[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Was a famous 20th century atheist darwinist actually a sleeper id agent? We will find out. I'm Robert Crowther, and for this provocative episode of Id the Future, we're going to look at famed atheist, noted scientist, one of the great popularizers of science in the 20th century, Carl Sagan. Recently, there was an article published at Evolution news titled Carl Sagan, an intelligence that antedates the universe. And to unpack what that means, what this is all about, we've invited today's guest, professor, writer, philosopher, and id proponent, all around good guy, doctor Paul Nelson. Welcome, Paul.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Thanks so much for inviting me on, Rob. You know, I was struck recently by the tremendous growth of interest over the past couple of years in what are now called uaps, unidentified aerial phenomena.
And in musing about this, I thought back on a figure who was really influential in my college years, roughly 1980 to 1984, and subsequently, namely the astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996, tragically young, younger when he died, in fact, than I am now. So I'm getting along in years. I went over to my bookshelf and got my paperback copy of his novel contact off the shelf. And even before I opened the book, I noticed looking at it sort of side on that I had dog eared folded over the corners of about 50 pages from when I first read the novel many, many years ago. And I flipped to those pages, and sure enough, contact as a novel makes an argument for the detectability of intelligent cause. In fact, you really wouldn't have a story without that premise, namely that humans can detect intelligence if it exists elsewhere in the universe. So that set me to thinking, and I wrote the piece that I did for evolution News, and now I've decided I'm going to do a follow up piece, which this podcast is sort of a prelude to, talking about some work of Sagan's that was published posthumously that I think is really significant.
But anyway, I think that contact and Sagan's own scientific work really does give us some insight into the methods of intelligent design detection in a way that's quite striking, because Sagan himself was, of course, a lifelong skeptic of religion and what he saw as superstition. And he would have included, I think, intelligent design in that category. So there's a bunch of interesting puzzles and contradictions here.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, he is detecting design, but he has a materialist view of where that design comes from, I guess. So what is it in contact, and you mentioned his other books and these things that we'll get to the television series he's famous for, I guess, Cosmos. What things does he talk about in there that design proponents go, well, of course you're detecting design. You're seeing design. What is that?
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Well, let me first give the sort of standard view of Sagan, which I think a great deal of evidence supports. Most people think of him as a leading example of a modern scientific skeptic, and he was. In his writings and media appearances, he consistently debunked religious and theological claims. He saw these as ultimately superstitious, meaning that they were based on projecting human desires onto the universe, but without any independent evidence that those desires match reality. And this skepticism is fully consistent with his now famous adage, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And you can see this skeptical attitude, I think, most clearly in his 1996 book, which was published the year he died, the Demon Haunted World. But this is the reason you and I are talking today, and I think it's endlessly fascinating. Sagan was not anti design in the precise sense of the uniqueness and detectability of intelligent causes. In fact, his own decades of research into hypothesizing and detecting extraterrestrial intelligence logically mirrored the arguments and methods of design theorists such as Bill Demski and Steve Meyer, senior fellows of Discovery Institute. As I am, as I'll explain in a few minutes, these logical parallels are clearly laid out in Sagan's and Gifford lectures, which he gave in 1985, published ten years after his death. The Gifford lectures, which are given annually in Scotland, were endowed by Lord Gifford in the late 19th century to, quote, promote the study of natural theology. Okay, I don't want to get ahead of the story. However, we should first focus on Sagan's novel contact, which was published in 1985. And that's actually, as I said, the same year he gave the Gifford lectures, the english poet William Blake had an what is now proved was once only imagined. And that's a good guide for thinking about why Sagan wrote the novel contact.
During his active lifetime of research, no unambiguous evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence had been discovered. And arguably, you know, that's still the case today. Although at the end of our conversation today, I'll describe what I think is a major shift in scientific attitudes towards SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a shift that's occurred, really, in the last couple of years anyway. What's the point of an aphorism such as, what is now proved was once only imagined? Well, we can imagine states of affairs in the universe which, if we actually observe them would lead us to infer certain conclusions, conclusions which, you know, we would regard as definitive as proved. So science fiction stories, like Sagan's novel contact, are, in this sense, a kind of hypothesis formation. And what's really interesting to me is Sagan's own Seti hypothesis emerges, ironically enough, from his philosophical naturalism. So, as he puts it in the television series Cosmos on PBS, quote, the cosmos. And by that, he means the physical universe. The cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be. Close quote. It's kind of a. I wouldn't say a mantra, necessarily, but it's definitely has a kind of a credal quality. In fact, it sounds curiously like the last phrase of the gloria patri in the latin right liturgy, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. So this is a kind of metaphysical statement of the whole of reality, for. For Sagan. So within that framework, he's got this philosophical naturalism, and it makes claims about the history of life like the origin of life. So cells arose via a discoverable physical process involving only physics and chemistry, undirected causes. And this process of life emerging was not a miracle or even a small probability event, then intelligent life itself is the outcome of a long evolutionary pathway from these strictly chemical beginnings. And then these evolutionary pathways almost certainly occurred on many other planets throughout the galaxy and the universe.
If you have that framework and you take something like the Drake equation, which is the product of a series of independent variables, that gives you the overall probability of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere. It's a sort of standard framework for SETI research. If you put the right numbers into the Drake equation, Sagan thought the probability would be high that intelligent life, which is capable, like we are, of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, focusing radio waves, for instance, to carry a signal out into space, Sagan thought the probability was very high that such intelligence exists elsewhere in the galaxy, in the universe, and furthermore, it wants its existence to be known. These intelligences, if they exist, want their existence to be detected, in other words. So here's how he put it in the Gifford lectures.
He says, if there's an affinity between these advanced beings and ourselves, close quote, we should be able to discover their existence in physical evidence, like incoming electromagnetic radiation. So Tegan builds all of this into the structure of the novel contact, along with. And this is critical to the logic of the story, philosophical arguments about the nature of mathematical objects such as PI or prime numbers. So I don't want to spoil the listener's fun. If he or she has never read contact. I don't want to give away how PI and prime numbers play their role in the story. Suffice it to say, however, the fact that we humans know the nature, the mathematical nature of PI, turns out to be essential to its role as an unambiguous indicator of intelligence elsewhere in the universe. Now, key point. What really deserves attention here is the contradiction engendered by Sagan's philosophical naturalism. So you can think of the philosophical naturalism as kind of the foundation.
Maybe Root's a better metaphor. It's a living thing, sort of. The root is giving rise to a pair of trunks that then become entangled and are struggling with each other. So there's a contradiction that's engendered by his philosophical naturalism, because the most widely accepted version of naturalism today is not philosophical naturalism. It's methodological natural, which is a rule about how science should be practiced. And I think we should talk about that contradiction a little bit. According to the rule of methodological naturalism, as it's put forward, for instance, in 1998 by the National Academy of Sciences, quote, the statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes. Close quote.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: That's a pretty solid rule there, I think, right? We like rules. I mean, we've become a society where we follow laws and rules and all these things. And why should science be any different? In fact, it should be kind of the place where, you know, testable, objective. We can measure these things, we can see these things. We can perform experiments and do all this stuff. We can detect design or not.
All of that is pretty reasonable, and it's what we come to expect from science as a society. So when you talk about SETI, extraterrestrial ets and so on, that's something that's measurable or detectable, and you have very solid rules of what is going to constitute intelligence, whether it's a radio wave or something we know could only, you know, it communicates information. So it's not an accident. These are the things they're looking for in SETI. Right? And that's what Sagan was really intrigued with, I think.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Exactly. And we want, I think you can say anyone who cares about the integrity of science, that it can be used by all cultures, whatever someone's religious views happen to be. Or maybe they have no religious views at all, right? But when they get on an airplane, they want it to fly. When they take a drug, they want it to be effective and so forth. We want science to be constrained and have an objective character and not chasing after every ghost or elf or mystical force. And so methodological naturalism, in that sense, looks very appealing and sensible, reasonable. Now, here's the problem. I like to think about it this way. You know how on the packaging of an over the counter drug like Zyrtec, which I recently bought, antihistamine, okay, you look on the label, on the box, and the manufacturer will list the active ingredients, which often turn out to be only a small fraction of the total composition by mass of the pill that you're buying. Right? It's maybe actually, in terms of mass, it's only a fraction of a fraction, but that's why you're buying zyrtec or Benadryl or whatever, because the active ingredient is actually going to do something for you. So what then, are the active ingredients in the National Academy formulation of Methodological Naturalism, which I read just a moment ago? I'll read it again. The statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes. Well, the active ingredients in that sentence are the adjective natural and the logical modifier only. So what do these entail? Well, natural in this particular context means ultimately deriving from physics, bottom up, from nonintentional, undirected, autonomous, mathematically describable causes, causes that can be captured in equations.
Or, as the late Nobel laureate in physics Stephen Weinberg said in one final theory, resting perhaps on one final equation. Right. Key thing is, there's no mind, there's no intelligence there. This is coming up through the layers of reality to us from the most fundamental foundation, which is strictly physical. Then you have the logical modifier only that entails. That's it. That's all you get in your explanatory toolbox. When you open the lid on your toolbox and look inside, what you will find are natural causes, in this sense of deriving from physics. And that's it. So, at bottom, the set of causes that may be legitimately employed in scientific explanation are all and only derivable from physics. No mind, no intelligence, no purpose. And, in fact, this was Sagan's own view. Now, here's the contradiction and why I find this so interesting in the evolutionary path, historically, in the history of the universe, from physics. Because once upon a time, there were particles in motion. There were no rob crowthers, there were no Paul Nelson's, there were no Carl Sagans. In the evolutionary path from physics to intelligence, qualitatively distinct, novel properties must arise. So, properties or dimensions, such as intention or purpose or goal, where the cause, for instance, in the case of SETI, has the apparent intention we wish to be known by other intelligences, or in case of Sagan, this is very important in the novel context and in his technical work, abstract nonphysical relationships, such as mathematical properties or objects like PI.
And these patterns and properties must be detectable and uniquely diagnostic of intelligence. So the critical point is whatever you're going for when you, you know, have your radio telescope gathering incoming electromagnetic radiation, what you're going to be looking for are properties that are irreducible to physics or to any natural origin. And Sagan was very clear about this. So in his Gifford lectures, he said, any pattern that is diagnostic intelligence must be, quote, a pattern that could not possibly be of natural origin.
Let me just read that again because it's so important.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: It could not possibly be of natural origin. All right, so a sequence of prime numbers, for instance, which represents a turning point in the plot of the novel contact, would suffice. Why? Well, again, as he puts it in the Gifford lectures quote, there is no natural process that could produce such numbers. Close quote. All right, now you have the pieces in front of you. You should be able to see the contradiction. If you take philosophical naturalism seriously, as Sagan did, and argue that everything derives ultimately from physics, there will be a point in the history of the universe when something new and qualitatively distinct or ontologically distinct will enter the universe, namely intelligence. And it has to be distinct from physics, or you've got nothing there to detect. And it will arise, this property of intelligence will arise in what's effectively a novel and unpredictable way on the path from physics to intelligence. And you need for that property, that irreducible property, to be there, because, after all, that's what you're fishing for. That's what you're looking for. And right now, okay, around the globe, radio astronomers are looking at all kinds of puzzling phenomena, and what they are doing is saying there's an undiscovered physical cause of. Right. So I think you may know that when pulsars were first discovered in the 1960s, for a period of many months, they were thought to be possibly of artificial origin, of intelligent origin, because of the extreme regularity of the signal, or it was of the pattern, right. And it was later realized that this was caused by the, you know, the very rapid spinning of, I believe, a neutron star. I'm not 100% sure about that. In any case, these puzzles, these puzzles that radio astronomers are looking at, they are saying, we know that there's a physical explanation out there. We just have to find out what it is, what Sagan is saying is, if intelligence is real, you will not be able to give a physical account of it.
You'll have to say, there is a mind at the other end, there's an intelligence at the other end. And the only way you can say that logically is if intelligence has properties that are irreducible to physics. So this is what I think is so interesting, because what happens is philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism end up crashing head on into each other.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: I think we have a word for that, or two words, intelligent design. It's quite amazing. I mean, he is fully believing and embracing this idea that there can only be a natural cause, and at the same time saying there is only a non natural cause that can bring this about, namely, an intelligent source of some sort, a mind, whatever. And it's quite amazing is the only word I can think of when you think about where he's coming from, and that he would understand this problem so uniquely and so intuitively and deeply, and then just puts this blinder on himself, which I think he knows he's doing, and says, nope, this is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. And yeah, it does sound a lot like intelligent design that we've had a lot of people talking about for so many years, and this idea that humans are uniquely able to detect that design.
Right? So if nothing was able to detect it, what would be the point? So, yeah, these are interesting. And when you think of Carl Sagan, you just don't think he would be saying these things quite that way. And then when I think about it, I think, yes, exactly. He has to say it that way.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, there are many dimensions to this that I find interesting. But I think for the sake of the podcast today, what's most striking to me is how a philosophical view, when you give it a chance to sort of run, you say, I've got this view, and I'm just going to let it run and see what it produces. It can end up generating a contradiction, right? And then that contradiction itself becomes something that you could really probe. And, I mean, you could really run a whole college course on looking at the dimensions of this contradiction.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Only in certain colleges.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Only in certain colleges. But let me just. Let me just look at one aspect that I don't want to be accused of misrepresenting. Sagan, there's no question that he was a skeptic of the intelligent design ideas of his time. So in his Gifford lectures, for instance, he goes after Fred Hoyle, the late british astronomer. And they may have known each other personally. I'm not sure about that. But Hoyle in the eighties was publishing books, arguing books and articles arguing that the DNA information content of even a single bacterium could not be explained bottom up from physics and chemistry. He was arguing, in effect, for intelligent design of life, not in a theological way, but beginning with a sort of analysis of what does it take to be a cell and what kind of information do you need? And so forth. And Sagan didn't buy that. But the kicker, and again, there's an irony here. In his Gifford lectures, which, again, were originally endowed in the 19th century to explore natural theology, Sagan is trying to fulfill his role as speaker in this series. It's quite an honor to be asked to give the Gifford lectures, which are done annually in Scotland. So his own view, I would say, is kind of strong agnosticism shading off into atheism at a boundary point where it's kind of hard to say whether a person is an agnostic or an atheist, but he still wants to fulfill his role as a Gifford lecturer and give his best understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. And that's where religion and theology and philosophy live, after all, at that foundation point. So what is natural theology, then, to a skeptical astronomer? Well, probably nothing, as I've been arguing, was closer to Sagan's own scientific heart than the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. If you look at his published work when he was editor of the journal Icarus, which is a journal of planetary astronomy, the totality of Sagan's publications show that Seti, that search, was really what he cared about. Well, that raises the question, how would you know? Right? You can't look for something seriously unless you have some criterion by which you can say, well, guess what? We found it. Right? So you need some epistemological criterion that tells you, okay, that's natural. It's a neutron star spinning at a very high rate. This other pattern, prime numbers, that's intelligence in a strange way, or an interesting way. It's the same question that intelligent design researchers face in biology. How would you know that you've got an intelligent cause? Here's how he answers it in the Gifford lectures. I really need to quote the whole passage because it's so important. So quote, at what moment Sagan writes, do you say that the evidence is sufficient to deduce the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence? I believe that while the details are slightly different, the argument is not significantly different from the question, what would be convincing evidence of the existence of an angel or a demigod or a God. So when I read that, it kind of jumped off the page at me, right? Because what Sagan is saying is there's a direct, logical parallel in the structure of the arguments and the possible lines of evidence between what we would regard as definitive grounds for saying, yes, there are minds like ours elsewhere in the universe. That's SETI. Or and saying, yes, a being we could call God exists somewhere in reality, which is the conclusion that many intelligent design researchers, like Mike Behe, make. When they look at a cell, they look at a single bacterial cell, and they say, the information here, the interdependent systems, the complexity represented by a single e coli, is compelling evidence for the existence of a supreme intelligence. And Sagan is saying, his SETI research and the kind of argument and evidence that one would make for the existence of God, there's a strong parallel between the two. And to leave no doubt about that, all right, he wants to hammer the point home. Later, in the same lecture, he comes back to this, and he amplifies the point. And again, I'd like to quote the whole passage. Arthur Clark. It's Arthur C. Clarke, Paul says parenthetically, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, 2001 A Space Odyssey, which, as you know, also involves design detection at the core of the plot. Anyway, getting back to Sagan, Arthur Clarke has said that christian orthodoxy is too narrow and timid for what is likely to be found in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He has said that the doctrine of man made in the image of God is ticking like a time bomb at Christianity's base, set to explode if other intelligent creatures are discovered. Sagan goes on, I don't in the least agree. I think that the only sense that can be put on the phrase, quote, made in God's image is that there is a sense of intellectual affinity between us and higher organisms, if such there be. And by higher organisms, he means advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. Okay, close quote. Now, what is that intellectual affinity exactly? Well, we find it in mathematics. Sagan thought, for instance, being able to grasp the truth that PI, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, is a transcendental number. This was deeply significant to him. Mathematics, for Sagan, was effectively a universal language, an expression of fundamental rationality which would have been shared by any intelligence anywhere in the universe or even beyond the universe, as he says at the close of the novel, contact. So, bottom line. And again, I'm going to do a follow up article on this for evolution news. Because of what I've discovered in the Gifford lectures and elsewhere in Sagan's work, without question, Sagan was an opponent of organized religion, and if he were alive today, he would not be a fan of the discovery institute. Let's just be honest about that. But big, but okay. Without question, he was a proponent of our ability, even if only in principle, to detect intelligent causation. And I think, you know, many years now after his death, I've really come to appreciate this fascinating contradiction in his work and in his own thinking. And maybe it isn't really a contradiction. At the end of the day, it's a dimension worth exploring.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: It's fascinating because I'm thinking about his comments as opposed to that quote about Arthur C. Clarke. It reminds me the saying where if we detect any supernatural, sorry, not supernatural, but extraterrestrial super intelligence, it might be indistinguishable from magic. And I don't mean Harry Potter magic. I mean magic in the sense that it is supernatural. It's, you know, something other than just that. Only natural cause. And if we can't tell the difference between them, I think that's what Sagan is saying, and he's disagreeing with the others who, you know, believe that that's not the case. But that is really fascinating. So I think you should write more about this. And how many of these Gifford lectures did he give?
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Oh, there were several. It's a whole series. It's a whole series. And what's fascinating about their publication posthumously is, I believe his wife, Andrurian, transcribed the questions and answers. So there was a period where Sagan was interacting with the audience there in Scotland and exploring, you know, different aspects of this puzzle of detecting intelligence. And I would recommend to the, to the listener, if you've got a good public library nearby. The title of the, of the Gifford lectures is the varieties of scientific experience, a personal view of the search for God. And as I said, I'll have more to say about this in my follow up article for evolution News.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: I think you wanted to talk a little bit about how SETI and design detection is different now than it was when Sagan died back 25 years ago. It is different now. And maybe you can shine a little light on that without giving away what you're going to write about in future articles.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Sure, it's interesting to speculate. If Sagan were alive today, he would be in his late eighties. But I think I want. I would like to believe that he would still have been very much involved in research and thinking about the significance of new data. There's been a major shift in scientific attitudes about extraterrestrial intelligence just within the past few years. I think this is due in part to the work of people like the Harvard astronomer Avi Lieb, who is heading up their Galileo project there at Harvard, looking for physical objects which may have been caused by intelligence. And this is a serious research effort. And I think in part for that reason, SEti is enjoying a renaissance. But I think it's also due in part to the us government taking UFO's, or as they're now known, uaps, unidentified aerial phenomena, taking them more seriously in a public way.
Now, Sagan himself was a lifelong skeptic of UFO's, which is how they were known, you know, during his lifetime. And that's because he felt that the evidence was just too equivocal, far too weak, really, to support any serious research on the puzzles. It was anecdotal and insufficient for a serious research program.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Well, this has been really fascinating, Paul. I appreciate your being here, and I know you're planning to write more on this at evolution news, so listeners can go to evolutionnews.org most easily. Just search on Sagan, and we'll find your your recent piece on the intelligence that antedates the universe, and future pieces, too, that you will be writing about this and related topics. So thanks for being here.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I hope in the next few days to have another article up. It's really a responsibility of any design advocate to be able to give an account of the underlying logic by which you arrive at a design inference. And I find thinking about Sagan's work really helpful in that regard, of kind of walking through what evidence would qualify and why would it qualify, how would you test that? And so forth. So thanks a lot, Rob, for having me.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Great discussion as always, Paul. Just to remind listeners, of course, evolutionnews.org. and you can catch up with this podcast, all the other
[email protected] exploring all the related topics on this subject. Thank you for joining us. I'm Robert Crowther at the center for science and culture.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot. This program is copyright discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
