Speaking

My books and lectures are oriented towards the goal of creating peace between Christian faith and natural science (Matthew 5:9) and to encourage us to be thinking people who fulfill what Jesus calls the first and greatest commandment: to love the Lord with all that we are, including all our minds (Matthew 22:37).

I give lectures on these topics:

• The imagined conflict. On science and God.
  It is widely believed that there is a conflict between natural science and God. I present instead how science and a creator give complementary rather than competing explanations. I also explore topics such as the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, and the origin of human rationality or soul. These are topics that fill many with wonder, they stimulate thoughts about where the boundaries of natural science lie, and they hint to a creation with a purpose.
• Lecture, The imagined conflict. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, UK, 2026.

• Ten Christian scientists that you meet every day.
  Starting  with your mobile phone waking you up in the morning, I take you on a journey through a typical day where you, probably without knowing it, encounter many of the most important (natural) scientists through history. Surprisingly many of them turn out to be Christians, and that is not only in name due to a general cultural influences. It is clear that the Christian faith meant something personal to them as well, as illustrated in the lecture by quotes from their own writings.
• Based on book "Science with overtones. 21 scientists and their faith in God." 2025 (Norwegian)
  
  
• The roots of mathematics and natural laws: materialism or theism?
  Nobel laureates such as Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner wondered about the comprehensibility of nature, which they saw as a miracle defying rational explanation. They were particularly struck by how mathematics is so well suited to describe the universe as seen in physics. 17th century scientist Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, had a very good explanation for why that was so. Here I discuss two hypotheses about the origin of mathematics and natural laws and compare them: an impersonal and material universe versus a personal creator and lawgiver.
• Video and transcript, "The Roots of Mathematics and Natural Laws. Materialism vs Theism," Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Dec 2021

• Learning from C S Lewis’ view on evolution.
  “In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth, it is a fact about improvements” is what Lewis wrote in the Funeral of a Great Myth in the 1940’s, demonstrating both an acceptance of and a skepticism to how much biological evolution can explain. Lewis's view can still guide us today to express awe and wonder at the evolutionary process, along with skepticism about evolutionism's claims that everything happens without plan and that all has been explained, what Lewis liked to call the Myth.
• Learning from C.S. Lewis’s view on evolution, Theofilos, 2026

• Galileo was right, but so were his adversaries.
  A scientist evaluates the Galileo affair. Many like either to attack or to excuse the church for the Galileo affair, believing the myth that this was about science versus religion. However, Galileo knew very well that he did not have a very good case scientifically for the hypothesis that the Earth revolves around the sun. It took several decades after his death before scientists in general started to favor the Copernican model. In Galileo's lifetime, the geo-heliocentric model of Tycho Brahe, ignored by Galileo, had better scientific support. This is hard to understand with a presentist view of history, where the past is understood in light of present knowledge, as many scientists unconsciously do. Upon investigating how scientists at the time reasoned, how severly they underestimated the distance to the stars, and the limited understanding at the time of the phenomenon of diffraction, one finds instead that it is impossible to comprehend the Galileo affair without understanding the importance of Brahe's model.
• Partly covered in these lecture notes for a lecture given to students at the University of Oslo, "How easy is it to show that? ... from Antiquity to Early modern time and the multiverse," 2023 (in Norwegian)

• Science in light of the Bible.
  Here I address topics such as cosmology, the age of the Earth, the age of life, and evolution, as well as human soul and nature and suggest how to understand them in light of both being faithful to the Bible and following sound science.
• Based on Appendix of The Imagined Conflict, Wipf & Stock, 2025.