[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm speaking with philosopher Peter S. Williams about his recent book an informed cosmos essays on intelligent design theory. Based in Southampton, England, Williams is assistant professor in communication and worldviews at NLA University College at Gimla Colin in Norway. He speaks internationally on topics in philosophy, apologetics and intelligent design. Peter, welcome to Idea the future.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to join a show that I've been listening to for years.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Oh, excellent. Well, you've written several books throughout your career so far, and the latest happens to be just published by Wif and stock this year. It's called an informed Cosmos essays on intelligent design theory. Now, obviously, this came up on our radar and you got some early interest from Stephen Meyer, and we'll talk about that shortly. Our very own philosopher of science, Stephen Meyer, wrote the foreword to your book. And so I'm really happy to have you on the podcast to talk about some of your book's insights. Let's start with your background. Perhaps in your book you talk about coming from a theistic evolution mindset. Growing up, you and your parents were comfortable with both the orthodox scientific account of origins and a belief in a theistic God. Tell us about that.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Well, my parents were both Christians who met at teacher training college, where they were training to be science teachers back in the very early 1970s. They qualified, and I came along fairly soon thereafter, and so grew up in this christian home with two science teachers. For parents. Indeed. My dad used to take geology field trips out to a little island just off the south coast of England called the Isle of White, which is famous for its jurassic coastline, where you've got these sedimentary rocks that have been pushed up onto the side, and you can kind of literally take a walk back through millions of years of history, and it's the best place in Europe for finding dinosaur skeletons and so on. So that was kind of the milieu that I grew up in, as you say, comfortable very much with the orthodox scientific account of the age of the universe and the age of the earth and evolutionary theory and so on, but also very comfortable with believing that this world had been created by the God of the Bible.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And so comfortable, in fact, that you had a teddy bear named Dr. Brunovsky, did you not?
[00:03:06] Speaker A: I did. Brunovsky was a scientist who did one of the very kind of early television documentaries in England that were explaining science for the layman, as it were. It was a kind of BBC version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, if you like.
And Brunofsky had this show that the BBC did, and then a book of that show that my parents had and still have to this day. The book and the show were both called the ascent of man, and it kind of went through history from a kind of scientific viewpoint. And, yeah, as a kid, I had a little teddy bear, red knitted teddy bear named after Dr. Browski.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Okay, well, so you grew up on a steady diet of popular science writers, you note in your book, including Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, our great friend Sally Ferguson, Stephen Hawking, John Polkinghorn. What was it like to absorb the thinking of these authors? And did it ever give you an awkward feeling when it came to your theistic belief, or did it seem to be one and the same or two separate things?
[00:04:22] Speaker A: I think when I was getting old enough to start getting into these popular science books in the 1980s, basically, it seemed to me that science was increasingly pointing in a kind of theistic, friendly direction.
Big Bang theory had become kind of standard orthodox science by then, and that seemed to kind of raise questions that the ancient greek idea of an infinitely old universe perhaps avoided.
And scientists were starting to talk about the fine tuning of the cosmos and sort of rediscovering a design argument that had been displaced by Darwinism at the biological level, but then kind of rediscovered in the broader framework of physical reality at this kind of cosmic level. And so reading folks with different worldviews talking about these things, as you know, Paul Davies coming at it from a kind of agnostic worldview viewpoint. Richard Dawkins from an atheistic viewpoint, someone like John Polkinhorn was a christian quantum physicist termed theologian. And so it was something that I picked up fairly early that different people's worldviews also kind of affected how they interpreted the science, what kind of framing they put on the science. And the science didn't kind of interpret itself, even though it was also something that could point you towards interpretations of reality. Science didn't get you the whole thing, that there was this kind of philosophical framework needed for science, understanding what science was doing, understanding what science kind of pointed to an interpretation of reality. But that had to be kind of go hand in hand with this kind of deeper or broader kind of philosophical level of thinking as well. And perhaps not too surprisingly, I got into philosophy when I went off to university eventually. And I think that kind of reading an interest in science and then the philosophy of science kind of was something that I brought with me into my philosophical thinking, yeah.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: And it sounds like it was a valuable lesson to learn to understand the connection between the scientists and their work and then the worldview from which it emanated.
I'm sure that did you favors later on. Well, at what point did you discover or become aware of intelligent design theory?
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Yes, that would have been in the kind of mid to late 1990s.
And I particularly became aware, first of all, of the argument about information in DNA, reading articles by folks like Nancy Pearcey. I particularly remember an article of hers on that issue. And then I also started discovering some of the early articles of Stephen Mayer. And I was particularly interested at that stage on the philosophy of Science question about what is science? And kind of questions of the so called demarcation issue of can you demarcate a hard and fast line between what's science and what is not science, what is, say, pseudoscience, or what is philosophy rather than science? And so on. And so I was really getting into the whole discussion about what is science? Would intelligent design theory, for example, count as science? Or was the idea that it was science a kind of a mislabeling? And really it's some sort of form of philosophy or theology or whatever. And I came to think that these id guys seem to have the best of this argument about defining science and not defining science in a way that kind of prejudges what the conclusion of your investigation is going to be, having, a so called kind of open philosophy of science, the whole debate about methodological naturalism, was that a good part of one's definition of science or not? And I thought that probably not.
And so that opened up for me. Then the question, okay, well, if the Ide folks have got their philosophy of science right, they're sensible on that. What other things might they be right about?
And so I kind of came into the discussion through thinking about what really I would now view as a very kind of secondary issue in the discussion, the question of does intelligent designer theory reasonably count as a scientific theory or approach nowadays? I would say, actually, the real Germaine question is not how do you label this? What kind of discipline does this fall under? But is it true?
Right.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Well, I like how, as part of your argument that intelligent design is a scientific pursuit, you parse out the difference between intelligent design and intelligent design theory. You give a simple definition for id, the science of detecting design. I like that. And you remind us how that method is already being used in several different sciences. Can you explain how you separate out these two and why that's important?
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So as you say you've got the kind of science of how do we go about reasonably making inferences to design as the best explanation for some set of data that we have? And that's something that's done in lots of fields, lots of disciplines, including scientific disciplines.
Indeed, one of the chapters of the book is basically a paper that I published some years ago in a philosophy journal, looking at this question of how we go about making design inferences, looking at William Dempsky's work on specified complexity. But what I did was show a number of examples of scholars who are atheistic scientists who disagree with intelligent design theory, but show that they either implicitly or indeed explicitly use specified complexity as a way of inferring to design, and then also showing a number of theistic evolutionists who, of course, disagree with intelligent design theory, but showing that they use specified complexity as a way of ruling in design. So there seems to be this kind of general acceptance, either explicitly or at least implicitly, that that's a good way of going about detecting design. And it's applied in all sorts of different scientific fields, from forensic science or archaeology or forensic engineering or cryptology or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and so on. And so there's actually kind of a common ground there.
Where it gets controversial is when you say, what happens if we apply that scientific method outside of the social sciences or outside of disciplines like forensic science and so on, and apply it in biology or cosmology?
If we just take that agreed test and see, is there data within the realm of nature that we're studying cosmology or biology or abiogenesis or studies or what have you, that would also pass through that same test.
And then really, you've got a very simple argument for intelligent design, which is saying, first premise, we think we've got a reliable test for design.
Second premise, we think we've got some data from within nature that passes that test. Well, if those premises are both true, then it immediately follows that nature gives you evidence of being designed in at least some instances.
And the more and more that you think that happens, the more you think you can see that in the world around us, you get towards thinking, actually taking a design perspective on the world. And it leads to a kind of research program of where, for example, do we draw the lines between the different layers of reality, and where, in that do we trace information, this kind of specified complexity? Can we parse kind of what the resources of nature can do without help from intelligence?
Or when we have to infer it, the kind of program that Michael B. Talks about in trying to draw what he know the edge of evolution and saying, okay, maybe you might think that we have this kind of basic framework that the fine tuning of the cosmos points to of design, but within that framework, there are things that obviously processes that follow their own laws that we can describe scientifically and so on, but there are things that those resources can achieve without additional input. Clearly.
And some of that is described by standard darwinian theory. But where do we think we draw the line of what it can't achieve without additional kind of intelligence helping it, as it were?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. And I do appreciate you pointing out the importance of looking for that common ground.
We're already looking for design in these places. Let's apply the same principles and explore it in other, harder sciences, something that many are reluctant to do. But I think that's changing.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: That reluctance comes from philosophical assumptions that basically say, no, you're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to draw those kind of inferences, or indeed assume that the world can't be like that, so there's no point in looking.
But this kind of open approach to the philosophy of science is saying, well, let's not make up our minds in advance.
That's something that young Earth's creationist position might be accused of doing. It starts with a particular reading of particular scriptures and then takes that as a kind of pair of glasses to go and look at the world just as much as a kind of hardline philosophically. Darwinian approach to nature says nature must be able to do all of its own creating. So there's no point in talking about design. But actually, if you think you've got some good tools for inferring design from data and you just say, well, maybe there's design out there to be detected, maybe not, how should we find out? Why don't we actually go and look at the evidence?
Right. That seems to be the more, I would say, kind of scientific approach to the issue.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Well, your book introduced me to philosopher Mary Midgley. I had not read any of her work before. One of the quotes you include stood out to me. She says, this whole reductive program, this mindless materialism, this belief in something called matter as the answer to all questions is not really science at all. It is and always has been just an image, a myth, a vision, an enormous act of faith. And I thought that was beautifully put in your book. You share quote after quote from materialist thinkers owning up to this very idea. Even Darwin, you point out, made the assumption that natural selection was limitless in its possibility. He says, what limit can be put to this power acting during long ages, favoring the good and rejecting the bad? I can see no limit to this power. Where did he go wrong with his assumptions?
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Well there in that quote, Darwin shifts from saying he saw no limit to what his evolution by natural selection could accomplish to saying that we should assume that there was no limit. That's the kind of shift that he makes. And then he tries to put the burden of proof on the person who doubts his theory, when actually what his theory there is based on is technically an argument from ignorance, saying I don't see any reason why this isn't the case, that evolution can explain everything and then jumps to the conclusion that, well, therefore we should assume that it does. And the burden of proof is now on the person who wants to say no, there are things that it can't do when actually of course his whole theory is framed as well as taking on the idea that things need design to explain them. And he says no, evolution by natural selection is a better explanation of things than design. Well how do we know that? Well, he describes the theory and then says, and I can't see any barrier to that process explaining everything.
Well, okay, but if you go from I don't see to let's assume that it is the case, that's an argument from ignorance.
Another way of putting it would be what some philosophers call a no seem inference. I don't see it, therefore it's not there. And those are very dangerous because if you look in your bathroom and you say well I don't see an elephant in here, so there probably isn't one, okay, then you're probably on quite safe ground. But if you look in your bathroom and you say I don't see any germs in here, then you're not on particularly safe ground. Right? So this is the difficulty with no CM inferences, I can't see anything preventing it. Well how much does Darwin at this stage when he's writing this, how much does he know about what's got to be explained? Well, from a view over 150 years later, we would kind of say, good grief, there's an awful lot that Darwin didn't know about that his theory is supposed to cover. He's assuming that it will cover. But actually the more and more that scientists have learned about the huge amazing integrated complexity of living systems, the less and less plausible that argument from ignorance, that noceum leap that Darwin makes appears to.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say the same thing. Well, Dr. Stephen Meyer, as we said, wrote the foreword to your book, calling it as informed as it is timely. And what I really think works about your book is that it's this collection of essays you're giving readers that shows a nice, informed overview of the contemporary case for intelligent design. So it is a good place to start if you're just a beginner or you're not convinced by certain arguments you've seen thus far, and even someone like me, I've been working with the Id community for twelve years now, and even I was reminded anew of different things that certain people had said. And when you bring it all together, it really shows you where you're headed and where you've come from in a good way. How long did it take you to compile this book and what do you hope readers will get out of it?
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Well, it basically took a year to produce the book. I've been doing a series of books with Whitfamstock that are themed collections of essays on different topics, and this is the third book in the series. I did one called apologetics in 3d essays on apologetics and spirituality. I did one on arguments for God called a universe from someone, kind of riffing off Lawrence Krauss's book title there, but a universe from someone, essays on natural theology. And then this one is an informed cosmos, essays on intelligent design theory. I'm currently working on the fourth and last book in that series, which will be a collection of essays on issues around the historical Jesus.
But I think it's nice to kind of lay that out, because I've got a book on natural theology and I've got a book on intelligent design theory, and that's making it very clear, as I also make it clear in the book, that those are different subjects.
Intelligent design theory may be of interest to natural theology, just as other scientific theories might be like Big Bang cosmology or plenty of people are happy to talk about the fine tuning of the universe as something that is discussed in natural theology, but they are, I think, distinct things. And we earlier laid out the kind of premise, premise, conclusion of the core argument for ID.
And the conclusion that you got to was there are things in nature that reliably signal intelligent design or allow us to infer to intelligence as the best explanation of them. But if you want to move from that conclusion to saying anything that natural theology would find interesting, anything that starts pointing you closer towards theism or thing, God is part of that explanation, well, you need another premise in order to kind of bridge that gap. There's clearly a logical gap there that you need. A bridging premise along the lines of atheistic worldview would be the best explanation of this intelligence that we have spotted at work in nature. And that, of course, will be a contested premise. There will be people with different worldviews who could accept the core idea conclusion, but who would disagree with that bridging premise and say, no, I think I can accommodate this evidence for design within a naturalistic worldview or a pantheistic worldview or all sorts of other potential ways of explaining that.
Know, Elon Musk is quite famous for spreading abroad the theory that we're all living inside a computer simulation.
Basically, we're all in the matrix, which is an argument that a philosopher called Nick Bostrom first wrote a famous article about.
Well, if that were true, that would be a kind of intelligent design theory, right?
But it could be framed in an entirely kind of naturalistic way.
So this kind of discussion about what is the nature of intelligence is a philosophical discussion, as I kind of point out in the book. Okay, two forensic scientists might agree that the body that they have in the morgue is dead because it was murdered.
Or two, archaeologists might agree that the thing that they've dug up was deliberately shaped like an arrowhead. The chipping was not just through natural forces and erosion and things, but one of those scientists might be a materialist in their worldview, a physicalist about people think there's nothing more to people than their brains. And the other scientist might be a substance dualist who thinks that the best way of understanding what human intelligence is, is that they have immaterial souls. Right? But they don't have to solve that philosophical debate between them to allow them to agree that, yes, this was a murder, or, yes, this was deliberately chipped to make an arrowhead. They can agree on the science and then go down the pub and have an argument about the philosophical interpretation of what's going on. And I think the same point applies to intelligent design theory.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And again, finding that common ground, which I think is the strength of your book. And before we get past that and just into our closing questions, I just want to bring out your premises for listeners one more time just to give them this simplified argument about intelligent design that I think is useful. Premise one, there exists one or more reliable tests for detecting intelligent design. Then you move to premise two. Nature exhibits empirical data that pass one or more tests for reliably detecting intelligent design, and then you have a core conclusion there. Therefore, at least one aspect of nature reliably signals intelligent design. And then you finish with this third premise. Inferring intelligent design from empirical evidence using reliable tests is a scientific enterprise. So I just want to lay that out again and just to be clear and give listeners a way to really think that through, because, as Dr. Meyer says in his foreword, it's deceptively simple, but it is a good way to understand what's happening here. Well, growing up with the writing of Richard Dawkins, you seem to have a special affinity for grappling with his arguments. And your book contains an appendix critiquing Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins as they had a friendly debate on Justin Brierley's show. What were some of the takeaways you got from that?
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. I've really enjoyed interacting with Dawkins'work over the years.
Indeed, over the COVID lockdown, I spent a long time writing a book, responding to his recent book, Outgrowing God.
And I wrote this book in a dialogue form between characters in a student reading group who are reading through his book. That book actually has two chapters that really interact with Dawkins on the intelligent design issue as well.
So I really find it fun to interact with Dawkins on this sometimes. I really like the way that he kind of framed things, some things I agree with him about. For example, Dawkins would agree that intelligent design is a scientific theory. He just thinks that it's a false scientific theory. Right, but he would agree with that premise. Three, he's said some complementary things about the first premise about specified complexity being a reasonable criteria. He just has kind of philosophical objections to design as the kind of bigger interpretation of nature at large.
But yeah, in that discussion, Dawkins.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: He.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Says, for example, that the question about where the laws of physics that allow life come from, the kind of fine tuning question, is a profound question that he says he's getting close to a good argument.
If there were an argument that would give him some doubts about his would, that would be the kind of argument that he's kind of impressed by at that cosmological level. He's prepared to kind of entertain that more than he is at the biological level. As I say, Dawkins has this kind of philosophical objections, really to inferring design.
And he notoriously, he complains that this inference is to an additional complex entity that requires further explanation.
Well, okay, even if that were the case, if you find the first astronauts who land on Mars to set up the Mars base there, and they stub their toe against some pottery lying there in the marsh in the sands. And they go, well, obviously we haven't been here before. This is obviously a pot. It's obviously the result of intelligence. You can't just say, oh, well, that's just to infer to an additional complex entity. You can't do that. No, that opens up a whole interesting research program. Right about that. But when it comes to the larger kind of philosophical framing, he kind of misses the idea that God, if there is one, kind of, wouldn't necessarily be in the same kind of category of contingent designers who are complex in the sense that they are composed of a number of different contingent parts arranged together in a certain way, in an unlikely way, things that have that kind of specified complexity, you have to infer design from.
And then you can ask, well, who is the designer? And so on. And Dawkins has the idea that, well, eventually you need to have a kind of simple explanation. You can't just keep an infinite regress of designers. Some people might be happy with that. I would agree with Dawkins that I'm not comfortable with invoking an infinite regress. But his objection to the philosophical interpretation of, you know, maybe there's an intelligent designer who is not something that exhibits specified complexity is not contingent. Hey, that's beginning to sound a bit like people have always said God is like a necessarily existent creator of the universe, an uncreated creator who's not a complex arrangement of parts, because God's not a physical object and not contingent and so on. And Dawkins kind of can't quite grasp that idea and treats God as if God were to exist, he would have to be exactly the same kind of contingent and complex object as would require one to infer design of it.
And that leads to an infinite regress, and that's no good. And so that's his objection. But actually he misses that. If there were a God, he'd be exactly the kind of, in the philosophical sense, simple entity that Dawkins says he wants arguments to go back to.
And so I just kind of find it fascinating how he kind of, Dawkins'own argument kind of points in the direction from kind of intelligent design premises, in a direction that natural theology might find interesting, and then kind of swerves at the last moment there, because he doesn't quite get the philosophical distinction. He kind of doesn't get the idea that there might be an intelligence that isn't something that exhibits specified complexity for the reason that there's no contingency in.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, good old Richard Dawkins in the intelligent design community, we love Mr. Dawkins. We appreciate his truthfulness, his honesty, his willingness to go right to the heart of the subject. And that's, as I said, Dr. Meyer has pointed out. He just has this uncanny way to frame the debate. So we really appreciate him. Well, you assemble a nice list of resources at the end of your book. Why did you decide to include that and what do you include in it for those who haven't seen it yet?
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Well, I always include lots of resources. I love reading and researching widely for my books. I always have a lot of footnotes, I always have big bibliography, but I always try and kind of separate out from just the kind of reference bibliography, a recommended resources kind of list in various media as well. And I run a website that we'll mention later, I'm sure, that connects to things like I have a podcast, I have a YouTube channel, but the main thing that I do with my YouTube channel is to curate YouTube playlists on lots of different topics.
And so I have lots of references in the books to YouTube playlists, and I usually arrange those playlists with short videos and longer videos as well.
And then I will reference podcasts, my own, but other people podcasts like your own as well, websites, online, articles that can be found.
I have a section of peer reviewed intelligent design articles that are listed in the recommended resources in this book and then books as well. So I try and give a kind of spread of media of different lengths and kind of different difficulties as well, kind of his introductory material, his kind of medium level difficulty material, as it were. And here's the really kind of deep stuff if you really want to get into the kind of mathematical formalism and so on.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: And so, yeah, I noticed that the way you break it down for various levels of those entering in and really appreciate that. Well, I think it's time to close this episode, Peter, but you are certainly welcome to come back on id the future and share with us updates and more of your thoughts on intelligent design. We really appreciate your contribution.
And like I said, you're welcome to come back. Thanks for your time.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Well, you can learn more about Peter's work at his website, peterswilliams.com. That's peterswilliams.com. And there you can get more information about his book, an informed cosmos, and get a copy of your own. Peter, is the book available in digital or audiobook form?
[00:37:04] Speaker A: It's not available in audio, but it is available in digital form, so you can get it as an ebook or download it on your Kindle from Amazon.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Okay, great. Well, Peter, again, thank you for your time. And as we sign off from across the ocean, you in England and me in the United States, I really appreciate your insight.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Well, for I do the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
