[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. Im Andrew McDermott. In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility, before adding, the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.
So how is the universe comprehensible or understandable to us? And is that comprehensibility a fluke or a hallmark of design?
On this episode, we're pleased to share a recent conversation between Doctor Jonathan Witt and author and teacher Doctor Ken Boa on the Explorers podcast.
The topic is Doctor Witt's book, a meaningful how the arts and sciences reveal the genius of nature.
Doctor Witt is executive editor of Discovery Institute Press and a senior fellow and senior project manager with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture.
In this discussion, Doctor Witt and Doctor Boa discuss the meaning and purpose inherent in our comprehensible universe. They talk about the effectiveness of mathematics to describe the deep realities found in physics, cosmology, and chemistry, an effectiveness that is unreasonable on a darwinian framework, but matches the expectations of a design perspective.
They unpack the elegance and beauty on display in the arts and sciences, from Shakespeare's plays, to Euclid's geometry, to architectural design.
The conversation rounds out with some discussion of a new young adult novel co written by Doctor Witt called the Farm at the center of the universe.
Now let's listen in as Jonathan Witt discusses our meaningful world.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: I want you to welcome you to explorers. And we are with Jonathan Witt of the Discovery Institute. And Jonathan just informs me that he also taught literature as well in Texas and Lubbock Christian University. And it shows because Jonathan's work, a meaningful world with Benjamin Weicker is a nice combination. And he was just describing how, like me, he's quite a generalist and he loves to synthesize and put things together. So I want to welcome you in our midst and thank you for being a part of this, our time together.
[00:02:33] Speaker C: Thanks for having me on. Ken.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Share what you just were sharing with me, this little observation you were making.
[00:02:41] Speaker C: Oh, right. You know, there's so much kind of emphasis in our kind of modern, technic, technological, saudi on specialists, and they do a lot of wonderful work. But I said the, the shameless generalist also has an honorable role to fill in. We can often make connections that the specialists overlook.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: That's. Yeah, they see, you see a larger picture and to some degree, I don't want to over push it, but in some degree, it's almost what Ian McGillquist does with the two sides of the brain and the whole idea of the left side and the right side, but the left being a good servant but a poor master, whereas the right side of the brain, you're seeing connections and meanings, and that's what you're talking about in a meaningful world. So the left side will help us analyze the situation, but the right side will give us the meaning for context. Does that make sense in your thinking?
[00:03:30] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good framework. And I know there's some debate about how much the left and right brain exactly maps, but it's a good rubric to think about how we have different strengths mentally. It's funny you mentioned that. I remember I took a, back in high school that we took a right brain left brain test and I had twelve. There were 36 questions, and my answers ended up being twelve right, twelve left, twelve middle. So I always felt very balanced.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: That's a good idea.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: Maybe I was just confused, but I took it as a good sign.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Now that's a good sign. I think that gives you a broader map of reality because you're using the fullness. As you know, the corpus callosum is what's presumably involved in integrating the two hemispheres. We know from Roger Sperry's brain studies and so forth like that with split brain and so forth. It's an astonishing and wondrous thing that we. The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize we can't even comprehend how it works.
[00:04:27] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Our minds reveal that you don't understand it. What's that?
[00:04:32] Speaker C: Oh, I understand. And how hard it is to take a purely brain. First, the idea that the mind is just an epiphenomena of brain chemistry that gets harder and harder to hold to that view. The more we're learning about the mind and the brain, multiple lines of evidence suggest that the soul is real, and there's actual empirical evidence of it. As you move into neuroscience, there's a.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Growing body of evidence that, as you rightly say, tells us that this is not some kind of reductionistic mindset. That's just a brain, that's an organism that has that, but rather there's something more than that. And it's always, in my view, the top down is the way to see it. The higher levels of understanding and interpretation account for the lower, but the lower can never account for the higher.
And so to me, that's another of the phenomena, the hierarchies of meaning. And that's one of the things that you discuss here as well, in terms of hierarchies of meaning in so many realms that I think it's absolutely phenomenal.
Just the very idea that, as Einstein was putting it, that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
Amplify your thoughts on that.
Einstein's thoughts on that for us.
[00:05:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
There's so many quotes by Einstein, and some of them are actually by Einstein, and I think that is one of them. A lot of attributed him that aren't by him. I think that was one of the things.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: I think that's authentic. Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:10] Speaker C: And another guy talked about the unreasonable and a mathematician.
Wigner talked about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. What do you mean, the unreasonable effectiveness? Effectiveness. And what he was saying is essentially on a materialistic, atheistic worldview, mathematics should not be so extraordinarily effective at mapping on to the deep realities we're finding in physics and cosmology, chemistry. And yet it does. And for the theist, of course, it's not extraordinary, it's not unexpected, because we would rightly expect that the most intelligent being in the universe, and the creator of the universe, God, is a supreme mathematician.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yes, yes, exactly.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Kepler, for instance, the great astronomer that revolutionized our understanding of the solar system, he essentially cinched the case, if you will, for the heliocentric model with his three laws of planetary motion that were very elegant, but they upended this idea that the orbits were perfectly circular. But when he came up with these three very mathematically elegant laws, he. He said, I was thinking God's thoughts after him.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Isn't that a brilliant thing? And that's the progenitors of real science, of empirically based science, really were largely theistic, because it was required, that vision of life, for us to see why it would be comprehensible, because we are bearers of the Imago Dei. It's the only worldview that really provides a sustenance for that, wouldn't you think?
[00:07:50] Speaker C: Yeah. And in multiple ways, the christian view said, the creator is a reasonable. He's a law giver. Cs Lewis talks about this, so we can still look for the underlying laws.
His wisdom is connected to ours because we're made in his image. At the same time, we're fallible creatures, the Bible teaches us, and so we should go humbly in search. So rather than saying, well, circular orbits are the perfect shape, and that's obvious, and so they must be circular. End of discussion. Kepler said, maybe, or maybe God's wisdom is deeper than mine, and I should subject my ideas to empirical testing. Even as I look for some deeper, elegant form.
And then he went and he found it. So bring all those together and also the incarnation.
You have a respect for the material world.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Not trying to flee it in some kind of platonic disdain or gnostic disdain for matter. And so those early scientists in the christian west were willing to get their hands dirty doing externally.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah, they could see that God's into the structures of things and the details of things. And then what we would now, later understand is the. The biochemistry and all the information rich biomacro molecules which you'd never even dream of in that time. But each thing, one of the things that I found fascinating about your book, a meaningful world, was. And the subtitle is how the arts and sciences reveal the genius of nature. And this is. I found it to be a very good read in many respects. But one of the most stunning things for me was the periodic table of the elements, because when I was a boy, because I always loved science, so I went to case institute of Technology and studied astronomy there and so forth. But I love both sides of the quantum, the quantitative as well as the qualitative. So, like you, I'm interested in both sides, the poetry as well as the technologies of these things. But in seeing those things together, you begin to realize that you are in a world where God has. It's almost like a guidebook. And as you were rightly saying, each thing leads us to the next hint. It's like a collection of clues that God's left so that we are able to catch that. And once you've got that key, ah, then we can go and apprehend the next one, like with the alchemists and so forth.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: Right?
Newton's laws. Well, Kepler, he found laws of planetary motion that were elegant and discoverable. Then Newton found, you know, his, his, you know, more laws of gravity in motion that were even more universal, but they weren't precisely accurate. And then you get to Einstein's. But if you'd had to get, like, if none of that had been useful, because we now know that Newton's as amazing as they were, aren't a precise description of physical reality. If you could only get to the elegant kind of obvious insight once you got to Einstein or quantum physics, then it never gotten there. But these intermediate steps also had a mathematical elegance and map closely.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:14] Speaker C: What are the odds?
Atheists.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And so it becomes a more and more rich and tapestry of design agencies that each one, like nested Matrusca dolls, remember, each one has a mystery within the but you have to open up one to see the next one and then you open up that one. Oh, there's another one. But it's iterative, isn't it? It's a kind of a process.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: Right. And if you see nature as the work of a genius rather than just happenstance or even just kind of a bare intelligent designer, you expect those layers because, you know, works of great creative genius have depths to them. Whether it's Shakespeare or Mozart or, you know, a beautiful painting. You expect depths to it. You don't expect it all just on the surface and easy peasy.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So your analysis of Hamlet, for example, and some of the other components that you were discussing there with just exegeting Shakespeare requires more than just a plot. There's just something that's. There's a richness, a tapestry of poetry and nuance and elegance and these motifs of themes that are related to the great. The great story, the greatest story ever told. I think you're like me, I love story.
And because a story. Well, that's why I love to teach film and literature and things like this in poetry for the very reason that a story well told always points beyond itself to the greatest story ever told.
[00:12:49] Speaker C: Yeah. That's something I think Cs Lewis emphasized. I think he did, yes.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: That nature, in effect, everything in the created order seems to point beyond itself to a moral and spiritual truth. But you have to have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, and therein lies the receptivity.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: In fact, I'm just remembering something that was Tolkien when he had befriended Cs Lewis. Tolkien and one of the other inklings.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:22] Speaker C: They kind of. They used that argument with, with Cs Lewis when he was a searcher and he was saying, you know, I find the story of Jesus and the death and resurrection. I find it very compelling. But, you know, in some ways, it reads a little like a myth.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: And they said, well, maybe it's the original myth and the others are shadows of that and foreshadows of it.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah. That was a major theme in his thinking, wasn't it? It was in Addison's walk, I think with Hugo, Dyson and Tolkien and the discovery that Epiphany, it seemed to be for him the realization that what if, in fact, that the things I've always loved in the best fairy tales and stories, icelandic epics and so forth, that they actually did happen in space, time, history, that epiphany then changed everything for him, didn't it?
[00:14:17] Speaker C: The world is the work of the greatest storyteller than we can expect to find those themes, and we're going to.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Find that it's going to be, as you were rightly saying in several of your chapters, one of the things I loved about it is, like each piece, once understood, becomes the key to another piece we didn't yet understand. But it opens up questions just as anything we learned from the natural world raises new questions we didn't know enough to ask.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Right. Yeah. You go from physics, astronomy, and then they make progress with chemistry, people like Mendeleev. He was trying to fill in the periodic table of elements, and he said, you know what? I think there's an order here. I think there's an order here, and I'm sticking to my guns, and I'm going to go look for elements we haven't found yet that fit the order.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Now he like, what would it feel like? It was. Yeah, it's an amazing thing, wasn't it?
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Yeah. And he subjected his theory to empirical verification. He had the humility to know, well, maybe my notion of octaves isn't right, but I feel like there's some underlying order here because I believe in an underlying lawgiver. So that happens again and again in science. So it totally upends the myth that science and the christian faith are somehow in opposition.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Christianity gave birth to science.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Yes. So this notion then, of not a reductionistic understanding, but rather than something that's so rich in its tapestry that it's a fundamental part of everything. I read this article in nature not long ago. What if math is a fundamental part of nature, not something humans came up with, which was a great question, of course. Always that debate. Or did humans just invent it? Of course. To me it's a both in because, you see, both were created by the same order, the one who made it, so it makes sense, but a world made of math. And as we know, Pythagoras was the one who identifies it as one of languages, as use of the architecture. But I just think about these broccoli's that look like expressions of the Fibonacci series. And I think about these wonderful things, like not just the Fibonacci nature and the cauliflowers and so forth, but also fractal systems like the Mandelbrot set. And then we can see this in so many areas, just Fibonacci numbers and sunflower seeds, pine cones, pineapples, spiral galaxies and nautilus cells. I just love how these things just reveal a collection of insights that we would have never even dreamed of and then came across a book that I think you might personally be interested in taking a look. Have you ever come across this book, Jonathan? Patterns in nature by Philip Ball?
[00:17:10] Speaker C: If I have, I've forgotten about it.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: Well, it's a beautiful book where he describes how there's symmetry and looks at symmetry, looks at fractals, then spirals, then flow and chaos, waves and dunes, bubbles and foam arrays and tiling cracks and spots and stripes. And it's an astonishing journey through these marvels and wonders that are seen just in terms of these extraordinary symmetries that are found in the natural world. It's fascinating, and it's absolutely fascinating. I can't get my eyes off of it, so I just look at these wonders and these things that are in this book, and I'm thinking of just teaching through it, just to walk people through these basic components, because he does such a splendid job. Then he goes to fractals and so forth and does the same with that. But then you just see how everything really connects together, and it's just another way of articulating that. But you were doing something very similar in your book, it seemed to me, in many ways.
[00:18:19] Speaker C: Right, yeah. And we look at the. We talk about the. Some of the key recurring qualities or characteristics of works of genius, and one of those is depth.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Depth.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: One of those is elegance.
And so a lot of those things you're showing me there, I would say, would be in some ways an example of both those qualities, because there's an kind of a mathematical elegance, whether it's the fractals or the Fibonacci series, you know, 12358, you know.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Etcetera.
But then there's a depth in that. You often find some of those as you go deeper. As you know, some of them are right. You know, if you can count, you can find it on a sunflower.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Then others, as they get more and more powerful microscopes and telescopes, they find.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: New depths of this, new depths of discovery. Yeah. And then I was astonished when I saw that the sunflower, for example, has, I forget which number in the Fibonacci series. It was the spiral. Right. And then there's a spiral to the left that has another fractal number, Fibonacci number. And the combination of these things is just mind boggling. I have a presentation that I do all these crazy things, but one of them is on diatoms, because I love the things, and about 100,000 species of these things. And some of them are more wonderful, really, than many things that architects have ever even thought of before. So when I look at diatoms and I just look at the structure of these things, trying to find. Here's an example of one where this pond scum, these silicate skeletons, this looks like they sit in the opera house, only looks better. And this one, what does this look like? The leaning tower? And so it's a structure that is just, in my opinion, if an architect took their cue from the natural world, they would actually be further along. And that's why I like Antonio Gaudi as my favorite architect, because there's no straight lines in nature and none in his work. It's all organic.
[00:20:30] Speaker C: Yeah. And somewhat there's this.
Systems biology is this burgeoning field where they're just shamelessly going to nature to find biomimetics, to get ideas for new inventions. But then they're also creating these great insights into mysterious biological systems by saying, whether I'm an evolutionist or a design person or a theist, I'm going to go and assume as a working heuristic that this biological subsystem is optimally or near optimally designed. And I'm going to, you know, bring that assumption and figure out what's going on here. I don't understand this, this and this. I'm going to assume this is optimally designed or near optimally designed and figured out. And that's been a hugely fruitful approach. And it's. It's just right down the mainstream of biology. And the only difference being some of them that are scared of being called ideas will kind of genuflect, give lip service to Darwinism, but then actually get in the lab.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Speaker C: Basically, id theorists, systems biologists.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah, they live in this one way, but what is it? The idea.
But design is a woman that no scientist, no biologist can live without, but he's ashamed to be seen with her in public.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Yeah. There's a fan, I can't remember who said that. That's a famous quote.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: It's a brilliant quote, though.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: But I love a mainstream evolutionist.
A moment of great candor.
[00:22:06] Speaker A: Great candor and weakness. But at the same time, it's kind of like an epistemic humility. There's a humility that requires me to think God's thoughts. As we were saying that Kepler does, Copernicus, and all of these great innovators in science, Boyle and all the others, are thinking God's thoughts after him rather than just trying to create a whole cloth out of their own mind.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: Right.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: And then learning from it and humbling themselves and then realizing this is I'm involved in something that's way beer, way more than I could have known.
But we know that the impersonal plus chance doesn't produce these things.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: Right. And, you know, we see it in very practical ways in recent science. The lot of the evolutionary biologists, when they discovered non coding DNA, that was just, you know, all over.
It's junk DNA.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Junk DNA.
[00:23:03] Speaker C: It's the darwinian natural selection trial and error method. You know, get everything right and there's gonna be a lot of junk. So it's junk. Whereas my d theorists said you might have a little bit of degradation in the cell, so there might be a little bit of stuff that's dysfunctional. But. But we're guessing, we're betting that this stuff's going to turn out to have function we just haven't discovered. And that's what's been happening over the last 1015 to where they've been discovering function after function after function with it. So that's the better approach to assume genius, assume depths of design, go looking for it and see what you turn up.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So it requires a certain measure of humility to do that, because I have to be the one who's instructed by and who learns and is tutored by nature, rather than me trying to impose narrative upon it.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Right. Absolutely.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: It's not our natural thing. Well, tell me more about your book that you've just done with Guillermo Gonzalez. The farm at the center of the universe. It's just coming out. This came out last month. Did it?
[00:24:04] Speaker C: Yeah, it did. It just came out. I've got a copy here. Very proud of it.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: I need to get a copy of that. Yeah, tell me about that. Looks great.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Yeah. It's a youth novel, but we wrote it so that adults could enjoy it, too. So it's, you know, I think if you read it, you're not going to roll your eyes.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:23] Speaker C: It's enjoyable. And what we wanted to do is create a story situation that conveyed a lot of the arguments for design.
But if we were going to do it well as a story, we needed characters. We needed an antagonist who's on the scene in this case, it's his older cousin who's an atheist science teacher.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:24:47] Speaker C: And we give him some good lines. You know, we try. I won't say he's a round character. He's not Hamlet or anything.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Give him some good arguments and good lines. And the granddad is a retired chemist who's a theist and sees evidence of design. And so those two kind of have at it. And the boy, he's got to kind of sift through this. His father has recently died, and so his cousin's like, well, you know, that's what you expect in a yemenite godless world. You know, nice people die, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog. And so he's grappling not just with kind of the science, though. He's into nature and into, he's also grappling with the problem of pain. This is a visit to grandparents farm I see during the summer. So they grapple with that. And there's some humor.
But the main thing is it's a teaching novel.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:36] Speaker C: That we tried to make enjoyable and accessible to cover a lot of the bases. Some of. Guillermo Gonzalez, you've interviewed him in the past.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: I think I have, yeah. I recently did it maybe a week or so ago. Yeah.
[00:25:51] Speaker C: Yeah. And so he co authored a book, the Privileged Planet with Jerry Richards.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Richards, yeah.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: Which showing how the universe is not only fine tuned to allow for life, it appears that our place in the universe is also fine tuned to promote discovery.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: That's correct.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: Yes. This is where you convert. So we boil that argument down, but then we also boil some of the famous arguments for Id from Michael Behe, William Dempsky, Jonathan Wells, Stephen Meyer. So if you want a short version of it and you want it in story form, and you also want to have something that kind of grapples with the problem of pain, that's all in there in a short novel, that's really.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: Unusual, though, for two people to write an author to co author a novel.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: Right. Yeah, it does happen occasionally, but it's, yeah, it's not easy.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Yeah. But I can see, too, how you would select certain components, more of the literary side, and he would focus perhaps on the discoverability of things and the optimal locations and so forth. I'm sure you talk about solar eclipses and a whole array of things of that nature.
[00:26:58] Speaker C: Yeah. He brought, he's an astrobiologist who said his work featured on the front of Scientific American. So he was well equipped scientifically. And then we have, at Discovery Institute, we've got this stable of brilliant scientists. We could avail, as we kind of tiptoed a little bit out of his areas of specialization.
We were able to avail themselves, avail ourselves of that and get their feedback and sharpen everything. So the sciences is right on the money. And then we tried to develop a good story, good characters and some conflict.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Sounds like a very clever thing. And you're right to include the problem of evil the problem of pain, the problem of suffering, because it raises that larger question. At the end of the day, if there is a mind, then how does this happen?
[00:27:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I think for us, a lot of people that accept Darwinism, that's the principal reason they say, well, this explains evil and death and decay and violence, and if there was a good God, we wouldn't have any of that. And so I'm just going to shoehorn everything else in if something Darwin, Darwinism doesn't quite cut it. So I'm just going to figure, well, what? We'll figure it out someday, because there certainly couldn't be a God. So for some people, you really do have to address that problem of pain and evil and suffering.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: And of course, it's an interesting thing because the very thing they're appealing to, namely evil or something, that would be something. How could he allow this thing to happen? They have to appeal to an ultimate for it to have any cogency or any meaning. One of Lewis's, Cs Lewis's great lines, unless ultimate reality is moral, we cannot morally condemn it.
So that at the end of the day, you're appealing to God to refute God. So you have to appeal to some absolute, because if there's evil, then there has to be a good, and so it doesn't work. And furthermore, they have a system that by their own admission, if they are thinking clearly, knows that a person literally can get away with murder forever. And so there's not a moral universe that we're living in.
[00:28:57] Speaker C: Right. And I think, you know, they might say, well, we're just saying that if you think there's morality, then it doesn't make sense because it wouldn't be evil. But if you can get them, just to be honest, at a deep level, most people, and Francis Schaeffer was really good on this.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: He was.
[00:29:11] Speaker C: Most people get that there really is good, there really is evil. Remember, at one point he, he confronted on a ship, there was this nice couple, and the husband was a non believer, and he kind of confronted the man with his genuine tender love for his wife. And he tried not to be harsh about it, but he said, on your view, that's just all glands and chemistry. It's just a complete illusion. But I don't think at a deep gut level you really think that, or at least I hope you don't.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Yeah, he called that lifting the roof, where he would take off the roof and expose the logical implications of their non theistic views.
[00:29:48] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Nobody can live consistently with. That's, that's one of his basic assumptions that he made, and I think he was absolutely right about that. So the form at the center of the, of the universe then, is this place that they visit then, and this.
[00:30:03] Speaker C: Right. And you'll have to read the novel to see how it's not literally, they don't get on a spaceship and go, and of course, anybody that knows modern cosmology knows that everywhere and nowhere is the center of the center of the universe. But there's a sense in which Earthen is so amazingly well configured for life and discovery. And all the other planets we're discovering don't hold a candle to it. And so there's a sense in which we may discover other amazing, habitable planets. I'm not holding my breath, but Earth.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Not holding my breath. You're right.
[00:30:37] Speaker C: Earth was the Copernican principle, which was misnamed.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Yes, it is.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: We thought Earth was special and wonderful and was the center of everything. And now we know it's just a meaningless little speck in a vast universe. Well, that's now dated and we now know, wow, the Earth is really special in a lot of ways. And these people searching for earth like planets and who are atheists are desperate to find any other habitable worlds. Our telescopes aren't quite there yet, but there's a lot of evidence, more and more evidence, that earth is, at the very least, quite unusual.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Quite unusual, at the very least, yeah. And this, this whole night notion then, that even led some to the almost nonsensical solution of panspermia, that it was, that life came from. It doesn't take much of a philosopher to realize that that's all you're doing, is putting it off one. Where did that come from?
[00:31:34] Speaker C: Yeah, it came either from undirected Panspermia or aliens dropped it off from their planet. How'd their planet get well?
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Where'd the aliens come from?
[00:31:45] Speaker C: Well, there was another planet. It's all the way down.
[00:31:50] Speaker A: That's no use, mister. It's turtles all the way down.
Right? Yeah, that's right. That's good. I hope this book does well. It would be a good thing in an educational situation. I'm sure you're.
[00:32:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, it would be so compelling that kids would be rushing out to get it, like Harry Potter. I think it's a good read, but realistically, it's going to be something that probably mostly parents, teachers give to kids, and then they read and are surprised. Oh, this was pretty. Yeah, pretty effortless. And I learned a lot of things and it wasn't, it wasn't a slog at all. I think that's probably gonna be the main. I think that's great audience for it.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Good for you. Well, I've enjoyed our time together. This was fun. And I look forward to being with you in July 13 at the museum of the Bible.
[00:32:37] Speaker C: And, yeah, that's, that's gonna be very stimulating looking.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: So it's looking like it'll be well attended, and I think it's going to be a, it's such a beautiful venue to go to anyway. And then the next day you have, you can, you're in Washington, DC and you can see any number of wonderful things like the National Gallery of Art and wonderful things of that sort. So. But thank you for your part of this.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: And here's a funny thing. The last time I was in Washington, DC was for the, it was for the grand kind of film premiere of the privileged Planet documentary, which I helped script, which is based on the book. And that was what? That was 18 years ago.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I saw, I recently revisited it. Jonathan, I didn't know you were involved in the scripting of that, but, you know, that was a very nice piece of work.
The date was 2004.
[00:33:30] Speaker C: I think it's further back than I want to admit.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I know you don't want to admit it was 20 years ago, but, you know, it's not bad even now. I mean, it doesn't really need serious updating, but it would be nice if you ever did a revised edition.
[00:33:45] Speaker C: Yeah, it's mainly just a little bit of the stylistics or a little bit. But. But the content held up really well and did. But there is. Jay and Guillermo probably mentioned this when you talk to him. They have a 20th anniversary edition of that book coming out.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: Later this summer that's going to update the science. And they made a lot of predictions about what astrobiologists would find. And so far any ones that have broken, you know, yay or nay, have all broken in their favor.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: That's, that's, that's significant right there. Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker C: So a lot of that. The atheist anti id. Well, it doesn't make predictions. It's not testable idea. Well, they made testable predictions and a lot of, a lot of what's being discovered is confirming the privileged planet hypothesis.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: This is excellent. That's an excellent thing. I just loved Guillermo's galactic habitable zone contribution. That was a brilliant thing.
[00:34:39] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Not only is there a habitable zone in our solar system, there's a narrow band in the Milky Way galaxy where you're having a chance of having a habitable planet.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: And so as time goes by, there are more, more and more restraining factors. It gets more elegant, not less.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: It becomes more and more special.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
Frankly, in my opinion, science and technology have become more and more force multipliers, if we see them correctly, as force multipliers of wonder and awe and worship in many ways. And it gives us a greater sense of humility and the capacity for us to even apprehend these things is such a great gift. And what a time we live in.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: It is an amazing time. I mean, you know, psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God. Nature pours forth its speech.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:35:34] Speaker C: And those that say, well, no, science and faith are separate. I want to ask them. So in David's time, before they had telescopes and micro, it poured forth speech. But now that we're discovering all these wonders, it somehow doesn't, it doesn't. It just doesn't make sense. And you cut yourself off to so much wonder.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yes. Yes, you do. It's, the elegance becomes more evident. But again, there's this stubborn refusal. It's the Romans won even though they knew God. They didn't honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculation. So a spiritual darkness produced an intellectual blindness, and then that led to a moral decay in romans one.
But it's not a surprise. But David saw that and only could see a few thousand stars. And now what we see are marvels and wonders that reveal much more than we could have ever dreamed, ever imagined.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: Yeah, it's an exciting time.
[00:36:25] Speaker A: Great time to live. I think we're blessed and blessed to have men like you who are guiding us into these wisdom, into this insight.
[00:36:32] Speaker C: And thank you for your work. Ken. Two shameless generalists, I tell you.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: Shameless, are they? No shame. Wonderful to be with you, though. And thank you for joining me in our time together. And I'll see you on July 13.
[00:36:46] Speaker C: All right, Ken.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: Bye bye bye.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: That was Doctor Jonathan Witt with Doctor Ken Boa discussing the meaning and purpose inherent in the universe. The interview originally aired on the Explorers podcast. We're grateful to reflections ministries for permission to share the discussion here.
We'll include links to Doctor Witt's books in the show notes for this episode. You can also hop on to discovery.org books to find Doctor Witt's offerings, as well as many books on similar topics.
That's
[email protected]. books for id the future I'm Andrew McDermott, thanks for listening.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by.
[00:37:37] Speaker C: Its center for Science and Culture.
