In today’s episode, our speakers discuss this question: Is science the only reliable tool for understanding the world? Or for questions about meaning, morality, and ultimate purpose, do we need something more?
You’ll hear from David Lahti, a biologist at Queens College, and Michael Weisberg, a philosopher at Penn. In this conversation, they explore the limits of scientific knowledge, how evolution intersects with questions of faith and suffering, and how their Christian and agnostic worldviews help them make sense of the difference between knowledge and faith.
This forum was held at Penn in April 2026. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
I think knowledge is the wrong place to focus when we talk about faith in God. Faith is not only assent to an intellectual statement or proposition—it's a trust despite uncertainty.
Faith, hope, and love are the three cardinal virtues. All require uncertainty. Faith is a trust despite uncertainty; if you remove the uncertainty, you can't possibly have faith. Hope is optimism despite uncertainty; if you remove uncertainty, you can't have hope. And then love—who can love a robot? So love is necessarily uncertain in order to put yourself out there and have devotion despite uncertainty.
I think evolution can give us history, but it can't give us meaning. It can give us the history of our moral views, but it cannot give us actual moral views or reasons to accept them, and it can't undermine them either.
