Magicians in Lab Coats
What your high schooler's science class and ancient occultism have in common
Dr. Dylan Thompson, a chemist at Concordia Mequon and author of the Faith and Science for the Classroom: Atypical Topics (Ad Crucem Books), joins Dr. Koontz to discuss how Christians should think about science, both as a gift and as a battlefield. Rather than retreading familiar evolution debates, Thompson covers infrequently addressed territory: the first principles that make science a legitimate Christian vocation, the beauty of God’s “unnecessary” creative flair (hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin in horseshoe crabs), the spiritual hazard of medicalizing what are also soul-problems, the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution, and, most surprisingly, the case that much of what drives contemporary science is not materialism but a Gnostic, quasi-magical pursuit of ancient occult goals: the hermaphrodite, the golem, and apotheosis through knowledge. The episode closes with a two-part answer to why Christians should engage science at all: because creation is an intellectual playground God made for us to enjoy, and because the wolves are already in the field.
ISBN: 979-8195719661
Binding: Hardcover, Softcover, Kindle
Pages: 188
Publisher: Ad Crucem Books
Published: 2026-05-04
Language: English (American)
Dimensions: 6x9 inches
Weight: 3 lbs
Amazon, $30 (hardcover) $18 (softcover)
Ad Crucem Books, $35 (hardcover)
Smoothed Transcript (verbal tics removed; substance unchanged)
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to A Brief History of Power. This is Dr. Koontz with an interview about a new book by Dr. Dylan Thompson from Concordia Mequon, where he is in the physical sciences department. He specializes in chemistry. We are going to be talking today about his forthcoming book — let me get the title exactly right — Faith and Science for the Classroom: Atypical Topics. This is forthcoming from Ad Crucem. I am fascinated by the topic myself generally. I am also working on it from my angle, theologically, in a way that I will talk more about as we get closer to the publication date. I am very excited to be talking to Dr. Thompson today. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
DR. THOMPSON: Thank you. I am very happy that you are willing to talk to me about my book and what I have been spending my time writing.
STRUCTURE AND AUDIENCE
HOST: What is the structure of the book, and who is the intended audience?
DR. THOMPSON: I wanted something to enable people to learn about these topics — primers on them. So it is aimed at high schoolers, or homeschool high schoolers. If you have a child who is really into it and has thought a lot about these things, they could do it sooner than that. But the primary goal is to give a structure for, first, how you think about science-based apologetics topics, and then to go over some topics that may be less commonly addressed. I did not want to spend too much time covering things that I have seen covered before at length. I was trying to go in different directions — things that students may be more concerned about rather than covering the same topics again.
HOST: What are those commonly covered topics? What is already out there as a resource?
DR. THOMPSON: A lot of things about evolution. We have been dealing with evolution for quite some time, and maybe originally the Christian church did not respond quite as proactively as it could have. But there are some good things out there. Book-wise, I think the classic is Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, which talks about irreducible complexity. One of my favorites is a man named James Tour — a chemist at Rice University, last I knew. He talks a lot about abiogenesis, which is the step where chemicals become living things — the step that most people do not spend any time talking about but that has to have happened. He is an exceptional resource.
FIRST PRINCIPLES
HOST: You think evolution is usually well covered. Looking through your book, it seems that you are not avoiding evolution but rather covering aspects of these questions that are infrequently visited. But I love where you start. What would you describe as first principles for understanding the relationship between faith and science?
DR. THOMPSON: I named my very first principle — I actually called it Principle Zero. The idea is that we can expect God’s truth to be found in creation as well as in the Scriptures. We are not going to find creation lying to us, because God reveals Himself to us through creation as well.
HOST: I appreciate that, because you use terms that are ancient in our theological tradition — the book of general revelation through creation and the book of special revelation, which is Holy Scripture. The idea that God has two books and neither of them are lying, because God never lies, is a place to start that I have found extremely helpful in apologetics works. In apologetics, you often have a clash between presuppositionalists and evidentialists, and you lay out a variety of evidences within His creation later on. But to start in the theoretical place with this assertion that God does not lie as Principle Zero — I thought it was wonderful, because it had the advantages of presuppositionalism. You are not just cherry-picking something; you are explaining why you are going to go about things the way that you do.
DR. THOMPSON: There has to be a starting point that you do not necessarily realize was your starting point. That is actually how the zeroth law got its name — they did not realize they needed it until later, and they already had a first law. But this idea that God does not lie in His creation — so we can go study it and learn from it — and some of the things that He does in His creation, He does to teach us things.
One of my favorite principles is thinking about how complicated an artistic creation is. God does not simply solve a problem — take, for example, how we are going to deliver oxygen where it needs to be in the body. If we think about that as a problem, God solves it in multiple ways, almost as if He is so grand He can do this in completely different ways. And another thing: He is using extremely common elements. As a chemist, when we try to make molecules behave for us, we tend to reach for what you might call boutique elements — rhodium, ruthenium, palladium — because they work better and the chemistry is very complicated. God can do it with iron, which is literally everywhere.
HOST: Can you give the example contrasting hemocyanin in horseshoe crabs with our blood? I thought that was a really great illustration under First Principle Five.
DR. THOMPSON: In our blood, the oxygen atoms are bound to iron atoms held in place in a very complicated molecule — a giant ring system held in place with even more complicated structures. All of that works to make it so that the oxygen atom binds to the iron atom reversibly. It can pop off when it needs to and go back on when it needs to. That is very difficult to design. If it binds a little too well, it never comes off — that is what happens with carbon monoxide poisoning. The carbon monoxide molecule binds too well and just never leaves. And if it does not bind well enough, it will just get loose. Solving this problem even once is remarkable. But God does it two different ways.
The horseshoe crab — most people, if they have heard of them, think they are fascinating. Their blood is actually blue. It looks like alien blood. It is blue because copper atoms are being used to achieve the same purpose. And none of the structure is the same. There is no structural similarity between the heme in our blood and the protein that holds the copper in the horseshoe crab blood. In fact, it actually has two copper atoms, with the oxygen held between them. It is a completely different solution to the same problem — and, from a pedantic human standpoint, a completely unnecessary extra solution. It is like the flair of an artist.
HOST: Exactly — where we are struggling like a four-year-old doing paint-by-number who barely knows numbers, let alone colors, and He is doing things we cannot even fathom.
I thought that was a fascinating approach, because often when we think of apologetics — the defense of the Christian faith — it can be quite dry, barely accessible or entirely inaccessible to those not initiated into philosophical terms and discussions. Starting from something like horseshoe crabs is much more accessible.
DR. THOMPSON: I think sometimes people think of science as inaccessible. But it is extremely accessible to say, look how He does this when He does not even have to. Look at the skill He demonstrates. I wanted enough scientific detail that you could learn something on that end, but not so much that a high school student could not grasp the point. Everything is more complicated than you first think, and the more you think about it, the more complicated it gets. Nothing ever gets simpler the more questions you ask of the system.
THE TWO “ENOUGH” PRINCIPLES
HOST: What do you mean by saying you do not know enough, but you also do know enough?
DR. THOMPSON: The first is that you do not know enough to never double-check yourself. Unless you have put in a great deal of time, you do not know enough to argue with an expert. Even if you are right and the expert is wrong, put in more work before you argue with the expert. From a standpoint of humility, you never know enough.
For the second point: you do know enough to understand how beautiful creation is. You know enough to learn the next thing, to think and study and have ideas and have valuable ideas. It is just two different realms — two different ways of approaching it.
HOST: I have often thought about how gloriously detailed God has made our minds. People have incredibly detailed knowledge of so many things — each person does. It is meant to move you toward wonder, especially when learning of His creation. But unless people actually study science, many are simply blind to these things. They cannot tell trees apart, cannot tell birds apart; they do not know what is in the creation.
DR. THOMPSON: I do not get a lot of students who are not science majors — not terribly many people take general chemistry unless they need to.
HOST: For the listeners’ benefit, I am a strange person. I had to take distribution requirements and took engineering chemistry and some kind of biology class.
DR. THOMPSON: As a chemistry major, my completely unrelated classes were a random History of England course — four students in it — and a couple of art classes.
HOST: I do think a lot of people get very narrowed, and people forget to contemplate and admire the wonderful things that God has made. You can go out just to the courtyard — you do not have to go to the Grand Canyon to admire creation. Maybe some of that is because our senses are deadened. You can look at pictures of Yellowstone, and suddenly Wisconsin does not seem all that remarkable — not as many nature photos of it popping up on the Windows desktop. But if you look at the grass, you can see butterflies.
DR. THOMPSON: Once I started studying butterflies a little bit because one of my kids was interested, I did not realize how many tiny little butterflies there are. They are all different and beautiful. People think of the monarchs because they are big and you see them — but the more you pay attention, the more things there are to see. And that is what we hope to encourage. I do not think this is idle knowledge. It is not knowing NBA stats for purposes of sports gambling. It is not vicious knowledge, nor is it idle. Even before the fall into sin, Adam — who is not going to utilize knowledge for any evil purpose — is naming each of the animals God has created. The knowledge of creation does not seem to me to be negotiable or something you could particularly do without, because Adam possesses it even before the fall.
My own inability to tell butterflies apart is a defect in me — not just a niche nerdy subject I happen not to be into. God bothered to make them, and He made each one beautiful in its own way. He has made them beautiful, and they are there if I take a look. He goes out of His way to make them beautiful because beauty is part of His nature, and we are supposed to appreciate that. If you can respond to the beauty of a human artist, responding to the beauty that God has made in creation is obviously on an infinitely grander scale.
PRODUCTIVE VS. UNPRODUCTIVE QUESTIONS
HOST: Can you talk about different kinds of questions and why you make the distinction between productive and unproductive questions, especially when looking into science?
DR. THOMPSON: A lot of science can really be thought of as the interrogation of something. When I do chemistry experiments, I am very deliberately asking questions of a chemical reaction. I am doing things and seeing what happens — trying to figure out what is actually going on. There can be all sorts of things you could know that do not actually help you with what you are trying to understand. There can be distracting evidence — something that is true, but not helping you understand what you are trying to understand.
As an analogy: if you are thinking about apologetics or having a discussion with someone, it helps to know precisely what you are trying to answer. If you think about that as the question, there will be facts that are not actually relevant to it. Some of those are obviously irrelevant — like what color the lab bench was when I was doing the experiment. But when we come out of chemistry and into apologetics, there are going to be facts that people care very deeply about and can get very emotional about that do not actually drive toward the actual answer. If we are trying to really think about something, we have to focus on the question at hand.
That is why I was thinking about different types of questions. We have to distinguish — especially when talking about science — between how does something happen and why does it happen. We grammatically frequently say “why” when we mean what is the scientific mechanism for how. And those are two different questions. Then there are questions about truth and questions about feeling. Questions about feeling are not irrelevant, but questions about truth are the important ones first. If something is not true, it does not matter how we feel about it.
DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, AND EUPHEMISM
HOST: Can you work through your discussion of how we talk about depression and anxiety and the chemistry of them — especially in terms of using euphemisms today?
DR. THOMPSON: We like to medicalize when we talk about problems that people have — we call it mental health. In some situations that may be a fine way to talk about it, and there may actually be physical issues with the brain. We are body and soul, and problems in one can affect the other. But saying “mental health” is essentially a euphemism. If we understand the human person as body and soul, these problems are at least also spiritual problems — from demonic assault, from feelings of guilt and the need for confession and absolution, from a number of other sources. We need to watch out for any proposed treatments that come from the world and claim this is going to help your mental health. If those treatments are spiritually dangerous, that is not going to be helpful.
There is a large push to make medical marijuana the answer for mental health.
HOST: That was exactly the example I wanted to ask about. Please go on.
DR. THOMPSON: Marijuana has many dangers. We could go and discuss the details of medical studies, but I believe the danger is this: indigenous peoples have used it in communicating with ancestors or in demonic ceremonies, which means there is a spiritual hazard in marijuana. So if you have spiritual problems and you take something that has spiritual hazards, you are certainly making the problem worse.
HOST: That is fascinating, because I have thought along similar lines — not so much from the chemical composition of THC, but from the perspective that modern Western man seems to believe he can take things and use them for his own purposes regardless of their history. What he particularly likes to do is take substances such as marijuana or psilocybin or other psychedelics that historically were used in the practice of assorted non-Christian religions — assorted teachings of demons, to put it in a biblical phrase. And we say, no, we are going to use it for good, and it has no spiritual relationship to anything. The irony being that we are supposed to listen to indigenous wisdom — that is what NPR tells us — but we do not pay attention to how the Hopi or whatever tribe under consideration were actually and consistently using the plant in question. We believe we can simply separate that and do whatever we want with it. There is an unusual hubris in that, maybe driven by the belief that substances are just substances and are only good or bad depending on how we intend to use them.
DR. THOMPSON: A lot of it is that people feel they control it. I included the chemical structures of some of these substances to make the point that we know exactly what THC looks like — there is no doubt this is the molecule that is THC. So we feel like we have controlled it. We have taken this thing, we own it, we put it in a pill, and we are the boss of it. We know what it is and what it does in the brain. That is a very dangerous presupposition. We are no longer going to some guy dressed up like a shaman — it feels like we have medicalized it, made it science, and therefore all of its spiritual concerns are gone. That is the mindset I am primarily trying to warn against with THC and psilocybin. We did not conquer it. We just put it in a different form.
HOST: To me, the more that we depart from an understanding of the study of creation as a discovery of the power, the goodness, the wisdom, the artistry of the Creator — the more we think that we are just discovering assorted raw materials — the more sorely deluded we are when we think that an understanding of mechanism, the how, is also an understanding of total control and can therefore be turned however we desire once we have some grasp of what it looks like. The examples you provide — THC and psilocybin — are very up-to-date examples of what seems characteristic of modern man’s hubris: our sense of total control over creation, which we no longer even call creation. We might call it nature, or the environment. We very rarely call it creation today.
DR. THOMPSON: It is absolutely hubris. There is a vast component of hubris in humans’ interactions with creation and in what they think scientists can do or will do or even have done. I have talked to students about evolution, and it is interesting how many people believe that scientists have randomly created proteins in lab experiments. Some students have been surprised to find out that we have never actually made life — because things have been so blown out of proportion in their minds. The best they have gotten is some amino acids, which chemically speaking we would have known would happen ahead of time.
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[ABIOGENESIS AND EVOLUTION]
HOST: Let us talk a little about abiogenesis and how it relates to evolution. I know you are not primarily writing about evolution, but I do think it is helpful to address that topic. And I love your diagram of supposed whale evolution as an image. Can you talk about what abiogenesis is and how it relates to the theory of evolution?
DR. THOMPSON: Most people think of the theory of evolution — evolution by natural selection — as starting with single-celled life, and that is the part that gets most attention. I think it gets the most attention because at least they can hand-wave a mechanism: the unfit ones die. But abiogenesis is the step that has to happen before that.
There is a phrase I heard while doing work on a ranch: “know what happened before what happened.” It sounds funny, sticks in your mind, and is very real. Abiogenesis is what would have to happen before what happened happened. You would have to go from what we would call small molecules — water, certain sulfates or phosphates, or other molecules you find on planets that do not have life — to something like RNA. RNA is immensely complicated. Or you would have to go from that to a lipid. A lipid is a couple of long carbon chains and a phosphate side — one side does not like water and the other side does, essentially what is in soap. Even that is far, far less complicated than RNA. It is hard to explain how much less complicated that is than RNA, and even that is not terribly likely to happen accidentally. But the theory of evolution requires that to happen accidentally. You would have to have, at the same time and in the same place, RNA, the necessary enzymes to copy the RNA, and lipids — all accidentally forming simultaneously. That is essentially laughable. There are theories that must be treated politely when speaking with an individual, but some theories deserve to be laughed at.
HOST: Let me read briefly from your book. This is from the chapter on creation and abiogenesis: “Another example: at some point in the evolution of whales, the mammal would have had to move its trachea to the back of its neck. If it can breathe just fine through its nose, there cannot be any evolutionary pressure — genetic pressure, population pressure — to move the air vent elsewhere.”
It is funny when you think of it that way: a couple of guys just move their tracheas around and suddenly we have something completely different. Can you talk more seriously about the distinction between macro- and micro-evolution, and maybe also where those terms might be flawed?
DR. THOMPSON: They frequently get muddled, and I think they get intentionally muddled by people who believe in evolution. Any genetic changes that persist over time, they will call evolution — and they can use one to pretend they have proven the other.
Micro-evolution is the process by which you end up with different types of horses, or horses and donkeys. These are genetic changes resulting from the loss of genetic information, and you end up with speciation under this kind of process. All of Darwin’s examples, properly considered, would be micro-evolution: a loss of genetic information resulting in a different species — what humans call a species.
Macro-evolution requires the gain of genetic information. This produces from one species multiple species — producing from a common ancestor things that have gained different genetic information differently. Under that framework, all mammals are descended from the same primal ancestor, but they just receive different genetic code in different ways, and you end up with humans, cats, kangaroos, and so on.
It is a helpful distinction because genetics do change over time, populations do change over time, and there needs to be a way to talk about that. It would be very nice if we could call micro-evolution one thing and macro-evolution simply “evolution” — but we do not live in that world, so we have to use the tools we have.
Macro-evolution is the idea that somehow a mammal decided to return to the ocean and evolved into a whale — lost its legs and grew flippers because it needed flippers to swim better — even though a legged mammal would just walk out of the water if it wanted to be safe. As I say in the book, it requires omniscient creatures. My example is a lily pad that decides to flower one day because somehow it knows that there are bugs that are going to move its pollen from one flower to another. That would be an omniscient lily pad. It is absurd on its face.
HOST: The coneflowers anticipated that one day there would be certain species of native bumblebees or hummingbirds migrating from somewhere southwards — and the plant just knew. And so there is the little flower.
DR. THOMPSON: It is much simpler to have one omniscient Creator — just logically speaking — than to have dozens of thousands of necessarily omniscient species in order to explain how all of these things came to be.
HOST: It is notable how often — particularly in trying to explain natural history to people — someone who fervently and unthinkingly believes in the theory of evolution will use a word like “designed” in order to explain why something is shaped the way it is, or why a certain species has the particular habit of storing food before a cold season. They slip into vocabulary borrowed from creation. I do not think they are doing it necessarily very intentionally, or dishonestly — I think it simply is what comes to mind when you actually try to explain why these things all work the way that they do with the relative harmony and beauty that they have.
DR. THOMPSON: It is absolutely the case. In graduate school I sat through many presentations — that is part of a graduate student’s life — and in any presentation having to do with biochemistry, you would hear “nature designed.” Because you cannot, as a rational person, use accidental language about a process that has something like a one-in-a-billion error rate that then gets fixed.
HOST: They end up capitalizing Nature. That is what happens — it becomes like the journal. Deifying nature. Everyone gets to be at least a little Thomas Jefferson, at the very least.
ALCHEMY
HOST: I thought your most surprising section was on alchemy. Can you talk about why you brought up alchemy, what it is, and how you see it going on today?
DR. THOMPSON: I tend to read widely — a lot of things not directly related to anything in particular. I get the sense of alchemy from various goals of scientists, and that is really where this came from. As I look into it, I see more and more that — as a good general heuristic — if you ignore what is said and pay attention to what is done, you get a clearer view of what someone might be intending. If you look at scientists, there are many of them doing things that match what magicians in the past would do. Alchemy being a branch of magic related to chemistry — we do not like the correlation, but there it is.
If you look at what some scientists are doing, they are pursuing goals that magicians and alchemists pursued. That seems to be a warning that needs to be sounded, and I have not seen other people talking about it.
It is sort of out there: one of the goals of the alchemists is to create a person that is a mixture of both male and female. And when you see the scientific goals in the transgender movement — there is the same goal. It is trying to produce the hermaphrodite, which is one of the goals of the alchemists. Which is, on a certain level, all that a person attempting to become transgender can ever be — I do not think a change in biological sex is actually possible. The man will never be a woman; he will be something that is neither fish nor fowl, to use a clichéd phrase rather than the true term. Hermaphrodite, I think, would be the true term.
HOST: I think you are totally right about that.
DR. THOMPSON: And you can see the scientific goals there. Another one I mention is the goal of producing something like a golem — some sort of man-made life. That is an ancient goal of the magician, of the occult world. I do not see a reason why a robot should be humanoid, except that making it humanoid is like making artificial life. If you go look at the people doing humanoid robots with AI processors in them, they sound like they are trying to make artificial people. When you see people accomplishing the historical goals of magicians, I do not think it is a stretch to say maybe the magicians just put on a lab coat and cleaned up their workspace. They do not have the guts of dead horses anymore — they have a nice clean workbench. But we should not be treating them necessarily as these hyper-materialists. We should perhaps be expecting them to be essentially a Gnostic magician in a lab coat.
GNOSTICISM
HOST: What do you mean by Gnostic? I think many of the listeners will be familiar with that. What do you mean by it, and where do you see the relationship between ancient Gnosticism and what is going on today?
DR. THOMPSON: I use it perhaps less precisely than might be ideal. I mean anyone who believes that what is really real is not the physical world — that what is real is the spiritual, and the realm of the spirit, and that the physical world we should be manipulating for our own enlightenment. This is frequently the belief system of the magician types — they are trying to rule the physical world, but the goal is a spiritual enlightenment from that. They are not trying to turn lead into gold because they want gold. They are trying to turn lead into gold because they think a similar process will make them like gods.
If you look at the symbolism in the way people talk about things — in a previous chapter, I talk about a YouTube video that explains the three laws of thermodynamics with deeply religious, Gnostic imagery. There is a definite group: plenty of scientists are the grumpy old materialists we envision, but then there are others who are essentially mystics. Their use of science has mystical motivations and mystical goals. That is what I am talking about.
CLOSING: HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS USE SCIENCE?
HOST: As we get toward the end of our time — and I am sure many of the listeners will want to know more, so please write in as so many of you do — let us wrap up with the idea of what you think the use of science is for a Christian. Why not leave it all aside? Why not simply dismiss it out of hand, when so many strange mystics may be practicing it and speaking about it? How should we use science?
DR. THOMPSON: That is a good question. Two parallel answers come to mind immediately — they are different.
The first thing that comes to mind is that God has created an intellectual playground for us. We admire its beauty, but when you engage with beauty, you actually know more and appreciate more of it. In a way, it is as if God has set puzzles. I like puzzles. I like solving puzzles. God has made this thing for us to interrogate and study and learn from and use our minds on. It would be a shame not to.
On the other hand, because people are abusing God’s creation for their own evil ends, we should be studying in order to warn our Christian brothers against things that are being done. We should be studying so that we do not fall for clever-sounding traps — like, here is a miracle treatment, but it has aborted baby cells in it. So that we do not accidentally fall into participating in evils we did not even know about. We need to be forewarned.
Those are two completely different reasons.
HOST: I think that is a great answer, because it goes in both directions — the positive direction: why pursue these things, why learn more about butterflies or ferns or the stars above that declare His handiwork? But also, on the negative side, apologetics is something like cutting down idols at their feet — letting Dagon fall down before the Ark of the Covenant to show the subjection of man to God, rather than exhibiting that pride, that hubris, that we talked about earlier, which in man is an expression of allegiance to dark powers. That always comes forth as these hubristic projects that I think you write rightly our civilization — certainly many of its scientists — are engaged in today.
Dr. Thompson, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thank you for being with us. I am going to put a link in the notes to Faith and Science for the Classroom: Atypical Topics. I hope people will go out and pick this up. Maybe we can have you back another time to get into some of these things in greater detail — but thank you for being with us today.
DR. THOMPSON: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and if you want to talk again, I would be happy to.
HOST: Outstanding. Thank you. This has been A Brief History of Power. You can find us at abriefhistoryofpower.com and on social media, especially Facebook and our X account. This is Dr. Koontz signing off.