This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Episode Transcript
Lee Camp
Lindsey Glenn Krinks
We're pretty comfortable with the status quo, but the prophets weren't. You know, Jesus was killed by the status quo system that wanted to keep itself in power.
Lee Camp
That's Lindsey Glenn Krinks, author of the new book, Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Lindsey Glenn Krinks
Faith calls us to get our hands dirty and our feet dirty in the struggles of this world.
Lee Camp
And I'm proud of the fact that she's one of my former students, a former student who has taught me a lot as she has pursued her sense of vocation and service in the world. A justice-seeker who brings all manner of passion, creativity, and compassion to her work.
Lindsey Glenn Krinks
We're not called to be comfortable. We're called to be faithful. And being faithful for me meant being uncomfortable.
Lee Camp
Today, an interview with Lindsey on her new book, as well as her experience as co-founder of Open Table Nashville, which is an interfaith homeless outreach nonprofit, which seeks to disrupt cycles of poverty, journey with the marginalized, and provide education about issues of homelessness.
All this, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp
Grateful today to have a special opportunity to interview Lindsey Glenn Krinks, the author of a brand new book, entitled Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets. Not only the author of a brand new book, which some people say is like putting a baby out in the world. She is also the mother of a brand new baby named Larkin Isaiah. And she is also one of my favorite former students. So welcome Lindsey, delightful to have you with us today.
Lindsey
So good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Lee Camp
I will say for those listening, that Lindsey is one of many favorite former students, but her husband, Andrew, is also another one of my favorite former students. And, uh, we've known each other a long time now. And so grateful for you and grateful for all you've been in Nashville and in our community here. So, how is life with a new baby coming right out of 2020 here?
Lindsey
Oh man, life these days, we are staying afloat. We are sleep deprived. You know, I do homeless outreach work and I told somebody recently homeless outreach work prepared me very well for the sleep deprivation of motherhood. And I stand by that. So we're hanging in there. We love our little babe so much. She's really cool.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Your new book, a spiritual memoir, telling your story or many stories about moving from a place of, as you say, early in the book, a sort of sense of a desire for a stable, predictable, married life with kids and good middle-class life. And yet here you've been, what, fifteen years now doing homeless advocacy and homeless work and literally working on the streets. And uh, for my first question, I suppose, is describe what your experience has been like in doing spiritual memoir as a practice.
Lindsey
Writing for me is the way I process things. It's the way I process a lot of the trauma that I've experienced on the streets, with people, alongside people. I started journaling through some times of burnout actually, in this work, and then going to the Abbey of Gethsemani for retreat, really reconnecting myself with kind of who I have always been, someone that's always been drawn to healing vocations and professions. I wasn't sure for a very long time what that would actually look like. I thought I would go into a medical field or physical therapy. You know, writing, writing my story, really helped reconnect me with my faith and a God of justice. It reconnected me with the prophets, um, with the Gospel that is the most radical thing I've ever read. I could read any number of radical books or philosophers, and the Gospels and the prophets are still coming in number one for me. Writing is an act of discovery, I think is what Flannery O'Connor said.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Lindsey
And so to rediscover my roots, both in my family history of addiction, mental health issues, and even homelessness. But also to rediscover my place in it has been a really healing thing actually. You know, I can't say that, I, writing has made me be able to make meaning out of the trauma that I've seen on the streets, but it's at least helped me to name it.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Lindsey
And there is healing in bearing witness to the things we experience and have seen.
Lee Camp
The title of your book, Praying with Our Feet, you say there in the early part of the book, you take that from Abraham Joshua Heschel. Tell us a little bit about that.
Lindsey
Yeah. So Rabbi Heschel is a mystic. He's a scholar of the prophets.
Lee Camp
Anybody who has never read his book simply entitled The Prophets is one to definitely put on the bookshelf for a long time.
Lindsey
Absolutely.
Lee Camp
It's a beautiful book. Yeah.
Lindsey
Um, he is so incredible. He actually came to the States by way of Europe in, you know, the thirties, when he was fleeing Nazi Germany, and many of his family members were killed by Nazis. And when he came over to the States, he realized, you know, the same evils that he had experienced in Nazi Europe, Nazi-occupied Europe, were very much like Jim Crow South, right? Segregation, the evils of the Holocaust were similar, um, to the evils of segregation. So he got really involved in the Civil Rights Movement here. And one day, after marching arm in arm with King from Selma to Montgomery, he penned this beautiful quote that said, I felt as if my legs were praying. You know, marching isn't worship, but my legs were uttering songs. And this, this beautiful idea that actually a number of mystics have held over the years that what we do in the world, our actions, have a spiritual component as well. And our faith calls us to get our hands dirty and our feet dirty in the struggles of this world. You know, I've experienced a similar thing in working for justice for the last fifteen years in Nashville.
I remember, you know, after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, joining Black Lives Matter marches where we would lay on the ground, hold die-ins on the ground for four minutes together for a minute for every hour Mike Brown's body was in Ferguson. And that dying together, and then that rising together, that resurrection of a body politic is one of the most powerful and spiritual things I've ever experienced. The chanting is like the chanting that you experience in a liturgy in a church service. So I can, I can really identify with Heschel's comments and his sentiments there. A comfortable faith, a private faith was never a faith for me. My faith calls me to act, and Heschel helped me understand what that should look like in the world, along with a number of other saints.
Lee Camp
Talk to us a bit more about some of your journey from a context of your faith supporting kind of a pursuit of a comfortable life to, where you've come fifteen, twenty years later.
Lindsey
Yeah. So I actually remember a conversation we had after some ethics class at Lipscomb. You had pulled me aside after class and said something about how I had an accurate theology or something. And, have you ever thought about, do you remember that? What do you remember?
Lee Camp
Yeah, I do. As I recollect, it was a medical ethics class because you were planning to be something in the medical profession, right?
Lindsey
Right.
Lee Camp
Physical therapist, right?
Lindsey
Yep.
Lee Camp
Yeah. And in that medical ethics class I would have y'all read some theology stuff and some moral philosophy. And I remember reading one of your papers and could tell that the theological and moral philosophy was suiting you quite well in this particular paper, and I think I remember pulling you aside after class and saying, have you ever thought about maybe doing theology instead of going to do physical therapy? And I don't remember what you said.
Lindsey
I remember!
Lee Camp
But I, I know that it, I know that it caught your attention.
Lindsey
I remember telling you, no, it's really interesting, but I'm going to do that on the side because my plan is to have a comfortable life. Haha! So at that point, you know, at that point I was, I was still running away from some of the ghosts of my past, right, in my family, the family trauma I had seen. I was pursuing a comfortable life because I felt like that was where I'd find security and salvation, right? But, through those kinds of classes with you, through rereading the prophets and the Gospel and through my own dark night of the soul. I had a terrible ankle injury and multiple surgeries during college and found myself in need, you know? Through those experiences, I realized that my calling wasn't just a calling to be comfortable.
I remember some quote that said, we're not called to be comfortable. We're called to be faithful. And being faithful for me meant being uncomfortable. It meant, I, you know, accidentally stumbled upon a homeless organizing group in town, and it meant pursuing my relationships with them, having them teach me what was really going on in our city. Having them teach me how to see the city from below, not from above, not all these shiny tourist places that you'll see in Nashville, but from the alleys, from the underpasses. And in doing that, it completely changed my life. And I was able to listen to where I was being called. And I was foolish enough to pursue that calling. And I'm very thankful that I, that I did because it's, it's utterly changed my life.
Lee Camp
Talk a bit about, as you began to do that sort of work. Draw some pictures of the Nashville that you've seen that a lot of people are unfamiliar with.
Lindsey
So the Nashville we see, um, you know, I, I am one of the co-founders of Open Table Nashville, a homeless outreach group here. And what we see on a daily basis is we see the forgotten and abandoned parts of our city. We see the foot paths behind the gas station, behind the Walmarts, behind the big box stores and the industrial areas that lead back into these clandestine, outlawed encampments, where people have resiliently made a home for themselves when our society was denying that for them.
We've come across phenomenal camp sites where people are taking care of each other, where they have generators, where some people have hospital wings, and they take in uninsured people who can't get the services they need in our city, because they don't have insurance because they have been cast out by our political establishment, denying health coverage to them.
They're being taken care of in these places. We also see tremendous suffering and need. We see, we see the seventy year-old woman in a wheelchair who can't go to the Mission because she can't take care of herself, but can't get in anywhere else, shivering under a bridge in the winter. Two weeks ago on one of the coldest nights, there was a man laying out on the sidewalk. His hip replacement surgery was pushed back because of COVID, and he had a broken hip and a walker and was laying out on the sidewalk in the freezing cold weather.
We see the mother renting a storage shed with her two children because she doesn't have housing anymore. She was evicted. We see the families that are doubled up in motels that are infested with bed bugs or wreaking of urine. These are the places that we go and the places we see, um, on a daily basis. And it is, it, it's abysmal. It's, it's unbelievable that it's right here in our own backyard. You don't have to go to another country to see the kind of poverty that will make your heart just utterly hurt and that breaks the heart of God. So that is where we choose to go. That's where I believe Jesus would be going if He were here.
Lee Camp
You address in the book stereotypes or false presumptions about the nature of poverty or about the nature of what we call homelessness. But tell us a little bit about what, what are some of those common stereotypes. What are some of those common presumptions? And then talk to us a bit about your experience of challenging those presumptions.
Lindsey
Absolutely. You know, our society looks at people experiencing homelessness, and they see what's on the outside, right? But when you look at what's on the outside, it's like looking at the tip of an iceberg. You see the tip, but you don't see all the things underneath who make that person who they are, who got the person where they are. And I'm not talking about personal, you know, problems or decisions. I'm talking about systemic issues. I'm talking about federal defunding of affordable housing for the last thirty years. I'm talking about the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies in America. You don't see these things, you see the person and how they are right there. And it's so easy to judge where people are. But how many of us have made mistakes? How many of our friends and family members struggle with addiction issues, mental health issues, other issues? And are still in housing because they had the resources because we had the privilege to access what we needed, right? Without falling out…
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Lindsey
...of these systems of care. I also think that when our society looks at people that are on the streets, all they see is need, and all they see is deficiency. But when we look at people that we meet, we see strengths. We see people's incredible abilities to keep going, their resilience, their creativity. Um, people survive things that I don't think so many of us could survive. I don't think I could survive. So I think it was Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology. He said, you know, the poor not only have needs. They have abilities. They have strengths. They have capabilities far beyond our imagining. There are nurses out there. There are college and graduate students out there. There are folks with doctorate degrees. There are skilled carpenters. The people that are building our city are living in camp sites. I see their hard hats and, and security vests, um, when I go to the camps. They're building our city, but they're not making enough to afford the housing here. So, you know, people aren't just lazy. They're not people that, um, just have needs and are sick. It's folks that have been cast out of these systems of care and of a life that, that could be flourishing. And our job is to build back community, build back relationships, and open up pathways for healing, whatever that looks like on a personal and a systemic level, right?
Lee Camp
What, what's your suspicion about why the notion of the systemic seems threatening to some folks?
Lindsey
That's a really interesting question. You know, those of us who might not have experienced, some sorts of systemic discrimination might not understand what other folks have experienced. I remember one of the first times I realized that the police don't protect everyone equally.
When I was a very young outreach worker, I was going to tent city to check on my friends there with some other outreach workers, and police officers were arresting one of the men there, and they were nailing up “No Trespassing” signs. Our people on the streets who are poor, who are black, who are brown, they get arrested for petty things like trespassing, like obstructing a passageway for sitting under an awning, like public intoxication, when the tourists downtown and the college students gone wild, right, are walking by them, stumbling over themselves, being more of a public nuisance than our friends sitting on a bench. Yet, they are still the ones who get charged. They are still the ones that get arrested.
What is happening here? This is social profiling. This is racial profiling. Those of us who haven't experienced that, those of us who haven't, who haven't ever been in such a vulnerable place might not be able to understand that. So, it's harder for us to realize that the system isn't built for everyone. The system is built for some of us who are white, who have a certain level of social standing. We're pretty comfortable with the status quo. But the prophets weren't. You know, Jesus was killed by the status quo system that wanted to keep itself in power, wanted to maintain its own lordship, right? So, so it can be uncomfortable for us to see the system that benefits us, not serving everyone. And it's easier for us to think it's, it's their fault for not thriving in this system when really the system was never built for them.
Lee Camp
You've pointed to a few already, but tell us three systemic realities that you wish could immediately change.
Lindsey
So, absolutely the mass incarceration of black, brown, and poor people, and folks with mental health issues. The reality of what's happened in the United States for the last thirty years is that we have defunded affordable housing. We have defunded systems of care, like mental health care, like food stamps, like other things. And we have given funding to these criminal justice systems. And you can't see my hands, but I'm quoting justice, criminal justice. We have thrown money into incarcerating people and to policing people and to the system that profits off of incarcerated bodies.
Lee Camp
And appears to further propagate the problems it purportedly addresses in many ways.
Lindsey
Absolutely. It's, it's literally not working. If it were a business, it would be shut down tomorrow. It's not rehabilitating people back to the community. It's incarcerating more and more people and separating more families. And instead of asking the deeper questions, it's addressing some symptoms, but never the root cause, economic inequity.
Lee Camp
Yeah. A favorite book on, um, mass incarceration?
Lindsey
The New Jim Crow is a go-to, a solid go-to. Michelle Alexander. I'd highly recommend that. And in 13th there's a, you know.
Lee Camp
Yeah, the documentary.
Lindsey
It's a documentary that's very accessible for people.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Both of those books are very troubling. And it's fascinating that Michelle Alexander starts saying how her premise that she develops in the book, namely that mass incarceration is in fact, a systemic continuation of practices of Jim Crow that, that earlier in her career, she explicitly rejected any such possibility. And then she actually starts investigating it. And then she becomes deeply convinced that this is what's going on. So yeah, it's fascinating from that perspective as well. Another system? Or systemic policy that you wish you could see changed?
Lindsey
Um, I truly believe, and I'm going to lump two together here. I truly believe that both housing and healthcare are basic human rights. And I'm not alone in that, right? The United Nations declared that housing is a human right as well in some of their declarations. But, you know, to live in this society without access to, to dignified housing. To live without access to healthcare is to live in subhuman conditions. I see that on a daily basis. I have held the hand of someone who lost their feet because of frostbite. I have stayed at the bedside and visited the hospital day after day after day of people who are dying for want of housing and healthcare that was actually going to be proactive for them.
I got a call from a mother a few weeks ago. Her twenty, I think it was twenty-four year-old son, died of an overdose on Nashville streets. He had been going to ERs seeking detox and rehab, but because he didn't have insurance in Tennessee, he was turned away, and she called me weeping. She was like, how do I find his body? I've heard he's died. How do I find his body?
Lee Camp
Oh.
Lindsey
These don't need to happen in our society. We can do more to make access available to both housing and healthcare. And what people don't understand is that it's actually cheaper to provide housing than it is to keep people unhoused.
You know, you look at the, um, all the emergency costs and all the jail costs that folks who are being spun in and out of these institutions, enormous bills. You know, charity is a, it's a whole industry, and I'm in the nonprofit world, and I understand the nonprofit industrial complex. What I mean when I say that is there's a whole, there's a whole system that benefits from keeping charity in place when what we need is justice. And one of our goals at Open Table Nashville is to work ourselves out of a job, you know, it's to, is to actually end homelessness, and not just to perpetuate the need. So that's why we work on issues of housing justice and housing rights.
Lee Camp
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Davidson County Drug Court and its approach, which is doing something similar to what you're saying is that rather than criminalizing drug offenses, it's this very fascinating, progressive sort of approach to saying you don't need to go to prison. You need help and access to resources that can help you not have to live under the lash of addiction.
Lindsey
Absolutely.
Lee Camp
And you know my understanding of that is that both the left and the right can love it, right? The left can love it because it fits all the things that the left loves. The right can love it because it's, it's much cheaper, it requires individual accountability and responsibility, and all of those get brought together, and it costs less money and it's more effective. And it seems like we desperately need more and more possibilities of looking for those sorts of solutions to our systemic problems.
Which raises another sort of thing I wanted to ask you about, because I remember, I don't remember how long ago this was, but I remember some years ago bringing one of my ethics classes down to spend a half a day with you downtown. And one of the things that struck me that day was that on the one hand, you talked about systemic issues out of all your experience and awareness of policy in this very informed way. And yet, I also watched you talk about things that people on the, on the so-called right would also have loved. Namely, you talked about responsibility and accountability, and I don't remember if you used the language of virtues, but it's just sort of people got to take account for their own lives and the choices that they do have available to them. They have to do that kind of stuff too.
So will you talk a little bit about that? Because I, again, I think that breaks down this kind of false presumption that it's a reductionistic approach to a problem, but a multi-faceted approach to a solution to serious problems.
Lindsey
Yeah, totally. I'll, I'll say that I don't believe that these social, economic, and racial issues that are deeply dividing folks, I don't believe they're a right or left issue.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Lindsey
I believe they're a human issue. And I truly believe if we as Christians believe that the image of God is in every human being, then it is up to us to really take that seriously and to put our faith into action, creating a more just and equitable world. That shouldn't be, you know, a political tennis ball that's thrown back and forth. You know, the folks I meet on the streets have agency. They are not helpless. They don't need saviors. They need friends to come alongside them to share the journey, and to push the barriers out of the way with them. I am as far from a savior as you could ever get on the streets. My friends on the streets are saving me. Like literally, I feel like I'm a more liberated person because of the relationships I have formed and how much I've seen the hospitality, the radical hospitality, and the faith on the streets. People, people need to have the barriers taken away. They need to know people are in their corner. They need the support and relationships that are, in and of themselves, healing. And they need to be empowered with the strength to tap into their own healing resources and the power that they have within them to take back their lives.
This is not a charity approach, and I am not giving the power to someone else to do that, right? I am waking them up, helping to wake them up to their own power and agency. And that is, that is healing.
Lee Camp
You're listening to Tokens: Public Theology, Human Flourishing, and the Good Life. We're most grateful to have you joining us. Remember, you can find links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel all at tokensshow.com/podcast.
And, you can catch us for our special public radio episodes on Sundays here in Nashville, 2:00 Nashville time, streamed all over the globe at wpln.org or in Middle Tennessee at 90.3 FM.
This is our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks on her new book, Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Coming up, we talk about the role healing and liberation of self can play in our work of seeking liberation for the impoverished and marginalized, as well as hear some powerful stories from Lindsey's own experience seeking justice in the streets of Nashville. Part Two in just a moment.
Part 2
Lee Camp
You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks, author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Your language there of avoiding a messianic complex, which I'm grateful for. As I was preparing for the interview, I remembered this encounter I had, I don't know, it's been a lot of years ago, but I was in a group of folks sharing our various forms of powerlessness, struggles, and so forth. And after the, after this evening, I was talking to a man who at the time was experiencing homelessness. And, he asked me, he said, what do you do for a living? And I somewhat sheepishly said, I teach theology. And given how vulnerable I had been that night about my own brokenness, I felt this kind of embarrassment about, you know, being a teacher of theology and how messed up I am. And so I kind of acknowledged him and I said, I guess that's kind of ironic, isn't it? And he just very, um, gently said, Well, no, that actually makes perfect sense to me. You have some sort of longing to make sense of your brokenness. And so it would make perfect sense to me that you would teach theology for a living.
I've remembered that for years now, you know, and further along the path of dealing with my own brokenness, I've heard people talk about how very often it's people who are in helping professions, who are actually often trying to deal with their own stuff. And so you've kind of intimated that in your book, but talk to us a little bit about that. In what way have you seen both in writing the memoir and also in doing this sort of work, in what ways are you addressing your own brokenness, and in what sorts of ways have you seen particular kinds of brokenness that you had to deal with?
Lindsey
So, I think you're exactly right. I think, I think all of us are always on the continuum of wanting to move toward healing, wanting to move toward wholeness. What that's looked like in my own life is, I'm prone to overfunctioning. I am prone to overworking. I am prone to running myself down and damaging relationships because of this tendency to always be doing. I learned that I think I have it in my blood from my maternal grandmother who was always over-functioning. She always needed to be needed. She was always, you know, doing more, making herself everything to people and allowing them to kind of latch onto her for that. That's a really destructive tendency, especially when you're trying to live in healthy relationships. And I found myself a couple years in to outreach work doing that and being that. And you know, I wasn't showing up in my marriage in the ways that I needed to, which I write about in the book. And, I wrote in the book, I was like, I can't believe Andrew married me. Like, did he know it would be like this? I'd come home and stare at that line between the wall and the ceiling for hours on end cause I was so burned out, and not be there for him. You know, one of the things I learned through, not only, um, therapy, which is very healing. I would highly recommend everyone do it and not just say, oh, you know, gardening's my therapy or biking's my therapy. Like, no, like you need therapy too. We all need therapy too.
Lee Camp
I agree. I agree with you. I agree.
Lindsey
So like in addition to doing my own work, and in trying to ask, what am I running from? Another question that comes up in the book. In all of this overwork, what am I running from? I realized I was trying to prove my worth to people by what I did. And what I learned through the radical acceptance of my friends on the streets and the ways they took care of me in the midst of all of this is that my worth is not determined by what I produce. It's in who I am. I don't have to be good all the time. In fact, that desire to do everything and be everything is actually incredibly detrimental. We could look at white savior complexes. We could look at all kinds of things. I learned that I was worthy as I was because I was a child of God, because I was human, not because of anything I did. It's my friends that encouraged me to rest, to take a break, to try to be more whole myself.
So, I truly believe that our liberation is bound up in the liberation of the poor and oppressed. And this kind of idea of co-liberation, we find our liberation together, I have certainly found my liberation in my relationship with people on the margins. And that's one aspect of it. One way that that's happened for me.
Lee Camp
I know in doing the kind of work I do, especially in my twenties and thirties. You know, I still have to watch it, but especially in my twenties and my thirties, reading theology that was grounded in history and lived experience of the brokenness of the world oftentimes, um, led me to immense anger and deep resentment. And in time, of course, I found out that living with that kind of anger and resentment doesn't work too well. So is that part of your experience, or are you, are you one of those good souls that doesn't have to process anger that way?
Lindsey
Oh, I am not a good soul that doesn't have to process anger that way. I, um, you know, I don't believe anger is bad.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Lindsey
But I do believe that we have to find ways to channel the anger we feel. I believe that some anger is righteous, but the problem is that I remember reading in seminary, reading about a book that distinguished between hot and cold anger. The author said, and I write about this in the book as well. The writer said, you know, hot anger is that anger that will burn you up to bitterness, to resentment. It will burn you in your relationships. It will burn bridges. It will burn others. It bounces around. It's chaotic and destructive. And sometimes there's a time for hot anger, right? Sometimes things need to be burned to the ground.
Lee Camp
Right, yeah.
Lindsey
And I truly believe that. Um, and there's this other kind of anger. There's a cold anger that we can cool our anger, and we can channel it into something that's constructive, that's productive, that's effective. And I believe in channeling, not only individual anger, but also collective anger. And through community organizing and activism, we try to channel that anger into cool ways, right? Into targeted ways that will change policies, that will change our city, that will change the hearts and minds of our decision makers and make it better for people on the bottom.
I do believe that bitterness will eat us up from the inside out. Resentment, cynicism. These things will leave you high and dry. There is nothing healing that can come from them, but anger is a very interesting and dynamic emotion. The question is in what we do with it.
And, you know, it's been said, if we're not angry, we're not paying attention. So what, what will we then do with that anger?
Lee Camp
Talk to us a bit about - you and I both come from a Christian tradition in which women typically are silenced in various ways and in our tradition, we didn't practice ordination generally, but if you were to ordain someone, you wouldn't ordain a woman, I guess we'll put it that way, right? What's kind of been your experience in having that in your background and then in time being ordained, and then in time, processing the sort of hierarchies that are in your past and your hierarchies that you continue to encounter as a woman doing the work you do.
Lindsey
Yeah. So, I, I grew up in a very conservative church in the foothills of South Carolina. And, it's really interesting because that church was the place that I learned how to love God and love people, right? I remember taking casserole dishes to people who were sick. I remember my parents dropping money to people who were struggling. Like, I learned that kind of care at church. And I fell in love with God at church. I was the kind of kid and even into like middle school and high school, I was sitting on the front pews. I was scribbling sermon notes. I was talking to the preacher afterwards. I was really into church, everything church. But there is a darker side too, right? That, that same place where I learned how to love was the same place that I felt immense exclusion. That I learned how to exclude people who are different from us. I learned how to exclude people in the LGBTQI+ community. I learned how to exclude folks that our church deemed as sinners who are going to hell or whatever. Even my Catholic friend, Mary, I remember hearing well she's, she may be great, but she's not going to heaven. So anyway I was like, oh poor Mary. But you know, that kind of mixed messaging, right? God loves everyone, but God excludes people who aren't good enough. And God excludes me cause I was a woman through certain roles that I would have been interested in pursuing.
I was so interested in theology, so interested in ministry, but I couldn't even be part of. I would help plan the high school worship that the boys were going to do, right, at our church. I, like, basically orchestrated it. They didn't care. I, like, did all the behind the scenes work, but I couldn't, I couldn't actually participate in leading that worship because I was a female.
So, no one encouraged those gifts. I had no idea that I could have done more early on to prepare me for a life of chaplaincy and ministry that I'm doing now. I was told you can be a secretary or a, you know, children's teacher, and those are great things, but it's not what I wanted.
So, it wasn't until I moved to Nashville, and I started seeing women in other roles. I started seeing people like Becca Stevens from Thistle Farms. Right? I started seeing Jeannie Alexander who's a dear friend of my heart and a fiery minister for people who know her, you know, living into their calling.
God uses women just as much as God uses men. God uses everyone that's willing, right? And I think it's very sad that the tradition that we've grown up in has basically, basically pushed out their future leaders. I am deeply, um, still in love with that denomination, but not a part of it because there's no place for me there.
My church is on the streets. You know, Andrew and I do attend a church here. It's virtual right now, of course, because of COVID. But my church is on the streets. My calling is to the people who are cast out. It's to the folks on the frontline of social justice movements. It's to the people who don't trust institutions that are living under bridges and are pushed out and have records longer than anyone can ever imagine. Those are my people, and that's where I find God. Trying to figure out what my calling looked like was very difficult because I was pushed out for so long. And I had to do some deep reckoning and realized that I was worthy of that calling and that indeed it was a calling from God.
You know, I, I, I just am sad about the people that are still excluded, and I, I truly believe that Jesus would be breaking every boundary and barrier if he were to drop in to Nashville in 2021. Like we, He would be offending all of us because He is so radically and scandalously loving, you know? Um, so I think we can learn from that in our own interactions too.
Lee Camp
Yeah. You tell in the first chapter of the book about Charlie Strobel, who had become a good friend of yours and a mentor of yours, and this important moment as an undergraduate when you're at this kind of a challenging moment to just try to decide what to do. And Charlie talks to you about the formative moments of facing fear. Because it's only through the formative moments of fear that we begin to be courageous people. And I can just imagine hearing Charlie say all those kinds of things you record there. But as you look back on the last fifteen years or so, what are some moments of your facing your own fear, um, that then in turn allowed you to grow in courage?
Lindsey
You know, one moment that stands out to me when you ask it like that is, um, you know, I remember. Folks, um, that are listening from Nashville might remember a few years back when the city was trying to close a very large encampment at Fort Negley, and that's the public park that's right next to the Adventure Science Center. That's been there for decades.
Lee Camp
It was actually where the, when the battle of Nashville happened in 1864 of December that year, right? That the Union had taken that, and they would fire their big, long guns all the way south.
Lindsey
Right.
Lee Camp
Seven, eight miles south of Nashville to the Confederate troops from Fort Negley.
Lindsey
Yeah, it was a Union stronghold and conscripted and freed slaves actually built that fort and died building it that winter. So, the history there of people longing for liberation and dying in those shadows is long and certainly still continues in different ways. But, um, but the city was trying to close that camp down, and we knew that it was probably not going to be a successful effort to try to keep that open. And yet, the housing waiting lists were astronomical. Most housing waiting lists were closed. There was nowhere for people to go. Couples, pet owners, people that didn't fit into the Mission's boxes. And we, we made a promise to the residents there that we would stand beside them, no matter what that meant for us at Open Table. Politically or socially, we would stand beside them.
I tell the story in the last chapter of the book, but I remember before the closing of Fort Negley, there was a Parks board meeting. And these meetings here, you know, in a stuffy, packed, you know, tight room, and there's a table at the front with all the board members, and they're all wearing their professional gear. And we were like, they have to change their mind. Like, they have to give us more time for these people that will have nowhere to go. And we're going to take people, and we're going to disrupt the meeting. And that was terrifying to me. Like, I was literally like, my hands were shaking because it's the Parks board. And so we went in and, um, you know, we listened to the agenda and they weren't getting to the camp. They weren't getting to the camp. All of us are packed in there. There's thirty, forty people, advocates packed in there, and they're not getting to it. And so Ingrid and I, one of my colleagues, Ingrid McIntyre, a fiery Methodist, um, minister. She, um, she and I, we went up and we stood with two of the camp residents, and we interrupted the Parks board meeting, and they said, you know, we have an agenda here. And Ingrid said, you know, we understand what your role is, but our role is to advocate with our friends who are about to be displaced. So we are going to interrupt this time so you can hear from them. And you know, for the next fifteen, twenty minutes residents spoke about what that place meant to them and their home. And we stood by the residents until the very end. We risked arrest with them. We looked foolish probably, but we knew that that solidarity and accompaniment mattered. We worked with a lot of other service providers to get a lot of folks into housing. And then the rest of the folks got hotel vouchers instead of, you know, being booked into jail, which was a huge win. But then the city still demolished the camp. They took out almost every tree. They left it looking like a wasteland. They demolished everything.
And so I would say, I feel like I've taken a vow to stand on the side of the poor, no matter what that looks like or what, what will come from that. I believe that that's where Jesus is. I believe Jesus reveals himself to us today in the guise of the poor, and what that looks like in the face of homelessness in Nashville is that sometimes we do campsite defenses with people. Sometimes we place ourselves in risk of arrest too. Sometimes we make ourselves very unpopular with the powers that be and look foolish, and we are willing to do that again and again. I believe that God loves a good holy fool. The prophets were were holy fools too. They were pretty pushed out of their, their towns too, but, um we've got good company there maybe. But yeah.
Lee Camp
Yeah. I would love to hear maybe a story or two, as you think back about. You said a moment ago, you think that a lot of us couldn't survive what a lot of your friends on the streets have survived. Who's a friend of yours, currently, or a friend from the past that you think of when you think of someone who has, against all odds, persevered and, uh, kept on going?
Lindsey
One of the people that I think about as a man named Ken. And I write about him. Ken Gosselin. I met him when he was in his late forties. He was sitting in a wheelchair at the library park on a very hot summer day. We were both dripping with sweat, and he held up a piece of paper to me, and there was a word on it that said “Help.”
And I went over to him, and I realized that Ken couldn't talk, and he couldn't walk because of a tumor. So picture a man on the streets. He cannot communicate. He can't talk, and he can't walk, and this is not an accessible city. And we formed a relationship. I said, okay, we're gonna figure this out. You write to me on the paper, and I'm gonna do what we need to do. And I gained his trust. Ken told me more about his story. You know, he was born to a mother out of wedlock. His mother was sixteen or seventeen, and she put him up for adoption, and he cycled in and out of different foster homes. He endured every abuse, every abuse you can imagine. Had stints where he was locked in the basement alone without food or water for days at a time when he was young. He hit the streets at fourteen. He left home, and he traveled the country working. He was a chimney sweep, you know, he went East to West coast. And then the tumor took away, in his forties, took away his ability to work. So he was confined to the wheelchair on the streets.
Despite this, Ken had a wicked sense of humor and taught me more about resilience than anyone. You know, I think I remember when he finally got a phone, he would text me and say, you know what people like about me? And I was like, what, Ken, your mullet? And he was like, no, that I can't talk back, they like that. That's why people like me. And I was like, I'm pretty sure that's not, cause you do talk back. It's interesting because you wouldn't think of Ken as a success story. Like we never got to write down on a piece of paper to put in a grant that Ken was housed. Ken died in a hotel off, off Murfreesboro Pike when he was never fully housed. But he died a freed man. He had us play “Free Bird” at his memorial because he, through his death, he found community in those last months and acceptance and belonging because of his own healing resources. And because of those of us who had come alongside him.
People never know when they look at someone from the street, what they have gone through, the horrors they have endured and survived. People are survivors. I am humbled and amazed. I also just want to name, you know, all the people that have literally nothing in terms of earthly possessions, literally nothing, yet they open their hands again and again and again to the people around them in need. I have seen more faith and hospitality from homeless encampments in Nashville than I've seen in most of our churches. And from most of our churches. I've seen people open their tents to people who had just gotten out of surgery, people that share their canned goods and their food stamps when they have nothing. And those of us keep clenching our possessions with tight fists, right? Every day we're given a choice to open our hands or close them to our neighbors, and the people I've met have encouraged me to open it wider and wider and wider. And that is humbling. So humbling. It's the widow's mite, right? It's that story told today living itself out among us.
Lee Camp
Yeah. I've been talking to Lindsey Glenn Krinks, a recent, brand new author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets. Thank you, Lindsey. I'm grateful for you, and I'm grateful for what you do, who you are in our community, and for your friendship.
Lindsey
Yeah, so good to be with you, so thankful for you too.
Lee Camp
You've been listening to Tokens: Public Theology, Human Flourishing, and the Good Life, and our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks, street chaplain for Open Table Nashville, and author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Lee Camp
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? Well, we'd love to hear from you. At least we love hearing from most of you. Email us, text, or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Our engineer Cariad Harmon. Production assistant Cara Fox. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
S3E2: Science
Faith
Lee Camp
This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Alister McGrath
When I came to Oxford to study science, I was an atheist.
Lee Camp
That's Alister McGrath, professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University. Professor McGrath has three doctoral degrees from Oxford. And, as he just said, he showed up as an undergrad with no belief in the divine.
Alister McGrath
One of the things that made me rethink that was reading Einstein.
Lee Camp
Here at Tokens Show, of course, we relish breaking down false dichotomies. And, today in our interview with McGrath, we explore one of the great supposed dichotomies of modern fault: the supposed mutually exclusive choice between science and faith.
Alister McGrath
There's this idea that you cannot be a scientist and a religious believer. That's clearly not right, but we need to explain why it's not right.
Einstein was very unhappy about being described as being an atheist. So the idea that somehow science entailed atheism was simply seen by Einstein as certainly not a conclusion that he would draw at all. Einstein really felt there had to be a confluence, a coming together of science and religion, if we were going to be able to answer all of life's big questions. In other words, if you'd like a theory of everything that matters, not just a scientific theory of everything.
Lee Camp
So on this episode of Tokens: our interview with Professor Alister McGrath on his new book, A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God.
Coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp
Alister McGrath is one of the world's leading theologians, born in Belfast, has three doctoral degrees from Oxford university, one in molecular biophysics, a doctor of divinity degree in theology, and a doctor of letters degree in intellectual history. He's a former atheist as a young person, who's done a great deal of work in the relationship between science and theology.
He's also been ordained in the Church of England and has held university posts at Oxford, Cambridge, King's College of London, and currently now back at Oxford. Today, we're discussing his recent book, A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God.
Welcome Professor McGrath...
Alister McGrath
Well, it's great to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Lee Camp
A delight to be with you. And thank you so much for your time. Uh, would you tell us a little bit about why this book and, uh, and why now, perhaps.
Alister McGrath
I thought that by engaging Einstein, I could not only say, look here is a very prominent scientist who thought religion was very, very important, but actually use that as a way of opening up the big questions in science and faith and help us think through some really good questions.
Lee Camp
One of the points of work in that sort of agenda seems to be making sure, at least people start with a good understanding of what science is. It seems.
Alister McGrath
Well science begins by patiently accumulating observations. And, you know, that's really important, but it's not just these observations. It is trying to figure out what the bigger picture behind them actually is. And I think we have to say that, um, you know, science is no more a mere accumulation of factors.
Building a house is putting stones in a big pile. You know, putting things together involves positioning them and trying to find a bigger picture behind them. And that's why Einstein is so good. He's a theorist who realizes you need to see the bigger picture, not just the fine detail. You need to be able to see what the detail points to.
Lee Camp
And it seems so remarkable to me to think of Einstein, as you sketch out so well, he's not doing much experimentation, if any, he's a theoretical physicist.
Alister McGrath
I think Einstein is really saying that I don't need to do experiments, but I can look at other people's experiments and ask, what do they point to? But actually Einstein is very good at one kind of experiment and it's a thought experiment. Imagine something. And in fact, one of the ways he used to illustrate his theory of relativity is to imagine somebody on a train, he goes through this and you imagine it. And suddenly you see the point he's getting at. So Einstein is very much not an experimentalist, but an interpreter of experiments saying, that's the detail. What's the big picture behind it?
Lee Camp
One of the common retorts that I hear people say, in suspicion of science, is that “that's just a theory.” But that seems a problematic retort given what you've just described.
Alister McGrath
I think there are those who would say, “hey, this is just a theory,” meaning it doesn't necessarily have to be true. I know what they mean, but you've got to say that in effect some theories will be discarded. That's true. Others will stay and we don't know which they are. So in fact, it may just be a theory, but it may be a theory that actually is right.
And that's why you keep checking up on these things to make sure they are right. Some theories were wrong in the past. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean they're all wrong. You've got to check them out.
Lee Camp
You sketch out in one of your chapters, the incredible year that Einstein has in 1905 publishing four major papers that are these brilliant accomplishments in the history of science. I wanted to see if we could just do an experiment here ourselves. Let's take three to five minutes on each of these and take a stab at describing these in layman's terms for those who are life folks, and kind of sketch out what they are and then perhaps some of the significance of these.
So the first one of course, photoelectric effect: light is both a wave and a particle.
Alister McGrath
Well, Einstein has papers on the photoelectric effect, one that won him the Nobel prize. So in many ways it is the most important of that group of papers. And what you're saying is we make this observation that when you shine a light at, for example, metals, it dislodges electrons. But the electrons curiously don't seem to depend on the brightness of the light, they depend on the color of the light.
Why is that? And so Einstein began to say, supposing light is made up of in effect little wave vehicles where the energy is shaped by its frequency not by its intensity. If you do that, suddenly everything becomes clear. And in fact, Einstein is opening the way to the understanding of light as both waves and particles. But also just showing that in effect we've got a way of understanding the nature of light, which makes sense of some otherwise very puzzling scientific observations and philosophical riddles. So that was a very significant paper.
Lee Camp
One or two of the philosophical riddles that help us begin to get some solutions to.
Alister McGrath
Well, I think one of them was, how can light be one and two things at the same time? Uh, you know, people said, “hey, it's a wave, no it's a particle”. Einstein would say, well, you know, actually, it's something of each. There is a distinct entity which later became known as a photon. And that actually, um, when you, when you see it like that, you realize this brings these two things together.
In other words, these two things initially seemed to be different. When Einstein came along, you could see them as different aspects of the same thing. So if you'd like, it's a wonderful exercise in integration, showing that things make sense without becoming chaotic.
Lee Camp
The next major paper on Brownian motion points to the reality of Adams.
Alister McGrath
Einstein's paper on Brownian motion is really interesting. Now some may say “hey, what's Brownian motion?” Well, if you put some very fine particles in water or something like that, and look it up close, you'll see they vibrate. Why? People used to think it was because they're alive but no! Einstein made the point that the reason these particles appear to vibrate is because there are atoms.
Water is made up of atoms and those are vibrating and are transferring their vibrations to these bits of pollen or whatever it is. Now, here's the point. People have been suspicious about these things called atoms. Some said it's just a theoretical construct. It doesn't actually really exist.
Einstein says the best explanation of that vibration of small particles is the existence of atoms. If you like, it's a very powerful indication that atoms were not simply a good idea. Actually, they really were there.
Lee Camp
Next, his paper on special relativity, consistency of laws of physics regardless of inertial frames.
Alister McGrath
Einstein here is really making what I think is a very important point. He's trying to say that, in a very special case, in other words where things are only moving under certain constraints, you begin to realize that the speed of light is absolute.
Lee Camp
The speed of light is actually close to 671 million miles per hour. If you could travel the speed of light, you could encircle the entire globe something like something like 7 and a half times in one second. That speed is represented by the constant c, the letter c, in the famous formula E = mc2. Here's how Einstein makes his case:
Alister McGrath
Imagine you're traveling on a train and it's going let's say 60 miles an hour.
The point Einstein is making is that if you shine a light on a train the speed of that light is the same, even though the train is moving 60 miles an hour faster.
Lee Camp
That is, imagine you're standing on a platform where you can watch a train pass by at 60 miles per hour. And imagine that you can see a man standing still in one of the passenger cars of the train. His speed, too, would be 60 miles per hour to you. But inside the train the man's speed, as he's standing still, would be zero relative to the train.
But imagine now that the train passes by again, still moving at 60 miles per hour. And yet this time, imagine that the man is walking toward the front of the train at a normal pace of something like 4 miles per hour. To you, watching from the platform, the man's speed is calculated this way: the speed of the train plus the speed of the man walking, 60 + 4 = 64 miles per hour.
But to that man, his speed, relative to the train, is only 4 miles per hour.
Here comes the crazy part by which Einstein begins to blow everybody's mind. Let's go back to the first scenario: a train moving 60 mph; a man standing still in the passenger car of that train; and you, standing still on a platform. You can see the train and the man standing still on that train. Now imagine that the man this time pulls out a flashlight, points it toward the front of the train, and turns it on.
Our intuition would lead us to assume that from our perspective, watching the train pass by at 60 miles per hour, that the speed of the light beam would be the speed of light, what we're calling c, plus 60 miles per hour. That the speed of the light beam would be c + 60.
But Einstein says nope. The speed of light would be c: and it would be c to you watching from the platform, and it would be c to the man on the train holding the flashlight.
If you happen to be thinking, well that's crazy, then well, you might actually be beginning to understand the special theory of relativity. And this observation about the speed of light, it turns out, has other outrageous implications.
Alister McGrath
Once you realize that you suddenly realized actually we have to rethink the nature of time. And that's why Einstein's whole idea of space-time, not space and time, but space-time is really so important. Now that paper was actually a limited case study, only one example. And he would expand that later in his theory of general relativity, which in fact was made applicable to everything. But it's certainly made people rethink.
It was very controversial. And there were many who said that he ought to have got a Nobel prize for that paper, but actually people were not sure about it until much later.
Lee Camp
I've always wondered, in thinking about special relativity and space-time continuum, when you think of the space-time continuum, are you able to visualize that somehow? Or after all your years of study, does that still seem to be a construct that causes some sort of cognitive dissonance that you can't quite get your head around?
Alister McGrath
I think that's a really good question. Can I imagine, um, space-time? Can I imagine multiple dimensions? The answer is I find that very difficult. I'm a very concrete thinker. I'm very used to the world I see around me, but I have friends who say “Hey, we can imagine this easily. We can think of up to 10 dimensions.” And I'm beginning to wonder if there's something to do with our psychological makeup and maybe some people can do this and others can't. I find it difficult, but I'm very happy to accept that other people find this very easy.
Lee Camp
Do you think that, um, Einstein felt that sort of imagination easy? Or was it still a stretch for him as well, you'd suspect?
Alister McGrath
Well, Einstein used to emphasize how important the imagination was to scientific discovery. And again think of his thought experiments. He's using the imagination to in effect help us to see something that otherwise we wouldn't be able to see. So I personally think that Einstein felt that his theory of relativity offered a new way of imagining what space and time were all about.
And then once you step into that way of thinking you begin to realize it has major implications, for example, for the way in which you understand time.
Lee Camp
As if those first three weren't enough in one year, his fourth paper on the equivalence of matter and energy gives rise to the famous equation: E = mc2.
Alister McGrath
Well, this is a very famous paper. E = mc2 is probably the most famous equation in the world. And actually you even see it on college T-shirts. That really shows it's famous. But it's very important because Einstein at the States thought this is a theoretical possibility. He wasn't actually sure that this meant this could be done.
It just meant that in effect, at least in theory, this is the case. And of course later on, Einstein became really well known for this. And of course, the real difficulty for Einstein is that this principle of interconversion of mass and energy underlies nuclear weapons. And of course, Einstein later had real anxieties about the fact that his uncovery of this principle could be argued to lead to the atom bomb.
I don't think it was his fault at all. I think we need to make that very, very clear. But certainly there were those who felt that Einstein opened the theoretical doors to that kind of development.
Lee Camp
You already noted this a moment ago but that his special theory of relativity in turn is abstracted or generalized into the general theory of relativity, in which he predicts this phenomenon of the so-called gravitational dilation of time.
Alister McGrath
The whole idea of that gravitational dilation of time is really very counter-intuitive. I think that we find this really difficult, but what Einstein is saying is that the nature of time is such that it is affected by gravity. The easiest way of thinking about this is in terms of light beams traveling through the sky. We naturally think they just go straight.
Well, Einstein is saying no, no, no. Um, in effect, they are bent by gravitational pull. That is why one of the most significant experiments was the observation of some solar eclipses shortly after Einstein published his paper on general relativity, which showed that light from stars behind the sun, which is coming to earth, were actually bent on the way by the gravitational pull of a sun. That was not predicted at all by earlier theories of the nature of light. And so in many ways, what Einstein was saying is that in effect, there's this gravitational warping of space-time, which causes light to be affected in this way. Very counter-intuitive.
Lee Camp
So is the idea that what happened during the eclipses was that they compared perhaps a night sky and the layout of the apparent point of origin of light from stars? And then they could compare that with those light beams passing past the sun during the eclipse, because the eclipse has blocked out the blinding light of the sun. And then you could still see the star field behind the sun and compare the bending of the apparent point of the light in the sky, is that the basic idea?
Alister McGrath
That's the basic idea. They took photographs. And what they showed was that the position of the stars that they were looking at shifted slightly when the sun got in the way. And it wasn't because the stars had moved, it's because the light had been warped. That's complicated because If Newton's theory was right then actually light will be bent by gravity. Newton acknowledges that, but there's this additional factor that it's bent even more than that because of the gravitational warping of space-time.
So in effect, that's the new element that Einstein introduces.
Lee Camp
Okay. Yeah. And so you worked through this pretty carefully in that chapter showing, was it Eddington, perhaps it gave the different kind of, if it had been this much, then that's Newton. If it had been this much, that's Einstein and so forth.
Alister McGrath
That's right. Eddington was very important because it said, look, here's what we might observe. If this, it means that Einstein and Newton are both wrong. If it's this, it means Newton's right. Einstein's wrong. If it's this, Einstein's right. It was very, very clear. And people were very impressed when the results showed, it was very clear, Einstein was right.
Lee Camp
Hmm. I suppose that this might be one of the theories that affects many of us on a daily basis.
Alister McGrath
I think that's right. I mean, most of us use GPS without knowing how it works. But if you go into the theory, you have to take into account the diminishing impact of gravity of the earth on the motion of light as we go further away from the earth. And GPS does that. It's a technical detail. I know, but a very important technical detail.
Lee Camp
And I think it's something like the clock's run, what 45 millions of a second, faster in the satellites than our clocks would on earth. And that therefore takes account of this adjustment.
Alister McGrath
And we don't know anything about that. We just use our GPS happily, but Einstein in effect got that right. And we needed to get that right to have GPS.
Lee Camp
Yeah. You mentioned a moment ago that for Einstein, his emphasis upon the importance of imagination. He's got this famous quote: “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Uh, fill that out a bit for us.
Alister McGrath
What Einstein is saying is that if you like knowledge, it's there, it's what we know. The question is how do we generate new knowledge? How do we begin to say here's another possibility to investigate? What Einstein is really saying is that imagination is a tool of scientific discovery that in effect invites you to imagine other ways of looking at the world and then check them out.
In other words, in the philosophy of science, you make a distinction between, in effect, the logic of discovery and the logic of justification. Logic of discovery is how we go about generating new ways of thinking about the world. Logic of justification? How do we check them out? Einstein is very, very clear.
The imagination is really important in generating new hypotheses.
Lee Camp
Hmm. Related to this, you sketch out this fascinating description of Einstein's relationship to music and to Mozart, which appears to be at least somewhat intuitively to the notion of imagination. Would you talk to us a bit about that?
Alister McGrath
I think Einstein's appeals to the imagination is probably seen at its best in the way that he didn't just listen to music. That in some way, music like Mozart or Johann Sebastian Bach made him receptive to something deeper. It's a very difficult idea to explain, but it's almost as if Einstein was tuning into something deep and music helped them to do it.
So there's a famous story his wife tells about how he would come down, have some breakfast, and go play his violin for a bit. He was a great violinist. Go upstairs. And the violin playing in a kind of way capitalized his scientific thinking. I mean that seems to be amazing. I mean, how many scientists do you know who kind of would play instruments in that way? But with Einstein that was creating an ambiance or a kind of intellectual environment, in which the imagination could work and he could in effect see these new ways of looking at our world.
Lee Camp
Why don't you suspect that your observation that so few scientists can play instruments that way, or, how have we gotten ourselves into the situation in which the ongoing tyranny, perhaps of specialization, keeps us from having these larger visions of the world.
Alister McGrath
I think it is a concern. And I think it's a fairly recent development because if we go back to the time of the Renaissance, we find scientists being very engaged with the arts, music, everything, and now that's quite unusual. I think the main reason, I'm afraid, is simply specialization. It takes so much concentration, so much intellectual energy, so much reading time to keep up with your own field.
It's very, very difficult to actually be able to get involved in any others. I wish it were otherwise, but it's so good that people like Einstein are there to, in effect, offer us an alternative.
Lee Camp
Later in your book, you speak of the ways in which his great quest in the latter years of his life to find some sort of single unifying theory was in some ways his great failure.
Alister McGrath
Einstein's great vision was to find a unified theory, a theory of everything which would account for quantum theory for gravity, for all these things. And, you know, he felt it was within his grasp. One of the reasons he was so excited about the general theory of relativity is that it explained so much.
And also not just explain things that couldn't be otherwise explained. Actually it held together things that people are up to that point for him as being completely different. And Einstein thought this was a staging post along the way to finding the big theory that actually explained everything. And unfortunately by the late 1940s, Einstein realized it simply wasn't going to happen. And some of those who knew him felt he was saddened by this. In effect, this was really the failure of an effort if you like. But I have to say that Einstein came closer to it than anybody else at the time. And I think that we have to give him credit for that.
Lee Camp
So the difference simply between what Einstein is working most on with theories of gravitation, he's dealing with, the very big, the very large, uh, in which there's a certain consistency and predictability. Whereas once one gets into the quantum area in Heisenberg's uncertainty principles of where there's, there's a sort of principled, inability to know or predict certain things.
If I'm understanding that correctly. And so he's trying to find a way in which you could find some metatheory that could somehow hold both of those together.
Alister McGrath
I think the use of the word metatheory is very helpful here because in effect it implies a bigger theory, which makes sense of existing theories. And I think the real difficulty Einstein found with quantum theory is it seemed to be statistics. It didn't seem to be about the laws of nature, and there's a very famous quote, unfortunately it's a misquotation, “my God doesn't play dice.” But what Einstein is getting at is that if PAWS 'way of looking at quantum theory is right, it's all about statistics. And he just couldn't see how notions of causality actually played into that. So, um, he just found that very difficult to comprehend. And I think that's one area where he might now say that actually Einstein may have got that wrong.
There are very few people today who would agree with Einstein and quantum theory, even though we can understand the concern he had.
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This is our interview with Professor Alister McGrath on his new book, A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God. Coming up, we talk about the often-hostile public intersection between science and religion, and the role Einstein played for McGrath in helping him come to a more holistic worldview. Part two in just a moment.
Part 2
You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Professor Alister McGrath
at Oxford University
Lee Camp
Well, let's learn a little bit about your exploration of the relationship between science and religion and the way in which Einstein becomes a dialogue partner for you in that sort of conversation. You sketch out three primary attitudes in Western culture: that of the war, that of two silos, or that of a dialogue.
But let's first talk about this notion of seeing science and religion as being in a war. I was fascinated that you point to the 1925 scopes trial here in Tennessee as one of the sources of the perceived antagonism between the two. But talk a little bit about how you've seen this notion of science and religion being at war with one another.
Alister McGrath
Most historians would now say that the idea that science and religion have been and must be permanently at war with each other as a myth, you know, something that's been invented for deliberate reasons. I mean, historically this goes back to the enlightenment. It's given a new burst of energy in the late 19th century.
And of course we find that doctored by the new atheism in the 21st century. And I think it's all about saying science is the only form of knowledge. There are other things which are simply about making things up as you go along and to preserve scientific integrity. We have to fight those who are simply making things up.
So a very good example of someone who thinks that science and religion are at war is Richard Dawkins. He would perhaps be the poster boy for that way of thinking. It is, I have to say, very difficult to justify that historically, because certainly there have been tensions in the past between science and religion.
But there've also been synergies. In other words there's no one way of looking at this and it's certainly not warfare. So I think that that's a very influential media trope, which is always repeated, but actually it's not taken seriously by scholarship anymore.
Lee Camp
It seems to me that there are a great number of similarities between American fundamentalists and the militant atheists. We presume that they're kind of polar opposites, but it seems like in many of their presumptions they seem to be quite similar, do you think that's fair?
Alister McGrath
I think that's fair. I have described Richard Dawkins as a kind of secular fundamentalist and people don't like that because they say, no, you have to be religious to be a fundamentalist, but that's not true actually. First of all, fundamentalism is about a quest for certainty. This has to be absolutely right.
And we find that in both camps. Also, fundamentalism is about, in effect, the in-group and the out-group. There's no in-between group and again, Richard Dawkins falls into that category just as well. So my sense is that we have two groups of fundamentalists and everybody else is trying to find out where they are in the middle ground.
Lee Camp
Hmm. What do you see from your perspective in the UK regarding the apparent rising tide of “anti-science”? Anti-science among Christians in the United States.
Alister McGrath
We are seeing cultural suspicion of science as a whole increasing. And that's causing concern. There's a concern that scientific experts are having too much control over our lives.
And I have to say I know what people mean by this. But nevertheless science is a tool of investigation and when it's used well, it really can help us. It doesn't answer all our questions, but nevertheless it needs to be taken seriously on its own terms. My problem with Richard Dawkins is that by exaggerating the power of science, he placed straight into the hands of those who want ineffective critique-science. Overstatement doesn't help the case at all.
Lee Camp
What do you suspect is precipitating this sort of rise in anti-scientific posture?
Alister McGrath
I think certainly in the United Kingdom, there are two things going on. One is, growing suspicion of experts, you know, in effect, “who are these people who are telling us what's right and what's wrong?” And there are scientific experts. There are political experts. And so on. People are just suspicious of the whole social category of experts as a whole.
So that's part of it. But I think there's also a sense of betrayal. Let me explain what I mean by that. There's this feeling science promised us so much, but actually it hasn't delivered.
Lee Camp
Do you have at hand any sort of criteria or suggested best practices for lay people in thinking through assessing sources and thinking critically?
Alister McGrath
I think what I would say is that science is about not here is a body of data. That is right. It's much more, here's a way of thinking that delivers results that can be trusted. But actually we constantly review those results and they may change over time. So very often in high school, people are taught that science is about this set of fixed beliefs.
It's not really, it's about the application of a method and its applications made the different results at different times. And I guess it is hard for people to grasp. What I would say is that culturally on the whole, you can trust scientists. Except where they stray beyond their area of competence. For example, if they're shaped by economic factors or political factors or religious factors, things can begin to go wrong.
Lee Camp
Hmm. Well, that raises the conversation that you have in the book about the so-called anti-Einstein campaign. I think it was in 1920, in which we see this sort of mixing of political and or cultural agendas with science. Would you talk us through that a bit?
Alister McGrath
Yes, this is a very disturbing episode in Germany. Einstein was a Jew, and by the early 1930s Einstein was very, very famous because of the theory of general relativity. For some reason, we don't quite understand the dynamics of this but basically, Einstein fell out of favor and was very quickly labeled as representing Jewish science because he was a Jew. And Jewish science in Germany was seen as hyper theoretical.
It didn't do experiments. It thought about other people's experiments. And so a lot of German scientists say that the authentic way of doing science in Germany is experimental. These theoretical guys. That's not real science. That's Einstein, that's Jewish science. So in effect, you saw this polarization between a theoretical science and an experimental science and Einstein was seen as being on the wrong side of that.
So if you like it here's a racial or religious or a cultural division. And actually most would say, look, the distinction between the theoretical and empirical is a little bit difficult to draw because theorists reflect on experiments. So it's a symbiotic relationship. So it's a very interesting example of where a cultural or political environment forces a distinction, which doesn't need to be drawn for political reasons.
Lee Camp
Last question within this attitude about thinking of the relation of science and religion as a war. You point to the fact that Einstein chafed at the notion that he himself was an atheist.
Alister McGrath
Einstein was very unhappy about being described as being an atheist. He wasn't. Einstein talks about God as a supreme mind behind the universe. And he was really quite annoyed when he learned that some people were, in effect, saying Einstein is an atheist, therefore all scientists are atheist.
He said, look, look, that's not me. And he was quite angry about that. And one of the reasons he was angry is that for Einstein, religion was actually very important. It was his own way of thinking about religion, which isn't mine, but he was saying religion actually is about a sense of wonder. And that sense of wonder is fundamental to scientific research.
We have to have it. So the idea that somehow science entailed atheism was simply seen by Einstein as certainly not a conclusion that he would draw at all.
Lee Camp
The second attitude that you sketch out that's common in western culture is this of, uh, different silos. You note how perhaps Stephen Jay Gould's notion that these constitute non overlapping magisteria might be a good analog for that today. But to talk us through that and the ways in which Einstein does and does not fit that particular approach.
Alister McGrath
This idea of science and religion, in effect, being in different silos is quite influential. Especially I have to say on academic campuses, because, in effect, it is about avoiding conflict. By avoiding interaction and avoiding discussion. Um, and yes, it buys academic peace. That means that scientists don't fight with theologians and theologians don't fight or scientists, but also means they don't talk to each other.
So for me it really is very inadequate. If you'd like, it's simply about closing down a discussion because it might get unpleasant. And I have to say that the academic in me just says, this is unacceptable. We need to talk, even though the outcomes of that may be a little bit difficult at times.
It's really important to get out of the silo and talk to other people, in effect, interdisciplinarity talking to other people and trying to make connections between what you're doing and what other people are doing.
Lee Camp
Throughout the book, you point in numerous ways that there's a difference in agenda between science and your definition of religion. That science is talking about explaining how things happen. And religion is more toward what end, or for what purpose, or finding some sort of meaning in that description of causal relations, and so forth.
But talk to us a little bit more about those two different concerns.
Alister McGrath
I think it's always difficult to try and reduce science to one point and religion to another point. But I think it's helpful in some ways because it means you can look at the same thing, the same process and approach to the different levels. And science is very much about how does this actually function?
What's the bigger picture? It helps to understand why this works. But a theologian might further the question, which is, well, what does this actually mean? So you might say that science focuses on how things work, religion focuses on what things mean, providing you don't say that's the end of it.
There's actually more nuancing that needs to be done. But I think it is a helpful way of starting that conversation because it's saying, in effect, that the scientific method is something that's very wonderful. But Einstein constantly pointed out that science is inadequate. It does not meet human needs. It doesn't tell us what is right in terms of moral behavior or what life is all about.
And Einstein gave a very famous lecture at Princeton in 1939 where he began to say: look what the scientific method does is tell us how things relate to each other. But it doesn't tell us what we ought to be doing. And it doesn't inspire us to do that either. So for Einstein science and religion were different, but they could be brought together to give you a deeper and richer understanding of what things were all about.
Lee Camp
You have this quote from Einstein: “a science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Alister McGrath
I think what Einstein was really trying to get at is that religion could very easily generate some kinds of superstition and science might help that to not go that way. But Einstein was more concerned that science would become a purely formal understanding of processes within nature.
And Einstein was saying, look, we need more than that. We need to have a vision of what it means to be human and understanding of what is right, what is wrong. And of course his thinking here was catalyzed by the rise of Nazi-ism and Germany. And Einstein really felt there had to be a confluence, a coming together of science and religion if we were going to be able to answer all of life's big questions. In other words, if you'd like a theory of everything that matters, not just a scientific theory of everything.
Lee Camp
That prompts in me one other discussion hearkening back to our conversation about evangelicalism in the United States, perhaps over and against evangelicalism in the UK, even though I hear you saying that you all are experiencing a similar sort of rise in anti-science in your context as perhaps we are here.
It does seem to me though that in the UK there's been more, or at least a different set of questions that has not immediately prompted some of the antipathy between the two. For example, if someone goes to Westminster Abbey, you've got a statue of Darwin in the church, whereas I think many evangelicals in America could not possibly fathom doing such a thing.
What do you think is the source of that sort of particular difference? It seems to me that many Christians in the UK generally have not had a hard time accepting, holding together, a theory of evolution with Christian tradition, whereas it's been much more challenging for many Christians in America.
Alister McGrath
I think that's a very good question because you're quite right. That if you like it, it's less polarized over this issue here in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States. And people do try and reflect on what the reason for that might be. I mean, one reason might be that the influence of religious fundamentalism here in the United Kingdom is a lot less than it is in the United States.
That might be one reason. Another reason is that things aren't quite as polarized here, culturally, we aren't really into cultural wars in the way that you are. But I think one of the reasons is simply that we have so many active scientists who have either religious belief themselves or have sympathy with the religious belief, and therefore are interested in constructing dialogues or bridge-building across disciplines to try and make this clear.
And I think that is a significant element in understanding the difference between these two cultures.
Lee Camp
And that raises then this third category of relationship between science and religion of seeing them in dialogue, one with the other. And clearly it seems to me that your own life experience illustrates this sort of quest for the conversation given your advanced degrees in both scientific fields and theology, as well as your experience.
So, being an atheist when you're young and then coming to faith through science. Talk to us a little bit more about how you see this quest for dialogue being key to your own autobiography.
Alister McGrath
Well, when I was a teenager, I loved science, I really did. But I was a very aggressive atheist. I believed that I needed to be an atheist to be a scientist. And I was into the conflict models, now called the warfare models, in a very big way. I then began to realize that actually this was wrong.
That actually history didn't justify it. But more importantly, I think when I went to Oxford to study theoretical chemistry, I read Einstein a lot. And actually Einstein was saying, look, we have science, we have religion, we have ethics. We can find a way of holding all these together. They are different.
But they're not incompatible for that reason. And that, that made me think that, that there are other ways of doing this. So when I became a Christian in my first year at university, I had to do this major recalibration of intellectual possibilities. And I began to realize that you could find ways of saying, look, science is very, very good at helping you to understand how the world works. But religious faith helps you understand what life is all about, what matters. If you like, science tells me how I function. My faith tells me what I mean. And so, that way of thinking has become very important for me. Now let me emphasize that a dialogue can be very cozy and uncritical. The kind of dialogue I have in mind is robust and critical, but nevertheless productive.
So for me, I have my science, I have my faith. Both are very important to me, but they can talk to each other. They can enrich each other. And to me that's really exciting and important.
Lee Camp
You use the work of Mary Midgley and talk about multiple maps of reality, which I find to be a helpful analogy for describing what you just articulated. Can you talk about that a bit?
Alister McGrath
Yes, Mary Midgley and I got to know each other back in 2006, I think it was, when I went up to give some lectures at the university where she was based. And we had a great time talking about Richard Dawkins. She was very critical of him because she felt that he simply reduced everything to science and she uses the idea of a mental map.
And it's a very helpful idea to say we need multiple intellectual toolboxes to make sense of a complex reality. Science gives us one set of tools, philosophy another, religion another. And actually what we need to do is find a way of taking the maps that each of these toolboxes generates and super-impose them, because each map gives us different information and we need all of that there to give us a bigger picture of reality.
So I find that way of thinking very helpful. If you want me to amplify a map of Europe which shows you physical features, here are mountains, here are lakes. Think of a political map of Europe, which shows where the borders are between countries. Our physical maps are great if you're tourists looking for lakes, if you're a refugee looking for asylum, you want to know about the political boundaries and you need different maps for those purposes. Midgley is saying to give as detailed and full an account of reality as possible. You need all these maps. And find some way of layering them on top of each other, and you can see what they all mean.
Lee Camp
Closing out this notion of dialogue: I'm interested in any sorts of accounts of dialogue, personal dialogue, between you and Dawkins.
Alister McGrath
Well, Dawkins and I have had debates. I don't think we've had discussions. I have to say that is quite frustrating because one of my big criticisms of Dawkins is this: that he uses criteria to judge religious belief. Which he doesn't apply to his own beliefs. You know, he says, can you prove there's a God? I would say, Nope.
Can you prove your atheism? Nope. I don't need to because it's right. There's a sense that in effect, the burden of proof lies on his opponents. So I do find that very unsatisfactory. What I would say though, is it's very important to have these conversations because as somebody who used to be an atheist who used to hold views very similar to what Richard Dawkins holds.
Now, I know why I don't have those views anymore. I want to talk to those who are atheist scientists and find out why they think like that, because I think there are other possibilities that need to be taken very seriously.
Lee Camp
There is in science, there are certain metaphysical, unprovable assumptions in the scientific method itself, as there are in the practice of theology, right?
Alister McGrath
Absolutely. I think scientists have to make a lot of assumptions to make things work like the uniformity of nature and things like that. But the real difficulty is that very often scientists import philosophical presuppositions into their thinking without realizing they're doing so. For example, Richard Dawkins is a scientist, but he's also a metaphysical naturalist.
Lee Camp
In case metaphysical naturalist" is not in your ready stock of vocabulary words
Alister McGrath
But you can be a scientist without being a metaphysical naturalist. I think it's very important to say that they'll need to challenge these implicit philosophies and ask where are they coming from?
Lee Camp
Can you point to any sorts of particular ways in which science or scientific contemplation provides a sort of immediate fueling funding of wonder and faith in you? Or does the dialogue within you remain rather abstract?
Alister McGrath
No, I think that the dialogue within me, it can be quite concrete. Let me give you an example. I read Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord.” And I think that's wonderful. I mean, the night sky is beautiful so I can see that. But then I began to realize no cosmology tells me the immensity of our universe.
And that means I go back to Psalm 19:1, and I read it in a new way. It's saying in the vastness of this universe, there is a God and I'm here. And I matter to God. For him it's like Psalm 8. So if you'd like, I see science, in effect, helping me to appreciate the majesty of God, the vastness of the universe, and therefore the amazing fact that God cares for me.
As he cares for you as well. That is truly amazing. So if you'd like, when read rightly theology gives you a grid, which helps you to appreciate some key themes of the sciences even better and make a scientific application.
Lee Camp
Last and final thing here, going out. A quick round of favorite nonspecialist introductory books, given your doctoral degree in intellectual history. What would be maybe two or three introductions to, or primers in intellectual history?
Alister McGrath
Tom Holland's recent book Dominion is very, very good at setting the scene for things. And that might be a very good starting place for somebody these days. Very up to date.
Lee Camp
Yeah. What about in the area of philosophy of science?
Alister McGrath
What I recommend is getting hold of one of these Oxford or Cambridge companions, handbooks, the philosophy of science, because those in effect will give you a general overview and allow you to focus on the questions that really matter to you.
Lee Camp
And finally, uh, primers on the Christian faith.
Alister McGrath
Well, there, I'm afraid I go straight back to C.S. Lewis, who I have to admit an extraordinary fondness for. His Mere Christianity remains a very good starting point. Sure, a lot more needs to be said, but it's a great place to begin that exploration.
Lee Camp
We've been talking to Professor Alister McGrath. One of the world's leading theologians, professor at Oxford university on his book, A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God. Thank you, Professor McGrath.
Alister McGrath
It's been a great pleasure being with you. Thank you for having me.
Lee Camp
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with Alister McGrath, professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, and author of a wonderful new book entitled A Theory of Everything (That Matters): A Brief Guide to Einstein, Relativity, and His Surprising Thoughts on God.
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