[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Greetings, I'm Tom Gilson. Today's, ID the Future episode features two of the most intellectually stimulating yet fun conversationalists on the planet eric Metaxis and David Berlinsky. Eric Mataxis is well known as a best selling author and cultural commentator, and he'll introduce David Berlinsky for us. This is the first of two episodes. We're bringing you from one of Eric metaxis'socrates and the city events in New York City. They're focusing on David Berlinsky's book on human nature.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Wow. Thanks again, all of you, for being here at Socrates and City. We've been doing these roughly monthly. Some of you, I know, have been here to each one of these, and we aim to be eclectic. For example, you'll remember May 31, we had Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke who walked on the moon 50 years ago.
And I'm sorry to say, none of the guests we've had since then has walked on the moon. And I feel we're doing the best we can. We tried, but there was no one else who walked on the moon who was willing to be our guest. So from here on in, I think it's going to be mostly terrestrially bound guests. And again, I apologize. I'm sorry.
I want to say to those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Socrates in the city, socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living. And then he blew his brains out in an alley.
That's not true.
He said the unexamined life is not worth living. And we thought, I think, 20 something years ago, that New Yorkers in particular lead particularly unexamined lives.
We're kind of going after the brass ring. And it would be nice if we could have a forum where we could have conversations where people talked about the big questions, the big questions whether God exists, whether there's such a thing as human nature, whether science is compatible with faith, whether we can know know things like that. First of all, I want to thank the Discovery Institute for helping make this possible. And I want to thank in particular Mr. David Thayer, who is now going to rise and sing the national anthem. David. David, are you no, not going to happen. What are you, a globalist now? You don't believe in that? David, thank you. Anyway, I'm happy to say that I was able to lure Dr. Berlinsky from Paris. It's a big deal to fly here from Paris, and we're really grateful that he was willing to do that. I only live on the Upper East Side, and I'm more tired than he is because we've spent some time together the other day. I think I've been doing too much. The other day, this literally happened. I was exhausted, and I said to explain that I was exhausted, I said this is a sentence I said I said, it is so tired. I'm 10:00.
I literally said that. I think that tells you that things were beginning to break down at that point. It is so tired. I'm 10:00.
Yeah. Thank you very much. You've been a great audience. Good night.
Some of you know about David Berlinsky, and you came anyway. I want to say thank you.
He's tough to sum up. Particularly difficult to sum up.
He's a bestselling author. He has a PhD from Princeton. Big deal. Who doesn't, right?
He's taught philosophy and mathematics at universities in France and the United States. He's a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. He's the author of many books.
I've been reading a few of them recently that I hadn't seen before. And I want to say I hate the fact that he's here because I hate to embarrass people. You know me.
But not only does he have something to say, but he says it so particularly gloriously that I am taken aback often. He's outrageously.
I think probably uniquely talented as a writer. As a speaker, not so much.
No, I think you'll see that I'm kidding in that.
Just to be clear, he has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, and again, who has not? Theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics. He's written three novels. He's taught philosophy, math, and English.
He's held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and at the institute how do we say this? Dizzle ETU scientific, something like that.
He is, as I said, the author of a number of books. I can't remember which one I read first. Some of you know the devil's Delusion. It is really, really extraordinary. No less than William F. Buckley, Jr. Said, Berlinsky's book is everything desirable. It is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly, polemical, amusing, and, of course, vastly learned. I congratulate him.
Buckley could. That's very complimentary. And yet he sort of sounds like a jerk, even in saying something that nice.
It's incredible. Other people have said nice things about David's books and the way they said them. I thought some of these were worth reading. George Gilder, who I was just with at an event, I don't know, in Las Vegas not so long ago. I keep threatening to have him as a guest at Socrates in the City, but he says David Berlinski is to science writing what Tiger Woods is to golf.
He can score from anywhere again. Now, this is in 2009. Woods okay, just so you're clear, we're talking about that Tiger Woods. He can score from anywhere, against any opponent on any course. The Deniable Darwin, which is one of David's books, is a compulsive revel of his incandescent prose and jugular polemics as irresistible as Goethel's proof. And who can't resist Goethel's proof?
I like to take a crack at resisting it.
Gerald Schroeder, who was one of our guests at Society in the City about ten or twelve years ago, says, dave Berlinski's ability to weave the lessons of history with the wonders of modern science is unmatched. As is his use of subtle humor that enlivens his text. These essays will delight many and annoy others. And David can be this is one of the reasons I love David Berlinski.
He can be beautifully annoying in the way that he writes. Michael Behe, whom I interviewed at Socdes in the City in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he said with high style and lighthearted disdain very well put. David Berlinski deflates the intellectual pretensions of the scientific atheist crowd. Maybe they can recite the periodic table by heart, but the secular Berlinsky shows that this doesn't get them very far in reasoning about much weightier manners. So we'll probably talk a little bit about a number of David Berlinsky's books, but we'll focus on the most recent one mainly, which is called Human Nature. And in order to do that, I have to ask David Berlinsky to join me on the stage. David Berlinski, please join me on the stage.
Well, hello there.
[00:08:26] Speaker C: How are you doing?
[00:08:28] Speaker A: I've been better. How are you?
[00:08:30] Speaker C: Better as well.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
I really do mean it when it just means so much to me that you were willing to drag yourself across an ocean to be here. Thank you very much. I didn't say this just now, but tomorrow you will be at our studio to do my radio TV program. It'll be way better than this, but whatever we don't talk about tonight, we can talk about then.
Socrates, of course, asks questions, and I always want to frame things with a question, roughly speaking. So the title of your book is Human Nature. And I did speak with you. You were in Paris. We did a Skype interview in my program. But I'm fascinated by your view. So I want to frame the larger conversation with the question what is human nature? Or whether there is such a thing as human nature. But before we go there, let me ask you, in writing the book, which is a series of related essays, how did you frame the book? Did you originally think you wanted to write a series of essays that would fall under the rubric of human nature? Somehow?
[00:09:39] Speaker C: No, I don't think so.
All of my books have been framed by the simple imperative of finding out just who I happen to hate at that particular time.
And it's a target rich environment, as one says in the military, especially talking about humanatrius. And so many people deny its existence.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: Well, what you just said, so many people deny its existence. That wasn't really clear to me until I was reading your book and talking to you about your book. I wouldn't have thought of it that way.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: No, most people ordinarily wouldn't think of it that way.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: So in what sense are people denying the concept of human nature? Maybe. Well, go ahead.
[00:10:28] Speaker C: Well, you take a look at the anthropologist or you take a look at the biologists. Take a look at Stephen J. Gould, for example. He's writing about human beings and he says, just an ancient prejudice that we are different in kind rather than degree from the rest of the animal kingdom. Well, it's an ancient prejudice for a good reason. It happens to be true. Human beings are different in kind.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: He obviously was a Darwinian evolutionist sort.
[00:11:00] Speaker C: Of I mean, he had many reservations.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: I know punctuated equilibrium and all that garbage. But the point is that one of the points you make, I think, in a couple of your books is that if you believe in Darwinian evolution, in effect you wipe out the concept of human nature because everything is attenuated and everything is gradations. So talk a little bit about that because I find that fascinating.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: I think that's a crucial point, and it's seeped into the larger culture in many different ways. It's not a simple story by any means, but the Darwinian point of view is that you have at the very beginning some sort of unadulterated blob of living structure. And by successive modifications, which inevitably are very small because large modifications will destroy the organism, you create a burgeoning network of different species. That's the Darwinian idea. A reticulation of a primordial blob from which most of us are all descended.
The idea fits very ill with facts on the ground. Facts on the ground, for example, is that no matter the extent to which we feel a warm sense of sympathy in looking at a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee is inevitably behind the bars of the cage and we're in front. And that's a very conspicuous difference.
It's not only who is telling whom what to do, it's also a fact about any number of different properties of the human organism. We're the only species that has language. We're the only species that does mathematics, art, literature, science, music. We're the only species to organize ourselves successfully in any kind of gathering larger than the herd or the tribe. These are all very fundamental characteristics.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: So Darwinian evolution, by definition wipes out the concept of human nature because it says there's no such thing as a distinct species. Everything's attenuated.
Do they deal with that?
I just find it so fascinating when I read it in your book and it struck me that by definition, there can be no such thing as clear human nature. If you believe we evolved out of the primordial soup, through natural selection, whatever, it just makes everything a muddle.
[00:13:46] Speaker C: I'm not going to argue that there's anything like a proof of it. It's a current of sentiment, a current of sympathy. And Darwin himself recognized that.
One of the notable passages in his book, he says he sort of scratches his head.
What are the real consequences of my theory, such that it is? And he says to himself, well, all of a sudden he comes to the conclusion there is no such thing as a species. Species is an elaboration. It may be a bookkeeping artifact, but it has no fundamental reality in the biological world. All that exists in the biological world, and this is Darwin paraphrased by me, is an accumulation of individuals fighting, mating, struggling for existence, and acquiring small differences in their characteristics. And if this is so, what room is there for an additional concept of the species? Species must be an ever shifting local group of populations.
Rather an odd conclusion for a man to make who's titled his book on the Origin of Species.
It was a conflict which he did not find particularly vexing. But I find it very troubling because what Darwin had to say about the existence or non existence of species is one thing, but the ramification of these ideas throughout the sciences, the social sciences at least, is very important. Look, Donald Trump very famous remark talking about other cultures.
Absolutely. Infuriating series of remarks, and he says about other cultures, why should we have rotten cultures coming into the United States? He made a firm judgment some cultures are good, some cultures are bad. Now, I'm not endorsing what Trump said, but it was a very honest expression of opinion, which I suspect, in one way or another, we all share, although in one way or another, we're all unwilling to advocate for the views that we share. However, the instantaneous objection from, say, the anthropologist or the social scientists was first, a declaration of moral relativism. It's impossible to make those kinds of judgments. That's just vanity. But second, and the much more interesting and important point, they rejected Trump for essentialist reasoning. And what is essentialist reasoning? It's assigning essential properties to one group of individuals, and essential properties, but different properties to another group. One group is rotten. One group is not rotten. It's an essential property.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Didn't he mean I mean, the way you just phrased it, he was criticizing the culture, not the people themselves.
[00:16:35] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: In other words, you can be part of a culture that that believes in human sacrifice and slavery, and you can say that we don't want that here.
[00:16:46] Speaker C: Yeah, that's my question.
I don't see the consequence that's said to follow.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: In other words, one would be racist or racialist.
No, the comment and the other one is criticizing a culture.
[00:17:04] Speaker C: The idea, the objation, as it was advocated by anthropologists, is that Trump and everybody who thinks like Trump is committing an intellectual error in claiming certain cultures or groups of individuals or societies have certain essential characteristics. I mean, after all, had Trump said certain people have not appreciated the grandeur of the English common law yet, and therefore they should be rejected from immigration status, but should they master the intricacies of, say, Braxton in the 13th century, they would be welcome. That would be one argument. I would be very sympathetic to that argument, as you would, of course, be sympathetic as well. But that's not what he was saying. He's saying these people are rotten. That's very different. Or these cultures are rotten?
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think the distinction between whether he said the people were rotten and the cultures were rotten is important.
But I don't know that we want to go down that.
[00:18:02] Speaker C: I don't know. A culture is just a group of people who behave in a certain way.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Well, but it's not intrinsic to the people.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: But that's the objection. It's not the objection from the anthropologist, the social scientist he's making an essentialist argument. He is saying, yes, it is intrinsic it's a necessary feature of these cultures and that's what they found objectionable. But that goes right into Darwin is there such a thing as human nature? If there is such a thing as human nature, it can be parsed into different human cultures and if there is such a thing as human nature, is it necessary inflexible irrefrangible? Is it part of destiny? That's a very important question when you ask whether men can become women, isn't it?
[00:18:47] Speaker A: It's not a question I ask you.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Should.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: I think that's been settled.
I'm fascinated that people we have settled.
[00:18:56] Speaker C: It in our own mind, but it hasn't been settled in the medical literature. It hasn't been settled in the literature of psychology, anthropology, social studies. It's wide open and it trades on these very subtle distinctions.
Go ahead.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: No, it gets to the heart of your book, the concept of human nature, whether there is such a thing and what it is and what does it mean? And yes, when someone blithely asserts that men can become women or women become men, it goes immediately to this question.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: Of course it does.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: What is a man? What is a woman? And when did we suddenly decide that there was much question about this?
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Well, I think the question was latent for a long time.
There's been a struggle in philosophy and in mathematical logic for a very long time about modal logic, that is, logic of necessity and possibility. Now, clearly, some things are absolutely necessary. We don't have to argue eric Metaxis equals eric Metaxis is true everywhere you look. There's no argument about that. But some things it's very difficult to assign the proper scope for necessity or possibility.
We talked about men becoming women, women becoming men. What about human beings becoming reptiles? Is that just not likely or is it impossible?
Which one? Where does intuition direct you? I suppose you had. Someone said the only thing separating me from life as a reptile is the acquisition of a suitable backplating. If I want to become a turtle, or whatever reptiles have by way of circulatory systems, these are certainly navigable acquisitions. I could acquire a reptilian armamentarium if I wished. Is that the only thing making it very difficult for you to become? I'm posing this as an open question is it just a little bit standing between you and the reptiles?
[00:20:59] Speaker A: I remember when you last spoke at Socrates in the city you were talking about evolution and you were making clear what most of us really aren't aware of is how unbelievably complex it would be, for example, for a whale to become a cow, or a cow to become a whale. In other words, if you don't know anything about what makes up a cow and what makes up a whale and what would be necessary for one to evolve into the other, you could say, well, I can see that happening but if you begin to look into it as you made clear, then it becomes preposterous. So when you talk about becoming a lizard, obviously it has to do with infinitely more complex things than some armor.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Plating well, that's true, but is it only that it's real tough for we men to become reptiles? Or is it that there's something more fundamental? It's not just that it's real tough.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: Well, tough to the point of impossible.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: I mean, remember Kafka's story The Metamorphosis? One day Gregor Sams up gregor Samza, I think I remember the name correctly wakes up and discovers he's been transformed into a gigantic cockroach. It's a wonderful story, wonderful story. There's absolutely nothing humorous in the story. Once you accept the first sentence of Kafka's prose, everything follows logically, and the family accepts him initially as a cockroach, and he discovers that he has cockroach tastes as well. And there are unbelievably Poignant scenes within the story. Gregor Samza, now incarnated as a cockroach, looks out the window and discovers he's got a cockroach's sight he can't see beyond the windowsill. And he remembers very distinctly in a moment of great Poignancy, he used to see the entire panorama of Prague before his eyes. No longer can do as much. Kafka, in his own way in 19, 6019, 7017 asked exactly the same kind of question is this a plausible transformation, no matter how difficult it may be? After all, on Darwinian scenarios, we certainly could become reptiles if we wound back the genetic clock to the last common ancestor and then follow a divergent path. That's possible, but that's not really the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is the question do human beings have a fundamental essence? It's radically different from the essence of other animals and that cannot be changed at will because the change would involve not something that's difficult but something that is impossible in the way that squaring the circle is impossible.
My own feeling, and it's no more than a feeling an intuition is, yeah, we do possess a radically different human nature, radically different from the rest of the animal kingdoms and no, it cannot be changed. And this has implications when we talk about those overly optimistic plans to download our consciousness into a computer and continue existing in silicon long after in my own case, the world goes mad with grief.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: We neglected to install the snare drum for lines like that, but in post I'm told we can get that effect. Well, look, there's no way around it.
If you have a secularist, materialist, naturalist worldview that says there is no God, and we got here by blind Darwinian evolution, it follows logically that there's no such thing as human nature. So to assert that there is such a thing as human nature somehow inevitably, for me at least, brings up the God question that we're made in God's image. In other words, why would we protest? On what basis are we protesting that it's preposterous that we could become lizards? Or in other words, all of this points sure, because when you say your enemies in writing this book, you're taking aim at a few different kinds of ideological enemies. And I think that at the back of much of it is a hostility toward the narrative that says there is a God that we're created in his image. That's kind of on my part. No, not at your part. On the part of your ideological enemies that you're taking on in the book.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: Well, I'm pretty Catholic in my ideological enemies, and they don't have to be atheists, but that's a convenient target.
I like going after dopey physicists too. I think you had three things naturalist, secularist, materialist. I'm behind all those three unwillingly. But that's where I find myself.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: How so?
[00:26:24] Speaker C: Because I think there's a tremendous weight of argument in favor of those positions as well as a tremendous weight of argument against it. And I think it's irresponsible, not to mention.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: I mean, let's define our terms because I'm not really doing that.
You in Darwin's. What is it? Deniable darwin. Your book.
[00:26:47] Speaker C: Yeah, I think so.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: In that book and in other books, you have argued brilliantly against the idea that we evolved through natural selection, through random processes, that we arrived here.
So how can you be a naturalist or materialist? I mean, at least to that extent, you're not.
[00:27:10] Speaker C: Well, I scruple at this claim that one is or stands in belief with a certain position. I'd be very happy to say I hate certain people.
I'm a great believer in hate speech, as you know, and despise others, and I'm willing to celebrate a third group.
But the fact is, in 2022, we're the heirs to a very long scientific tradition, and it's just not a good idea to say one part of that tradition is sunk into iniquity and the other is incandescent with probity. That's not a good idea.
Even Darwinian evolution has a great deal going for it. I mean, there's a great deal of evidence that suggests that's just what happened small variations happening, adventitiously followed by natural selection. That's not an illusion, that something like that happens.
The skepticism, the points of counterargument go deeper. But to say that there are very serious counterarguments is not to deny the plain facts underneath our nose that there is a powerful scientific tradition incorporating Darwinian evolution, a powerful scientific tradition incorporating materialism as well. However vague the concept of a material object is. We know from the history of physics that any intuitive concept of a material object that just disappears very quickly, a quantum field, is not a material object in any sense of the material, however loose. But that said, the enlargement of a concept to include things formerly precluded is not a bad thing. We now have a much expanded idea of what a material object could be, might be or is.
The important claim is that letting those definitions slide or become elastic? Are we still prepared to say that the world that matters is the world of matter? That's the intrinsically interesting claim.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: I want to read something from your book The Devil's Delusion, which speaks to this. You say every paleontologist writing since Darwin published his masterpiece in 1859 has known that the fossil record does not support Darwin's theory. The theory predicted a continuum of biological forms, so much so that from the right perspective, species would themselves be seen as taxonomic artifacts, which we've touched on, like the classification of certain sizes in men's suiting as husky. That's unbelievably funny. I just have to pause just to make it clear that that's very funny.
Questions about the origin of species were resolved in the best possible way. There are no species, and so there is no problem inasmuch as the historical record suggested a discrete progression of fixed biological forms that was fatal to Darwin's project.
So I understand that there's this tradition, but you've stood pretty clearly against it, so I'm a little bit confused at what are you, in other words, I think it is scientific, it's particularly scientific to reject Darwinism at this point, because we now can know, based on the absence of the fossil evidence that they were expecting, that it makes sense. But that doesn't make somebody anti enlightenment or anti science.
[00:30:51] Speaker C: No, far from it. But look, it's certainly true that no paleontologist will tell you that the fossil record is anything like the record that Darwin predicted. But it doesn't mean there's no fossil record. In a very important pregnant fossil record, we have a vast store of information about transition between different body forms, for example, simply can't be ignored. The question is what theory adequately explains it? That's a very different theory. My view is that Darwin doesn't contribute a whole lot of enlightenment, but some and generally speaking, we could all appreciate a little light from time to time.
I can very plausibly to my own satisfaction say that this is an important movement in intellectual history. Darwin's theory is an important theory, and it's all wrong. I think those positions are completely consistent.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: It's all then what?
Well, it's interesting. We were talking last night about James Tor, whom I interviewed two weeks ago roughly in Houston at a Soctis in the city event. He deals it's a similar concept. Right. We've all been told, just as we've been told that we got here through random processes, natural selection, whatever everybody believes that it's the story. It's the story. And then we come to think, no, it's wrong. Similarly, Abiogenesis says that 4 billion years ago there was no life on planet Earth. Then suddenly single celled life forms appeared. And then you say how? And the scientists have been fumfering endlessly for 70 years, for more than 70 years to come up with this. And James Tor says to that what you just said. Sorry, it's a nice idea, but we now know that it ain't right.
[00:32:51] Speaker C: I agree. Look, I think James Tor is remarkably courageous. He's a great synthetic chemist, and he's absolutely dead right about origins of life research. That said, there's been a lot of origins of life research and some remarkable synthetic chemistry at the same time. And Tuhr is the first one to acknowledge that.
[00:33:11] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:33:11] Speaker C: I mean, he thinks Donald Sutherland is a great synthetic chemist. So do I. Who is Sutherland?
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Oh, I thought you said Donald Sutherland. I thought I think I think Elliot Gould is the one you're thinking of.
[00:33:24] Speaker C: Probably his twin, kidnapped at birth by gypsies.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: Well, I mean, that's to me, that would be the fair thing. In other words, you're doing science and you learn things, and at some point maybe you discard what the big theory was, but you don't discard everything you've learned along the way. I mean, what you've learned about what constitutes a cell, what is in a cell, all of that stuff maybe wouldn't have been learned if the origin of life folks hadn't been at it. But at what point do we ask them for a little intellectual honesty to say, maybe you can admit that the ladder you've been climbing up low these seven decades has been leaning against the wrong building?
[00:34:11] Speaker C: That's a good question. I think James Torres asked that question of himself. We've talked about it many times, and it's really tough to know when that point comes. It's really tough to know if you're a working synthetic chemist and you feel that you've made some small, incremental progress in explaining the origins of life. And James Tor comes along and says, I mean, that's hopeless. That's hopeless because there's experimental interference in all of your work. Do you give up or do you say, well, I'm not going to listen to James Turer? That's a very difficult judgment.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: That was Eric Mataxis and David Berlinsky at a Socrates in the City event held in New York, talking about Berlinsky's book titled On Human Nature. That was part one of two. We'll be back soon with more for Idthefuture. This is Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
