Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It didn't add to his own sense of gravitas or indeed his own argument, but it rather belittled him.
And I don't know why I want to like Dawkins, I really do, because I think he's a personable chap.
He's just got this strange tick that makes him rather unlikable in certain circumstances.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: Well, in September 2026, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer argued in Britain's newspaper the Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph that discoveries in cosmology and biology are strengthening the case for Intelligent Design and the God Hypothesis.
Well, Richard Dawkins was given a chance to respond to this article and he did so with a vigorous defense of Darwinism and as well as a defense of his 20 year old book, the God Delusion. But did Dawkins really respond to Meyer's arguments? And did Charles Darwin actually demolish the argument from design, as Dawkins insists? Well, welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and today I'm exploring these questions with Neil Thomas. Thomas is a reader emeritus in the University of Durham, England, and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association.
He studied classical studies and European languages at the Universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up a post in the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. He has published over 40 articles in a number of referee journals and is author of a number of books, including the 2021 title, Taking Leave of Darwin A Long Time Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design and his latest book, False Darwinism as the God that Failed. Neil, welcome back to ID the Future.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: Well, so you have been following a fascinating exchange in Britain's Daily Telegraph between Stephen Meyer and Richard Dawkins. Now, before we get into the arguments, what was your reaction to seeing Intelligent Design debated so prominently in a major newspaper?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: My first reaction was hallelujah.
At last the idea of Intelligent Design has gone mainstream in Great Britain because people simply do not talk about it. It isn't a conversational topic.
Not only that, but I had a very strange experience some weeks ago with a retired biology professor whom my wife and I knew very well. And when she realized that I was writing books against Darwin, essentially she cut us off dead.
And I find that such a strange, almost morbid reaction.
I don't want to diss her, just. And I'm not going to name who this person is.
I'm not trying to settle any scores, but it was such a strange thing. And what I'M trying to get at to you is the difference between America and Britain in their attitudes to Darwinism.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Yeah. That is illustrative of the differences. And I'm sorry you had to go through that.
But it shows that there is a definite price to be paid even for taking a stance, you know, for or against Darwinism, you know.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Well, if you're in a professional post in the United States, yes, but, but, but you wouldn't have think, you wouldn't have thought so social chitchat, which is all our relationship was, would have.
Have that effect. But anyway. Okay.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Huh. Interesting. And your other observation, of course, is that people are not talking about it, so you're glad that it was in the newspaper so prominently. Now, for those who haven't read the articles in the Telegraph, the Stephen Meyer argues that the new atheism has lost some of its cultural momentum and the recent scientific discoveries have strengthened the case for design. What would you say were the most important arguments that Meier put forward in that?
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Well, I think that Meier put forward a very decent and respectable and intellectually responsible set of arguments based on cutting edge experience and experiment.
He and Michael Behe and others have drawn attention to such things as irreducible complexity, the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold.
Is the universe calibrated for human welfare, and so on.
Whether you say that what has occurred is a result of some strange conjunction of circumstances or some godlike mover, prime mover behind the scenes is a little bit academic. I mean, you know, for some reason, and maybe we will never know for certain that the circumstances are propitious for human and animal life. And I give blessings for it.
[00:05:49] Speaker C: Well, the Telegraph invited Richard Dawkins to respond to Meyer, and he did so in an article marking the 20th anniversary of his book, the God Delusion. Interestingly, though, Dawkins chose not to mention Meyer by name. Now, you wrote a commentary on his response at Science and Culture Today. What struck you most about the way Dawkins approached Meyer's arguments?
[00:06:12] Speaker A: I was a little bit surprised.
I thought that Dawkins seemed to be in some sort of denial, maybe some kind of inferiority complex. Because as one rather sniffy academic said, dawkins, he's a journalist, isn't he, rather than a scientist now?
And I think he's beginning to think that he's falling behind the curve of younger men like Maya.
I mean, he can't help being 85. And I'm not being ageist. I'm just saying that I really am not. I'm quite an age myself. Not that old, but. And so I'm certainly not doing that.
And one person even had the temerity to suggest the Dawkins had a minor form of Tourette syndrome where you sort of repeat meaningless phrases or almost meaningless phrases.
I wouldn't go as far as that. I think he's a very.
I'm sure he's a lot more intelligent than I am, for instance, certainly as far as scientific smarts are concerned.
But the other thing that really struck me was the coarseness of his language.
When you meet somebody like Richard Dawkins with a sort of upper middle class, semicolonial past, as he's got, you imagine that you're going to meet somebody like David Niven, but he's not like that.
I mean, he even talked about God as the divine knob twiddler, which in British youth slang means a master masturbator, which seems to be totally uncalled for. And it didn't add to his own sense of gravitas or indeed his own argument, but it rather belittled him.
And I don't know why I want to like Dawkins, I really do, because I think he's a personable chapter.
He's just got this strange tick that makes him rather unlikable in certain circumstances.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's good insight and I fully agree with that. I want to like Dawkins myself. And in fact, most folks in the ID community have great respect for him because as Meyer says, he frames the argument that very well in the way that he approaches it. Yeah. It's just that he lands on the wrong side of, of, you know, reality and the truth according to, to what science is showing.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: I think he writes clearly and unpretentiously and I think he will, he will endear himself to a number of ordinary people who are not super educated and so on and so forth.
But he has these vices. Maybe we've all got vices, but that's what, that's his.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: Sure, sure, yeah, it's, it's, you know, when, whenever Darwinism is threatened, it's something very close and very personal to him. And he doesn't mind insulting the Almighty if it means, you know, giving credence to Darwinism. But here's a question for you that's sort of connected. Piers Morgan invited Dawkins to directly debate with Meyer on his show. And, and Dawkins declined. You know, he. And yet he will appear on Piers Morgan separately, but not with Stephen Meyer.
What do you, what do you think? Of that. What do you think of Dawkins avoiding directly engaging.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: What I think of it is that I am not a mind reader.
[00:10:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: I do not fully understand why he would not appear, because I think he would probably give us a good account of himself as anybody else.
What I do think, perhaps, is that Piers Morgan is a very superficially, a very polite English person, but he's got fangs, which, if he were so minded, he could skewer.
Sorry about the metaphor being mixed. That he could skewer Richard Dawkins and make him feel uncomfortable. And perhaps that's the reason that he didn't want to have sort of two enemies in the same camp, as it were.
That is my supposition, but it is only a supposition
[00:11:23] Speaker C: that makes sense. That makes sense.
Well, Dawkins spends considerable time defending the tone of his book, the God Delusion, in his Telegraph piece and criticizing religious belief. You suggest that his response is as interesting for its rhetoric as it's for its scientific content. Tell us about the two voices of Dawkins that you can sense there and what each is trying to do.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think this.
We're now in the realm of pr.
I think that what he was.
Yes, he dishes out the dirt on Christianity as he can, but in order to mitigate the effect of that on his audience, he comes over with a more gentler form of Dawkins.
So, oh, poor me, writer as I am, why are people always piling on me?
I haven't done anything. I mean, the ancient rhetoricians, Roman rhetoricians, were onto him.
They had a phrase called argumentum ad misericordium, argument to mercy, please have mercy upon me. Or the other one was Captatio benevolenti, trying to solicit people's benevolence. And so he's trying to do two contradictory things, but somehow trying to harmonize them so equal them out.
It doesn't make total logical sense, but I think that's what he was trying to do.
[00:13:08] Speaker C: Well, so in his Telegraph piece, Meyer presents three major lines of evidence. The beginning of the universe, cosmic fine tuning, and the information found in DNA. Now, Dawkins discusses cosmology and fine tuning, but doesn't really address Meyer's DNA information argument. What do you make of that omission?
[00:13:30] Speaker A: I suppose that I'm guessing that Dawkins, who. It's been at least 20 years since he's been a research scientist, and he may not be quite up to date with the tremendous amount of information that is compacted into each tiny cell of our Bodies to program us to be who we are.
[00:13:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: And I think if he'd got onto that subject, it could have been slightly embarrassing for him because people could have thrown all sorts of huge numbers at him, and he might have found it difficult to argue his way out of that huge preponderance of information that has come to us.
None of us really knows how wondrous the prime force God, whatever you call it is, was.
Has been.
And even he, I think, probably had to tacitly admit his own ignorance in these matters.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Yeah. And in fact, he does acknowledge that he's not a cosmologist, but. But what he does do is he expresses confidence that the argument from cosmic fine tuning will eventually be explained away. Now, can we call that materialism of the gaps?
[00:15:02] Speaker A: I think it's more like a pious hope.
I think that's the standard English expression for it.
In fact, I think it's the most naive bit of scientism that I've ever heard.
I mean, why on earth should in his lifetime, or even in his children's lifetime, illumination come to a problem that has puzzled humanity for millennia?
And I simply think that he essentially ducked the question.
I don't blame him. I think I would have been tempted to duck the question as well.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: And speaking of gaps arguments, I mean, he does bring up the God of the gaps objection in his article. He says it is, of course, an elementary fallacy to say I don't understand the origin of the laws of physics, therefore God did it. Do you think he's misrepresenting the design argument there?
[00:16:06] Speaker A: I mean, theologians disagree about this. I mean, the concept of. Of the hidden God is well known. The concept of apophatic theology, that which you cannot speak of because you do not have the necessary vocabulary or perhaps even the necessary brain power to do so.
I think that he is probably wise not to get too embroiled in things which are beyond all conjecture at the moment.
And so I don't blame him for that, but I suppose he might have seemed a little bit slippery to some.
[00:16:52] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good assessment, I think.
Now, perhaps Dawkins most striking assertion in his Telegraph piece is that Darwin mortally wounded the biological argument from design and that his successors finished the job. Now, in a separate episode, we'll take a closer look at that assertion and. But I just wanted to touch on it briefly before we close here. You've spent years studying Darwin and the reception of his theory and why it grew to such dominance. Is Dawkins justified in saying that Darwin demolished the so called argument from design.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Certainly not quite the opposite, I would have thought, because I'm on record on a number of places as saying that I do not think that evolution is something that can be proven either way.
So I cannot for the life of me think that he can put his hand on his heart and say, well, you know, this is something I'm sure of.
I think he's as much in the dark as many of us are. He pretends not to be, that's his trademark, but I think that he's just as much in the dark as I am about such things.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: Right, well now, and I mentioned that you've written a commentary on this desktop in the Telegraph, and in your commentary you write that Dawkins's response is clearly designed to raise the profile of Neo Darwinism in the face of increasingly cogent scientific objections to the cult, like adherence to a flawed 19th century theory.
So is Dawkins's response evidence that he and other materialists are still putting their trust in this flawed 19th century theory?
[00:18:52] Speaker A: I think that is bound to be the case simply because scientific knowledge does not stay static.
Admittedly, it doesn't go along in leaps and bounds, but it has improved a lot, especially the question of information.
And so to try and cling to some Erasmus, Darwin or French philosophe kind of idea about the mechanical nature of the world and its predictability and so on, I think is way off a mark for the 21st century.
It's complacent to a culpable degree.
We cannot say what our ancestors said.
I'm not saying that we're omniscient, we're certainly not that. But we know a hell of a lot more than they did.
And certainly.
To say that the, to put forward the point about information and how that information got there and how it was miniaturized, I mean, I still don't understand how any.
If you were an engineer, how could you possibly make such nanotechnology as exists?
I mean, our ancestors would have had no idea about that. And I'm not sure whether I don't. I have any either.
I would prefer the word miracle, to be honest, because it just doesn't make any rational sense to me according to normal criteria.
So no, I don't think that Dawkins has done himself any favors by harking back a few centuries. I think that he's only made himself seem somewhat archaic
[00:21:01] Speaker C: and that is a danger.
So you're saying that intellectual humility is very important.
Now, here's one more question for you before we close section one here. You suggest that this exchange between Meyer and Dawkins might signal a change in the British intellectual climate.
So what makes you hopeful that the discussion is opening up a bit?
[00:21:23] Speaker A: I am not hopeful about any change because I know Britain far too well.
Let me just tell you a little parable.
When I was a boy between 11 and 18, I intended. You'll know what I'm talking about.
Americans might not.
I attended a grammar school. A grammar school was something that you got there by brains, by passing examinations.
At the same time parallel were the so called public schools.
Public schools is a totally dishonest name because they are private schools in Alban Lane. In other words, if your parents could afford £30,000 in tuition fees every year then fair enough, you could go to them. But otherwise you couldn't.
And I thought almost half a century ago now that surely by the time I got to my age public schools would be abolished. They have not been abolished.
Things take such a long time to, to get abolished. I mean one of my favorite, one of my childhood heroes was William Wilberforce. A man who got slavery vanished from Britain when I was nine years old.
Nine years old.
I was appalled that such inhumanity could have gone on in the name of my ancestors.
But that again, I think slavery was abolished in 1807. But if you were already a slave, I don't think you were enfranchised until 1833. So things take such a Jurassic time to improve in Great Britain. So sorry, I'm going on a bit. I'm just trying to show you that this is such a conservative country that I don't think anything is going to happen in a hur.
[00:23:34] Speaker C: Yeah, good point, good point. Well, in a separate episode we're going to take a closer look at Dawkins's claim that Darwin demolished the so called argument from design. I mean that is the subtitle to his Telegraph article. We're going to take a closer look at that. And you've written a book about walking away from neo Darwinism, taking leave of Darwin. And in your most recent book, False Messiah, you contrast the official story of Darwin and his theory with the much more fascinating true story of how Darwinism triumphed and why it's failing to live up to its promise. So I think you're in a good position to help us assess this claim of Dawkins that everything is settled and we can all go home. So thanks for your time, Neil. We'll, we'll come back.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:24:19] Speaker C: Well in the show notes for the episode we'll of course, link to Myers Telegraph piece as well as Dawkins his response. And we'll point the way to Neil's books as well for the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
