[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I think most of us can agree that there's an undeniable element of purpose to all living things. The question is, where does this purpose come from? Can it be explained purely in terms of the physical world, or does it point to a source outside the realm of nature and science?
I'm going to probe these and other questions today with my guest, Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, an award winning cancer researcher and practitioner of medical oncology for 40 years. In his personal memoir, the Undying Soul, he chronicles his spiritual journey and return to faith. In his latest book, the Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose, he offers a unique reconciliation between faith and and science.
He also writes Up a storm
[email protected] our flagship news and commentary website covering the evidence for intelligent design and the debate over evolution. Stephen, welcome to Idea of the Future.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew. It's a real pleasure to be here.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Well, this is actually your first appearance on our podcast, so a hearty welcome. How long have you been
[email protected] I.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Started in August of 22, so we're coming up on three years, doing about one post a month.
I'm still working full time and living my life, so to speak. And so I put a lot of time and effort into the posts. And so as I'm doing more and more research on perhaps another book or just what, I'm expanding my knowledge on all of the information that comes out in modern science now, which is a fire hose. Yeah. New insights that come up and when something meaningful can be added to my narrative, then I sit down from, and put something together for, for the, for the publication.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, we appreciate your, your additions and like we were talking before our interview here, it is a labor of love and it a lot goes into, you know, creating a short piece that can share insight with people. Now I recently came across a couple of your articles there and also one by Daniel Witt. He is one of our
[email protected] now he compares your view of purpose in life with that of the world famous theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufman.
And on the face of it, you and Kaufman have quite a bit in common. You're both MDs and graduated from the same medical school. You both came of age during the biologic revolution of the 1960s and 70s and we'll talk about what, what it was like to, to grow up in that and, and matriculate in that. And as young medical school graduates, you were both fully indoctrinated in this mechanistic consensus which asserts that all organisms, including humans, are biologic machines without souls, products of an unguided process that did not have us in mind.
But that's actually where the commonality with you and Kaufman ends. And from that point early on in your careers, there was a profound divergence. Kaufman went straight into research, never looked back. What did you do?
[00:03:22] Speaker A: I actually. I did my training to become a practicing physician, but my goal actually was to go on and do research, clinical research. I think Dr. Kaufman, Professor Kaufman, I don't know that he did a residency. I think he went straight into laboratory research. And so there are a small number of people who get an MD, PhD, and they never, after medical school, see a patient. They're basically scientists.
I'm pretty sure that's what he did. There wouldn't be much point in him internship and all of the labor that that includes and a residency and so on if he didn't intend to get a license to practice.
But if you are an MD and PhD, you have more access, actually to research funds than some PhDs anyway. And so my understanding is he's been a theoretical biologist with an MD after his name.
And I went into.
My intention was to do clinical research, meaning that my research would not be in a laboratory or theoretical. It would be seeing patients who had a disease, and I was treating them with a new drug that the FDA was allowing us to trial in clinical trials, looking forward to FDA approval and then use. So we call that clinical research, meaning you have to be a skilled clinician in order to do that. In other words, you have to see the patient, decide if the drug is appropriate for them, monitor the side effects and results, and then report on it. So that's a different kind of research.
It's a lot less intellectual. It's sort of straightforward. If you have a disease A, and you give drug B, are the results good or bad, as opposed to theoretical, which is what Kaufman went all the way back to the beginning of the universe, so to speak, and dealing with atoms and molecules and why they organize and so on. So it's kind of. I was surprised to find out that he had an MD because I've been familiar with his work and it's all been purely theoretical.
And mostly that's a PhD. But that being said, I was doing clinical research, and I did that for a while at MD Anderson. Some people say it's the top cancer center in the world.
And I got awards for my research when I was doing that and I was trying to cure cancer.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Well, you write that it took you about 20 years after medical school to break free of your mechanistic prison. What paradigm did you adopt that in is so different from Kaufman's materialism?
[00:06:20] Speaker A: I think the main difference between myself and Kaufman was that I was always a clinician.
When you go to medical school, there's a wide range of people that go to medical school and there's a very wide range of things you can do as an MD you can sit in a dark room as a radiologist and read pictures. You can sit in a room and look at slides and be a pathologist, you can talk, take care of children who are coughing and sneezing all the time to be a pediatrician and so on and so on. You can fix broken bones, you can operate on the brain. So there's a wide. People go to medical school and then they get to choose among 50 different ways to practice.
When I went to medical school and I had my eye on research, I really fell in love with being at the bedside taking care of a sick patient.
And not everyone wants to do that, which is why some people become radiologists and some people become pathologists and so on and so on.
I think the most devoted clinicians are the pediatricians who deal with children and because they're very challenging and it's also so rewarding and family practitioners. But I was also a pharmacologist, and that is to say my interest was clinical pharmacology. And so I wanted to choose a specialty that was challenging in that regard. And at the time that I came of age, chemical chemotherapy was just in its infancy. And I always had a fascination with cancer as a disease.
And the other thing about being a doctor is some people don't like to take care of sick people. They like to take care of, well, people. So most pediatricians may witness five or 10 deaths in a 20 year career.
I see five or 10 deaths a year, maybe 20.
I like taking care of people who are quite ill and who need something dramatic done. So all of that combined made me go into medical oncology. The other thing was when I started out in the 80s, it was really the Wild west. The pioneer days of oncology was not a popular specialty for people to choose, but it was the frontier. And I was drawn to the frontier because I thought that starting out in a practice in a specialty that hadn't been completely reduced to algorithm would be more fun. So I think one of the main differences between myself and Kaufman was when you both went to the same medical school, I think he's a few years older than me.
But UC San Francisco was considered one of the top academic medical centers in the country.
And even back then it was at the center of scientific atheism, along with Saint, Boston and New York.
We were basically told, well, you know, you're a biochemical machine and learn to be a doctor and be a good humanist and take care of people and try and be ethical if you can.
But we did partial birth abortions and a professor while pulling out the limbs of a baby in the mother's womb, she was saying, no, you can't criticize anybody for this because there's nothing absolutely unethical about ripping a baby to shreds. And we all go, yeah, of course. We're all just machines and this machine isn't always defective, so it's going into the junkyard.
That's how we were trained, you know.
But if you take care of living people long enough, that mythology, that insidious sort of Cobb view of life finally breaks down.
And if you never do that, I don't think Kaufman ever did, then you can sort of keep fooling yourself into thinking that your feelings are just chemical reactions, which is limited way to live, I think.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. Very, very eye opening. Now, this ties into the difference between the science of medicine and the art of medicine, which you have written on. Can you, can you explain how that relates?
[00:10:53] Speaker A: I don't know. People talk about the art of engineering, but there is an art to it. Although it's mostly science, the science of medicine is very, very incomplete.
We only know a little bit about what's going on.
And so in order to solve a problem like why does this person have a headache or why is this person losing weight, or why does this person have pain in their hip? You can gather all the information you want, but it's, it's not always definitive. So, yeah, if there's a broken hip, that's the reason they have pain in their hip. But there are a hundred reasons to be losing weight, from the psychic to the malignant. And there's a hundred reasons for having a headache for the same reason. And it's your job to figure out what's going on and make it right.
And so you take the science as far as it will go, but then you have to fill in the gap, so to speak. You have to say, well, the CAT scan shows a little of this, but I'm not sure that's the cause of the headache. And she tells me that the dog wakes her up every morning at 3:00 clock to go out. Do Its business in the yard. And she used to drink, but she doesn't anymore. But I wonder if she really still is. So on and so on and so on.
It's like solving a. A crime or a mystery.
And it's. That's kind of the fun of it is, is you have to solve problems. And the answer isn't always completely obvious because the solution depends on the problem, right? So if the problem is the dog, you just do something about the dog.
If the problem is there's a brain tumor, then you do something about the brain tumor. But until you identify the problem, you can't really solve it.
And so the art is taking everything, you know, from the psychic to the chemical, everything in between, which is a universe of facts and relationships and organizational frameworks and figuring out what's going on here, make a decision, and try and solve it. The other thing is there's a certain amount of process of elimination. Like, well, I think you're just. It's the dog. So you put the dog outside for the night, and the headaches don't go away. Okay, well, we've eliminated that. Now we have to go back to sort of, like I said, solving a crime, a process of elimination.
You don't have the luxury, like my friends at Boeing, to say, I wonder if we should increase the curve on the wing. Well, let's build an experimental wing and put it in a wind tunnel and see what the aerodynamics are and then decide.
Now, the art of that is saying, well, I Wonder if a 10% change in the arc of the wing would reduce turbulence. That's the art, asking the question.
Einstein always said the difficulty in science is asking the right question.
And so there is certainly art to anything that anybody does, including brushing your teeth, for that matter, as mundane as that sounds. And doctors have to be humble. I actually say that about Kaufman, reading his work.
He doesn't overstate things.
Among all of the sort of materialists, he's one that I actually study and read carefully because he's thoughtful about what he says and. And he doesn't overstate things. He even quoted as saying, well, intelligent design might be real. That's kind of interesting thing. He doesn't, you know, call us names or dismiss what we have to say.
I respect that.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
Well, I really appreciate your.
Your reference to the analogy of the investigator as a way to. To kind of understand your profession and both the science and the art of medicine.
You know, when you're. You're studying crime, for example, you know, you're you're really getting to the heart of, of criminal activity and, and good and evil and why people do the actions they do. And so you sort of become an expert at that, and you get really deep into studying that, and you learn to know the heart and morality.
And as you study the human body, you know you're going to equally become as expert in that, even as you approach the challenge of the universe of possibilities that can affect the human body. Well, you've written about the changes in the practice of medicine in the last half century. There's a culture of life and a culture of death, to borrow from the title of bioethicist Wesley J. Smith's book that seems to connect with your delineation of the science of medicine and the art of medicine.
What are a few challenges you've experienced in the face of this march of scientific atheism into medicine that's now so prevalent these days?
[00:16:01] Speaker A: It's been profound. When I was growing up and I was in medical school, well, when I was in college, and I was associated with physicians who are already in practice, not UCSF, most physicians, and up until, say, 1970, they're politically conservative and fairly religious because they were trying to figure things out by taking a little rubber hammer and tapping it on your knee and spending hours talking to a patient and all these things. And they had to be very humble at the magnificence of the life that they were trying to influence.
And then after Watson and Crick and Jacques Mano told us that we're all molecular machines, and those of us told that as students, and it seemed.
And they'd synthesized. Millie and Yuri had synthesized amino acids in a test tube, it seemed that that was probably true and that we could let go of religious mythology and just do our best, carrying on as good humanists, benevolent caregivers, so to speak.
And that worldview dominated science, still dominates science, but I mean, to the second half of the 20th century, from 1970 to 2010, at least, it was dominant. I'll tell you a funny little anecdote. My son, one of my sons, was in a PhD program in biology at Duke University, which was one of the most difficult and prestigious graduate programs in the world.
In fact, they only admitted two Americans to their 12 people a year program. He was one of them.
And so I was visiting him as a life scientist myself.
He was actually doing botany.
And there was someone who was doing a guest lecture on something people weren't too familiar with, which is around the year 2008.
And it was on Mobile elements, which.
One of the world leaders in transpositional DNA genes was coming up from Missouri, and he gave a talk, and we were in a room with graduate students, and he was very nervous because he knew that I was going crazy and thinking about intelligent design.
And he said, don't ask anything stupid, dad. And I said, well, what if I ask him if DNA is a myth? He literally said, you'll be laughed out of the room. Don't do it. But anyway, I did work up the courage because he gave a lecture about how these genes hop around the genome in different locuses. And as an oncologist, we know that if you.
The disease chronic myelogenous leukemia is more or less pathologically defined by the fact that a gene promoter translocates to a cell surface receptor, and that the entire pathophysiology of this uniformly fatal, fortunately rare diseases based on that molecular transposition of genes.
And so I thought, well, these genes hopping around are going to cause all kinds of chaos.
And so I did raise my hand, and I said, so you said that these genes are hopping around.
They call them transpositional, but at the time they call them mobile elements.
It was something that Barbara McClintock eventually got the Nobel Prize for after discussing it for 50 years before she got the prize and getting all the pushback she got for daring to think that something Lamarckian could be going on.
And I asked these movements of the genes, does it seem directed in any way or is it random? And at the time, he said, well, you can't discern any direction or meaning or purpose to what's going on. And I said, oh, okay. Now we know 20 years later that it's very directed that these genes move around purposefully.
And getting back to one of the questions you asked, one of the things that finally overwhelmed me was when I realized that the whole paradigm of scientific atheism was based on the fact that nothing is really purposeful. It looks purposeful, but it isn't. So their favorite argument is, well, it looks like the sun goes around the Earth. It really looks that way. And for thousands of years, people thought, we live in a geocentric system. The sun's going around us, and then we know that's not true.
And so they said, well, see, things can seem a certain way, unlimited knowledge, but when you dig deeper, you find out that that's not it. And so it looks like there are purposeful things going on inside your body.
And they are, in the sense that they all serve a function, like your heart isn't your kidney, they're both doing different things, and you need them both to live.
But they just got there by accident and by trial and error. And there was no mind to put the thing together in the first place.
There was just a cell long ago in a tiny organism that learned how to contract, and then it recruited more cells around it and kept contracting. And when it did, it started moving fluid around the body. And this naturally selected those small multicellular organisms to say, hey, this is a good idea. And eventually you have a heart and a kidney and a mind and an eye and all those things. You know, William Dembsky has talked about, written about.
Yeah, but the probability is insurmountable.
And I'm looking at all of this going, wow, this really is. It's hard to be an atheist when I look at all this.
But what really turned me around was when molecules started doing intentional things. Because once you have a machine and it's running, you're not that impressed. And most people start their car in the morning and they're not thanking the engineer because it's a machine and it's built up and it does what it does when you push the start button.
But when little molecules should have no intentionality whatsoever, are actually wandering around yourselves doing this and that. There's no brain there. There's no guiding force. Well, there is. That's what I wrote about my book Telos. There's a guiding force. It's called telos.
And I didn't make that up. Aristotle said that. And it was so worthwhile that the greatest theologian of all time, Christian theologian of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas, said, yeah, Aristotle's right. No, there is teleology. And that's my book is about. These molecules are acting with intention. Once I found that undeniable, then I had to change my whole worldview.
The biggest failure of molecular biology or scientific atheism rests at this very point.
So when I went to medical school, I was required to read Chance and Necessity by Jacques Barnod, who at the time was the chief of the Pasteur Institute, which made him actually the most important biologist in the world.
He said, you know, it really looks. It really looks like there's purpose here, but it isn't.
These molecules bounce around together, and eventually they start doing things that serve a function. And once that happens, then they're.
Then they propagate it, because this function gives them survival advantage, and they're naturally selected to keep doing what they do and recruiting other things to do that. Well, the problem is. And then when Miller and Uri synthesize amino acids out of basic molecules.
Methane, oxygen, hydrogen, water, and an electric shock spark. He said, okay, well, permitted Earth when those elements were there and there lightning, it had amino acids in some warm little pond, as Darwin said.
And we thought, okay, that was like in 60s said, okay, well pretty soon, you know, from there you get proteins and proteins will then cause DNA polymerase, which will make nucleic acids and polynucleic acids, and you have life.
Well, as James Tour, the great James Tour keeps pointing out, everyone has been trying to take the next step and show that when you put these amino acids, which do spontaneously form into any sort of beaker that might mimic a natural surrounding, they don't polymerize.
It's like having one tire mimic. You don't have a whole car, you have one tire and even have three tires, you don't have a car. But anyway, in order for amino acids to turn into a polypeptide, that is to say a protein, you have to have a polymerase, which is a protein. And so it's a chicken and egg thing, which is unsolvable.
And James Tour keeps saying this is unsolvable. Unless there is some other force we don't know about which made this happen. And I believe, since I believe it happened because we're all sitting here talking about it, that it did happen. And the reason it happened and the reason why transposable elements in the DNA pop around is because there is, it's all purpose driven.
In order to keep science from being sort of unobjective, purpose was eliminated.
You have to re invoke purpose in order to understand it, because everything is purposeful. In other words, if you want to build anything inorganic, it's a straight line of linear steps.
You just take your bricks and you line them up and you put the mortar brick by brick until you have a wall and so on.
But in order to build an organism that once you start an organism and starts doing things and it's doing other things that you have to account for. And so we refer to as self referential. It's not linear, it's circular. And there's all these loops of things going back and forth, which is what you do when you get up in the morning. You don't just get up in the dark and pick clothes out of your drawer without looking at them and not knowing what the weather's going to be or what time of day it is.
You figure out what time of day it is. You go to the kitchen, decide what you want to eat, for breakfast, you decide whether it's cold or hot outside. To choose your clothing, you decide which, you know, whether your car needs oil or not. All these things, because all of these things influence what's going to happen to you as an organism during the day. And every creature has to do that all the time.
If you're a cow, you have to figure out where the grass is. If you're a wolf, you have to figure out where the cows are.
And so if you're a cell, you have to figure out where's the glucose. And then when you get the glucose, you have to say, okay, am I going to do glycolysis or am I going to do ox bones? And once you do that and you have an ATP molecule saying, now, do I have to fix the DNA molecule, or should I send this energy over to the ribosome?
And so actually, what goes on inside a single cell is more complicated.
36 trillion cells in your body, and what goes on inside every single cell is more purposeful and definitive and exacting and meticulous than what 100,000 people do in a year getting through their day.
It's a little universe inside the thing.
And when I came to that realization, I said, this isn't working. And then, fortunately for me, I like to think it's providential.
Other things happened in my life that sort of showed me the way.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Well, that's a great flyover of both the mechanistic framework and how that has entered science as well as the history of teleology. So I appreciate that insight that you've given. Now, this brings us to the thrust of the conversation today, which is theory of purpose. You know, it's all about purpose. So in a nutshell, very briefly, because I want to compare it to Kaufman's view of purpose, too, what would you say is your theory of purpose that you unpacked in your book and that you operate with in your career?
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Excellent question.
When you're going to dethrone God, you better really have a good argument.
You know, as Jacques Minode said, I really apologize for destroying your mythology, but we have to face the fact that everything we believed was a myth.
And so he had to really be explicit in saying there is no purpose. And I have proven that scientifically. That's the whole basis of what scientific atheism was in the second half of the 20th century.
It's important to point out that or his whole argument was based on scientific knowledge, as it was known in 1970, which is sort of like saying you can't improve on the Model T, his theory was wrong.
Completely wrong. Science took 30 years, but by 2005 or so, we knew that what he said was completely false and his argument was false, and so his proof of the death of God was false.
Now that left people like Stuart Kaufman and the rest of the gang having to figure out what to do. And so Anthony Flew, who wasn't a scientist, but scientists, but believed in atheism because that's what science seemed to say. He said, no, I was just reading the data here and like Galernter, Michael said, no, actually there is a God and science points to that. They're not academic biologists, so they can, you know, they don't have to quote the party line. They're external to that.
Now the, the goalposts have been moved way, way, way back because they first said, if there is no purpose, then there is no God.
Okay, yeah, if it's just a chemical reaction, DNA makes rna, which makes a protein, which makes an organism, or all chemicals, okay? Now it turns out that all of those molecules are acting with more purpose than, than you do in 100 days of your life. One little molecule fixing everything, groping around the cell. Okay? Now there's purpose. And they admit it.
Now they say, but purpose is still just a thing that happens in a material world, and therefore it's material.
And the problem with that argument is, true enough, I write in my book that the teleology, which is the fancy word for purpose, is an empirical fact and it was taken out of science because they didn't think it was factual enough. Well, now they say, oh, okay, I guess they are. It is, I guess you can have self driving cars. I never thought you could, but okay, now we have them. Okay, the problem is, is that purpose requires what we call reference of the thing that's being, acting, purposeful and the thing that it is acting a purpose on.
And that requires a mind, period.
Now you can say, well, my car, when I turn the engine on, all the things that go on inside the motor are purposeful. And you know, the fuel injector purposely is putting gas in more gas when I push on the pedal. I said, yeah, because an engineer with a mind made it that way.
And then you say, okay, well, when a fox hunts a rabbit and he's just doing it because he's hungry.
Yeah, but why is he hungry? Because there's molecules in his brain saying, your stomach's empty, you need to get something to eat. So that's chemical. Yeah, but, well, why is all that there? How did it get there. It's a, it's a. If it were a machine, which it isn't, it's vastly more complicated than any machine. But if it were a machine, you would say, how?
Get put together and that the. If you want to just really, really drill down to the ultimate point of it.
What I tell my engineering friends is if you're a doctor or any physiologist and you study any organism and you look at the eye and the ears and the heart and the liver, every one of those pieces of anatomy or physiology exists to keep the organism alive, except one.
There is an organ in your body and in the organ of every living thing that jeopardizes survival, makes survival harder and, and makes survival risky and difficult.
And that is the reproductive system.
Now, if organisms were just machines whose sole purpose was survival, they would never have said, oh, I need to reproduce myself, because I know that I'm not going to last very long.
But that's not the case.
You have to go back to the first cell, the first autopoietic system. Say there was a bunch of molecules that came together and had a cell membrane and started metabolizing ambient reduced molecules in the soup, start living.
Why would that cell say, ooh, I have to reproduce myself? Because I know that I'm going to fall apart due to entropy and I don't want this process to end, so I'm going to reproduce myself. That's all that is so purposeful, so intentional, so outside of anything random or undirected that you have to realize that something external or intrinsic to life exists that we haven't been able to identify. And that's what telos is.
It's called intentionality.
And intentionality requires a mind pure and simple. Purpose is intentionality, and it requires a mind. And for there to be a mind above all of the matter that I live inside my skin and you. It had to come from somewhere. And so we find ourselves now in 2025, looking at organisms that are utterly purposeful down to the molecule.
And there's no law of science that says as how this can happen. Then I said, yes, there is.
Yes, there is. I found it is something that Aristotle said 2,400 years ago and that is so great that St. Thomas Aquinas said, yes, there is.
It's called teleology. It's a fact.
It's just an empirical fact.
And if it's a fact and you have to say, what's it doing there?
And you can.
Scientists have said, well, gravity is just a gravity and matter and the universe is just there and they sort of exist without a mind. Maybe, but intentionality as a fact has to come from a mind.
And a mind is something that's not material.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: And so there we are.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, Kaufman, for his part, also recognizes that intrinsic element of purpose in living things. And he knows it can't be explained, you know, through the laws of physics.
So how would you describe his theory of purpose and how does it differ from yours?
[00:37:25] Speaker A: That's the core question. That's really where we're at right now. You either take the Thomistic point of view, which is what I've tried to articulate in my book, or you take the Kaufman point of view.
So Kaufmann and I agree that there is purpose and that there is something called emergence, that things go on in the world and organisms emerge and properties of organisms emerge.
He says that because of that it's not possible to predict the outcome of evolution in the future. And it was never possible to predict it before because there's no external intentionality. It's still random within the constraints of physical law as we know it. And that anything that our. He still maintains that our existence here is an accident, that there was no God behind it. And my point of view, which is nothing more than a re articulation of what the most brilliant people in history have said, is that our emergence was predetermined by the mind of God.
Emergence comes from a pre designed point of view.
So, for example, if you were a God and you were creating a world, and you said, I'm going to have water and I'm going to have air, I'm going to put everything together so that eventually there will be things that fly and things that swim.
And if I was going to have terrestrial beasts, they would have four of them because that's ergonomically the best way to go.
And if I was going to have insects, they need more of them because the limbs aren't there to hold them up. The limbs are going to do all sorts of other things that they have to do in their little scurrying around the dust. And that I would have carbon that's reducible and oxygen that can oxidize the carbon to make energy, so that I have chemicals that make life.
There's no way to prove one or the other. It's just that if you, if you go back to William Paley, you know, what is this watch doing out on the heath? Well, it was made.
It gets you back to Dembsky. Well, I like to tell people you have 100 billion neurons and a trillion synapses.
Okay, they're there. But wait a minute. Before they were there, there was one fertilized cell.
And in that cell you ended up with 36 trillion cells, each of which is more purpose driven than any city or any person you've ever known or any computer we've ever interacted with. And it made 10 billion neurons that are so well put together that they have a trillion synapses. I gave a lecture once to a group of Christian physicians and I said, wow, you know, I've been joined this conference and I'm amazed to see so many intelligent statements coming out of brains that were randomly assessed, you know, conglomerated from a glob of cells and somehow put together synapses that made you utter some intelligent statements.
The missing ingredient in purpose is intentionality. Intentionality has to come from a mind, right? So once you, once you invoke purpose, you've invoked intentionality. And that is, as Michael Behe would say, it is just irreducible.
Sorry.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Well, and, and the, and the way Kaufman tries to explain that intentionality in organisms is. He points to quantum physics. Do you think that's a satisfying answer to the question why life?
[00:41:11] Speaker A: I'm going to try and be polite here.
Everyone uses quantum physics for all kinds of crazy stuff. It's just a formalism. There is no wave.
The collapses.
If you ask any quantum, you know, the collapse of the wave function, that's our model, that's our formalism.
But there is no wave that collapses.
There's a photon going where it's going. And when it interacts with something, it interacts with something.
And yes, it is a bit mysterious, but this other worlds and other realities business and Schrodinger's cat is all based on the fact that we have no macroscopic model for what happens at the subatomic level. That's why they came up with string theory, which another physicist came along and said, this is so bad, it's not even wrong.
I mean, you could be wrong and be respectable. This isn't even wrong. This is just stupid. I mean, it's just a big model. One of my favorite sayings is that you cannot reduce an organism to a formula.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: And so again, it's, it's, it's intentionality. And that comes from something. Something immaterial.
And that's the thing about teleology is it unites the material world with the immaterial world.
Because without having the duality, Cartesian duality of mind versus body, it's all integrated. And the beauty is that St. Thomas Aquinas explained all that. You know, you didn't need to separate the two.
Our minds are the formal cause of our material cause, which is our brain.
And the formality precedes materiality. And that's the basis of his metaphysics. And still inviolate, that metaphysics is still. Now we know that the other thing about that was final causality. And then now we know final causality, which is telos, is real.
And then we know that St. Thomas Aquinas was right all along.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, Stephen, final question for you today. You have a desire to help your fellow physician colleagues escape the suffocating boundaries of mechanism and materialism, as you put it. So how do doctors free themselves from this materialist paradigm?
[00:43:36] Speaker A: What I like to sort of make it very simple for them to understand. So if you think you are a machine, say you. You're a molecular machine. Really, that's what you are.
Then you have to accept, say you're a young mother or father, and you go kiss your child good night.
And you kiss them, and your child says, I love you, Mommy.
I love your daddy or your spouse or your lover.
That. That feeling in your heart when that moment occurs is something that can be put in a machine because you're just a machine. And eventually the circuitry will be good enough that I love you, Mommy, is reducible to some algorithm.
If you don't believe that, and it's impossible to believe that, isn't it, then you must concede that you're missing something. You're missing something. That's all. I'm not. I'm not trying to tell you that you're stupid. It's just that you've been missed, deeply misled.
And I write in my book I was misled, but I kind of wanted to be misled because following these rules is hard for a young person who wants to be hippie, as I was in San Francisco.
And it's okay, look into your patient's eyes, hug them, realize that they have a heart and soul and that you're the physiology engineer.
But they came from one fertilized egg that made 36 trillion cells that operates at a complexity beyond any description that. And Kurt Kudel explained that 50 years ago with the incompleteness theorem, Set yourself free and embrace it. You will find. What I found, actually, in my own experience, was that when I thought if I started treating my cancer patients as people that I cared about who were dependent on me for life and death, and that I went beyond being a technician That I would be overwhelmed by the emotion of was harder for me, I guess because I was seen to be accessible.
It was harder for me to. To keep my distance than to just give in. And once I gave in, it was easy. The patients were less demanding.
They just wanted to know that I cared. And so now I approach every patient as if as I do care about them and thinking about them in the best way possible. And it makes medicine joyful. That's why I'm 72 years old. I'm still working full time. I don't have to work.
I think physicians really need to get on board with this because we are where science and art and intuition meet and intentionality meets and the complexity of what we do for a living every day. Unlike someone in the lab or an engineer. God bless them for their brilliance and their hard work.
We are the ones who really, I think, need to carry the torch as well as they are.
And so going to try and do that.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, some great advice now Stephen, what's your website so that those who are interested in your books and articles can have a good place to go and check those out.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: So@stephen yakovone.com www.steven yakovone.com it's my website.
All my posts are on there and a few other things.
You can order the book, you can send me emails.
So I look forward to hearing from everybody.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, thank you for your time today for joining us.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Well, a quick heads up audience that I do. The Future now has its own YouTube channel. You can help us spread the word by subscribing first of all and enjoying some new video content. You know, we're going to have the same audio content as you know and love, but we're also going to have interviews in video form that you can check out and you can share with family, friends, associates. So please go there, subscribe. It's YouTube.com d the future. That's the new channel YouTube.com id the future.
Well, I'm Andrew McDermott for id the future. Thanks for joining us.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
