transcript

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Speaker 4:
[01:00] Why is this such a hot topic in a way that the beginning of the universe isn't?

Speaker 2:
[01:03] Well, I think the beginning of the universe is a hot topic, and we should get to that because it's become hot again for some interesting reasons.

Speaker 4:
[01:09] Did God make Adam out of the dirt? Did he make Eve from the rib of Adam? Like, literally, is that your opinion, or what is it?

Speaker 2:
[01:16] I don't know what to make of the Genesis passage on that kind of thing, but I don't think it's implausible to think that human beings were specially created.

Speaker 4:
[01:23] Do human beings and chimpanzees have a common ancestor, according to you?

Speaker 2:
[01:27] I'd be skeptical of that. There's an important new piece of information that's come out.

Speaker 4:
[01:32] Would you really follow the evidence where it leads, if it did lead to a common ancestor?

Speaker 2:
[01:36] The key question in the question of biological origins is the question about whether there's evidence of design or not. Great works of science are not divorced from argumentation. They depend upon argumentation for their prosecution. Being a polemicist or an apologist is also being a good scientist.

Speaker 4:
[01:54] So, where do you expect Darwinian evolution to be in 50 or 100 years? What do you think people will be saying about it?

Speaker 2:
[02:02] I actually think it's already dead. Good.

Speaker 4:
[02:14] So I have your book. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2:
[02:16] Thank you for your interest. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[02:19] How long have you been writing on this for?

Speaker 2:
[02:21] I've been thinking about this since 85, 86. It took me three years and three months. I think I was 30 some months to write the, no, it was a little bit more than 33 months to write the book. But thinking about the topic for a long time, and then the film based on the book has taken four years to produce. So it's been, it's a big year for us. Kind of a year of a lot of things coming to fruition.

Speaker 4:
[02:45] Now, you came to faith in Christ after, I remember watching you on Joe Rogan, you talked about having some kind of existential crisis. Did arguments play a role in your coming to faith at that time, or was it more desperation crying out if you exist?

Speaker 2:
[03:00] Yeah, they did eventually. But it was started with questions that I couldn't answer, and the questions that ultimately kind of terrified me, made me think there was something wrong with me. When I got to university, I had the existential, it was kind of a, I guess later someone described it to me as a metaphysical panic. There was a point where I was having questions which I later realized were philosophical, existential questions. But I was 14 and I didn't know what they were, questions about what's going to matter in 100 years. How do I know that what I'm seeing is actually what's really there? What does it mean to live in time? What is time exactly? Other things. My mind was kind of swirling with things that were, and at one point I remember having a thought about the thoughts, and the thought was maybe this is what it means to be insane. Then I had a kind of panic attack inside. I could feel the surge. I had a roughly six-month period of my young life where I was aware of a kind of a dark cloud over everything that was related to these questions that I was having that I was now afraid of. So I had a fear of the questions and a fear of the fear of the questions, and it was a kind of a male spiral and a very dark. I remember at one point, I remember my memories are of staring at things, having these troubling thoughts. I remember staring at my window seal thinking, my life is over. I couldn't imagine anything in the future to look forward to. It happened that I was in a leg cast that was full length leg cast from a skiing accident. So I had a hyperactive mind and I was unable to move my body, which was a bad combination. I eventually started to pull out of it. I have a happy-go-lucky little brother who's my alter ego. He's a wonderful guy. He's an entrepreneur. I'm a philosopher. He inadvertently pulled me out of it. But I would have recurrent bouts of this. When I got to college, I was taking philosophy courses and started to come across thinkers who were asking the same questions. I remember taking a course on atheistic existentialism, and the professor paraphrased Jean-Paul Sartre as saying, without an infinite reference point, nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning. I thought that's what had been bothering me. What's it going to matter in 100 years? I was at 14 when this first came on. I was in a leg cast from a skiing accident. My dad gave me a book about the history of baseball. I absolutely loved baseball. I was very into baseball. I was reading the stories of all the greats from yesteryear and right up to the present. And it seemed that the stories all ended the same way. Young men full of athletic promise were scouted. They came up to the big leagues. They had a successful career. They amassed records and then they retired at 36, 38, whatever it was. They lived out the rest of their lives happily, enjoying the celebrity of having been a sports star. But what did they have to show for their life? It was a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper. And when I started to talk to my mother about this, she said, Well, of course, they wasted their life chasing a ball around. But to me, that was the best thing you could do. That was what I aspired to do. And I got to thinking, well, what if I were a surgeon? I'd save people's lives, but then I would die, and then they would eventually die. And then what was left? What was the point?

Speaker 4:
[06:59] I remember thinking that someone will think about you for the last time at some point in the future.

Speaker 2:
[07:04] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 4:
[07:05] That's quite a sobering thought.

Speaker 2:
[07:07] No graves go unvisited at the end, right?

Speaker 4:
[07:10] Yeah. And I've started doing this when, it's kind of weird, but when someone will mention, so-and-so has died, depending on how well you know them, you might not know them that well, but you go, oh, God rest him or something. And I think to myself, how long will it take for us to move on to normal conversation? Well, anyway, what do we have for lunch?

Speaker 2:
[07:31] Exactly.

Speaker 4:
[07:31] That's what will happen with you and me and everyone.

Speaker 2:
[07:34] That's right. And I was on Piers Morgan two years ago and my mother had just passed away. I didn't mean for the conversation to go in that direction, but it came up. And I found myself saying something I'd never been able to articulate exactly, precisely, but it was that nothing can mean anything to a rock or a planet or a DNA molecule. Things only mean things to persons. And yet we all die. And so if there is to be lasting or enduring meaning, there must be a person whose existence transcends or extends beyond ours. And I think the death of God philosophically and the rise of the scientific materialism and popularly, the new atheism has come with a great cost to the sense that people have of personal meaning. There's a Harvard study that's come out recently in which it's been, I think, fairly conclusively documented that 56% or something like that of young people in the 18 to 30 age group acknowledge having persistent doubts about whether their own lives have any lasting or enduring meaning or any purpose. And I think that's a crisis. I think that's a big factor in Ayon Hersi Ali's conversion away from the new atheism and embracing Christianity. In her view, the scientific materialism of the new atheists is a failed philosophy because it can't give a satisfactory answer to the question of human meaning. Now you might say, oh, it gets a perfectly satisfactory answer. It answers in the negative. There is no ultimate meaning. We have meaning in this period of time between birth and death, in this veil of tears.

Speaker 4:
[09:17] But what scientific experiment could make that?

Speaker 2:
[09:20] Well, certainly, you can't derive it from a scientific experiment.

Speaker 4:
[09:24] Right.

Speaker 2:
[09:25] Or from the material world. Things mean things to persons again.

Speaker 4:
[09:29] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:29] And personhood is something that is not co-extensive with matter and energy. It's something beyond that.

Speaker 4:
[09:36] So it seems to me it's more of a philosophical axiom. You begin based on all sorts of data, maybe, that you haven't really thought through whether or not life has meaning or not. Nietzsche, for example, as far as I could tell, didn't have an argument for atheism. He just asserted that God is dead. Can you think of a compelling argument against God's existence? And here's my point, right? If you can't, right? And the arguments for God's existence seem kind of interesting to me, maybe a little bit compelling, if not all the way. Okay. So now I've got to choose between a life of meaning or a life of nihilism.

Speaker 2:
[10:09] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[10:10] Then, okay, well, since I can't tell, and if the arguments for atheism aren't any good, I think we can make a very strong case.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] I think we're in a stronger epistemic case than that. I don't believe in demonstrable proofs.

Speaker 4:
[10:21] No. But the reason I say that is just for those who are at home like you, where you were a kid and like I was when I was a kid.

Speaker 2:
[10:27] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[10:28] It's like, well, even if the evidence is equal, I think there's still good reasons to choose God. But as we'll see in this interview, they are certainly not equal. But what do you think a good argument for atheism is or the best one?

Speaker 2:
[10:39] Well, I think there's the problem of evil. I think the strongest form of the argument from evil is the argument from natural evil. I think that might be the strongest atheistic argument. For me, the theistic argument that became compelling, and it was interesting the way it percolated for me. It wasn't in the, someone presented me with a syllogism or something. It was that I was having questions that were a precondition of, effectively sanity, that my mind lacks structures to make sense of the world. And as I picked up at a certain point, I picked up the big, fat, white Catholic family Bible. And it fell open to a picture between the two testaments. And the picture was of, not the Jesus you sometimes see in religious art that looks like he's almost going to get lipstick put on or something, but it was a very manly carpenter Jesus. And the caption underneath was, Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 1128 of Matthew's Gospel. And that sounded pretty good to me. And I started reading and I was so troubled. I couldn't take in more than a chapter at a time. But at the same time, I couldn't go to sleep unless I read at least a chapter. There was something about what I was reading that was settling me at a metaphysical level. I didn't quite know what it was. And as I got further into just reading the text, just a simple example was I had this troubling thing about time, where I'd hobble up on my crutches every afternoon. In April of 1972, I was 14, to the mailbox to get the newspaper. I'd bring the newspaper down. I'd open it up to read the box scores, go right to the Yankees, my favorite team. And the dates would change April 19th, April 20th, April 21, April 22. The time was passing. What exactly did that mean? I'd think of an event. I could take something and I could drop it, or I could kick something, or I could say something. Now, that event where I just dropped the book is, we can remember that, just happened, but it's already gone. So where did it go? What exactly was the meaning of that event? It seemed to me that there had to be something. I can't prove this, but it was just this deep intuition that there had to be something somewhere that didn't change, or else everything that did change was completely meaningless. There was no grounding to reality. I had the same thoughts about my own thoughts, weirdly. I thought that there must be some, for my thoughts to have a kind of coherence and a meaning, there must be a greater mind in which my thinking was perceived. I can't prove that, but I got, when I got to university and I was starting to learn about in my, I wasn't a philosophy major, I majored in physics and geology. My dad was an engineer and he urged me in that direction. But I was so interested in these philosophical things. I did a strong minor in philosophy and took every course I could work in. And I remember the big issue in modern philosophy since the Enlightenment forward has been the whole question of epistemology. How do we know what we know? How is it possible for us to know anything? And underlying that is the whole question of the reliability of the mind. And so there were things about the scriptural worldview that started to ground my thinking. For one thing, if there was a benevolent God who made my mind and who also made the world, then there was a principle of correspondence between the two. The early scientists talked about the intelligibility of the world. And this is the big thing that is missing in secular enlightenment philosophy. There is no reason to trust the reliability of the mind. And so that was actually the argument that really convinced me of theism as a university student.

Speaker 4:
[14:49] Were you coming into contact with Plantiga's natural...

Speaker 2:
[14:51] Well, I didn't know of Plantiga then, but there were other philosophers who were making similar argument about the proper grounding of the mind. It's sometimes called the argument from epistemological necessity. I had a conversation with Thomas Nagel years ago after he made the mistake of favorably reviewing my first book for the Times Literary Supplement in London, and then was skewered by fellow atheists for having done so. But we ended up having a conversation, and he asked me... He's a famous atheistic philosopher, a fantastic philosopher of science and epistemologist. He said, well, how did you become a Christian? It happens that he's a good friend of Plantingas. They're old friends and know and respect each other on opposite sides of the theistic naturalistic divide. I started to explain the argument from epistemological necessity, and he shut me down very politely. He said, oh no, you don't need to explain this to me. He said, there's no question that theism answers a lot of fundamental philosophical questions.

Speaker 4:
[15:53] Could we please pause and have you lay that argument out for us?

Speaker 2:
[15:57] Sure, so the thing that has troubled modern philosophers, start with, the classic sequence in philosophy is Descartes, Hume and Kant, Descartes, the rationalist. He tries to make these absolutely certain proofs, first of his own existence, then of God's existence, and then of the reliability of the mind. By attempting to prove things absolutely and also because of one of the forms of the argument he made, called the trademark argument, which wasn't really very strong, people realized these arguments don't work. We don't have absolute proof of, maybe we have absolute proof of our own existence, but we can't get much further than that. So then you lapse into this alternative view is the empirically based skepticism of Hume. So he shows we can't know anything at all, and he argues that, and then Kant comes along and says, well, the real question here is what Hume has shown is there's certain assumptions that we make that are necessary to have knowledge at all, and we can't prove those assumptions from our empirical knowledge. So maybe there's some other way we can know them, and he wants to say that Kant says that they're categories of the mind, that they're things that the mind assumes about the way the world works.

Speaker 4:
[17:22] Sort of like lenses.

Speaker 2:
[17:23] Yes, exactly, for philosophers, it's the synthetic a priori. These informative assumptions we make about the world, they're not true by definition, but they're things like, all events have causes. Not true by definition, but it's something we have to assume if we're to make sense of the world at all.

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Speaker 2:
[19:29] There's a, there's a-

Speaker 4:
[19:29] I know it's a big topic, but-

Speaker 2:
[19:31] Yeah, well, he denies causality because you don't see, he's an empiricist and you don't see causes. You see a sequence of events.

Speaker 4:
[19:38] Through a billiard ball hitting-

Speaker 2:
[19:39] Yeah, billiard ball A hits billiard ball B. And so, okay, we want to say the billiard ball A caused billiard ball B, but Hume says, wait a minute, time out. All we're actually seeing, hang on, as the Brits say, hang on. All we're really seeing is the motion of billiard ball A, and then the motion of billiard ball B, and maybe a sound. But we're imputing the notion of causation. That's something that's coming from the mind. And then there's this whole dialectic where his imagined interlocutor says, well, but why do we see the same thing happening over and over again if there isn't some causal connection? And then he says, ah, but that's an inductive argument, and we can't prove induction either. We only have a limited sample of things. All inductive arguments are saying that we are inferring to a generalization based on limited instances or cases. All swans are white, we want to say, but we haven't seen all swans. All matter gravitates, all unsuspended bodies fall, but we've only sampled a small number of the cases in the universe of an unsuspended body doing something. That's right. So causality can't be proven by empirical observation. The attempt to justify causality by induction is based on limited sampling. Then if you try to justify induction, you end up inadvertently using causality to do so. So you end up in this tight little circle. Actually, I think it's one of the best things to teach if you're teaching philosophy, because you get people to start thinking philosophically. You start thinking about thinking and realizing that stuff that we take for granted is not to be taken for granted. We can't actually justify the most common forms of reasoning that we use all the time, because they presuppose things that can't be proven empirically. Kant says, well, you can't prove them empirically, but we can, in a sense, say that-

Speaker 4:
[21:49] Kant's trying to save us from Hume's skepticism.

Speaker 2:
[21:52] Exactly. But whether or not he does so is quite debatable. And what he does is he says, well, these propositions that we can't prove that we assume that are necessary to knowledge are part of the structure of the mind. They're part of the way the mind works. And if you ask him, well, is the mind reliable in assuming that all events have causes, or that things don't vanish without a trace, the Kantian category of substance or whatever it is, there's 12 categories and those of space and time, Kant's philosophy, he says, well, you can't really even ask that question because you're now using the mind to ask questions about the way the mind works. So he punts on that and says, we can't really even address the question of whether or not the categories of the mind which can be expressed as propositions, whether those propositions that express the categories of mind are true or false. We can't ask those questions. But of course, you can ask those questions. Are the things that we assume that are necessary to knowledge true or false? And I think what theism provides is a metaphysical grounding for to say, yes, if you presuppose the existence of God, a benevolent God of the kind that Descartes wanted to prove, but couldn't. If you presuppose such a God, you have a good reason to trust in the reliability of the mind, and therefore in the possibility of knowledge. But if you deny the existence of God and try to justify the reliability of the mind in some other way, and as Plantinga has shown, by conjoining some form of evolutionary account with strict naturalism as a philosophy, it doesn't work. There's no good reason to trust that the structures of the mind are going to be truth-tropic, that there's no correlation between those beliefs that might lead to a survival and those beliefs that are actually true. He comes up with a whole bunch of-

Speaker 4:
[23:59] The taiga example.

Speaker 2:
[24:01] Yeah, a whole bunch of examples where you're thinking something that's false that leads to your survival or you're thinking something that's true that doesn't. So there's no necessary correlation between truth and survivability. And so theism ends up being a much better basis for grounding knowledge. And this was the argument that convinced me that theism must be- It was a dichotomy. Either theism was true and knowledge was possible, or naturalism was true and no knowledge was possible, even knowledge of naturalism as a philosophy. That's right. And so it was a self-defeating philosophy.

Speaker 4:
[24:44] And planting his point isn't that knowledge is necessarily false. It's just that we now have a defeater for it, so we can't tell one way or the other.

Speaker 2:
[24:51] Right. And I wasn't- At the time, I wasn't aware of the more rigorous form of this argument that planning develops and warrant proper function. But I was encountering it in some more popular level philosophical thinkers, but it connected with me. And the other element in the version that I encountered was that these presuppositional arguments also traded on the way we as humans live. That if you think that there's a proverb that says, as a man thinketh, so shall he act. We act as though knowledge is possible. You know, this saw in philosophy courses is that Hume proved that knowledge was impossible, but then he got up from his desk and walked out through the door and not the window. You know, he acted as though he knew something. So we're acting as though we have objective knowledge of the world. And in so doing, we're acting as though the mind is reliable. And in so doing, we're therefore acting as though God existed. Because the only adequate grounding for the reliability of the mind is the postulation that it was created by a benevolent creator who made our minds to know the world the way it works. And this was something, this is why the scientific revolution happened, is that the early scientists realized that there was a principle of correlation. They had confidence that they could know the world. Because the same God who made our minds in his image, the same rational creator who made our minds in his image, built the rationality and the lawful order and the design into the world. And so, there was a principle of correspondence, that the mind was made to know the world the way the God had made it. And so, they didn't have an epistemological crisis.

Speaker 4:
[26:40] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[26:40] And...

Speaker 4:
[26:41] Just to sum that up, to use the reliability of the mind to prove that the mind is not reliable, is what some people do.

Speaker 2:
[26:49] Well, exactly, exactly. Within contemporary philosophy, where you have a huge degree of skepticism, the skepticism is a product of careful philosophical thinking, which is paradoxical and contradictory in itself. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[27:05] Yeah. As Peter Kreifte says, why not be skeptical of your skepticism?

Speaker 2:
[27:08] Yes. Why not? Why be skeptical of everything?

Speaker 4:
[27:10] And he says, well, because to be skeptical of one's skepticism is to become more certain. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[27:14] Yes. Yeah. No, Peter Kreifte is obviously a wonderful figure. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. So these were the sort of, these sort of considerations connected with my adolescent angst.

Speaker 4:
[27:27] This is amazing.

Speaker 2:
[27:27] So I couldn't have thought this through when I was 14.

Speaker 4:
[27:29] Do you have intelligent friends or are you just like, are your parents intelligent? Were they able to kind of go back and forth with you on this? Or are they just like, our son's different? Well, 14 years old is pretty young to have these sorts of things.

Speaker 2:
[27:41] I don't mean to present myself as a prodigy, more as I was deeply troubled and kind of neurotic. What Christianity did for me was it provided structures for my mind, for my thinking. I had other people, other friends, were having these very dramatic Damascus Road type conversions in high school. What was happening for me, and I didn't really settle until my first year out of college. But it was a protracted conversion. But what was happening was little by little, I was becoming normal. Other people were getting full of joy. They found God. For me, it was like-

Speaker 4:
[28:31] You were becoming less weird.

Speaker 2:
[28:32] I was getting less weird.

Speaker 4:
[28:33] Heck yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:33] I was getting less weird.

Speaker 4:
[28:36] Now, what did you make of these conversion Damascus type experiences? Did you look on them with skepticism or jealous?

Speaker 2:
[28:41] No, I thought it was awesome. I wanted that myself, but I couldn't- Did you try? Do you know what I mean? I said the prayer lots and lots of times, but I was waiting for something more to happen. I just overthought everything. I remember some time in my junior year in college or in high school, I remember where I was because I always remember what I was staring at when I was having these thoughts, so I was really in my own head. But I thought I have to stop thinking about Christianity. I just have to stop thinking about it. So I vowed I'd stop thinking about it for two weeks. It didn't take.

Speaker 4:
[29:20] Were you open to any other possible religion looking into any?

Speaker 2:
[29:24] I didn't really have a framework for considering other things at that time. I had been raised in a Catholic, nominally Catholic home. Our parish was mostly full of liberal politics. There wasn't a lot of Christianity.

Speaker 4:
[29:39] I'm so sorry. As a Catholic, I'd like to apologize on behalf of the Czechs.

Speaker 2:
[29:42] It happens in all the denominations. I picked up the Bible. That was the thing I started reading. Just to give another example, I got to the Book of Hebrews and it said, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever and I had been sensing, there must be something that doesn't change. Otherwise, this ephemeral, this transient flow of sense experiences is nothing more than that. It couldn't have any lasting meaning. Then I got to found the part in the Hebrew Bible in Exodus 3, and Moses is talking to the voice at the bush, and he says, who should I say has sent me? Then the words were, tell them that I am that I am has sent you. I thought, who would have even thought, what human would even come up with that idea of an eternal self-existent person, but that was what I was sensing was necessary. So these are not proofs. These are just what I sensed for some strange reason was necessary to make sense of things. So then the idea that, oh, maybe there is a benevolent God, then maybe my mind is reliable, then maybe I can know the world, maybe there is meaning to the world. Later I encountered those as kind of philosophical arguments or presuppositional, they're not evidential arguments for theism, they're presuppositional arguments for theism. If you posit God, then you have a basis for affirming knowledge. If you posit God, then you have a basis for objective morality. If you posit God, you have a basis for affirming some kind of ultimate and lasting meaning. And it happens that we all either live as though these things are true or want them to be true. So it's very difficult to not live as though something like theism is true. And so that was the kind of thing that connected with me as very persuasive. The alternative, I spent a semester in college, sort of really wallowing in the existential despair thing. And I read Nietzsche, we were learning Nietzsche, and I got, and it was so dark in the end. I mean, I remember my sister writing home saying she was worried about me because she'd see me staring at the, or she was a freshman when I was a junior. So anyway, I had a sort of a deep dive into some of this philosophy and realized that it was, that the only coherent view of things was theism. That you could adopt the other view, but you ended up being self-contradictory and also led to a kind of meaningless darkness.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
[35:35] No, well, probably in some philosophy class, none of that was of any interest to me. Design argument, cosmological argument, was not what I was thinking about at the time, because I was coming out of my own experience. But my first year out of college, I got a job as a geophysicist. I moved to Dallas. I had been in the gloomy Pacific Northwest, where it was raining all the time. I got to Dallas, the sun was out, there were all these can-do people. It was the 80s, Reagan was president, everyone was creating wealth and making things happen. I had settled. I not only had become, for the last couple of years of college, I was convinced Christianity was true, but I didn't want it to be true. I wasn't ready to kind of, why didn't you want it to be true? I think it was mainly lifestyle issues. I wanted to have my complete freedom. I even remember having one of my big issues that I wrestled with was, and this is ridiculous, I didn't mean for this to get so autobiographical, I'm sorry. No, it's helpful. But the Nietzschean question, why should he rule and I serve? It seemed wrong to me. It was the Nietzschean objection. It was like, because I'd wallowed in the existential stuff, I knew that a condition of my happiness was accepting the reality of God's dominion, lordship, authority in my life. But something in me recoiled against that. And so I had this presented as a philosophical question, but one of my philosophy professors said, well, could it be there's some personal issues that maybe you're not wanting to face, that you're shrouding in it? So there was some soul-searching. But I settled my first year out of college. And then I just got this incredible energy. Instead of always being introspective, I wanted, I was ready to go. I'd spent seven years in my own head. And I thought, I was convinced that God was real. I was deeply attracted to the person of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4:
[37:37] Do you mind bringing that just a little closer?

Speaker 2:
[37:39] No, not at all, sorry.

Speaker 4:
[37:40] You're deeply attracted to the person.

Speaker 2:
[37:41] Well, the person of Jesus Christ, you know? He combines these things that no human person combines. We have our hard-headed conservatives and our bleeding heart liberals. He brought the two things, truth and grace together in perfect balance, not as Chesterton said, not as a admixture, not as a compromise, a little bit of each, but full on in both. He was fully truth, fully grace at the same time. And so many features of his character brought those polarities that we find in extremes or in isolation in us normal humans together, and so many other things. But so sometime 24, 25, I'm in my first job, I'm meeting friends that have not been wallowing in existential despair like all my college friends were, and I just wanted to go. I was ready to go. I wanted to serve God. And I started to pray, Lord, use me please. And about a year later, this conference came to Dallas called Christianity Challenges the University, an international conference of atheists and theists. And it was, I heard about it the night before. I had attended a talk that was being given by some of the, one of the astrophysicists who was going to be speaking at the conference at Southern, he was speaking the night before at Southern Methodist. And I went and I heard about the conference. I walked in off the street and it was discussing the cosmological argument. It was discussing, actually, it was discussing three great questions and with world class scientists and philosophers who were divided on three panels between the theists and the materialists, agnostic atheists. And the first question was, where did the universe come from? It was the question of the origin of the universe. The second was the origin of life. And the third was the origin and nature of human consciousness, the mind body question. And what shocked me, having attended a small Christian college, was that the intellectual initiative in all three of the conversations seemed to be with the theists. And in the first panel, the very famous astrophysicist, cosmologist from Caltech, Mount Wilson Observatory, he had been a PhD student of Edwin Hubble, was Alan Sandage. He took to the podium and to the shock of many people in the audience who knew the players, he sat down with the theists and announced in his talk that he had experienced a religious conversion. He was a long, long time Jewish agnostic, well-known scientific materialist in his worldview, and announced he gave a talk on the evidence for the origin of the universe and its fine-tuning, and told his story of conversion and how it had been encouraged, predicated, inspired by, not in spite of the evidence, but because of the evidence. And talking about the evidence for the beginning of the universe, he said, here is evidence for what can only be described as a super natural event. And he meant that literally, something beyond nature. If you want to explain the origin of the material universe, you can't do it by reference to prior matter or matter independent of the universe. You can't explain the origin of physics by physics. It's something beyond, and he was very grave, somewhat grisly in sharing this. He got the sense he wasn't entirely happy about having to have changed his mind, but he had, and it made a big impression on me. And there was a similar discussion in the Origin of Life panel with a prominent scientist who repudiated his own chemical evolutionary theory, the first life guy named Dean Kenyon. And he announced at the conference that he thought it was time for the theologians and philosophers to reopen the natural theological question based on the discoveries that had been made about the inner workings of the cell and in particular, the information bearing properties of DNA, which to him pointed to an intelligence of some kind. The code pointed to a master programmer. And so this was this is where I was first became first acquainted with what might now be called the Intelligent Design Movement or Research Community. And I got to know some of those people immediately after the conference. And that's how I got into all the stuff I'm into now.

Speaker 4:
[42:20] At what point did you sort of officially give your life to Jesus Christ? Or was it a kind of gradual thing?

Speaker 2:
[42:25] I did it lots and lots and lots of times and kept thinking it's a good idea that something more needed to happen.

Speaker 4:
[42:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:31] And all my friends were full of joy. And I, you know, so yeah, you know, it was we need melancholic introspective. I was the worst. I was the worst, really. And this was my problem in baseball, too. I over thought everything. And so I go into the batter's box trying to reprise all the technique tips. And later, so I played baseball in college, but I sat on the bench mostly. And the big problem I was having was overthinking. Yeah. And then 20 years later, I was invited to play on a men's hardball team. And baseball no longer seemed important to me, so I didn't think about it that much. And I had a wonderful season. I was hitting the ball over the place and I realized, oh, I actually, you know, because I had a great swing. I was practicing all the time, you know? So yeah, this was just a, it was a liability of my temperament in early life that I've mostly overcome.

Speaker 4:
[43:21] I want to get into arguments for God's aggression. I don't want to get there too quickly, right? I want to point out the fact that many of these things that we had, that were being discovered in science, such as Big Bang cosmology and fine tuning and so on, preceded the New Atheist Movement. Oh, right. So my question for you is, what do you think it was that triggered the New Atheist Movement and what did that do and why is it now dying or is it maybe dead?

Speaker 2:
[43:49] That is a really good question, actually, because the arguments were, the evidence that was attracting me to this kind of work, that had led me to go off to Cambridge to do graduate work. My PhD was in Origin of Life Biology. I was investigating whether or not this early reformulation of the design argument based on the discovery of the information-bearing properties of biomacromolecules and the importance of those molecules to explaining the origin of life. I was discovering whether all of that might in fact provide the basis of a compelling design argument or whether it wouldn't. When I encountered this in 85, I was really intrigued, but I wasn't entirely convinced. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this during my PhD years. But the point is, all of these new developments in science, the molecular biological revolution happened in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. It has rocked the world of evolutionary biology and origin of life research. The materialistic attempts to explain the origin of both new forms of life from simpler pre-existing forms, that'd be biological evolution and the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals, that'd be chemical evolution. Those attempts have, I think, reached an impasse because of the things that were discovered in modern molecular and cell biology during that period of time. All right. So all of that precedes the new atheists. Yeah. So why did they get away with it? Yeah. With becoming this great cultural force, especially with Dawkins' claim that it was Darwin that made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. He rooted his case for atheism in the denial of design. His reasoning was very, very, by the way, I love Dawkins.

Speaker 4:
[45:48] As an individual, you mean?

Speaker 2:
[45:49] Well, I've only met him once, and that was in a book signing line. But what I love about him is that he has this beautiful clarity in the way he frames issues. By my lights, he always gets the issue wrong in the end, but he frames things so beautifully and clarifies what's at stake in the discussion. So his reasoning in the God delusion was pretty straightforward, that the strongest public evidence that we had always had for the existence of God was the design in nature. So prior to Darwin, the design argument provided a compelling public basis for belief in God. One of Aquinas' five ways, right? But when Darwin came along and explained design without a designer, namely by invoking the undirected, unguided process of natural selection acting on random variations to account for the appearance of design but not the reality of design, we now had an account of that appearance without having to invoke an actual designing intelligence of any kind, including a creator God. And so Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Post Darwin, we now know that belief in God is tantamount to a delusion. He would never say that he had completely disproven the existence of God, but he would say that he had rendered belief in God, or that Darwinism had rendered belief in God to be an incredibly improbable belief.

Speaker 4:
[47:27] I know you want to be friendly to him, and that's great, but the argument's crap.

Speaker 2:
[47:30] Oh, of course.

Speaker 4:
[47:30] It's crap because you could have all sorts of arguments for thinking God exists that have nothing to do with the design argument.

Speaker 2:
[47:36] You might have an ontological argument, you might have a cosmological argument, you might have an epistemological or a moral argument. Exactly. Yeah, but-

Speaker 4:
[47:42] And the conclusion doesn't even follow, even if you follow his premises.

Speaker 2:
[47:45] Yeah, there's so much to say about it, but he's an Oxford professor at the time, he's got a lovely accent, he's extremely well-spoken, and he frames arguments in a way that are at least superficially very compelling. And his book, The Blind Watchmaker, was really his first great book in 86. And he says, the biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. So he sets up the right issue. Is the appearance of design real or illusory? And Darwinism isn't just about the idea that things change over time. Okay, that's a rudimentary meaning of evolution that everyone accepts. Yes, things change over time. It's not even the idea that things change over time in a continuous way such that the best way to represent life, the history of life, is as a great branching tree, the idea of universal common descent. I'm skeptical about universal common descent, but that's not the key issue in play. The key issue in play is design or no design. Is the appearance of design the product of undirected, unguided processes? That's Darwinism? Or is it the product of intelligence acting in some discernible way? That's the real issue.

Speaker 4:
[49:04] Do you think the appetite for what the New Atheists had to say to us was born out from 9-11?

Speaker 2:
[49:11] I think some people have argued that the real target there was Islamic extremism, and the New Atheists were afraid to attack Islam, so they just attacked religion in general. I don't know. That's a bit of a motormongering. I really don't know about that. I think what's interesting is that when you read the books, you find that they really allied the kind of evidential arguments for theism that I make in this book, and that many people in our larger network and researchers would make who are theistic. The fine-tuning argument was already well-honed by the time the New Atheist books came out, and it had been advanced by people like Sir John Polkinghorne. These were serious figures advancing this argument, and they address it superficially, but they don't make very compelling refutations of it. Positing a multiverse turns out, as I show in Return of the God Hypothesis, not to really work because the universe generating mechanisms that are necessary to render the multiverse plausible, themselves have to be finely tuned in order to generate new universes. So, it was a system of thought that was allegedly based on science, but the scientific arguments that it posited were very poorly formulated and not very compelling.

Speaker 4:
[50:47] I would say it felt like for a long time, people wanted to do away with God. There was this idea in the air that if you did believe in God, you were naive and judgmental and puritanical and narrow-minded. That was all there, and it was almost like then the new atheists came along and they just lit the match, and we all just agreed that God didn't exist for no good reason.

Speaker 2:
[51:09] There are cultural moods right now, and I think we were in a different mood.

Speaker 4:
[51:13] That's what I wanted to get. What's happened that the mood has changed? Because I don't know any blowhard atheists who are successfully more. I know people who would say that they are atheists, and they might define that in several ways, but they're at least nuanced and careful in how they talk about it.

Speaker 2:
[51:29] I think there are a lot of atheists who want to say that the new atheist arguments were really bad.

Speaker 4:
[51:33] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[51:33] If I could just say one of them that I think is particularly bad, that Dawkins dined out on and just over and over and over again, the claim that, well, if you posit the existence of God or an intelligent designer to explain anything, then you violated Occam's razor because you've posited something that's more complex than the thing that you're explaining, and we need to affirm only explanations that posit more simple things.

Speaker 4:
[51:59] So why is that false?

Speaker 2:
[52:00] Well, first of all, just rough and ready, if that were true, it would always be wrong to posit the action of an intelligent agent to explain anything because an agent with a mind is a more complex thing than the thing that the agent has done or is doing.

Speaker 4:
[52:17] So if we went to Mars and we found an arrowhead, I don't know why we'd find that in Mars.

Speaker 2:
[52:23] Maybe we'd find something like...

Speaker 4:
[52:25] We wouldn't be able to posit a design.

Speaker 2:
[52:27] Maybe we'd find a space station, we couldn't posit a design. Well, we have a book here on the table. If we posit an author for the book, let's not say it's my book, let's say it's The God Delusion. And we say, well, Richard, what is the cause of the text in The God Delusion? Is the answer not Richard Dawkins? But wait, Richard Dawkins is more complex than the thing that Richard Dawkins has written, right? So it's self-refuting in that sense. But the fallacy here is he's misapplied Occam's razor. Occam's razor says that the principle of parsimony in explanation is that we should not needlessly multiply theoretical entities. It should not be complex in the sense that we are generating lots and lots and lots of ad hoc hypotheses. It is not a prohibition against positing a more complex entity as an explanatory cause.

Speaker 4:
[53:26] That's the best way I've ever heard that refuted.

Speaker 2:
[53:28] In fact, when you do that, if I posit a single mind to explain something, that someone else is coming along and positing multiple theoretical entities as in the multiverse, and its postulation of all of the entities from string theory, and all of the entities from the inflationary cosmology, positing a single God as the explanation for the fine tuning is infinitely simpler than all of the theoretical apparatus you need in the multiverse to account for the same thing.

Speaker 4:
[54:02] Very good.

Speaker 2:
[54:03] So, it was, this is just, I've self-triggered myself, but I wanted to talk about this because he got away with this bad argument, less than any scientific argument back and forth about design or no design or the cosmological argument. It was this repeated appeal to...

Speaker 4:
[54:22] You must have been pulling your hair out. Because laymen like myself, you hear that, yeah, fair enough, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[54:27] Fair enough. Yeah, it sounds good. No, but it's a complete misapplication of the principle of parsimony in assessing competing explanations. It's a bad use. He's not actually applying Occam's razor. This is not what Occam's razor said.

Speaker 4:
[54:42] So, before we look at arguments for God.

Speaker 2:
[54:43] Sorry. Anyway.

Speaker 4:
[54:44] No, no, are you kidding? That was gold. I'm so glad you share that. As I say, that's the best way I've heard that refuted. Before we get to arguments for God's existence, I want to ask just a sociological question, which I'm sure you don't feel yourself equipped to answer, but I want you to take a shot. Why is it that people are returning to God, or at least are looking at the God question with a seriousness with which they didn't in the past? You being on Rogan's show is illustrative of that. His not making fun of Christians the way he may have in the past.

Speaker 2:
[55:10] Well, his own very authentic exploration of these deeper questions. He's not the only prominent person in culture who's doing that. And I think that is a shift. I think one factor is that the new atheism, I think, ran its course. It ran out of steam. It overplayed its hand. There's a wonderful book by a friend and colleague, Justin Briarley, in the UK, titled The Surprising Rediscovery of Belief in God. And he tells the story of the unraveling of the new atheism, that it devolved into infighting in very particular ways. Because remember, all atheists should be moral relativists. They don't have an agreed moral framework above us all, to which we can appeal to adjudicate moral differences. So apparently, within the New Atheist Conferences, very spirited fights broke out about woke anti-woke. Yes. And there was, Dawkins was more on the anti-woke, and there was some very, I shouldn't tell all, Justin tells the stories with some juicy details. But there was a kind of moral chaos that broke out within the New Atheist movement, because they didn't have a framework by which to adjudicate moral differences. And secondly, I think they massively overplayed their hand on the scientific arguments. That the kind of arguments that were being developed within our network, were slowly, carefully, melodically being developed. And as those started to be presented, and you had some terrific figures, William Lane Craig, who's out there doing this. Not very many people beat him in debates. He's very formidable. And Dawkins wouldn't debate him. Dawkins has passed three times on invitations to debate me, including on Piers Morgan. So we've had debates in Seriatum where Dawkins was on, then Piers had me on and had me react to Dawkins, and he had Dawkins on to have me react to me. And I've been invited back. Hope that happens sometime. I may get to. But the point is, I think even a lot of atheists regarded the new atheist arguments as very thin. And so you have a figure like Alex O'Connor in the UK, who's having a bit of a rethink about that.

Speaker 4:
[57:42] Has he had you on the show?

Speaker 2:
[57:44] Not yet. We had been possibly paired to have a discussion. That would be great. But he's, I think, moving away from materialism. He's not a Christian, not a theist. Maybe something from a mutual friend told me that he's considering something like panpsychism rather than straight up materialism. But he started out in that hard-nosed new atheist group. You have Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New Atheist Movement.

Speaker 4:
[58:11] Now, has she said that she thinks there's good arguments for Christianity? Or in the beginning, it just seemed like she just decided because she wanted there to be meaning. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[58:20] I think that's right initially. But I think she's in conversations with some theistic thinkers who are saying that there's an epistemology. Your conversion has authenticity. Yeah. And there are intellectual and scientific reasons to support your beliefs as well. So I think those, I've heard those conversations are going on. Right. So, but back to the phenomenon, you have figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Jordan Peterson, and Charles Murray's book, Taking Religion Seriously, was just, he just wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia, who has become a Christian, you have cultural figures that are unexpected, Russell Brand or Jim Carrey, the comic.

Speaker 4:
[59:09] Jim Carrey said something?

Speaker 2:
[59:10] I think he's become a Christian.

Speaker 4:
[59:11] What?

Speaker 2:
[59:11] Yeah, and-

Speaker 4:
[59:12] He was like a Nietzschean for a while.

Speaker 2:
[59:14] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you, and- And beyond that, you just have people who are, well, in Britain, Tom Holland, the historian, you know, who's-

Speaker 4:
[59:23] Has he embraced Christianity? He's in the direction.

Speaker 2:
[59:26] He's, yeah, he is an absolutely wonderful person. Okay. And I was on a three-way with him, with Douglas Murray, who also, and they were presenting themselves at the time, this was on Peter Robinson's program, Uncommon Knowledge, and they were kind of defining themselves both as Christian atheists, that is to say, people who are friendly to Christianity, who saw its importance and value for culture, realized the importance of Christianity to the continued health of our culture, but couldn't themselves quite get over the line. I think Douglas is still not a believer, I think Tom is either very close or has crossed over.

Speaker 4:
[60:05] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[60:06] That would be my read. And, you know, the first chapter of Dominion is, it's like reading one of St. Paul's epistles, I mean, it's unbelievable. It's just such an insightful thing about the crucifixion, about what the cross meant, and just how important Christianity has been. His key point that we all are swimming in Christian waters and we don't know it. The woke and the anti-woke alike, you know, we have this across the political spectrum, a concern for compassion, right? Where do we get that? He said that that existed nowhere in the ancient world.

Speaker 4:
[60:41] Now you've been, I mean, because you've been an intellectual discussing these matters before it was cool, before the mood changed, if you want. So you've taken some slings and arrows from people, I'm sure seeing you as a threat, they came after you and tried to discredit you, no?

Speaker 2:
[60:56] Well, I don't know about me personally, but our friend, we have a staff writer at Discovery who edits our online science publication, David Klinghoffer, former books editor at National Review, writes for the Jewish Forward, wonderful guy. What he says of the ID team is that, he said, we got canceled before getting canceled was cool.

Speaker 4:
[61:17] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[61:19] I think because the issues have moved on a little bit to some of the things more to do with cultural Marxism, a lot of our scientists now are being left alone and we're attracting a huge amount of energy among younger rising scientists. I think there's a sense that there's a lot of momentum with the scientific research network of people that are interested in these questions about design.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
[64:28] Right.

Speaker 4:
[64:28] It's about to hit the theaters. We're going to put a link below so people can learn more about it. I'm excited about this because your team sent me it ahead of time. I was able to watch it with my wife and kids and it's incredibly well produced and it takes these very complex issues and makes them a lot more digestible, without dumbing it down unnecessarily. Congratulations on it, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[64:51] Thank you very much. You excited for the release? Well, yeah, it's going to be released April 30th. In theaters all across the country, you've got a commitment for 1,000 screens, so it'll be viewable in most places in the country. It took a long time to make. We went for the producers opted for an interesting style of storytelling that I think is really quite compelling. If people have seen the story about the financial crisis in 2008, the big short, in that film, it's actors, but they're playing principles in the story, and the principles tell the story as they intercut from one bit of testimony to another. So the story of everything is told in that way. Essentially, it's the story of the scientific rediscovery of God, or the scientific rea- more accurately, the scientific rediscovery of the evidence that's pointing strongly to God in three different fields, in cosmology, concerning the origin of the universe, in physics, concerning the fine-tuning of the universe from the very beginning, and then the thirdly, the story of the discovery of the complexity, the integrated and the nanomachinery and digital code that's been discovered inside living cells, and how that's rocked the world of many previously committed evolutionary biologists who are now thinking, maybe there is evidence of design after all. Then there's a longer story arc about how all these things are contributing to this general cultural shift towards a greater openness toward the God question.

Speaker 4:
[66:32] Will this link just point people to theaters or is it possible still for people to have the movie come to their local theater if it isn't going to be on?

Speaker 2:
[66:40] Yes, people can request the theater through, if they find that their local theater isn't carrying it, they can reach out to Fathom, is the distributor, and give us those links.

Speaker 4:
[66:57] We'll make sure they're all below so people can easily find them.

Speaker 2:
[67:02] If you would like to purchase tickets in bulk, there's a link, discovery.org/story.

Speaker 4:
[67:14] Thank you for doing this. Imagine if you were 15 or 16 and your youth group leader or school brought you to this. Would that have been-

Speaker 2:
[67:23] Well, it is a world-new shaping film. It's also a film that I think if you're a person of faith and you want to bring a skeptic, you're not going to be embarrassed by this. A lot of religious filmmaking is a little ooky sometimes.

Speaker 4:
[67:38] This is excellent.

Speaker 2:
[67:39] It's not that. It is very well-produced.

Speaker 4:
[67:42] A lot of money went into it, I can tell.

Speaker 2:
[67:43] The storytelling is great. The cinematography is fantastic, taking you deep into space, and then the animation is taking you deep into the cell, and I think the arguments are persuasively presented, and the counterarguments are also addressed. So it's not just the sound of- I had a PhD supervisor in Britain who said, beware the sound of one hand clapping. We always make sure we get the other hand in there so that people can weigh the competing arguments.

Speaker 4:
[68:11] All right. I cannot wait to talk to you about evolution, but before we get to that, could you, and keep in mind that I'm not a PhD, obviously, so help me. Let's choose one argument, one scientific argument for the existence of God, and lay it out for me.

Speaker 2:
[68:27] All right. Well, let's start with the one that I worked on the longest. This would be an argument for an intelligent designer of some unspecified kind. It can be conjoined with other arguments to make a compelling case for theism, which is what I do in the last book, Return of the God Hypothesis. But in the 1950s, we all know that Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. So we all learned about the famed double helix molecule in our high school and college biology classes.

Speaker 4:
[69:00] I have no idea what that means.

Speaker 2:
[69:01] Okay. So there's a molecule that is thought to have something to do with the transmission of hereditary information inside every cell. When our cells divide, we get a new copy of DNA. We get some DNA from each of our parents, the DNA. So Watson and Crick in 1953 were the first scientists to actually show what the structure of that molecule was. And by that time, people were suspecting that DNA had something to do with the transmission of hereditary information from parent to offspring, okay? And they were able to elucidate the structure. And it turns out that it has a beautiful double helix, the helices wrapping around each other. And along the interior of the DNA, there are chemical subunits called bases, or sometimes they're called nucleotide bases. And these bases are, well, this is what Crick discovered or realized in 1957, 1958. He advances something called the Sequence Hypothesis. And what he realized is that these subunits on the interior of the molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or like the zeros and ones in a section of software code, which is to say that they are conveying, collectively, they're conveying instructions for building key stuff inside cells. In particular, the protein molecules and the protein machines that keep cells alive. So we've got all these really intricate metabolic processes going on inside our cells, and all of those are conducted with the help of protein molecules. And when I say protein machines, there are machines in cells now that we have discovered that are like little robotic walking motor proteins. That's called a kinesin protein. It toes vesicles of materials down tracks, taking materials from one parts of the cell to another. It's kind of an automated factory going on inside our cells. We have little turbines that are responsible for producing the energy-rich molecules called ATP that provide the energy basis for all metabolic processes. They're made from little, essentially, turbines. We've got sliding clamps that are involved in the copying of DNA. In our gut, we have bacteria. The bacteria in the cell membranes have little rotary engines that have rotors and stators and O-rings and bushings and drive shafts. They look like something Mazda designed. There's this whole realm of molecular nanomachinery that is something we've discovered in life since, say, the 1970s.

Speaker 4:
[71:53] I have a question.

Speaker 2:
[71:54] All of that's built from, all those machines are made of proteins, and the proteins are built with instructions that are stored in the DNA.

Speaker 4:
[72:04] I got a stupid question. How do we see these things? What instruments are we using? You said they look like this and that.

Speaker 2:
[72:11] Well, some of the things we can see with electron microscopes, micrographs, some structures we infer from other things that we can see. So the structure of the DNA was initially inferred as a result of X-ray studies of DNA crystals, of more than one copy of a given DNA molecule. You shine X-rays through and you see what kind of pattern emerges on the other side. The pattern they got was something called a Maltese cross, a fame pattern, that we know is produced by shining radiation through a helical structure, okay? So in science, there's a lot of times we can see things directly, and other times we posit the existence of things we can't see because of our ability to explain what we can see if that thing we posit actually exists. And that's worth noting, just because we're talking about the God question, right? Science is full of unobservables. Think of dark matter. Think of quarks. Think of the Big Bang event. Think of, if you're a Darwinian, I am not, but you posit transitional intermediate forms. We posit thing, or think of the structure of the DNA, or the subatomic particles, which we can't see at all, okay? We posit things we can't see because of their superior, because on the assumption of their existence, we can better explain things that we can see.

Speaker 4:
[73:42] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[73:43] Now, if that's a legitimate epistemological move in the natural sciences, why isn't it also legitimate in what we might call natural theology? Why can't we posit the existence of a designing mind on the supposition that, if it happens that upon supposing such a mind, we can better explain what we do see in the physical world around us, whether it's the creation of the universe at the Big Bang or the information-bearing properties of DNA, which is what I was going to-

Speaker 4:
[74:14] I think I know the answer.

Speaker 2:
[74:14] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[74:15] The answer is because that thing's telling me how I can and cannot have sex.

Speaker 2:
[74:19] Well, in other words, it's not a principle epistemological objection.

Speaker 4:
[74:25] I think so. I think this is why-

Speaker 2:
[74:27] It isn't a principle epistemological objection.

Speaker 4:
[74:29] Right. If God had no demands on us, we could just call him the designer or some other name and he was far removed from us. I think many people will be very willing to go along with that.

Speaker 2:
[74:39] Yeah. Think of the way that St. Paul affirms the epistemological basis for faith in Romans 1. He says, from the creation of the world, God's eternal powers, his power and divine nature, sometimes in older translations wisdom, have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made. Okay. So what we see provides an inferential basis for affirming not only the existence of God, but certain of his attributes, his power and his wisdom. Well, we do that all the time. If we look at the Rosetta Stone, we go into the British Museum, we infer something about the existence and powers of the agency that produced those inscriptions. It's an inference. In logic, it's called an abductive inference from effects back to causes. It's a perfectly legitimate way of reasoning. It is a basis of knowledge of God. It provides a basis for the knowledge of God from the knowledge of the physical world around us. So the argument I was leading up to, if we go back to Watson and Crick, and the sequence hypothesis is that there's the realization that at the foundation of life, in the DNA molecule and in the system of information processing, that's involved in expressing that information, you have a distinctive hallmark of intelligent agency. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. Bill Gates, our software mogul up in the Northwest, says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Well, think about that. Where does software come from? Comes from a programmer, right? Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that the machine code of the DNA, of the genes, is uncannily computer-like. So we can characterize the phenomenon of interest. It's a kind of information that we know only arises from a mind. So whenever we see that kind of information, it's called specified or functional information, and we trace it back to its source, whether we're talking about a computer program, or a paragraph in a book, or hieroglyphic inscription, or information being transmitted vocally from one mind to another. If we trace that information back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life, in large biomacromolecules like DNA, is a decisive indicator of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.

Speaker 4:
[77:30] Well, isn't that begging the question? Because you just said, whenever we see information, we can trace it back to a mind. And then you seem to say, well, we have this information in the cell, therefore we can trace it back to a mind. But maybe we can't, and that would be the example of something we can't trace back to a mind.

Speaker 2:
[77:44] Well, the point is we always make our inferences in science from effects back to causes based on established cause and effect principles that are established as the result of repeated observation. So based on our uniform and repeated experience, we know of only one cause that produces specified or functional information. So when we find an instance of specified or functional information, we have strong basis for inferring retrodictively to that kind of cause.

Speaker 4:
[78:16] Retrodictively is my new favorite.

Speaker 2:
[78:18] Moving from effect back to causes. So this is an established way of scientific reasoning. And it's not a proof because maybe we'll find that there's some other cause that can produce the effect in question. But as far as we know, based on a vast amount of experience, there's only one known cause of this type of information. Notice how solidly established it is too if you think of something like the study, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That same principle is presupposed in SETI. The astronomers that are looking for evidence of an intelligence transmitting, making us aware of its existence in space, are looking for specified information embedded in a radio signal. In the Jodie Foster novel based on this contact, they were looking for the prime number sequence. The astronomers have not found the kind of information that would indicate intelligence in space, but we have that type of information inside cells. By the same logic, we should infer that an intelligence played a role in the origin of that information. Okay.

Speaker 4:
[79:31] This is an argument.

Speaker 2:
[79:32] This is an argument for intelligent design simplicitor. It doesn't get us to theism because it's at least logically possible that the intelligence thus inferred might exist within the cosmos as opposed to beyond the cosmos. It might be an imminent as opposed to a transcendent intelligence. And so in the Return of the God Hypothesis, I take on the idea is sometimes called pen-spermia, that life was designed someplace else and then seeded here on planet Earth. And no less a figure than Francis Crick himself entertained this idea in a little book he wrote called Life Itself, because he was convinced that the prebiotic environment on planet Earth was unfavorable to the spontaneous or chemical evolutionary origin of life from simpler chemicals here. So he posited that it had been designed in space and transmitted here.

Speaker 4:
[80:28] That's how compelling the evidence was.

Speaker 2:
[80:30] Yeah, yeah. And Dawkins actually floated that idea in an interview at the end of a film called Expelled.

Speaker 4:
[80:36] Yes, I'll never forget that.

Speaker 2:
[80:38] I think he lived to rue that and regret that. But nevertheless, the point is that this has been proposed. And so I took that hypothesis on. It has an obvious flaw and that is that none of the panspermia hypotheses that have been proposed actually get to the really root issue, which is how did the information arise? They simply say, well, it arose someplace in space. But the problem of the origin of information from some chemical antecedent or some chemical precursors has not been solved. It's very difficult. There are reasons and I go into them in Signature in the Cell and in God Hypothesis as to why chemistry does not produce code, that there's something else going on there that seems to be something that only intelligent agents produce. So the panspermia hypothesis ends up begging the question of the ultimate origin of information. It just kicks it out into space without solving it. But in addition, there are other evidences that have to be taken into account if you're thinking about, well, which metaphysical hypothesis provides the best overall explanation of biological and cosmological origins. We also know that the universe, as best we can tell, had a beginning. We also have good reason to think that from the beginning, the universe was finally tuned. No alien being within the cosmos can account for the origin of the cosmos itself, which is a precondition of its own existence, nor can it account for the fine-tuning of the universe, which would be a precondition of its own evolution down the timeline. So the panspermia hypothesis doesn't do a very good job of explaining the whole range of things that theism explains very nicely.

Speaker 4:
[82:25] Wow, that's amazing. I want to tell people about this book, Return of the God Hypothesis. So if you are intrigued, pick up this book, because there's a lot more to it.

Speaker 2:
[82:35] I would mention, too, Matt, just that the Return of the God Hypothesis, the new film, The Story of Everything, is really the film adaptation of the book. So if you're a reader, the book is there. If you want to get a first pass at the argument, watch the film.

Speaker 4:
[82:50] All right. Tell me what evolution means, because people mean different things by it, it seems to me. Maybe we could just begin with a general definition. Maybe the definition we got.

Speaker 2:
[83:02] That is the right question to ask, because that's where the confusion always starts, is by not defining terms. Okay. It's a good classical philosophy, define your terms. There are multiple meanings of the term, and that's where a lot of confusion comes in. The most basic meaning of the term evolution is simply the idea of change over time. Do biological organisms change over time? Yeah, sure, they do. So that's not controversial. No one is disputing that. There are different senses of change over time within biological context. You might be talking, when you're using this term in this rudimentary way, you might be referring to the simple fact that the life forms that exist on planet Earth today are different than the ones that existed, as best we can tell, from the fossil record on planet Earth a long time ago. We do not have trilobites or triceratopsis today, but we had triceratopsis in the Jurassic, check me, Cretaceous, one of those, and we had the trilobites certainly in the Cambrian period. So we have life is different now than it is today, it's changed over time. We've had evolution. Fair enough, not controversial. The other sense of evolution in this non-controversial sense is the idea that there are small-scale variations or adaptations of organisms to their environment within various, usually within limits you can think of.

Speaker 4:
[84:32] Yeah, give us some examples there.

Speaker 2:
[84:33] Well, the famous examples are the ones that are in the textbooks, the peppered moths, the coloration of which shifted in response to varying levels of atmospheric pollution in industrial England, dark to light and light and dark again. Or the shape of the finch beaks, Darwin's famous finches whose beaks have changed size and shape in response to varying weather patterns and the availability, apparently the availability of food supplies. So different beak shapes seem to favor survival of certain, when harder or softer nuts were available.

Speaker 4:
[85:19] So those that survive reproduce.

Speaker 2:
[85:21] Yeah, reproduce and right.

Speaker 4:
[85:24] Is this called microevolution?

Speaker 2:
[85:26] It's called microevolution, it's called adaptation, it's called small-scale variation within the limits of a pre-existing gene pool. It's well-established, nobody doubts it. So that's evolution number one. Okay, evolution number two. Second meaning is the idea that not only has there been change over time, but that change has been continuous and effectively unlimited. So that such that the best way to depict the history of life is as a great branching tree, where the base of the tree can be represented or represents one or very few simple organisms, maybe even one celled organisms that have morphed and changed gradually to produce all the forms of life we see today. And the branches at the top of the tree represent the forms of life on planet Earth, whether the elephants or eggplants or kangaroos, or all the wonderful things in Ozzyland, right? In Down Under. And this is the idea of continuous biological change over time. And a single tree of life is the image that best depicts the history of life, where this axis is the time axis, and this axis represents morphological form, changes in form.

Speaker 4:
[86:37] Now, is this necessarily Darwinian evolution?

Speaker 2:
[86:39] It's part of Darwin's theory, but not the whole of it. Okay? He had several chapters in the Origin, just on the argument for universal common descent. The third meaning of evolution is that there is an unguided, undirected process known as natural selection. Acting on random variations, if you're a Darwinist, a classical Darwinist, or acting on random mutations, you're a more modern neo-Darwinist that has the ability to produce all that continuous change, and that it does so without any guidance or direction.

Speaker 4:
[87:11] What explains the mutations for that kind of Darwinist?

Speaker 2:
[87:14] Well, let's hold off on that for just a second, just to get the definition straight. The key thing is that the Darwinian argument is an argument about the appearance of design. And there are lots of Darwinian, the great Darwinian examples. He has one with wolves and prey, deer. I think it's wolves and deer. The one I like to use, which is sort of an adaptation of a Darwinian argument, is just, I like to use the example of sheep. Imagine you have some very woolly sheep in the far north of Scotland. Okay? And you want to breed, a woolier breed of sheep. What do you do? Well, you take the woolliest males and the woolliest ewes, and you allow only them to breed. And then you repeat that through multiple, multiple generations and cycles. And eventually you'll get the really woolly sheep that are kind of like the ones that were in the Veggie Tales movies. You know, so woolly they fall over. But what's going on there? Well, that's, that's, that's what's called artificial selection. There's an, there's a, the, the, the, the sheep has been, certain attributes of the sheep have been maximized because of the intentional selection of the breeding pairs by, by the rancher or sheep herder. Now, what Darwin did was in effect, say, now, and if you're in, if you're in the far north of Scotland, you got a very woolly breed of sheep, you might have bred something that has an ad, that's advantageous, that has an attribute that helps it survive. What Darwin said was, this was not his example, it's mine, but it's the same kind of reasoning. Imagine instead of selecting the woolliest males and females each generation, what if instead there was a series of very cold winters, such that only the woolliest survived? Now, after 20 generations or whatever it is, you're going to get the same outcome, but there was no mind behind it. Instead of artificial selection, now you have nature doing the selection, now you have natural selection. Now, how does that get rid of design? Well, in the Darwinian way of thinking, it gets rid of design because in the 19th century, one of the most striking evidences of design that was often cited by biologists was the adaptation of organisms to their environment. Fish live in the water and they have fins and gills. Birds live in the air and they have wings. Organisms seem to have the attributes they need to survive in the environments in which they lived, and that to 19th century and prior biologists seem to be an evidence that there had been design in the placement of the organisms in their environment. Well, now Darwin comes along and he can explain adaptation without recourse to a designer, okay? It's now nature doing the selecting. Now you have a woolly breed of sheep in the far north of Scotland, and you haven't had a Scottish sheep herder doing the selecting. It's been the winters, okay? And so now we've explained design, at least the feature of design that attracted the attention of a lot of 19th century biologists without a designer. And so this is often very puzzling to the public when they hear Francisco Ayala or Richard Dawkins talking about biology is a study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose, but it's only the appearance. Why only the appearance? Well, because there is this unguided, undirected mechanism of natural selection, acting on the random variations to favor only those variations which will confer survival in a given environment. So far, so good, okay? Now, what the Darwinists do is they say that that mechanism can explain everything, okay? And what I like to ask is, well, is that adaptation the only evidence of design? And if not, does the Darwinian mechanism explain all the others, okay? It does a very nice job of explaining small scale variation and the adaptations that ensue within an environment-

Speaker 4:
[91:21] Type 1 evolution.

Speaker 2:
[91:22] Yeah, yeah, essentially, it's exactly. And what evolutionary, even leading evolutionary biologists are now acknowledging is that the mutation and the selection, and we can even bring in mutations even if we just add in them, which is the variations in the sequences of the ACs, Gs, and Ts in the DNA, random changes. Because that's now been posited as a source of variation upon which natural selection can act. And what many, even leading evolutionary biologists are asking is, can that mechanism produce not just small scale variation and the adaptations that ensue from it, but can that mechanism produce large scale morphological innovation, fundamentally new changes in form? And there is a huge skepticism about that, certainly among those of us who are proponents of intelligent design, but even among leading evolutionary biologists. There was a conference in 2016 convened by the Royal Society in London, arguably the oldest and most august scientific body in the world. A group of evolutionary biologists convened a conference to explore the need for a new theory of evolution and the need for new mechanisms that would have the creative power that mutation and selection lack, something that would complement that. One of the conveners at the end of the conference said that the conference was characterized by a lack of momentousness. In essence, the talks did a good job of characterizing the problems, but did not come up with any solutions, any new mechanisms that would have the creative power that mutation and selection lacks. And I haven't really talked about some of the evidence that the mechanism lacks the power so we can do that. But the point is that it's widely recognized now that the mutation selection mechanism does lack creative power, and therefore there's something else is needed to account for, the origin of genuine innovation in the history of life.

Speaker 4:
[93:24] So spring is here, summer's on the way, and you really start to notice how much of life happens in one place, the kitchen table. That's where the conversations happen, where the phones hopefully get put away or set on fire or just gotten rid of altogether, and where the day actually slows down for a minute. For me, being intentional about what I serve there really matters, and that's a big part of why I am happy to use Good Ranchers. Good Ranchers partners with local farmers and ranchers to deliver 100% American meat straight to your door, so you actually know where your food is coming from and you can feel good about what you're serving. Their meat is high quality and it takes the stress out of trying to stand in the grocery aisle deciphering labels and wondering what you're really buying. My good wife eats almost exclusively meat and so believe me when I say she is a meat snob and Good Ranchers most certainly passes the test which is why we eat it. Plus they've just launched something I think is quite brilliant, custom boxes which means instead of being stuck with a present assortment, you can build your own box with exactly what your family wants, loaded up with steaks for the grill, chicken for those busy weeknights or whatever cuts you reach for most, and it just shows up at the door on schedule. When you subscribe, you'll get free meat for life added to every box, and $25 off your first order with my code PINCE. That's free meat in every single box for life plus $25 off your first order when you use my code PINCE at checkout. goodranchers.com, American meat delivered. Okay, so to sum that up, and if I'm not doing it right, you do it for me. It sounds like what you're saying then is Darwin did a good job at proving microevolution, or as you've put it, type one evolution, but you do not agree that it proves what could we call it, trans-species evolution, that one thing morphs into another?

Speaker 2:
[95:12] Well, yeah, we can put some terminology on this. So there's evolution meaning change over time, and that would include the microevolutionary variations that we observe that are offered as evidence of the whole show in textbooks. Okay, there's a little bit of equivocation going on there.

Speaker 4:
[95:29] So it would be why people in Africa are darker skinned than those in Scandinavia.

Speaker 2:
[95:32] Would that? Or why you get high, yeah. Minor variations in within the...

Speaker 4:
[95:37] That would be an example of it, would it?

Speaker 2:
[95:38] That would be an example, sure. Changes in, yeah, changes in pigmentation, superficial changes in the coloration of the moths is the classic example.

Speaker 4:
[95:50] The woody sheep.

Speaker 2:
[95:51] So evolution number one is change over time. Evolution number two, and that includes microevolutionary variation and adaptation, and the fact of changes in the representation of life over time in the fossil record. Evolution number two would be the idea of continuous biological change, and with that, the depiction of life is a single branching tree, therefore what's known as the theory of universal common descent. All organisms have descended and morphed in change from a single common ancestor a very long time ago. Then the third meaning of evolution refers to not the historical pattern of change, but rather the mechanism that allegedly produced that pattern and all instances of apparent design.

Speaker 4:
[96:34] So do you deny three and two and accept one?

Speaker 2:
[96:37] Yes, but I deny universal common descent, but accept limited common descent, and I think it's an open question in different taxonomic groups as to how far the envelopes of variability are.

Speaker 4:
[96:52] What is limited, what did you call it? Limited descent, what was it?

Speaker 2:
[96:56] Limited common descent.

Speaker 4:
[96:57] What does that mean?

Speaker 2:
[96:58] Well, that would mean that all felines would probably be related by common ancestor. All dogs, they might be very different species now. One of the things that tripped people up in the 19th century was this concept of the fixity of species, but the definition of a species was somewhat artificial.

Speaker 4:
[97:19] Like language, maybe?

Speaker 2:
[97:20] Human design.

Speaker 4:
[97:21] How it changes over time gradually?

Speaker 2:
[97:23] Well, you've got all these different varieties of dogs, but dogs are just one species among all the canines. In the taxonomic hierarchy, you have species, genus, and families, orders, classes, et cetera. My view is that the higher taxonomic categories, typically when you get to order, class, and phyla, you're looking at groups that are discontinuous, they're not related by common ancestry.

Speaker 4:
[97:56] So, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[97:57] In genus and species, very typically they are related by common ancestry. Families are often at the boundary, and so there's research projects here. Are group A and group B related or not? How can we tell?

Speaker 4:
[98:14] They may not look like they're related because of the changes over time.

Speaker 2:
[98:17] We've been, I think, victim of some one-size-fits-all thinking that's come out of the Darwinian synthesis where we say, well, because we see evidence of common ancestry, of a limited ancestral connection within some groups, therefore everything is related by common ancestry. Because mutation and selection can explain modest changes, therefore it explains everything. I think that's where the fallacies come in.

Speaker 4:
[98:42] You wouldn't be of the opinion that a kangaroo and a fish have a common ancestor.

Speaker 2:
[98:47] Probably not. I haven't looked at the genomic data, but I'd be skeptical about it. Yeah, right. Then the third meaning has to do with the mechanism. That's where a lot of ID people have joined the discussion. Where we have people that accept, at least for the sake of argument, maybe more, the idea of universal common ancestry, who still believe in intelligent design. But the key question is whether or not the mechanism that's responsible for the origin of biological form of morphological innovation novelty, is undirected or in some way directed or guided or designed.

Speaker 4:
[99:21] Yeah. Now, I understand someone can believe in macroevolution and believe the whole thing was designed and planned, and then you've got people like yourself who can also agree with that. But I'm just really fascinated with this evolution question, right? Because for the longest time, we've been told that if you question it, you're an idiot.

Speaker 2:
[99:38] Well, a lot of evolutionary biologists are questioning the standard neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and there's not a really good replacement yet.

Speaker 4:
[99:47] Then it's also, you're not helped by the fact that you have certain Christians who don't understand science, who are making these postulations that make Christianity look stupid because they're wrong in what they have to say about evolution.

Speaker 2:
[100:00] Or you take up the entirely wrong issue, as if the key issue is the age of the Earth. We've had a lot of internecine battles about whether the Earth is old or young. The really important question, both scientifically and metaphysically, is design or no design.

Speaker 4:
[100:20] All right. Let's say right now, let's just give it a completely artificial number. Let's say there are 1,000 species in existence. I know there's many more. You're saying this could be traced back to, again, the number doesn't matter, but could be 100 original things that then branched out and then look very different. Maybe we're not aware that there was this one ancestor for this particular thing, but we might find that out. So then what does that mean? Did God just create those original things out of nothing? Or what's your view with that?

Speaker 2:
[100:49] Yeah, why not? Cool, and I say why not advisedly, okay? Because I just put a little chip on my shoulder just for effect for a second. Because we live in an intellectual milieu that has been dominated by scientific materialism and naturalism for over 150 years. And so our sensibilities about what is plausible have been conditioned by that default assumption of naturalism. So if we posit the activity of God as an explanation for something, anything, it seems that we're doing something that's intellectually quite disreputable. But which prior to 1859, or if you go back to the period of the Scientific Revolution, would seem entirely plausible. So a lot of times as theists, we're comfortable saying maybe God had something to do with the beginning of the universe, but we don't want any, quote, interventions after that. But as theists, as Christians, as believing Jews, we believe in a God who not only sustains the universe by the word of his power, as it says in Hebrews, but we also believe in a God who acts as an agent within the creation that he otherwise sustains and upholds. This is the essential meaning of Christianity and the incarnation, God came literally as an agent in the flesh into the world that he otherwise not only created, but is moment by moment sustaining by his power. And our Jewish friends believe the same thing. If you think about the Exodus account, and the Lord caused an east wind to blow, he affected nature. And the medieval theologians, the Catholic theologians, prior to the Reformation, prior to all of that, had a wonderful distinction that they made between the two powers of God. They talked about the potencia ordinate, the ordinary power by which God sustains the world, and which is manifested in what we call the laws of nature and the orderly concourse of nature, and also his potencia absoluta, his fiat power, by which he could act as an agent within the creation that he otherwise is upholding. And so he can act discreetly in time as well as continuously. And so we've become conditioned by the dominance of naturalistic thinking to feel somewhat embarrassed about that kind of a distinction and about affirming divine action as an explanation for things simply because it's become intellectually unfashionable. Naturalism is not a priori self-evidently true. And in fact, there's a lot of good reasons to question it and to doubt it, and a lot of good reasons to affirm theism. And once you've affirmed theism, that is to say a God who not only can sustain the universe, but who can create and to act, you need to be open to the possibility that God may have acted more than just one time. Because if we can put God's action to the very beginning of the universe and nowhere else, that feels a little more comfortable in a milieu in which divine action is a kind of embarrassing way to, invoking divine action seems embarrassing. So that's why I say it advisedly. Yeah, why not? Why not? Maybe if we have evidence. I wrote a book about an event called the Cambrian Explosion. Yeah, please break that down for me. The Cambrian Explosion is...

Speaker 4:
[104:20] This gets into why we might have evidence to think that strict evolution.

Speaker 2:
[104:25] And I want you to ask me about the limits on the mechanism because it's really, it's fascinating and people can understand it. It's really easy to understand why mutation and selection lacks creative power. But let's get, we'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker 4:
[104:37] I hope I won't prove you wrong, that I won't understand it.

Speaker 2:
[104:39] Well, you can prove me wrong. Maybe I have the wrong argument.

Speaker 4:
[104:42] But yeah.

Speaker 2:
[104:43] So the Cambrian explosion is an event in the history of life. In the Cambrian period, the Paleozoic way back in geologic time, typically dated about 530 or 520 million years ago, depending on which paleontologist you ask. And during the Cambrian period, roughly, depending on how you classify whether you're a splitter or a lumper, but two or three dozen of the animal body plans first emerge on planet Earth. A body plan is a unique way of organizing body parts and tissues. So you have an animal body plan, the arthropods, which have a hard exoskeleton. They like the trilobites or modern crabs, hard exoskeleton. You also have another body plan where the structural stability for the animal is provided internally with either a notochord or a spinal column. Those are the chordates, completely different body logic. To put a chordate together and an arthropod together, it's a different way of organizing parts and tissues. It turns out there's two or three dozen of these body plans of new animals that exemplify new body plans that arise abruptly in the Cambrian period. You look in the pre-Cambrian period, there's maybe three, the classificatory group that corresponds to body plans is usually the phyla or just below that the classes. So you go in the pre-Cambrian and you get maybe three phyla. But the body plans represented in the pre-Cambrian, don't, they're not morphologically similar to the new things that arise later. And so you've got a whole bunch of new things that have no ancestral precursors that we can point to in the lower pre-Cambrian sedimentary rocks in the lower strata. They appeared to come out of nowhere as it were. And so they appear very abruptly, geologically. Now there have been all kinds of attempts to explain why we didn't find the ancestors. Maybe they were too small, they were too soft. Maybe they were not preserved in the right kind of environments. But 160 years later, the pattern of abrupt appearance just gets more dramatic with passing time, not less dramatic. Darwin knew about some of these Cambrian animals with no ancestors. Now we know there were a lot more than he knew about. So we just get more and more, the pattern gets more discontinuous, not less. And the different versions of what's called the artifact hypothesis, the idea that we haven't found them. And the reason we haven't found the ancestors is an artifact of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation. The sampling question has been settled, they're looking all over the world. No joy. The incomplete preservation version of the hypothesis doesn't work very well either. In southern China, there's a formation called the Chenjiang Formation, where they have found small soft bodied organisms in the pre-Cambrian strata just beneath. So if you find small soft body things in the pre-Cambrian strata beneath, then clearly the depositional environments would have been sufficient to preserve larger things with hard parts. So leading palaeontologists now, in fact, two leading palaeontologists, Valentine and Irwin, either the year or the year right after I came out with Darwin's Doubt, published their own book on the Cambrian Explosion, affirming that the Cambrian Explosion is a real event. It's not an artifact of incomplete sampling or preservation. Whatever happened, we've got to reckon with it. We can't continue to say it's illusory as it were. So that's an example of dramatic discontinuity of form arising in the fossil record. It's at the higher taxonomic level, where we're talking about body plan differences. But it's very dramatic, very discontinuous. It turns out that that's not the only example of that in the fossil record. And in 2017, I wrote an article with a German paleontologist, Gunter Beckley, and of blessed memory. He passed away recently.

Speaker 4:
[109:04] I believe I had him on my show.

Speaker 2:
[109:06] Wonderful man.

Speaker 4:
[109:07] By Skype.

Speaker 2:
[109:07] Yeah, wonderful man. And we wrote an article about, I'm forgetting the count, it was either 17 or 19 total major fossil explosions in the history of life. The first turtles, the first sea reptiles, the first flowering plants, the first mammals. Just go down the list. This pattern of sudden appearance and what's called stasis, where there's limited change over time of a group, and has been the dominant pattern in the fossil record. It's a discontinuous pattern. So that's something that contradicts evolution number two, challenges evolution number two, the idea of continuous and completely connected seamless evolution. And it also raises questions about evolution number three, because we need to, what kind of a mechanism is capable of producing that amount of evolutionary change in the time available?

Speaker 4:
[110:07] Okay. Does the fossil record show that there is this change between species, the way that Darwinists want to show?

Speaker 2:
[110:16] We do have change at the level of species and genus, these lower taxonomic levels. The changes are smaller. Yes, there is evidence of continuous change. Then in different groups, that evidence of change is going to break down at different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy. But generally, by the time you get to orders, classes, and phyla, those classificatory designations or differences are designating degrees of change that are not documented as having occurred in a continuous way.

Speaker 4:
[110:50] Okay, let me ask you this. Do human beings and chimpanzees have a common ancestor according to you?

Speaker 2:
[110:57] I'd be skeptical. Okay. So do you think- I work the other end of the time scale.

Speaker 4:
[111:02] So you think that God made Adam and Eve ex nihilo, as it were? Well, I understand we need to distinguish between philosophy, science, and speculation here, but do your best.

Speaker 2:
[111:12] Well, there's an important new piece of information that's come out. We've been told for a long time that chimps and humans have a genome that's 98%, 99% similar. And on that basis, there's an affirmation of a common ancestor. The new studies, the new genomic studies are placing that number quite a bit lower. But an even more important study has just come out about what's called the proteanome. Going back to the Watson and Crick thing about genes making, coding for proteins. If you look at the different proteins that chimps and humans have, which is the output of the genomic system, the degree of similarity is dramatically lower. Now, I should have one of our own researchers just published a paper on this. It was a big research group out of Brazil in top journal. So I should have the number right at hand and I don't. So you have to forgive me. But it's quite a bit lower than, it's not in the 90s or the 80s, it's lower than that quite a bit. All right. The point there is that we were never able to account for the morphological and behavioral differences between chimps and humans on the basis of one or two percent of the DNA. So what's going on? Well, DNA codes for proteins, but DNA goes through all, but then proteins, the DNA is differently processed. So you have what's called post-transcriptional processing of information. The differences in the proteanome, in the proteins that do all this important work inside cells and bodies shows that the information in DNA is being processed differently in the different species, in this case, humans and chimps. So the difference that makes a difference is not just in the DNA. There was a fallacy of genetic reductionism in that whole way of analyzing things. So the differences between our species are actually quite stark, behaviorally, morphologically, and at the level of the proteanome. Therefore, in the way that the information in the genetic library is being processed, is DNA is essentially a library for making proteins, and the parts of the DNA can be expressed and concatenated and combined in different ways, depending on what the higher order information processing is doing, or depending on the higher order information processing that is there that is present in the organism. Okay, so it turns out we're quite different, and the simplistic argument, if high degree of similarity points to common ancestry, what does increasing levels of disparity point to? Maybe it points to discontinuity.

Speaker 4:
[114:16] Yeah, wow, that's really...

Speaker 2:
[114:18] So there's just a lot more there to consider.

Speaker 4:
[114:21] What's so tough about this is I'm watching your excellent documentary that comes out soon, The Story of Everything, and I'm sitting there and I'm watching Einstein fudge, you talked about how Einstein fudge the numbers to fit his theory, right? And I'm eating potato chips and I'm like, I don't even know how plastic is made, right? So I'm trying to understand something that I have no background in. And I think that's really where most people are coming from.

Speaker 2:
[114:46] Sure.

Speaker 4:
[114:47] Like if we were just honest, we would say, okay, look mate, I believe in evolution for the same reason I believe in Big Bang cosmology, people who are smarter than me, who seem to be smarter than me, told me that. And so I think people are reluctant to abandon their belief or acceptance of Darwinian evolution based on their faith, because that feels like a cop out.

Speaker 2:
[115:10] Yeah, sure. Not based on your faith, but I think there's scientific-

Speaker 4:
[115:13] Unless the faith teaches that-

Speaker 2:
[115:14] I think there's scientific reasons to doubt things, to doubt Darwinism that are pretty easy to understand, and that people should trust their own horse sense on this. They do their homework and read up on the topic, weigh arguments on both sides, avoid the sound of one hand clapping.

Speaker 4:
[115:30] As best as they can, yeah. But your point is that people who know stuff are now beginning to call into question.

Speaker 2:
[115:35] Yes, of course. The other thing I say is, our documentary-

Speaker 4:
[115:38] Do you like how I phrased that? People who know stuff, all right.

Speaker 2:
[115:41] Yes, exactly. Who are the people that know stuff?

Speaker 4:
[115:44] I don't know. I'd love to meet them.

Speaker 2:
[115:45] You say- Well, we live in a culture with a lot of highly specialized knowledge, and people even adjacent to people who know stuff, don't know stuff. When I was doing my PhD on origin of life biology, I was working in a philosophy of science department. History and philosophy of science department was interdisciplinary, but I got to delve into this deep scientific question that had philosophical implications. I would have people in Cambridge that would find out what I was working on, who are working at the Lensfield Road chemistry lab, would come up to me and say, what is going on in that? They would say, that whole theory has never made sense to me. I mean, how do you get from polymers in a prebiotic soup to, or monomers in a prebiotic soup to, they shouldn't even polymerize. If it's an aqueous environment, I mean, the amino acids aren't going to polymerize, but that's what it says in all the textbooks. How does that happen? I said, actually, it's a huge problem. So you'd have this kind of sense of the people that were adjacent to people who presumably knew themselves were skeptical, because it had never really been adequately explained to them. I mean, we're talking about other scientists. So this specialization of knowledge can often lead to a kind of group think where people, they genuflect to the received knowledge without having either the time or wherewithal to investigate it for themselves, and that may have some doubts of their own.

Speaker 4:
[117:23] All right. So did God make Adam out of the dirt? Did he make Eve from the rib of Adam? Like literally, is that your opinion or what is it?

Speaker 2:
[117:32] I don't know what to make of the Genesis passage on that kind of thing. But I don't think it's implausible to think that human beings were specially created. I don't know what those metaphors mean. I mean, there's deep things to plumb there, theologically and politically.

Speaker 4:
[117:47] But your point is two things can be true at once. It could be the case that this is metaphorical, and it could be the case that God specially created Adam and Eve.

Speaker 2:
[117:54] The metaphor may be capturing something that is too hard to describe scientifically to an audience of our species earlier in our history. I don't know, I don't know, the, the, the, there are things about human beings that are qualitatively different than any other form of, of organism on, on the planet, including our, our primate friends. I don't know if we should call them cousins, I don't know. The origin of language is a complete mystery from, from an evolutionary standpoint. And it's a mystery for some reasons that are pretty easy to understand. The account of language that was given that was closely aligned with some sort of Darwinian account was a Skinnerian behaviorist account, you know. What, what I'm going to try to say, I'm going to say that's wood.

Speaker 4:
[118:52] Okay. Wood, wood, wood.

Speaker 2:
[118:54] I pointed that. Well, how do I know whether the thing I've just pointed at here, the paradox is how do you establish a symbol convention, which is necessary to language without already having a symbol convention that will allow you to, by mutual agreement, establish such a convention.

Speaker 4:
[119:10] Right.

Speaker 2:
[119:11] Okay. It's a huge catch-22. So if I point at this-

Speaker 4:
[119:14] In other words, how can you have terms without concepts?

Speaker 2:
[119:16] Yeah. How can you have terms without agreed upon terms? If I say, wood, wood, wood, am I saying red? Am I saying wood? Right. Am I saying grain? There's a number of things that my pointing at that. Now, that's just with a noun. Okay? Think how difficult it gets with the tenses of verbs. How do you convey with pointing and grunting or stimulus and response something like what I would have said, the subjunctive, or what you should have done? How do you possibly convey that? This was Chomsky's great point.

Speaker 1:
[119:55] Every human language, wherever we find them, has all of these tenses built into it and every human being born to woman, comes into the world with a capacity, unless there's serious brain damage or something, every human being has the capacity to understand these different tenses. Chomsky called it the language organ, but it's not a physical organ. It's something that is mental, that we inherit. It was one of the arguments, by the way, I just found in the founders. Some of the founders argued against slavery and they argued for the equality of all human beings because they found that in the Africans that they had enslaved, they found that same capacity for language that the Europeans had. There was no difference, that every language has the same richness of potential for expression. To explain the origin of that without pre-existing languages, well, it's very, very difficult. No one has done it. There's so many things, our capacity for humor, our capacity for abstract thought, our capacity for science, for music, and there's absolutely unique things about human beings. So I see discontinuity in the genomic record. I see discontinuity in the fossil record. And I see qualitative differences between us and other human beings. So the Judeo-Christian view is that we were specially created to reflect the image of a transcendent being who also has a conscious mind and is creative seems to me to be highly plausible.

Speaker 2:
[121:43] I was always taught by Christians who were trying to talk about evolution that, all right, like you're allowed to believe in evolution, but you have to say that, you know, man and women evolved from some humanoid-looking creature that may have been irrational, but you just have to say that God planted the soul.

Speaker 1:
[121:59] On the soul, whatever.

Speaker 2:
[122:00] What do you think about that? That sounds really ad hoc.

Speaker 1:
[122:02] It does sound a little ad hoc. I mean, I guess I'm not, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the different ways of reconciling these things. But see, I'm so skeptical about macroevolution. I'm skeptical about macroevolution. I still want to tell you why. I don't think the mechanism is creative.

Speaker 2:
[122:21] You have to remember that, because I want to forget.

Speaker 1:
[122:22] Because that's very important.

Speaker 2:
[122:23] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[122:24] But the...

Speaker 2:
[122:26] In other words, you're like, look, I don't have a solution. I just think the thing you're giving me doesn't cover it.

Speaker 1:
[122:31] I just think the basic message of the Genesis account. First of all, I don't have a lot of problem with it, because I don't hold to an old earth, okay? I think that I don't hold to a young earth, okay? I don't have, and I think a lot of the problems that people have are around the days of creation being six 24-hour periods. And I don't think the Bible teaches a young earth. You get to day four just for one reason, just one exegetical reason. You get to day four, and the text tells us that God either created or caused to appear, the sun and the moon and the stars, and He made them as markers of the seasons, the days and the years, okay? So that they're time markers, right? And there's a Hebrew verb, hayah, and you can render it as either created from nothing or caused to appear. Either way, you get to the fourth day of creation, and up until that time, we don't have the time markers by which we render time on planet Earth. We mark time.

Speaker 2:
[123:29] And isn't this Augustine's point? I think this first came up in him.

Speaker 1:
[123:32] I think Augustine made this point. Yeah, I think he did.

Speaker 2:
[123:34] In other words, it's not backpedaling in the face of modern science.

Speaker 1:
[123:37] No, no, no.

Speaker 2:
[123:37] Some of this, at least, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[123:38] People have seen this for a long time. And we mark time with the movement of the sun across the ecliptic, across the arc of the sky. And in the most rudimentary primitive way, we have solar denominated days. We still have solar denominated days. If the sun is either not visible to us or not yet created on day four, then what are the days, the yombs of creation? They can't be solar denominated days. Maybe you could argue, well, day four, five, and six are. Well, but you've got three days before that that clearly could not have been. So we have to be very careful about imputing our notions of time onto the divine time scale of the days of creation. And there are very conservative biblical scholars who have affirmed that same point. This comes from a careful reading of the text, not trying to allegorize everything. And yet, it's clear that in my view is that in the Genesis account, there's a clear sequence that comports very nicely with our understanding of natural history starting with in the beginning.

Speaker 2:
[124:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[124:44] Okay. The Bible affirms that was the beginning. And now lo and behold, after 25 centuries from the ancient Greeks, well, behold, the astrophysics has affirmed the same thing.

Speaker 2:
[124:58] People who don't know much about Thomas Aquinas often say, well, Aquinas wasn't a philosopher. He was merely an apologist for whatever the Catholic Church had to teach, which is nonsense, of course. He disagrees with Anselm's argument.

Speaker 1:
[125:08] The Catholic Church used him as an apologist.

Speaker 2:
[125:10] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[125:11] Such a good philosopher.

Speaker 2:
[125:12] But I imagine that people say something similar of you. They would say, you're not a scientist, you're not a philosopher. Like you're just an apologist for whatever the Bible has to teach. And so what do you say to that? I mean, would you really follow the evidence where it leads, if it did lead to a common ancestor?

Speaker 1:
[125:28] You're pressing me to answer questions about the Bible, which are essentially my personal opinions. My work is mainly in philosophy and science, or the combination of the two. So yeah, I do think the Bible is credible across the periods of history that it talks about. There's tremendous evidence for the historical reliability of the Bible in different periods of biblical history.

Speaker 2:
[125:49] But if it could be shown more concretely than it has been up until this point, that we do have a common ancestor. And I know you're saying you think it points in the opposite direction. But if it does, would you have to abandon your Christian faith? Is it that contradictory?

Speaker 1:
[126:04] No, no. There are many people that hold to the theory of intelligent design that accept common descent. But the key question in the question of biological origins is the question about whether there's evidence of design or not. And that's where the analysis of the creative power of the mechanism is so important to understand that.

Speaker 2:
[126:25] So you want them to talk about this. Okay. Sum it up. Simplify it for poor me. And then let's explain.

Speaker 1:
[126:32] Yeah, yeah. And then we can talk about something else. But, yeah. One more thing about just the point about, are you an apologist, you know, or a polemicist, or a...

Speaker 2:
[126:47] Propagandist.

Speaker 1:
[126:47] A propagandist. The idea that, well, Darwin said that his great work, his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, is a masterpiece. He said that it was one long argument for the idea of descent with modification by natural selection. Newton started the Principia by stripping the bark off of the received theory of gravitation, the vortex theory of Descartes. The theory of vortices is beset with difficulties on many sides, and he proceeds to make an argument. Great works of science are not divorced from argumentation. They depend upon argumentation for their prosecution. I think we've gotten the idea that science is this kind of, it's this positivist idea of the men in white coats and they're sitting there, they do their experiments, and the theory jumps off the experiments, and then the truth emerges from the data without a human contribution, without interpretation, and without any need to argue with other scientists about how best to interpret the evidence. And so being a polemicist or an apologist is also being a good scientist. There's an Italian philosopher of science that I like very much named Marcello Pera, not Opera, but Marcello Pera, he's not Irish. And he says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence. So the libel that you're being a polemicist or you're being an apologist for a point of view, I think is entirely misses the nature of science itself, that scientists like everybody else have to argue for a point of view. And that's why it's so important to keep science open and free for that kind of disputational method because, and this is right back to the namesake of the podcast, you know, with the medieval philosophers, they would make their argument, but then they would address each of the objections in turn as part of that medieval disputational method.

Speaker 2:
[129:01] And take them seriously.

Speaker 1:
[129:02] And take them seriously. That's a fantastic way to get to the truth. So anyway, I just had to-

Speaker 2:
[129:08] That's good.

Speaker 1:
[129:09] You've triggered me again.

Speaker 2:
[129:09] Well, whenever I trigger you, apparently, you do a great job, so I'll keep trying to trigger you.

Speaker 1:
[129:13] So finally get back to why the mutation selection mechanism lacks creative power.

Speaker 2:
[129:17] All right. And again, you get to talk to me like I'm five.

Speaker 1:
[129:20] Okay. In my book, Darwin's Doubt, I lay out four different reasons. I'll give you two right now just to give a flavor for this. Once we realized that hereditary information was being stored and transmitted in the form of digital code in DNA. And that the whole of life was dependent upon information stored in a digital form. It at first suggested a means by which new variation could arise in the process of evolution. And it therefore caused a great sigh of relief among proponents of Darwin's basic framework. In the immediate wake of Darwinism, around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, there was a lot of, there was acceptance of evolution in the sense of one meaning one or meaning two, but not meaning three. A lot of, there was a lot of skepticism about the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection being creative. Because it wasn't clear where the new variation come from upon which natural selection would act. When mutations were discovered, and when DNA and the structure of DNA was discovered, and the idea about mutation could be linked to changes in the genetic alphabet. If you've got A, T, C, G, and then those letters get mixed up, well, then maybe you're going to produce a different kind of protein that will make, and maybe most of those will be deleterious and harmful, but maybe occasionally you'd get a new one that would confer a new trait on an organism. So now we've got something that can be, makes the mechanism creative again.

Speaker 2:
[131:04] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[131:06] All right. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, thinks that what Watson and Crick has discovered, well, at first, they breathe a sigh of relief. The problem is, is we realize that the information is stored in essentially a digital way. We also simultaneously are learning a lot about digital communication in the computer world. There's a conference that's convened in 1966 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, convened by a group of MIT mathematicians, physicists and computer engineers and evolutionary biologists. The conference became known as Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinism. Here was the worry. The worry is that if the DNA system, if DNA is part of an information processing system, that's not dissimilar and in fact very similar to the information processing systems that we use with software and hardware, we know a lot about those systems and what happens if you subject the original sequences to random changes. I like to ask computer programmers, I just like to ask audiences this question. If you have a section of software code for making your favorite app or program or underlying the operating system on your iPhone, and you start changing the zeros and ones, what will happen? Will you change it enough to create a new program or operating system first, or will you break it first if you start randomly changing things? If there are computer programmers in the audience, they always start laughing. It's an obvious question. We know that if you start randomly changing a section of functional digital code for building some functional outcome, and you start changing it randomly, you're going to degrade this information that's there to the point of non-function long before you will ever change it enough to build something functional. This was a problem that was highlighted at the Wistar Institute's conference as it relates to the information in the computer world. The computer scientists and the mathematically inclined scientists were challenging the biologists to say, if what you guys are telling us is true about the informational nature of life, we are skeptical about what you're telling us about how life evolved. Because the neo-Darwinian mechanism relies on the random changes in the digital characters in the DNA. And remember, that precedes the action of natural selection. You've got to change things into some sort of, you've got to change the sequences into something functional so that they can be preserved and selected and passed on. But those random changes have to happen first. And if the other part of this is that, and there's a reason that it's inevitable that you're going to fall off the functional plateau into the abyss of non-function. And that is because in any system of digital communication, the number of ways to go right are minuscule compared to the number of ways there are to go wrong. So that probabilistically, with each additional change, you're going to be more and more likely to fall into that functional abyss. And so systems, whether it's software code or human language or the DNA protein sequence, that have that kind of informational constraint are repeatedly subject to this problem of random change in this, what they call a vast combinatorial space of possibilities. You're going to inevitably fall into the abyss before you find something new. And that is turning out to be not only what you'd expect based on our knowledge of computer, the computer world or natural languages, it's being borne out with experiments. There's a researcher in Israel, also sadly, a blessed memory, died recently back in the, I think it was 16, Daniel Taufik. And he was doing experiments on protein, structures called protein folds. And he found that you could, you could mutate and change them, provided the fold stayed the same.

Speaker 2:
[135:34] Got you.

Speaker 1:
[135:34] You could get variations on those proteins. But if you change them enough to change the fold, after very few sequence changes, they'll die, they'll break. They would become thermodynamically unstable.

Speaker 2:
[135:46] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[135:46] And so it's exactly the analogous problem to the one that you have in the computer world. Where if you start accumulating random changes, you will destroy the structure and function you have initially, and long before you would change it enough to produce a new protein structure.

Speaker 2:
[136:05] Right. So this is again, the argument against macroevolution.

Speaker 1:
[136:09] Well, it's showing that there's a clear limit to the amount of change that can be produced by random changes or the amount of information. You're going to degrade information, not generate novelty, not novel information. And then there's an analogous problem with the level of body plans as well. Maybe I won't go into that, but it's a something called developmental gene regulatory networks that are necessary to build animal forms. And they also are highly resistant to the kind of change that would be necessary to build a new body plan.

Speaker 2:
[136:38] So where do you expect Darwinian evolution to be in 50 or 100 years? What do you think people will be saying about it?

Speaker 1:
[136:47] I actually think it's already dead.

Speaker 2:
[136:49] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[136:50] And I think a lot of people know it's already dead. Interesting. Let's call it, let's be really precise. Neo-Darwin, the theory, the modern synthesis, as it's called, of neo-Darwinism. There was a 2004 book, 20 years ago, MIT Press, two leading evolutionary biologists saying that neo-Darwinism lacks a theory of the generative. Does a nice job of explaining small scale variation, but it lacks a theory of the generative. It still lacks a theory of the generative. In 2016, at the Royal Society Conference, the first evolutionary biologists to speak, an Austrian biologist named Gerd Muller, he enumerated the explanatory deficits of neo-Darwinism. He highlighted five. One had to do with the abrupt appearance of novel form in the fossil record, but a lot of it had to do with the lack of creative power of the mutation selection mechanism. People in the field know it's not working, and we still teach it in high school and biology classrooms, but I think the word is getting out. You asked before about the demise of the new atheism. I think one factor in that is that Dawkins hitched his wagon to Darwinian thought. Remember it was Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. With so much high-level skepticism about Darwinism being expressed, I think inevitably some of that percolated through and said, look, the foundation of this atheistic argument is not very strong.

Speaker 2:
[138:23] So why is it, because I've had people on my show before and they do not believe in Darwinian evolution the way Dawkins believes in it, but would never say it publicly because they know they would commit career suicide.

Speaker 1:
[138:35] Right.

Speaker 2:
[138:35] Why is it that you can't come out and say what he would like to say but can't, but you could say, well, there's a multiverse or you could debate how the universe came into existence, steady state theory or oscillation and this sort of stuff.

Speaker 1:
[138:49] I think that's shifting, first of all. I had an experience in 2004, more than 20 years ago, where I published one of the first peer-reviewed articles advancing the theory of intelligent design. My argument was about the Cambrian explosion and the information that would be needed to build all those animals, arguing that that was actually providing an instance of the action of an intelligent agent, that we know that information always comes from a mind. We're seeing a vast expansion, explosion in the amount of information present in the biosphere. That looks to be an instance of intelligent design in the history of life. It went through peer-review. It came back the first time. I had to make some changes and improvements, corrections. I made those to the satisfaction of the reviewers. It got published and it was quiet for a week, and then the lid came off the Smithsonian. The editor who published it was viciously persecuted and eventually left the Smithsonian. His name is Richard Sternberg. He had two PhDs, has two PhDs in two different fields of biology. That was 2004. Now we have young proponents of intelligent design who have gotten their PhDs, they've gotten post-docs, they've gone through the academic gauntlet, they went to tenure, and now they have tenure, their own labs, and PhD students of their own. That's a picture of generational change in the sciences. I think that's starting to happen.

Speaker 2:
[140:25] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[140:25] I think there's still plenty of people who would like to prevent that from happening, and so we're-

Speaker 2:
[140:31] But why is this such a hot topic in a way that the beginning of the universe isn't?

Speaker 1:
[140:35] Well, I think the beginning of the universe is a hot topic, and we should get to that, because it's become hot again for some interesting reasons. There are similar reasons. They have to do with metaphysical pre-commitments. I have a former debating partner- Krauss. No, well, Krauss. Yes, there's Lawrence Krauss, but a gentleman that I always enjoyed having discussions with, Michael Ruse.

Speaker 2:
[140:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[140:58] And Ruse died last fall. He was always very kind to me, even though we were on opposite sides of this issue, but he wrote a very important book. He was a Darwinist, philosopher of biology. He said that Darwinism, in one of his books, he said that Darwinism, for many of my colleagues, functions like a secular religion. Well, that's easy to see why. It answers one of the fundamental questions that every philosophical or religious system of thought must answer, which is what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes? It answers that question for life, which is something that's really important for us to understand. And so, I think there's just a kind of a human thing going on. It's become, Darwinism became the dominant way of thinking in biology from the late 19th century forward. It has clear metaphysical implications that are generally affirmative of philosophical naturalism and materialism, and generally understood to be at least a challenge to theism. And so when you start challenging a scientific theory that is loaded with those metaphysical implications, people that hold to it are going to react the same way that people like you and I would respond if somebody challenged our religious beliefs. And so, I think the whole discussion of-

Speaker 2:
[142:16] And I figured that was the reason. I just wanted to get you to say it.

Speaker 1:
[142:18] The whole discussion, yeah, I probably explained it in more detail than it needs. The whole discussion of origins is fraught with larger philosophical and religious implications, or anti-religious implications. And so, it's a conversation that's more difficult to have in a calm manner, which is why I really appreciated Michael Ruse. He was able to do that. Not everyone is. And there are lots of people who have equated philosophical materialism with the practice of science itself, such that if you challenge a theory that has implications that are in turn challenging to materialism, you are challenging science and really ought to be booted out of the guild. And so, that's been the kind of logic that has led to a lot of the cancellations of people like Sternberg and...

Speaker 2:
[143:05] And the fellow who endorsed your book, the atheist who said that he wishes it were true that God existed.

Speaker 1:
[143:12] Oh, Thomas Nagel, exactly. Yeah, you know, he was skewered on the cover of magazines. There was the Weekly Standard. Well, actually, the Weekly Standard was reporting on the skewering, but they had a cover story about the burning of an atheist or something. You know, they had him bound and tied up in a cartoon and showing all the other atheists attacking him. So, yeah. But that was 2012. I think things are shifting.

Speaker 2:
[143:41] Yes. And what do you see in academia that suggests that?

Speaker 1:
[143:44] Well, I see a lot of younger, very bright people, first of all, who are interested in exploring biological questions from a different framework. If life, you have this whole phenomenon called systems biology, which is essentially applying engineering principles to understanding how biological systems work. And it is implicitly pro-intelligent design. It implies, you know, you can only understand life by using engineering concepts. Maybe biology, maybe living systems were engineered by an intelligent agent in the first place. And so I think there's some of that going on in a lot of young people, young talented scientists are thinking, this whole 19th century reductionist, materialist way of looking at life has really run its course. It's run out of steam. We've got, you can't even describe the information processing system in the cell without using words that are laden with teleological import. We have the translation system, we have the transcription system, we have code. If you can't describe life without imputing teleology to it, maybe there was a purpose behind it after all. And that I think, so there's maybe a more fruitful way to describe life. I think a lot of people coming into science are eager and hungry for that. And so there's a flood of younger, talented people. And at a certain point, the trickle becomes a rivulet, becomes a stream, and you can't cancel them all. And so I think that's part of what's going on.

Speaker 2:
[145:14] Well, as we wrap up, I would like you to tell people why they should go and see this movie. Obviously, at Daily Wire, we've had Matt Walsh's book, Am I Racist? It came out in theaters, and it was so important that people go and support that. Not just so that movies like that can continue to be made, because it was a bloody great documentary, as is this.

Speaker 1:
[145:33] Well, thank you for saying that. I would mention we've been having a really deep conversation about evolution and the different meanings of evolution and the reasons for skepticism and its metaphysical implications. There's actually very little in this particular film about the question of biological evolution. There's a little bit about the molecular machinery, the miniature machines that Michael B. He has made famous, and there is a little bit of a gentle critique of the Darwinian account of those machines. But the film is really about the origin of the universe, which is more of a cosmological discussion, and then the origin of the fine tuning of the universe, and then the origin of the first life, which is not so much a question that Darwin addressed, but the question of the very first life. How did you get to the first life from simple non-living chemicals? And there's a theory called chemical evolution, separate from Darwin's biological evolutionary ideas, that has been popular in the scientific world since the 1950s, except that it's really been in a state of impasse since the 1980s. And that discussion bears on, it's just fascinating, that what the director and the producers do is they take you inside the cell and let you see the intricate processes that are taking place, the information processing and the miniature machinery and the factory-like distribution of materials. And you can't really see that and walk away with the same worldview. If you come in thinking there's no God, there's no evidence of a guiding hand or a creator, a designer of any kind, it's really hard to look at, to actually see what's going on and not think, hmm, maybe there is a mind behind all this. So what the film does is it compiles, it tells the story, the stories of three great stories of three scientific discoveries that changed the mindset and the worldview of leading scientists and move them away from a materialistic atheistic mindset towards a mindset that was much more open to the idea of a creator behind the universe. Then it shows how if you synthesize the evidence of these three different discoveries, about the beginning of the universe, about its fine-tuning, and about the intricate information-bearing processes and systems and machines that are necessary to explain the origin of life. If you synthesize all that, it really adds up to a kind of theistic conclusion. It's pointing in a God-friendly direction. There's a wonderful conclusion to the film that's aesthetically very beautiful, that conveys not only the evidence but also the beauty of creation and reprises at the end the key stories that you will have seen by that point with The Scientist. So it's got great storytelling. It's got a very persuasive argument. And it's also, I think, just aesthetically very beautiful experience. One of the reviewers said it was a cinematic experience.

Speaker 2:
[148:43] We have a lot of people who watch the show who don't live in the United States. Where will it be available and when after it's been on the big screen?

Speaker 1:
[148:50] The producers are negotiating deals for what they call home entertainment, which is essentially just digital releases on various platforms. And the company they're talking to is, I think, poised to release it on multiple platforms. So I think it'll be pretty easy to find. And for right now, if you just Google The Story of Everything, you'll find the trailer and the trailer will lead you to places where you can get- Yeah, the link below where you can get tickets and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2:
[149:15] Yeah, great. Well, thanks for the hard work you've put into it. As we wrap up, where can people learn? I mean, we've talked about the film, but where can they learn more about you? What books would you have them read? Do you have a website?

Speaker 1:
[149:26] Sure. There's a website with my name, I think stevencmeyer.org. But I think the best website that's just loaded with information is the website for the book, returnofthegodhypothesis.com. It has my debates, lectures, animations. I think we even have a playlist. I had a rap artist come to my office the day before yesterday, and he had done a rap on the whole design debate. All right. He even worked the word specified complexity in rhyme. Go. So I think we even have a playlist of intelligent design in poem and verse. There's a slam poet that's gotten into this. But there's just lots of information there. Short articles that can be easily digested. I had an op-ed in Newsweek distilling the whole argument of Return of the God Hypothesis in 750 words. So it's a wealth of information, and it's a porthole into the work. Not only my work, but I'm the synthesizer in chief in the ID, the Intelligent Design Research community. What I synthesize is the work of a lot of our other scientists and scholars.

Speaker 2:
[150:35] So now I know you've done a lot of debates. Is there one debate out there that you would have people go watch? And is the one you talked about at the beginning of this book with Krauss, is that unfortunately?

Speaker 1:
[150:43] That was my most embarrassing moment.

Speaker 2:
[150:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[150:45] I got a migraine at the beginning of the debate.

Speaker 2:
[150:47] Is it out there somewhere?

Speaker 1:
[150:49] It's online. You can go watch that.

Speaker 2:
[150:51] It's owned, but you could.

Speaker 1:
[150:53] I think some of the things that people might enjoy most are the conversation with Rogan that I had. I think people will enjoy this conversation. This has been fantastic. And the recent conversation I had on Piers Morgan's program, I had a debate with Michael Ruse on a program called Think Tank. That was a PBS program that I think was very clarifying on both sides. Michael did a good job. I thought my side was okay. It was good. But I've done lots of them, and there's a playlist of debates so that people can find them online.

Speaker 2:
[151:28] Thank you so much for taking the time to fly out here and sit down with me. It's been really fast.

Speaker 1:
[151:32] Unbelievable conversation. I thought we would take a break somewhere in the middle. But one thing just flowed seamlessly into another. Thank you. Great questions. Yeah.