heading off to university and as a student?” And, in fact, I had you on just recently, and that will post, I think, in July. So thanks for doing that.

Yeah. Well, thanks for this time, Stan, and thanks to our listeners for digging in and pursuing the life of the mind. Please do check out stanwallace.org, his website, and also our cslewisinstitute.org. Tons and tons of resources there from a wide variety of topics. As always, we hope that all of our resources help you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. Thanks for listening.

We'd love to hear your feedback about this episode and really all of our episodes. Please send us any questions or responses to this episode at [email protected].  We hope to see you again on the next presentation of Questions That Matter.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.

COPYRIGHT: This publication is published by C.S. Lewis Institute; 8001 Braddock Road, Suite 301; Springfield, VA 22151. Portions of the publication may be reproduced for noncommercial, local church or ministry use without prior permission. Electronic copies of the PDF files may be duplicated and transmitted via e-mail for personal and church use. Articles may not be modified without prior written permission of the Institute. For questions, contact the Institute: 703.914.5602 or email us.

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