^{July 3, 2024}

Can You Believe in Science and God? (Justin Brierley with Biochemist Sy Garte)

Inside This Episode

Raised in a Marxist, militant atheist family, Sy Garte fell in love with the factual world of science. He became a distinguished research biochemist with an anti-theistic worldview to bolster his work--and he had no intention of seeking a God he didn't believe in. That is, until the very science he loved led him to question the validity of an atheistic worldview. His journey to answer the questions that confronted him drew him into becoming a fully committed Christian, determined to show others the truth: modern science doesn't contradict God at all but instead supports Christianity. 

More about Sy Garte: https://sygarte.com/

Read Sy’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sy-Garte/author/B001JS80FY?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Head to YouTube to watch Maybe God’s full-length interviews! 

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Transcript

Julie Mirlicourtois: Today on Maybe God. Why would a biochemist who was raised in a Marxist household and taught to look down on Christians later become a follower of Jesus?

Sy Garte: When I started studying the details of biochemistry, I just felt chills going up and down my spine, literally. I just thought, "This is unbelievable. How did this happen? How do we have such an incredibly complicated, beautiful system in every cell of our body?"

Julie Mirlicourtois: Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley talks to scientist Sy Garte about his remarkable conversion to Christianity and why he's determined to prove that modern science doesn't contradict God.

Sy Garte: We are on the surprising birth of a whole new way of understanding biology, and all of that, in my view, is going to point to the Creator God.

Julie Mirlicourtois: We'll also hear how Sy addresses miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. That's all today on Maybe God.

[00:01:04] <music>

Justin Brierley: Hello, and welcome to the Maybe God podcast. I'm Justin Brierley, guest hosting this week's edition of the show. This show inspires doubtful believers and hopeful skeptics to seek answers to their most challenging faith questions through uplifting and powerful storytelling.

My guest today is Sy Garte. He's the author of books, including, The Works of His Hands, which really told the story of his own journey as a scientist from atheism to faith. He's also the author of the recent book, Science and Faith in Harmony. Really looking forward to interviewing CS.

Sy, you've come across my radar a number of times over the years. We move in similar circles, so I'm really pleased we finally got the chance to sit down and talk through your story. Welcome along to the show.

Sy Garte: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Justin Brierley: Tell me a little bit, Sy, about your upbringing, because I think you were actually raised in a Marxist household, which not everyone can say is true of their story. What was that like? What were the influences of your parents and so on?

Sy Garte: I usually think of my parents as something I'd call ideological atheists, as opposed to atheists who just say, well, I don't have enough evidence to believe in God. No, my parents were ideologically convinced, mostly through Marxism.

They were members of the American Communist Party, which is fairly rare, but that was in the 30s. They were committed to the idea that there is no God, cannot be a God, and religion is evil. Christianity was responsible for most of the evil. It was a tool of oppression by the ruling classes. These are all standard Marxist ideologies. That's how I grew up.

I read Soviet-published books, translated to English for children, and many of them were anti-religion, anti-God. I just assumed that that was the case. I didn't have many experiences of religion. We didn't celebrate Christmas or any of the holidays. We gave presents on New Year's Day because that was the Soviet tradition.

That lasted pretty well into my youth, into my early adulthood. I did feel there was something missing in my life, which I now know is the sense of spirituality. At the time, I was able to fill that gap, at least I felt that way, with science because I began studying science in college, chemistry at first, and then in graduate school, I went to biochemistry, got my PhD in that. I found that very fulfilling, just wonderful. I loved science.

Science has a spiritual quality in that it seems to relate to truth that's somewhat beyond what we know, what we can see immediately. So I really liked that. The problem was that I started running into conflicts with my worldview, which was that when I learned about quantum mechanics by studying chemistry, that didn't quite make sense with the materialistic reductionist view that I had of science, of the world.

Justin Brierley: That's very interesting to hear you say that because you might assume the opposite given the way that obviously the new atheist scientists have constantly talked about the way atheism and science fit together perfectly, materialism, and so on. What on earth was it that made the science you were encountering actually a challenge to your atheistic, materialist worldview?

Sy Garte: You're right that that is the dominant view among atheists is they'll say, well, I don't believe in God, I believe in science, which to me is, and that's the subject of my second book, is just absurd. It's nonsense. It's like saying, I don't believe in goats, I believe in sheep. What sense does that make?

What happened was that the science that I had thought I knew was very materialistic and the idea was that everything is easily explained by a group of equations and there are no mysteries. There's some things we don't know, but we'll eventually solve them using the same methods.

But the problem is that when I learned quantum mechanics and especially things like the uncertainty principle, it said, no, there are things we can't know. We will never know the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. We can't. And there's a lot of probability rather than certainty in the Schrodinger equation.

So this didn't quite jive with that. It was more of a philosophical thing that I had. I just was kind of worried about it. But when I started studying the details of biochemistry, for example, how proteins are made, I just felt chills going up and down my spine. Literally. "I just thought, this is unbelievable. How did this happen? How do we have such an incredibly complicated, beautiful system in every cell of our body?"

I had no idea what the answer... I knew there was an answer. I thought it was probably evolution was doing it because certainly evolution does a lot of things. But still it raised in me questions about how can we really answer all these questions that are coming up from science itself? And I didn't know the answer. That did not lead me to theism, to believing in God. I don't think it ever came up in my brain. But what it did do was kind of break down this certainty that science is the answer to everything.

In fact, even my father, a lifelong atheist, and a scientist, he was a chemist, told me that science is not the answer to everything. It answers very specific questions, but not everything. And most scientists hold to that, in fact. It's non-scientists atheists who are believers in scientism, which is that if it's not scientific, it doesn't count.

Justin Brierley: Did you ever encounter in your scientific career people who were believers, people who perhaps had been happy to reconcile faith and science, and so on?

Sy Garte: I might have done, but I wouldn't have known it, because I never encountered anyone who specifically said, I'm a believer. And that question came up later. It's a very important question for me. And I'll just skip to it right now.

When I actually did become a believer, many decades after this, and I announced it in a talk I was giving to my colleagues... Somebody asked me what I was going to do after I retired, and I said, I'm going to work at my church. There was a moment of shocked silence.

But afterwards, five or six people came up to me and said, I'm a Christian also. And I had not known that, and they had not been public with it, as I had not.

Justin Brierley: Is that because there is any kind of stigma in the scientific community about kind of wearing those sort of faith colors on your sleeve?

Sy Garte: Yes, there is a bit, and it depends on the person. There are some scientists, I don't know them personally, but I've read some of the things they've written, and of course, we all know some of them who are atheist apologists, Jerry Coyne and, you know, Sam Harrison, who are very militantly atheist. But most are not.

The reaction I get from most of my former colleagues and friends who are scientists are, Oh, oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. Frankly, my early career as a scientist I never thought about religion, atheism, any of this. I was too busy getting grants, writing papers, doing what scientists do. I didn't have time for that.

Justin Brierley: Yeah, I was going to say, you got busy. You had a very successful scientific career. I suppose there were these questions coming up that were sort of niggling at your sort of, I guess, secular atheist assumptions. What was the change then? At what point did you begin this journey towards really thinking about faith, God, specifically Christianity?

Sy Garte: Well, I realized pretty quickly that I could no longer call myself an atheist in that I did not believe in God. I didn't actually say this, but I think what actually happened is I began to realize that I was an agnostic. I just didn't know. I started exploring other things. You know, I'm a baby boomer, and this was a period in the 60s and 70s of a lot of new age things, and spirituality became a thing. I explored some of that. I looked into biofeedback.

There were a lot of things that I found interesting that were not strictly within the domain of science. Nothing caught me. Buddhism I looked into it, I didn't like it. Other religions didn't attract me. But I was open. I was willing to think about these things and explore them a little bit.

At that point, the Holy Spirit played the role. I mean, I had a couple of dreams which were... well, the first one I didn't know what to make of, but it turned out they were eye-opening, and they were pointing me in a very clear direction, which was God.

At some point, I actually, in my 40s, I went to a church. I was brought there by a friend. As I always say, I was terrified to walk into a church. I don't know what I expected. I probably expected something like, you know, people throwing stones at me or being burned. I mean, that was what I had been taught.

So the contrast with the reality was great. I mean, everybody was very friendly. Nobody asked me hard questions. The priest, which was a Catholic church, the priest gave a wonderful sermon about love, nothing wrong with that, and I realized I'd been lied to, you know? These people are not flesh-eating monsters.

Justin Brierley: That's so interesting that you'd really had imbibed this picture of Christianity and church and so on. Obviously, some of the barriers came down just by actually experiencing a church service. I'm fascinated to hear a bit more about these dreams, though, that actually propelled you in that direction. They must have been quite striking for you to believe that God was perhaps communicating with you.

Sy Garte: Well, the first one I was much younger, and I may have still considered myself an atheist. I'm afraid of heights, and this was a nightmare because I was holding on by my bare hands to a cliff. I was just about to fall. I was terrified.

I started calling for help, and I heard a voice say, "Just let go." And I thought, "That's crazy. I can't let go. I'll fall down." The voice said it a couple of times. And then eventually I said, Well, I'm falling anyway, so I let go. As I let go, the world turned 90 degrees, and instead of being vertical, hanging off a cliff, I was lying on the ground, horizontal, and instead of hanging onto a cliff, I was holding onto a boulder lying on the ground. AI looked up, and there was a man standing there, and I realized that was the man who had said, "Just let go." I woke up. I had no idea what that dream meant, but it was so vivid. I mean, I can see it now. I didn't know what it meant, and I put it aside.

The second dream was much later. I think I'd already been to that church. I hadn't read anything in scripture, which I did later. But in that dream, I was near a walled garden, and I wanted to get in because the walls were very high. I tried to get in by climbing over the walls. I kept trying to climb up, and I couldn't. It was very frustrating. I walked around, and I couldn't find a better place, and finally, a man appeared and said, "What are you trying to do?" I said, "I'm trying to get into the garden, and I can't climb over the wall." And he said, "Well, why not use the door." And I looked, and there was a door, and I walked in.

Now, when I woke up from that dream, I knew who the man was because by then I had been doing a little research, gone to the church. And I knew that was Jesus. What I did not know at that time was the scripture that says, Knock, and it shall be opened. When I finally saw a stained glass window with a picture of Jesus knocking on the door, I had quite an emotional response to that.

Justin Brierley: Yeah, I could imagine. Gosh. So these were all elements of this journey. Was it a big shift as you started to take the possibility seriously of God and of Jesus? Was it something you had to put aside, a different way of looking at the world? Did it in any way create any conflicts with your scientific worldview, or did you find actually that it came alongside it quite happily?

Sy Garte: Well, at that point, I was still not a believer. I thought this might be true and one of my arguments to myself against it was that I'm not going to give up evolution and I'm not going to give up my scientific worldview. I was kind of battling that.

Also, I just didn't feel ready to make that huge shift to say I believe in this supernatural story, which my whole upbringing had been against. And so it wasn't an issue, because I wasn't ready to go there. But then, it wasn't a dream that brought me, it was a waking experience.

I was driving in my car, and I turned on the radio, this is in the middle of Pennsylvania, and I heard a Christian station and I heard a preacher preaching. And I wasn't really listening to what he said, but I liked the way he spoke. And I thought, "Well, gee, that would be interesting. What would I say if I wanted to say something like that, give a sermon," which is kind of funny.

Then I had some kind of a strange thing happen, which I have no idea how to explain it. But next thing I knew, I was preaching a sermon to a group of people somewhere outside. Fortunately, I pulled the car over and heard myself preaching words that didn't come from me, but included the phrase "I know that God loves all of you because He loves even me."

After I had said that to myself, I began crying uncontrollably, and said out loud, "I believe." I knew that those words they didn't come from me, they came from the Spirit. There was no denying. I mean, the way I put it is, I was dragged over that threshold. I didn't step over it. I was pulled, and there was nothing I could do about it. So at that point, I was faced with the problem he raised: now what? Yes. Do I quit science? It turned out, there's no conflict at all. None.

About the same time as that happened, Francis Collins' book came out, The Language of God, which was, I'm pretty sure at least the first very popular book by a scientist of huge stature, who was a Christian, and who spoke about it. I then found out there are thousands of scientists in the US who are devout Christians. There's an organization which I'm now part of, and pretty active in, called the American Scientific Affiliation, which is made up of PhD scientists who are all Christians, and of course, the Faraday Institute, Dennis Alexander, and you know, all those great folks there.

There's plenty of evidence that you can be a fine scientist and a devout Christian. The idea of the conflict thesis is just nonsense.

Justin Brierley: Yeah. I mean, you'd obviously imbibed something of up to that point and were pleasantly surprised to find that actually when you did embrace faith, that it didn't conflict with the science you were doing in the laboratory.

Sy Garte: Not at all.

Justin Brierley: I mean, that extraordinary experience you described as you were driving along, I guess the closest I can think that it is, is almost like a vision. As you say, a sort of waking vision. And it's interesting to me, because I could... I often put myself in the shoes of perhaps a skeptic who might be listening, someone who maybe is asking questions and thinking, Well, that's a very interesting story you've got there, Sy. But you know, as a scientist, don't you have to sort of treat these sorts of phenomena with a certain amount of skepticism? After all, a dream is a dream. You might sort of put some sort of interesting meaning upon it. But that's a very personal thing. It's not something I can objectively, if you like, look at and say, well, yes, there's definitely some evidence.

I suppose what I'm saying is these are quite personal, subjective experiences that brought you to the threshold of faith. What would you say to the skeptic who says, I wouldn't have interpreted it that way? Or I don't see you have to interpret it that way?

Sy Garte: Well, that they're perfectly correct. In other words, I tell these stories, not to try to convince somebody that they should become Christian but to explain how I became Christian. And they are subjective. And subjective experiences are real. I mean, they're not scientific evidence for anything. I know what scientific evidence is. And these are not.

When I'm talking to someone about why I believe God exists, why I believe God exists, I might give this story. When I'm speaking to them about why everybody should believe God exists, that's a scientific claim, then I would use a whole different argument. I don't talk about my own experiences because of everything you just said. And believe me, I have had that reaction innumerable times.

If you look at the comments of any of my popular videos, you know, you'll find that comment repeated often. And the answer is that. The answer is no, that's not an apologetics argument. That's my own personal reality. The only person I have to convince for that is myself. The only burden of proof I have is myself.

Now, if I wanted to talk about science and faith, and this is the reason for my second book, Science and Faith in Harmony, I mentioned many things about Christian faith, the Bible, which are very harmonious to scientific reality, which don't conflict at all, even when people think they do. And there's so many examples.

But, you know, there is scientific evidence for the existence of a creator, the fine-tuning of the physical constants in the universe, not just the cosmological constants, but many, many constants is one. I have published papers in the mainstream scientific literature about the problem with understanding the origin of evolution and the origin of life because of... in fact, my latest paper actually uses a mathematical demonstration that you need to have accurate self-replication before you can have life or evolution or anything else. And we don't know how that started. Now, is that proof of God? No, but there is no proof in science, but it is evidence.

Justin Brierley: Let's stick with that just for a moment, because I find myself fascinated as a non-scientist with these questions. I've tried in various respects to convey some of this at a lay level to audiences. But this idea of how did life get going? I mean, that is a really remarkable and fascinating area. Because I think a lot of people do sort of just assume, well, I guess evolution explains it all. You know, it's a bit of a catch-all, isn't it?

But one of the important things that you and many others have noted is that whatever you think about the process of evolution, it didn't create the first self-replicating molecule. You have to have that before you get a process of evolution.

Sy Garte: Absolutely correct.

Justin Brierley: I think that's often the thing that people don't realize is that there's this enormous mystery at the very center of life on earth, life in the universe generally, really, of how on earth it began, how those extraordinarily complex arrangements that are necessary in order for a self-replicating molecule to come into being, how exactly that happened.

So let me put a few things I've heard from different people on this one side. Because I've heard Richard Dawkins address this and say, well, there are many, many planets in many, many galaxies in a, you know, incomprehensibly large universe. So yes, it's unlikely. But when you sort of extrapolate to all the possible places where life could get going, then it becomes not so unlikely. So essentially, yes, absolutely, it does seem unlikely on the surface of it. But actually, in the vastness of the universe, it's going to happen somewhere. What do you make of that argument?

Sy Garte: Well, I mean, I've obviously heard that argument. I mean, yes, if you're talking about having a very unusual thing happen, like, you know, a straight flush or a royal flush and dealing out five cards, that's extraordinarily rare. But yeah, if you deal out a thousand hands, you might get one.

That's not what we're talking about when we discuss the origin of life. What we're talking about is something that doesn't seem possible. So if you deal out a million cards, you will never have, you will never see the Ace of Loops because there's no such thing.

Justin Brierley: Right. It doesn't exist in the back of God.

Sy Garte: It doesn't exist. So it's impossible to get a royal flush with the Ace of Loops. Now, is that the case for the origin of life? Obviously not, because here we are. So we know that life began, but we don't know how. So when I say something impossible, what I'm saying is that it's impossible based on the laws of science we now know. In other words, the laws of chemistry. You're absolutely right. It cannot be evolution. Almost everybody agrees with that. It just doesn't work. So we're missing something. We're missing some laws.

I'll tell you, I'm writing a third book, which will come out in about a year or so, I hope, which is all about this, about the laws of biology that we don't know. And what's fascinating to me is how many non-theists are coming to similar conclusions. That we need new concepts, we need to include purpose, teleology, agency. The fact that, and this is astonishing, but it's something that is real, is that even the simplest of microorganisms have cognition. They make decisions. They remember. They act in unison. They have a purpose.

So we are just on the verge... This is much like the surprising birth. We are on the surprising birth of a whole new way of understanding biology. And all of that, in my view, is going to point to the Creator God.

Justin Brierley: That's very interesting to hear. I hint at some of this in my own book, as you say, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Many people, I think, are reasonably aware, even now, of some of those extraordinary cosmological aspects that you've already referenced, the fine-tuning of the universe to allow even for the kind of chemistry that could produce conscious life in the universe.

I think what is less well-known is just how much of a revolution has been going on behind the scenes in biology. Because a lot of people still have, I think, this kind of assumption that what they basically learned in their 10th-grade biology textbook, that we're here because of essentially very long process of mutation and natural selection acting upon sort of random mutation, that that just doesn't really cut it now in terms of what we're actually seeing.

We could get very complex here, and I want to keep it at a level that everyone can engage inside. But I'm speaking to more and more people, as evidently you are, who are saying, actually, we need something else. We need a kind of a new way of understanding how this...

Now, that's not necessarily meaning everyone's becoming a creationist, but there's a sense in which the naturalist atheist perspective, it feels like it's harder to say this is all just purely physical, material processes working their way out. It feels like there's something else going. I mean, can you talk into that? Because I've said a lot of words there, but I'd just be fascinated by kind of what you sense is happening in that whole field of biology and why you think it might be pointing towards some kind of, yeah, agency created behind it all.

Sy Garte: It's absolutely fascinating. And people don't know what's happening in mainstream biological and biochemical laboratories. And it's fascinating, and it needs to be out there, I think. There is a recent book called Purpose in Evolution, something like that. There's another book about teleonomy and evolution. Teleonomy is a version of teleology. It's purpose, but it has a program. So you can tie it to DNA or other programs within life.

But the point is, purpose was always excluded in biological science. You couldn't say something did something because it wanted or it had... And that's such nonsense. I mean, we use the word "function" for an enzyme. Every enzyme has a function. What does that mean? It means it has a purpose. It does something on purpose. And that's a molecule. So how much more purpose is there in life? Life is full of purpose.

So that was a philosophical era that was made by scientists to sort of purify biology as a science. And we have to reverse that. We have to bring other things back in. But when we start doing that, what we're going to find is, yeah, we're talking about agency and purpose, where did that come from?

It's kind of like the argument that people like Stephen Meyer and others have made for a long time, which is, where does the information come from? We have information that's like language. It's a symbolic information. Where does that come from in the universe? A volcano blows up because of natural forces. Great. We don't decide to go swimming because there are many natural forces. It's a decision, and we do it. We might have a purpose.

Now, of course, that gets the argument from atheists: it's all neurochemistry, that explains everything. Well, sorry, no. I mean, if you actually look at the neurochemistry, no, it doesn't. At least not anything that we can say right now.

One of the clues that you can tell the things are really moving in that direction is that the atheist arguments against just fall apart. I had an interaction with Stephen Woodford, you know, the Rationality Rule.

Justin Brierley: Oh, yes. He's a well-known atheist YouTuber.

Sy Garte: Yes, very well-known YouTuber who many years ago put out a YouTube saying that genetic code is not really a code. He did that because of the argument that since there is a genetic code, there must be a coder who made the code. So he wanted to attack that.

The problem is he attacked the wrong premise. He attacked the fact that the genetic code is a real code. I made a video explaining where he went wrong. He got code and sequence mixed up. That video was seen by an American explainer of science, not a theist, named John Perry, who actually had done an interview with Richard Dawkins in which he asked him about this. And Richard Dawkins said characteristically, that's nonsense. Of course, it's a code. Now, what I will say for Stephen Woodford is when John Perry pointed this out to him, he graciously admitted that he had made a mistake.

So, you know, what is the lesson here? The lesson is that when atheists begin denying science, you know something's happening. Atheism is losing its ground.

Justin Brierley: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? As I say, I've taken an interest in this having been charting what I see as a sort of interesting renaissance of God in lots of different spheres. We've been talking about science, you could also talk about consciousness and the way in which increasingly a kind of at the very least, an atheist materialist view of how the mind exists is starting to come under a lot of pressure.

Likewise, in lots of other areas, ethics and philosophy and all sorts of things. I think people are asking, how do we make sense of life if we are ultimately just a result of, you know, unguided forces, a randomly evolved collection of chemical reactions, and so on?

The question is, I suppose, in the end, how does this map onto the, you know, the very tangible claims of Christianity, the historic claims of Christianity? I suppose I could see all kinds of ways in which your own scientific kind of interests and research were guiding you towards sort of questioning that atheism.

As a scientist, how do you engage with those claims? I think a lot of people do struggle with, even if they're sort of attracted at some level to Christianity, that a person called Jesus Christ is God, came to be part of this creation, died, and then resurrected again. A lot of people, you know, they would say, well, I am a scientist and that's the one I find hard to swallow in the end.

Sy Garte: That's a great question, Justin. One thing that I found very interesting about the New Testament, and specifically the Gospels, is that Jesus doesn't say one word about science. This is God incarnate. He quotes scripture. He never says, well, you know, Genesis was a little off. It really wasn't... you know, there was a lot of other things that happened. He didn't have to refute the 6,000-year thing because that came much, much, much later. But anyway. He never told us anything about science. And this is God.

So why? I think the answer, at least for me, is clear. Science keeps changing. There is no correct science. In other words, the science we know today is not the final answer any more than it was in 1780 or even 1870, okay, when there was no genetic code, there was no quantum theory. And it's going to keep changing. It's going to keep changing.

So what would God tell us? Here's the scientific truth. Not only would the people of the time not understood it, we wouldn't understand it because we're not there yet. So understanding the truth of the natural world is our job. That's what we do as humans. And God is smiling on us every time we get something right. We get a paper in nature and everybody loves it, He smiles. But He's not telling us what it is. So the Bible not only is it not a scientific textbook, it's almost exclusionary of science. It's not God's job to explain it to us.

So now in terms of the resurrection, that's not scientific. People don't rise from the dead. Absolutely true. People don't rise from the dead. And Jesus Christ was a person, but He was also God incarnate. God incarnate can rise from the dead because He's God. So that doesn't bother me at all and neither do miracles, which by definition can't happen. That's the definition of a miracle. So I would recommend C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel if you have more information on miracles. But that doesn't bother me either.

Justin Brierley: You came to faith, I would guess in the... would it be around the late 90s, early 2000s?

Sy Garte: Early 2000s.

Justin Brierley: Yeah. Now that's really interesting because you've already said that, you know, Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, which came out around then was one of the first times you saw a significant scientific voice kind of talking about their Christian faith. But obviously, at the same time, it was also the time when lots of other scientists were coming out very strongly on the atheist side. The new atheism really got going around.

Sy Garte: Absolutely.

Justin Brierley: In the mid-2000s, Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion was published. You had all these other bestselling new atheist books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens. What was that like to kind of be, I suppose, a new Christian at a time when the new atheists were coming into focus? Did you feel sort of in a sense, gosh, I've really kind of, you know, landed in this particular camp just at the moment when suddenly all the scientists seem to be turning against faith?

Sy Garte: Absolutely. And I wrote about that in that book by Dennis Alexander and Alastair McGrath, who edited 12 essays about people who came to faith through Dawkins. My chapter talks about my journey. And as I said, it was exactly the words you used. I said I was a new Christian suddenly surrounded by new atheism.

I will be honest with you that when I heard about The God Delusion, before I actually read it, but when I heard about it, Dawkins had been a hero of mine, I don't know, for decades. And when I saw that he had written this book, The God Delusion, I was quite nervous. I was afraid that this would send me back. I would read it and be convinced that I was wrong. But exactly the opposite happened. I read The God Delusion, and I said, well, I guess I was right. I mean, I found that book completely non-convincing, to say the least, and affirming of my newfound faith. The same with Harris, even more so perhaps.

Justin Brierley: What in a sense was so underwhelming about these books? You were obviously very impressed by Dawkins' science up to that point. What was it about his case against God that you just found so unconvincing?

Sy Garte: Well, by that time, I had already been going to church a little bit. I hadn't joined the church yet or been baptized. That took a few more years. But I already knew a little bit about the Bible and a little bit about theology, and I realized Dawkins knew nothing. I mean, literally nothing. He knew about as much of theology as my parents did. I mean, it was just shocking how little he knew about it, and even the history. And... oh, my goodness. You know, some of that is documented in that chapter that I wrote.

And the science... some of the scientific arguments he had against Christianity were just nonsense. I mean, they weren't scientific, which really depressed me because as I said, not only did I respect and admire Dawkins, I actually had some correspondence with him about Darwin. He's even mentioned me in one of his books as someone who found out something interesting about Darwin. So this was a shock to me. I recovered, and I just decided, well, okay, I'm safe.

Then I had the same reactions that many of the other writers of the book had, was that the whole tone of this kind of new atheism was so negative and so depressing. The famous Dawkins quote, which is at bottom, the universe is just nothing but pitiless indifference. I even have a chapter in this book called Pitiless Indifference. I mean, yes, it's absolutely true, the universe is full of pitiless indifference, but the exception is planet earth, because we are not pitilessly indifferent. It's demonstrable. So it's a false statement.

Justin Brierley: Yeah. Well, I'd love to bring you into conversation with Dawkins one day, maybe it can happen. I do get the sense, Sy, and as you'll know from having read my book, that new atheist sort of phase has waned, that there is a sort of an openness that perhaps wasn't there 15 or 20 years ago now, which, as you've already said, we're seeing that in various aspects of science, actually, as things open up a bit. I even wonder whether Dawkins has mellowed quite a bit. I saw very recently him actually championing the benefits of cultural Christianity, at least.

Sy Garte: There you go.

Justin Brierley: He at least seems to now be recognizing that, well, yes, I don't believe it's true, but actually, it turns out Christianity might have done some fairly good things for us up to this point, and maybe better than some of the alternatives on offer, frankly. You never know where someone's journey will end up, you know, as your journey proves itself.

Let's talk about your newest book, Science and Faith in Harmony. I'm fascinated by the subtitle, Contemplations on a Distilled Doxology. You'll have to explain that one for us, Sy.

Sy Garte: Sure. I came up with a phrase in writing my first book, which is science is distilled doxology. And I liked it so much, I kind of made it my motto. So it's on my website and other places. This was the publisher's idea to use this as a subtitle. I thought it might be a little difficult for people to understand, but they liked it, and I said fine.

The reason it says Contemplations is because the book contains 44 chapters, but they're all about three to five pages long. They're not very long. And each one is a contemplation, so to speak, or a reflection on the harmony between science and faith.

Now what does distilled doxology mean? Well, I never knew what the word "doxology" was until I started going to church. And then I found out it meant praise. Praise of God. Praise of creator. Distillation is a chemical term that is involved in purification of materials, especially liquids. So it dawned on me that I've always thought that science... what does science do? It's praise of the universe.

When you make a scientific discovery in any field of science, even if you don't think you're doing it, what you're doing is you're moving forward, you're progressing the reasons for praise of God, of God the creator. And it's pure praise, because it doesn't have any other motivation. You've just discovered whatever... like DNA is the molecule of inheritance. Wow. That's praise of God. That is saying, look at this creation that we have. You've just discovered something new in geology or physics or chemistry. That is saying something pure about the creation of our world. It's pure praise. It's distilled doxology. So I liked the phrase, and the publisher liked it, and they decided to put it as the subtitle.

Justin Brierley: It's great. It's great. Again, I wonder how Dawkins would feel about being told that any of his discoveries are effectively praise to God. I suppose there's a sense which you obviously see that the natural world and our exploration of it is a God-given gift in that sense, that anytime that we are exploring and unearthing and uncovering the mysteries of science and the universe, that in some sense, we're worshiping God in doing that.

Sy Garte: Yes, absolutely. I think that doing science is... God wants us to do science. He wants us to make these discoveries. He's not telling us. He wants us to make these discoveries and learn about the natural world. It's His creation.

The other thing when this is... you know, the word harmony is important here because I started out as a musician. My training in high school was in music, and I love music, and I think that music is prayer. When you play or sing or perform music, you're doing something that shows how human beings are made in the image of God, because we're the only ones who make music the way we make music.

There are many ways to praise God. There are many ways to worship. It doesn't have to be on your knees in church, or it doesn't have to be singing a hymn. It can be walking through a forest and looking at the leaves and seeing how beautiful they are and the flowers, but also knowing how they work. You know, how photosynthesis works, how the sunlight is converted, knowing that just increases your feelings of worship and praise for our creator.

Justin Brierley: It's interesting to hear you say that because I often get contacted by people who I think see the way that other people experience faith in maybe quite emotional or experiential ways and they say, I don't know if I'm a Christian because I've never really had that experience. I'm more of a logical person. I'm an engineer. I'm a scientist or whatever.

I sometimes wonder whether we just need to give people permission to realize that they can experience God in all kinds of other ways. And exactly as you say, the wonder that comes often with just realizing just how extraordinary life is by analyzing it and doing experiments, that is a perfectly legitimate way of encountering the aura of God, the wonder of God, without necessarily being some spine-tingling moment, you know, singing a song in church or whatever. I don't know what your thoughts are on that side.

Sy Garte: I have a chapter in this second book, The Science and Faith in Harmony, called The Voice of God. The chapter relates a personal experience I had with a couple of dolphins when I was out in the ocean. I was still an atheist, but that experience was religious to me.

I think what you said is true, Justin. People have religious experiences all the time, but they don't recognize it. They don't realize it. You could be listening to the radio. Well, I don't know if we have time, but I would just say that I had an experience once way, way back before I was even thinking about this, where I was also in a car and I was totally lost. It was a rainy, dark night. I was trying to find a place. I was completely exasperated, frustrated, angry, upset, scared. It was a terrible moment.

I had my radio on. You know, it was on. I didn't hear anything. Didn't know what to do. And I finally just stopped the car. And after yelling and screaming to myself — I was alone — I just stayed quiet for a minute and I suddenly heard the radio. And the music was beautiful. I hadn't been listening. When I heard that music, I calmed down a little bit. I was able to eventually get back driving and find my way.

And it dawned on me, that's a metaphor for life. We don't hear most of the music that's playing as we're going through our lives, especially when we're busy, which is all the time. We don't get those little clues, you know? We don't see the things that are happening. And some of those things are God's calling us.

That happened to me — and I talk about it in some book or other — several times when I was young. I had calls from God, which I didn't recognize, but I remember them and I realized later what they were. So what I say to people who tell me that, and I get quite a bit, I say, Okay, God has not called you with a dream like I had or with giving a sermon like I had, but He's calling you. You just have to open your mind as to what that call could be. It could be anything. It could be a child smiling at you as you walk by. It could be anything. And if you're more open to listening to the music, you'll hear it and it'll change you.

Justin Brierley: Yeah, it's a beautiful place to end our conversation, Sy. Thank you so much for giving us some of the details of your own journey, the way that the science and the faith have come together in your life. Do you see maybe going forward that God is calling you to reach people who perhaps feel in a similar way to you? Perhaps they've been told all their life there's no purpose, it's all blind, pitiless indifference, or whatever. Do you feel that your experience can help them to discover that there might be purpose behind the universe, that might be a purpose for their own life?

Sy Garte: Well, I didn't think that way when I started. I wrote the first book simply because I felt like I just wanted to write it. However, I have gotten incredibly moving, and I'm sure you have had the same feedback from people who have either read the books or heard some of the videos that I've made with other people. Some of that just brings me to tears. I just thank God for the opportunity to be able to have an effect on some people's lives.

Now, I'm not swaying millions of folks, but if one or two people... and this doesn't apply to me only, it applies to anyone who is out there making YouTubes or writing books or whatever. If you can help, in some cases, save the life of one person, God is smiling at you. I mean, you're doing what Jesus told us to do.

Justin Brierley: And hey, you're a testament to the fact it could happen to anyone at any time in their life as well. You were very much an adult convert, but God found you. And it's amazing to see the way that your experience in your life is now being used to help others on that journey, Sy.

Sy Garte: Well, that's why in that sermon that I gave, the keyword was "even me". Because I considered myself the last person possible to be able to convey such a message.

Justin Brierley: Yeah, wonderful. Well, for anyone watching or listening, we've mentioned a few books, and I'm just going to remind you of what they are. Sy's first book, The Works of His Hands, describes his journey as a scientist from atheism to faith. Then the most recent book, Science and Faith in Harmony: Contemplations on a Distilled Doxology. We also referenced the chapter that Sy contributed to a book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins, which is 12 essays on people who found faith via new atheism. You can find all of Sy's writing resources and books at sygarte.com. We'll make sure there's a link from today's show. But for now, Sy, thank you so much for being my guest on the Maybe God podcast.

Sy Garte: Thanks for having me. It was really a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Julie Mirlicourtois: This episode of Maybe God was produced by Julie Mirlicourtois, Adira Polite, and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our editor is Justin Mayer, and Donald Kilgore is the director of Maybe God's full-length YouTube videos. Please help more listeners find Maybe God by rating and reviewing us wherever you're listening today. Thanks for tuning in.