He was a scientist by training, a biologist to be specific. He was also something of an amateur philosopher. He had read Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Erasmus, Kant and Spinoza, Nietzsche and Whitehead. He had also read the Bible. No education was complete without an understanding of the Bible, he would say.

            But he didn’t read the Bible as a believer, but as a scientist. The Bible was valuable to him because of its contribution to western civilization. He read the Bible looking for facts. Facts equal truth he would say. He also read the Bible with a philosopher’s critical eye. Just as facts equal truth, he would say, inconsistencies equal untruth.

            His overall estimate of the Bible was mostly positive. Morally, he would say, he could see where the Bible was taking us. He was especially impressed with the ethics of Jesus. “The moral message of Jesus is profound,” he would say. “Jesus’ views on non-violence were way ahead of his time. In fact, they are way ahead of our time.”

            But as impressed as he was with the moral teaching of the Bible, the scientist-philosopher in him could not embrace the miracles. He simply could not accept the idea that God would break into our reality, move against space and time and alter the physics of water and wine or darkness and light -- it was just too much to accept. Miracles were mythical, the scientist would say. They are not factual; therefore they are not true.

            Holding to this view of miracles obviously put our scientist f

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