[00:00:00] Speaker A: As we now know that organisms don't act like inert objects responding to external forces impinged on them, which is the mechanistic theory.
Organisms are active agents that figure out what's going on in their conditions of existence, and they figure out what to do about it in real time.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: Purpose has been a fundamental part of our understanding of nature for millennia. But the rise of scientific materialism and Darwinism saw purpose get left out of the scientific pursuit.
But in recent years, materialists have found it necessary to bring purpose back into the equation, and they're looking for a way to explain purpose without recourse to intelligent design.
Welcome to Idea of the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Thanks for being with us today. Well, today I get to conclude my conversation with Dr. Steven 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 the faith.
And in his book Telos the Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose, he offers a unique reconciliation between faith and science.
He also writes regularly at Science and Culture Today, our flagship news and commentary website. That'
[email protected] In a previous episode, Dr. Iacoboni reviewed for us the history of when and why purpose got excluded from science.
Today he unpacks the dramatic shift in core argument from materialists over the last few decades as they're forced to grapple with the reality of purpose in living things.
We'll also talk about how the ID research community should respond to this change going forward.
Well, let's get back into the conversation now.
And so this has been the dominant understanding for scientific materialists for quite some time. But you're noticing something changing, right? You're seeing that there's a dramatic shift in the core argument from materialists that's been happening last 10, 20 years. What's going on?
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Well, it really has been dramatic. And people sometimes like to use the term paradigm shift just because there have been small changes. But this is a fundamental paradigm shift. And the reason I'm so passionate about it is I think that the naturalists are getting ahead of the ID community in this regard because as I read and study everything that's going on, including a discovery, we are in large part fighting the last war. In other words, we are trying to refute the mechanistic consensus of the 20th century, which is no longer the argument.
So let me explain why it's no longer the argument. Because in the last 20 years, we still continue to think of organisms as machines, which they are not.
And what has the simple idea that you could take a model t and go 20 miles an hour without a horse was the model. And so a lot of 20th century biology was based on this one gene, one protein concept. Like, for example, one single amino acid replacement in the hemoglobin molecule can lead to sickle cell anemia.
And so was the idea was that's how genetics works, but that's not how genetics works. Mostly that is the little tip of the iceberg that we're able to see without digging any deeper.
What we have, what scientists have found, not because they were trying to overturn naturalism, but what they simply found was that it's so complicated that, that it could never arise. In a purely mechanistic way.
The, the paradigm that the. The 20th century naturalism was using was that the organism is a machine. And that's what jocks.
And the person who followed him, who wanted to sort of become his successor as the great scientific atheist, was E. O. Wilson, who wrote the book Consilience. And he said the organism is a machine. Now, if an organism is a machine, then it is reducible. And if it is reducible to chemistry and physics, then there is no need for the God hypothesis.
And yet a lot of my colleagues are still referring to organisms as machines, and trying to point out that the reason there is a God is because machines, all machines do have to have an external designer.
And there, there, ergo, God is the external designer of organisms, and organisms are a machine according to his design. Well, if you can reduce organisms to pure chemistry and physics, you really don't need a designer. You just need chemistry and physics. And it is important to understand that the chemistry and physics that came from Newton, he believed that because he had shown there were laws of nature, that there had to be a lawgiver.
And so Newton, I write this about this in my book, of course, but Newton thought, okay, now that I've shown that there are laws that could be understood by the human intellect, and then clearly we are reading God's mind and there is a God who made these laws. And of course, then Laplace came along and said, there is no need for that hypothesis means the God hypothesis.
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: So now we're in a different world, we're in a different era, because organisms don't behave hardly at all like machines. They're always far from equilibrium. Machines are not. Organisms are not created by an external designer that we can see everything that happens in an organism is internal. And the things that an organism does to maintain itself is not for some external purpose like you, you, you plug in a toaster for the purpose of, of toasting the bread of the person who put the toast in. The organisms aren't doing anything for the sake of something external to them. They're only doing it for themselves.
And so purpose was kept out of science because it has teleologic or intentionality connotations. And, and the goal was to reduce everything to the collision of atoms. And then, you know, atoms collide into each other just like rocks fall down a hillside. There's no intentionality.
And that would have cemented scientific atheism if you could show that that was what was going on.
So purpose was left out because they thought they could reduce it all to things that are utterly purposeless. And then when you say, well, this is all by design, he said, what? Design is just Newtonian mechanics.
Now we know that it isn't reducible Newtonian mechanics, of course B pointed that out in of course Darwin's black box, but in all of his other writings. But in order to see what's going on inside the cell now, but let me back up a second. One of the things about all this again is if you're looking at it from a, from a primitive or say, elementary point of view, you go, the reason why I eat is because I'm hungry. And I'm hungry because there's a chemical signal in my stomach that goes to the brain that says it's time to put something in your stomach. And that's all well defined physiology. There's nothing mysterious about that. And so yeah, that purposeful behavior is like, I don't, I'm cold, I want to put on a jacket or there's a grizzly bear coming at me, I'm going to hide in a cave.
All of those purposeful actions are reducible to simple physiology.
But all of the things that we do as whole organisms, it turns out we didn't know this until recently.
Sit at a top of a hierarchy of all the other little things going on all the way down to the cell.
And down there the cell doesn't know there's a grizzly bear and the cell doesn't know this and that. But they are still doing all these things that can't be reduced to linear, what we call linear chemistry.
The idea was that you had a genome that coded for proteins. Proteins go out and make an organism. And it is all very linear and mechanical.
That was what was believed in 1990, so to speak.
That was in medical school at the time. That's what we were taught.
Now we know that's like saying that a car can't go faster than 20 miles an hour and it can't run on a battery. Well, now we know cars can go fast and you don't need gasoline.
We now know that when the body senses that it needs something, it goes into the cell and says, I've got a library of genes here.
What do I need? I need to grow thicker fur because it's cold outside. So instead of I'm going to. The spliceosome goes to the DNA and the epigenetics goes to the DNA and said, we need the gene that turns on hair growth right now because it's coming on cold weather and we want those genes to be expressed. We're going to suppress the genes that have to do with swimming because water is too cold, it's frozen.
All that's going on.
It's not just A goes to B, goes to C, 2 plus 2 goes to 4, 4 plus 2 goes to 6. Now that's going on. And, and so we see purpose happening on the part of cells and molecules, but have no reason that we can understand to be purposeful.
And what's very interesting is that all of this was more or less uncovered by studying bacteria. Not much, because you can't really.
Now we know, of course, that all of that is happening inside our own bodies, but it's very hard to study in whole organisms, especially mammals and so on, and get down to the cell. Whereas all this is for, and less discovered by people who were studying E. Coli, because you got a cell doesn't even have a nucleus, doesn't have introns. All of the gene, all the, all the DNA is, are exons.
And so everything that it's doing, you can see what's going on.
And they took these little bacteria and they did things to them, and they did all sorts of unexpected things. They only did them because you, you, you, you provided a stimulus or an external condition of existence that they had to cope with, that they had never coped with before. And so Michael Levin, for example, has shown that planaria can do things that they never did before. And there's no historical evolutionary history to allow these genes to express themselves in these ways. But you can expose planaria to barium, which kills them.
And there's no barium out there in the world where planarians are sitting out in ponds, and then the planaria will figure out this barium is bad. I'M going to figure out a way to detoxify it, and then the planaria come back to life and so on. And so they're going.
This idea that the gene is just a software for hardware and that it runs according to a program is a vast oversimplification. And that what's going on is that the gene and the epigenome and the spliceosomes are all measuring what's going on outside their external environment and figuring out through cybernetics inside the cell, stimuli and responses and what they need to do to overcome whatever it is that's bothering them or exploit whatever new food source you put in the petri dish.
So that we now see that organisms aren't passive objects that are responding to external forces the way a baseball is hit when hit by a bat and goes somewhere into the.
Into the baseball field, but the ball itself is deciding, I think I'll go over the fence this time.
In other words, they're behaving like intentional agents.
[00:13:29] Speaker C: And
[00:13:29] Speaker A: this is no longer controversial. This isn't. Gee whiz, are, Is this possible? No, this is already established.
[00:13:35] Speaker C: Yeah,
[00:13:35] Speaker A: it's already established. And so, as we now know, that organisms don't act like inert objects responding to external forces impinged on that, which is the mechanistic theory.
Organisms are active agents that figure out what's going on in their conditions of existence, and they figure out what to do about it in real time.
One of the reasons why this is so profound is because it explains evolution in a whole different way. In other words, discovery. And all of the other wonderful ID theorists basically pointed out, I mean, look at David Gor had no interest in being an ID theorist. And Anthony Flu, who was dedicated, dedicated himself to atheism.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: He studied the mechanics of randomness and selection and said, this just can't happen. And that's the whole point of design inference by Dembsky is this just can't happen in the mechanisms that you have that you've said you have available to you to make these changes. And so naturalism has said, you're right, we concede, we give up, you win. Oh, wait a minute. We're going to come up with new mechanisms. We're not going to call them mechanisms, we're going to call them agency, and we're going to give them intentionality, and we're going to show that these things can occur. Because, for example, if we believe in evolution, then you have to show, why would an organism change itself? Why would would an orca turn into a blue Whale at some point.
Well, so these things have to say, gee whiz, there are not enough seals around. I think I'm going to go eating krill and so I'm going to change my anatomy and turn it to a baleen instead of a tooth. Cetacean.
All that happened.
It happened. And so organisms had to figure this out, you know, and you can say that's wild. Well, think of this. You know, the, the cetaceans, meaning dolphins in whales who require echolocation in order to live.
You can't hear underwater with the ears of non cetacean mammals or you can't localize.
So the inner ear of only, only whales and porpoises, it's completely different.
They said, oh, we want echolocation. We've got to change our inner ear so that we can tell where the sound is coming from. Because the reason you and I can tell that the sound is coming from here or there is because sound travels differently through air fast enough that we can tell something happening right here is not right here with our eyes closed because we, because sound gets to there. That can't happen underwater with these ears. If you go underwater in a swimming pool and try it, you can see it doesn't work.
And it gets even better. There are birds, not bats, but birds who live in caves who echolocate because they live in caves. So they said, we're living in a cave and we need to echo locate. We're going to have special echolocating systems only because we're in a cave. You know, there's conditions of existence said, you've got to fix this.
You have to agentially change your hearing in order to survive. And so that's what they did.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: And so, and so it's not.
There's no mechanism that provides for that in terms of genetics or the mechanism is that the genes and the epigenome are figuring these things out.
Now the beauty of it is, of course, this is our only surv way to maintain naturalism. But what I'm going to write on my next piece, which is coming out in a few weeks, is that this whole idea of agency is just Thomistic Aristotelianism.
The design is built in.
It is not reducible the way he said, it's not reducible.
It's a complexity that's beyond mechanism.
And so there that. But it can't happen by magic. So there has to be some external design of organisms. When we said organisms weren't externally designed, they are externally designed by the God who created the biosphere in the first place. And so I think they're going to end up losing this argument. But if we don't figure this out and start responding, they're going to get ahead of us for a while until they catch up.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: Wow. It's all very interesting.
So we have materialists who are sort of bumping up against the ceiling of reductionist biology and they're saying, hey, they're onto something, but we're not going to join them. So we've got to figure out where this purpose is coming from, evolutionarily, as it were.
So let's dig into this just a little bit more with our time left here. Now you highlight the work of University of Toronto philosopher of biology Dennis Walsh, who argues that we need to move beyond what he calls object theory.
You know, that would be the mechanistic idea of organisms toward agent theory in our understanding of living things. So briefly, what does he mean by those terms and why is the distinction important?
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Well, first of all, like I said, object theory just doesn't explain organisms. And everybody now can understand that.
And, and so the whole fundamental basis of scientific materialism of the 20th century is over.
It's like saying you can't have an electric powered car. Yes, we can.
No, we're not gonna, we're not gonna debate that anymore. Yes we can.
And so the only way to, to maintain naturalism is to say organisms are figuring things out. And they figure things out through what we call cybernetics and computation, which is then reducible to something material.
And, but it is very clear that, that they have to find a way to explain all this.
And this is, this is their approach.
The problem is, is that it's going to be impossible.
But they're not saying that, they're saying it's just a matter of time until we figure out more things. But it is now really the naturalism of the gaps as opposed to what was in the 20th century, the God of the gaps, where we said in the 20th century, well, is this little thing science hasn't explained and that's consciousness. And so that's a gap that allows us to still have faith.
Now the naturalists have to say, well, you've really pointed out that the mechanistic theory doesn't explain organisms. And so we're going to impart intentionality and consciousness to, to molecules.
We don't know how that happens. There's a gap in our knowledge as to how that could happen.
So that's our gap. It's important to point out to one of the most important intellectuals who knew from the beginning that materialism was a bad idea was Alfred North Whitehead and of course came along too early in the, you know, the 20s of the last century, invoking panpsychism to explain why.
Why the heck does an electron care if there's a proton around?
Why, why, why does mass attract mass?
All that so called totally reducible physics is actually still irreducible.
Mass is made up of protons and quarks and prions and so on and so on. Einstein figured out that the M in F equals MA is the same M in the gravity equation, where in force equals mass times acceleration. Mass isn't the force, it's what gets pushed.
And in the gravity equation, mass is the thing exerting the force m 1 times m 2 times g over R squared equals G, the gravitational force.
And so how could the same symbol do be inertia on one side and mass on this side? Well, it's just the way the equations worked. It doesn't mean that it's that real.
We measure gravity by mass and you measure mass by gravity. And so it's a circle. And it's not really the most rigorous thing in the world.
So they're in big trouble. But as long as they're going to keep promoting these things, we have to be able to respond. And the simplest thing is that we would respond by saying that everything you're saying is Thomistic Aristotelianism, meaning all things actually do are ordered to their end.
For example, if you ask the question why great biochemists, organic chemists like James Tour and all the other people who aren't, who aren't ID but are naturalists who want to create life in a test tube, they simply can't.
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Yeah,
[00:23:14] Speaker A: and, and you know, in science, if you have a theory, you can test it, but after you've tested it enough times to show that it isn't working, you really have to say I've got the wrong theory. You know, rare, rare rabbits in the, in the briar patch. If you don't look in the briar patch, you're never going to find it.
And so the reason why you can't create life from non life is because you're doing the wrong experiment. The right experiment is to create agency within matter so that somehow, some way that we have no way of explaining other than God, of course, is that the DNA and the RNA and the spliceosome are put together in such a way that they become active agents.
And now of course, you have this Compelling need for the God hypothesis.
As Stephen Meyer says, without the God hypothesis, there's no hope, and there isn't hard to imagine filling that gap.
They simply want to say, well, organisms have agency and it's the agency which is the natural thing. And I say, yeah, of course. Life is, Life is natural. They took natural nature away from us. I like to tell people, you know, materialists call themselves materialists until it sounded like they just wanted a lot of money. They're materialists. Okay, we're not materialists, we're naturalists.
What I think we need to do is, is understand that they're changing the argument and that we, we need to know how to respond to it, because they're very clever and they're not equivocating either. They're not.
So I was reading the other day that they're now saying that what goes on in organisms really is irreducible. They're agreeing with beihi, but it's irreducible. And yet it's, it's its spontaneous generation of order.
And my response to that would be, yeah, I agree. We don't know how it happened because it's a mysterion. And the only way it could happen is if God created a world and a universe where these things could all come together and have and, and become what they are in a way that isn't reducible.
He was totally right. It's not reducible. It has to come.
There has to be at some point an external designer. And this is what Aquinas said 1200 years ago.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And I, as I was reading some of your, your pieces in preparation for our conversation, you know, I was seeing, well, from, from their side of things, I was seeing words that they're coming up with new words, you know, that I had, I wasn't familiar with. And I was also seeing things like the law of increasing functional information. You know, it's almost like if they come up with a fancy term, if they come up with a new law, you know, and give it a name, that they found the source, you know.
But as Stephen Meyer's fond of saying, you know, laws don't make things happen. They just describe things that are already happen. And so, so do you think they're going to come up empty handed? What's next for this debate?
[00:26:49] Speaker A: No, I don't think they're going to come up empty handed because as they take over the. Well, for one thing, they still dominate.
They have the dominant power of discourse.
Adversaries are always coming up with new ways to fight and create their own advantages. They were trying to solve one of the great ontologic mysteries of the universe, and they utterly failed. But I mean, they wrote a book about it, and other people who endorse the book said, oh, this is brilliant. This really breaks the new rounds and so on. It doesn't do a dang thing.
But I mean, these are complicated issues and most people are not science literate.
And I hate to go back to this, but one of the good things about the pandemic was it showed the world, the sophisticated American world, that the scientists are not dispassionate, apolitical seekers of truth.
They are liars with an agenda.
And, and the fact that they say, there's the head of the NAIA doesn't mean a dang thing because they lied to us and they took away our civil rights and they told us not to go to church while they kept all the casinos open in, in, in, in. In Nevada and they kept all the bars open. But you, you couldn't go to the park and exercise.
People need to understand. Is that in my book telos, I use the L word.
They lie to us.
This isn't like, oh, gee, we really thought there wasn't a God and we're just trying to seek truth. No, they're lying because they have an agenda. They want to take the apple from the tree of knowledge and take it for themselves. This is the original sin.
You know, there's nothing wrong with knowledge, but you have to understand that the fruit of the tree of knowledge belongs to God. And you can take the apple if you say, thank you, this is knowledge you gave me, and I give you all the credit, Lord.
But if you say, oh, no, we don't need that hypothesis. We've got Newton's laws and we've got chance and necessity.
You want to become a demagogue, and there's a lot of people want to become demigods because then they're powerful. That's just part of what humans do. And it's a great sin, and we need to be aware of it and do our best to educate everyone that it isn't that they're lying and that the fact that they're scientists doesn't make them.
They're politicians. You know, all politicians lie both left and right. It's a matter of what they're lying about and how bad the lie is and where they're. Mostly, they're trying to tell the truth.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: And so we just have to be aware of that.
[00:29:55] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Science, very, very human pursuit. And as you're saying there are agendas. And here we see materialists who are turning back to purpose, but they're doing it in a way that doesn't turn to intelligent design and recognize the true source of that. And so they're still headed in a wrong direction.
Well, Stephen, thank you for spending an hour with me unpacking this. This has been enjoyable.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Andrew. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
[00:30:25] Speaker C: Yeah. And I do want to let people know how to find your book.
Now I mentioned you have an ongoing
[email protected] that's called the Science of Purpose. So look for Stephen iacoboni's
[email protected] and you'll be able to read some of his articles on this topic. And and of course, to dig deeper, you can get a copy of his book Telos the Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose. Well, until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew.
