Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Hello and thanks for tuning in. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Anne Gaer, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and received her undergraduate degree from m i t and her PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at a Harvard University where her work focused on the molecular motor Kinson. Her research has examined the limits of protein evolution, the origin of humans, and the evolution of metabolism. Her work has been published in Nature Development, the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Biocomplexity. And welcome back. It's good to be here. You know, folks, Anne is the editor of a new book, and this is what we're gonna talk about today. It's called God's Grandeur, the Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. A book al this Spring from Sophia Institute Press. It's an anthology featuring chapters by an array of distinguished Catholic scientists, philosophers, theologians, and laypeople.
Speaker 2 00:01:15 The book refutes the scientific materialist thinking that even some Christians, scientists and theologians espe. It also delves into the positive case for intelligent design by laying out key scientific evidence in cosmology, origin of life and biology. The book also helps to clear up common misunderstandings about how Catholic theology relates to debates over science, evolution, and intelligent design. It's a formidable tool then to reconcile science and faith in today's culture. The book is available on Amazon, so anytime you can go order your copy. And if you go to god's grandeur.org, I'm told you can order the book and get a free copy. A free download, not of the whole book, but of a chapter just to get a taste. That's gonna be at god's grandeur.org. The book actually takes its name from a poem by the same title, by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Let me set things up a bit.
Speaker 2 00:02:13 If you allow me just by reading this first stanza to listeners, the world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil. It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil crushed. Why do men then now not wreck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have tro, and all is seared with trade. Blad smeared with toil and wears man's smudge and shear's. Man's smell. The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel being shawed. And before we get into, uh, all that this book has to offer, I wonder if you would just start by maybe sharing your comments on, on that poem and also how this, uh, whole book project came to be. How did it come to fruition?
Speaker 3 00:03:05 Well, I was an editor on another book, theistic Evolution, A Scientific Philosophical and Theological Critique, uh, really big thick book with a lot of contributors. And while the book was, was very good in, in what it accomplished, I afterwards was thinking about what I wanted to do. And I wanted to put together a book where the emphasis was on the positive case for intelligent design and how well it fits with traditional Christian teaching in this case, specifically Catholic in some ways. But I think that the teaching I have in mind is actually traditional for all Christians. Let me give you a flavor for what that means. The intelligibility of the universe. Christians would say, oh, it's because it was made by God. That's not something that an evolutionist could say. The beauty in nature, it's because God himself is beauty, goodness, and truth. And so those transcendentals are gifts he gives to us and makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3 00:04:13 But you can't get that from an evolutionary biologist. And I could go on and on and in the book covers a lot of these topics. That was my goal. We wrote two different important scientists, philosophers, and theologians, and asked if they'd be willing to participate and almost to amend. They all were willing to do it. I think it's just gonna be a terrific book because it is like an antidote to the modern scientific culture, the materialist culture. That chapter, if you get a copy of it, is the preface to the book where I lay out why I wanted to do the book and what it's about.
Speaker 2 00:04:53 So you're seeing it sort of as a bridge for believers who might have this sense that, that God created the heavens and the earth, but they can't quite rectify that with what the evolutionist says. And you want that to come together, right? And you provide right the evidence that, that people need not to check their mind at the door, but to bring it with them and, and really bring the two together.
Speaker 3 00:05:15 Right? And there's a really good introductory chapter by Logan Gage, who's a philosopher at Franciscan University, where he outlines what intelligent design arguments are and what they're not. This is something that's really important to clear up because there's a lot of misconceptions about intelligent design theory. One of them is that intelligent design, people want to make everything mechanistic, or it has to be by direct intervention from God, you know, a series of miracles or that God can't act through his creation. It's all one thing or the other. And, and I think that that's actually one of the richest parts of this way of looking at things, is it isn't either or. It's God is creator in all ways and in all things. Whether he's using direct intervention a miracle, or allowing it to be the unfolding of his will through his creatures, God sustains everything He is involved with his creation.
Speaker 3 00:06:20 And that sense of who God is in relation to his creation is one of the things that I think comes through in the book very well. It's, it's actually a wonderful, freeing experience to be able to look at the world through those eyes and see how well it fits to what actually is. And then say to yourself, okay, does Darwinism do this? Is there any way for Darwinism to do this? And it's flatly, no Darwinism overturns, all those things that we have as Christians, as our heritage, in particular, who we are as people, what the human person is, and dignity of, of humanity as children of God. I'll tell you what, I'll go down the table of contents and let you know some of the topics and who the authors are. As I said, Logan Gage has the first chapter on understanding design arguments. Brian Miller from Discovery Institute has two chapters, cosmology supporting Cosmic Design and Origin of Life.
Speaker 3 00:07:30 Mike Behe has a chapter on the grande of God reflected in the Molecular Foundation of Life. I have two chapters, one on the design of biology and one on humanities design. And Linter Beckley has one on the fossil record for philosophy. Michael Ner, who is a neurosurgeon and writes about mind and philosophy for evolution news. His chapter is The Human Mind As Evidence for Design and Creation. Scott Ventura writes about the distinctiveness of the human person, Benjamin Wer, nature's intelligibility. Robert Koons writes about teleology and design. Teleology means the purposefulness of things. Everything has a purpose, and Darwin can't account for that. And Ben Weicher has another chapter on science and the Natural Law. Jay Zeke's philosopher, professor at University of Texas, I think the Natural Moral Law and Logan Gage Beauty and Design. Now, we get to theology. I mean, this book is 270 pages.
Speaker 3 00:08:41 It's not a a doorstop, but you can see there's a lot of really interesting stuff in here. Don Bergsma Design and Scripture. So he outlines all the places where you can find God. Speaking of his design in scripture, Pedro Barone is a priest in Rome, rector of a university there creation, revelation of God's glory. Michael Ric, who is a Dominican priest, has a chapter on Is Darwin a problem for the Church? And Aquinas and Design Richard Sternberg on Aristotle and Intelligent Design. And these last two chapters are dealing with the controversy that's specifically Catholic over Philosoph. And then Jay Richards chance and Randomness on the persistent conflict between Orthodox Catholicism and Orthodox Darwinism. And then the church must encourage the debate. And finally, a beautiful chapter, which I hope everybody reads, called A Living and Symphonic Order by Anthony Epsilon. He is a scholar English professor and a beautiful writer. He writes a magnificent piece where he draws in the beauty of music and poetry and language and the order we find in the universe and what scriptures says about it and how it, the medieval people came to see that God's orderliness in creation allowed them to start to search for him in the Book of Nature as well as in the book of Scriptures. I put it last because it's like the icing on the cake.
Speaker 2 00:10:25 Yeah, I've read parts of that chapter already and it truly is inspiring. So you can see that there's three sections here, signs, philosophy and theology. What an amazing team of writers you've assembled to equip, uh, believers of the truth of our claims, right, of the truth of intelligent design claims. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's quite, uh, quite amazing. Now, you've been connected with discovery since about 2004, and I was, I was reading a bit, uh, of your background and for a good while. Evolution made a lot of sense to you, didn't it? I mean, you, you embraced it all the way through your, your education. And so how did this scientific background help you on this particular project? Was this a good time for you to do such a project?
Speaker 3 00:11:11 Well, let me back up a little bit. I didn't embrace evolution. I was sort of like waiting to see how things turned out because when I was in graduate school, this discipline called evolutionary developmental biology was new and hot. And everybody was excited because they were identifying mutations that affected the body plans of organisms. And they thought that once they clone the and sequenced them, they'd know how body plants were put together and how things evolved. And, you know, it would solve everything. Of course it didn't, but I was waiting to see. But that was in the eighties and there wasn't anything that I knew of, like intelligent design. I didn't know if there were any other scientists out there asking these questions. I had looked into creationism after I got out of college, but it didn't quite satisfy me. So I just sort of set things aside. Now you asked me what switched me over. I did. Is that one of the things you wanted to know?
Speaker 2 00:12:13 Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:14 Okay. <laugh>, I can't really explain it. All of a sudden, one day I was obsessed with the question of evolution and faith because I saw very clearly that biology pointed towards God and not a way that the evidence for design and and purpose in nature and the beauty and everything shouted the reality of God. And I just couldn't understand why other people couldn't see it. And so I started looking to see if there was anyone out there. Now I had been home with my kids raising them for 12 years, and I had not had anything to do with science. So when this question popped up, I started looking around and I discovered that while I was gone, several people had written books on the subject, including Mike Behe and Jonathan Wells and Steve Meyer. And then I discovered Discovery Institute was right in my back door.
Speaker 3 00:13:11 I was in Seattle. And so I tried to make contact once I went to a seminar, but nothing ever really clicked. Some loop was dropped. So we decided to put the kids into Catholic school because they needed more structure. I'd been homeschooling them, and I had taught a homeschool course, I'm biology teaching it from the viewpoint of saying, okay, here's the evolutionary argument. Now here's the intelligent design argument, what do you make of it? And that went really well. But then nobody signed up for the next year. And I thought, God, what are you doing? What? There were lots of other signs and symbols going on at the time, but I'm not gonna talk about all of 'em. It'd take too long. But somebody sent me a note of Bennet newsletter, they forwarded it to me, the newsletter in which it was announced that Steve Meyer had published his paper in the proceedings at the Smithsonian on the Cambrin explosion. And I was really interested. So I, um, said, I'm gonna sign up for this newsletter and I'm gonna sign my name Ann G your PhD. I wonder what will happen. <laugh>, 20 minutes later, Logan Gates, who was working at the Discovery Institute called me up and said, I see you have a PhD. Yes, I see you're here in Seattle. Yes. I see you signed a descent from Darwin List. I said, yes. And then there was this pause and I said, can I send you my CV <laugh>? And the rest is history
Speaker 2 00:14:41 <laugh>. Indeed. The rest is history. Yeah. That is a humorous account. And you've really brought a lot to the table since then, since those early years, done a lot of research on various problems. We've articulated the causal circularity problem, the waiting times problem, the implausibility of human evolution, and the possibility of mono genesises, which is of course humanity descending from two first parents. So you have brought a lot of scientific to the table, and I'm sure that that has informed this book. Do you write about just the biology in this book, or you also write about human evolution,
Speaker 3 00:15:21 Right? I do. I talk about biological design and then also humanities design. And in that, that chapter, I try to, well, I do deal with some of the specifics of Catholic theology, which is we are freer to accept scientific explanations, but there are some things we're required to believe. One is that God created everything from nothing, de Novo. Second is that we are descended from only two first parents. There wasn't any other human around at the time that was not descended from Adam. And the third is that we are, each of us is given a soul by God at the moment of our conception. So from that, I then go on to talk about what the biology says, who we are as human beings, what makes us special, and why can't that be something that you get from Darwinism? And so I say, okay, how do we address this? How do we reconcile faith and science in this situation? Because ideally, that's what you wanna do. God's the author of truth, and that means his creation should also coincide with what he says in scripture. Right? And so how, how do we reconcile it? And I, I go through the scientific evidence, and then I go through what we know, uh, from scripture, and I come up with a way to synthesize. Not everybody's gonna agree with it. And there are things that are certainly adjustable, but invite people to read the chapter.
Speaker 2 00:16:57 Well, even in the preface, I noticed that you introduced two, just two common claims that those in the Catholic community often fall prey to as well as others. And that is that one God is unnecessary. You know, this idea of scientific materialism explaining all that is, and then that's through physics and cosmology. And then the other idea being that even if God did create his design is undetectable, and you, you push back on both those claims and others with this book mm-hmm. <affirmative>
Speaker 3 00:17:29 Mm-hmm. <affirmative> to say that God is unnecessary. Well, first of all, materialist science scientism makes the claim that there is nothing that is not material either made of atoms or energy. So there's no spiritual realm, no spirituality, no. They don't even believe that there's such a thing as free will. So that's based on a philosophical approach. They make the choice to say that there is only a material world, and it's not based on any science. There's no demonstration anywhere that that's true. It's just a claim they make. And then they say that denies God, and they also say, we cannot allow a divine foot in the door. We don't want to take into account the possibility that there might be more going on than that. And then the second one, remind me what it is.
Speaker 2 00:18:22 Yeah, the, the second, uh, common claim that, that God's design is undetectable, indistinguishable from natural processes.
Speaker 3 00:18:31 Well, actually that's a sort of a, a claim that theistic evolutionists like to make. These are Christians who accept God and certain aspects of Christianity, but also want to say that evolution is how God made living things. It's a way of trying to be part of the mainstream scientific community and squeeze in your faith by saying, God did everything, but we can't tell that he created anything. There's no evidence that he created everything. And I, I kind of find this funny because atheistic scientist like Richard Dawkins have said things like, life gives the appearance of having been designed for a purpose, even though we know it wasn't. So, which is it, does it look like it's designed as the atheist said, or does it not look like it's designed as theistic? Evolutionist said
Speaker 2 00:19:28 <laugh>? Yeah, it can be both, can it?
Speaker 3 00:19:30 No, it can't. And so, yeah, I think the claim that you can't detect design is just a false claim. Yeah. Let me just clarify one thing. Some people think that intelligent design means God intervened for every single change necessary, or it's all special creation. Then the theistic illusionists would wanna say, well, no, God acted through secondary causes mean he's the prime cause. And he creates creatures with their own characteristics and purpose and allows them to outwork the results that lead to change. So that's called secondary causation. And then they say everything looks like a natural process. So, but we can't tell that God was behind it. The thing is, if you study science from a purely materialistic point of view, you can get equations and measurements and demonstrations of chemical reactions, things like that, material explanations. But what you can't get is an explanation for why it is that a beaver knows he has to build a dam and he has to build his hut, and he, he knows how to live in his environment. You can't get an explanation for why the weaver bird can build that incredible nest or other birds learn to sing their own songs, or gosh, ants build an colonies and they divide up the labor. It's all part of what they are, what they were created to be. There's a purposefulness in what they're doing. They have a purpose in life. We have a purpose in life. But purpose is an idea that Darwin can't account for. It's not an evolutionary thing. Evolution doesn't care about purpose. It only cares about who lives and who dies.
Speaker 2 00:21:26 Right. No, that's good. That's really good. And I'm glad that you are bringing arguments together in this book that can really address that. Well, as we wrap up here, I have another question. Is this book just for Catholics or can those in the greater Christian community, can they find things of use in it as well?
Speaker 3 00:21:45 Oh, for sure. I mean, evangelicals and Protestants of all stripes that share the same beliefs as us, you know, uh, if they're a creedal faith, we say the same creeds. Um, we share those beliefs. We have the same God and the same faith in Christ. So there's not that much difference between us as far as the basics, the things that affect creation and science in that realm. So the question of purpose, the question of intelligibility, the question of why we have a moral law, um, the question of the human soul, those are all things we all share. And those are the things that are discussed in the book. There are segments, a few segments where Catholic theology is mentioned. Like for me it was, uh, the three points that I said earlier, but Christians believe that God created the earth from nothing, the universe from nothing. And most Christians who aren't theistic evolutionists would say, yes, we came from two first parents, Adam and Eve. I don't know that Christians would articulate it, that we are given a soul at our creation by God himself. That's a Catholic teaching. And actually it's an important Catholic teaching because it demonstrates our dignity and how much we are valued if we are each given our unique soul at the moment of our conception. It, it's a very strong statement about who God sees us to be and, and what he intends for us.
Speaker 2 00:23:16 Well, there's so much more that we could unpack here. And as you suggested, maybe we'll come back and we'll talk about specific chapters and specific themes in future episodes. That's about all the time we have for this one. But let me just close by reading that second and last stanza of the Hopkins poem that inspired the book's title. And for all this nature is never spent. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. And though the last lights off the Black West went oh, morning at the Brown Brink eastward springs because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah, bright wings. So there's a, there's a brightness, there's a beauty, there's an encouragement there that I think, uh, is also present in this book that you've assembled.
Speaker 3 00:24:07 Yeah, the Holy Spirit broods over us. And thank God <laugh>, we need it <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:24:13 Well, and thanks for taking the time to share about this important new contribution to intelligent design literature, and I hope I can speak with you again about it soon. Thank
Speaker 3 00:24:22 You. My pleasure. And I'd be happy to do it again.
Speaker 2 00:24:25 Well, God's Grande is available to order on Amazon, but you can also go to gods grandeur.org and you can order there and download a free chapter. That's god's grandeur.org. For more episodes of the podcast, visit id the future.com or check out previous episodes wherever you enjoy your podcasts. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:24:52 Visit
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