Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today enjoy the second half of an intimate conversation between philosopher of science and bestselling author Stephen Meyer and one of his dearest friends and longest standing colleagues, Dr. David Berlinski. The occasion for the exchange was a recent gathering of Discovery Institute colleagues and supporters in Cambridge, England.
Dr. Berlinski, in case you don't know him or aren't familiar with his background, is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. He is author of numerous books, including A Tour of the Calculus, the Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift, the Deniable Darwin, and Signs After Babel. In this second half of the conversation, Berlinski discusses the books he has written, his career in teaching, and some of his most memorable experiences critiquing the Darwinian paradigm. The pair recall Berlinski's seminal article in Commentary magazine, the Deniable Darwin, that brought him to the attention of Meyer and the intelligent design research community. And then Berlinski agreed to join forces with Meyer and his colleagues and since then his contribution has been formidable. Enjoy hearing the conclusion to this intimate exchange between two great friends and colleagues about some of the work they've done together to expose the inadequacy of the Darwinian paradigm.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: We had a 40th anniversary conference commemorating Wistar out in Boston. Right in Boston and I met Murray. He was 89 at the time, sharp as ever, and in conversation he explained that part of his insight or skepticism came from his background in computer science that if you begin to, if you have a sequence of digital characters which also would form a large combinatorial system, lots of ways to arrange those zeros and ones, if you allowed them to change randomly, you were inevitably going to fall into the non functional abyss because there were so many great, so many more ways to go wrong than there were to go right, is the way.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: I that's a general law of life.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: We have a lot more ways to.
[00:02:32] Speaker C: Fail and succeed, unfortunately, right? Everybody wishes it was the other way around.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Once you had the Watson and Crick and the molecular biological revolution that revealed that that hereditary information was stored in a digital form on a long chain molecule. Then as you put David's famous phrase in an essay he wrote later wrote was we had this problem of combinatorial inflation. So many ways to go wrong in comparison, very few ways to target.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Very rarely, you know, that is something that's the kind of conversational gambit Marco would instantly seize upon. He said, it seems to be almost a law, if not a law, certainly a generalization, that if you have a space of possibilities, there are many, many more ways of going wrong than going right. Why is that? And it's not so clear that there's an answer.
Why is going right singular but going wrong generic? That seems to be a law of life, right?
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Much to our regret. But it could be the other way around. Is it a necessary feature? I have never really. Well, I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about that, but I've never really understood what an explanation would look like.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: It seems to be associated with the whole notion of information. And excluding information involves reduction of uncertainty, which involves excluding many possibilities and electing a few.
[00:03:51] Speaker C: Yeah, but you know, it's not as if when we're faced with enormous number of possibilities, any subset of those possibilities will be okay. If I'm trying to. To utter an English sentence and something comes out in Mandarin Chinese that's not quite okay.
So it's a normative distinction as well as a numerical distinction. Lots of possibilities, small number of successes. But the balance between the two cries out for some kind of explanation.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: It does, it does.
Moving forward a little bit. So you are ruminating, cogitating, thinking about all this. And in 1996 you write what I think has turned out to be the most popular or most provocative, most responded to article in the history of Commentary magazine. You wrote an article called the Deniable Darwin. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:04:44] Speaker C: I kind of forget the background to it. Oh yeah, I remember now. I had published something in Commentary. Neil Kazarev was the editor machine. Very smart guy, very good editor, which he titled the Soul of Man Under Physics.
I had a title involving Elvis Presley, but I can't remember why I thought that was appropriate. No, really, Elvis Presley remembers or something like that.
And the article generated quite a bit of interest and he asked me to think about another subject and I said, why don't we do Darwin?
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see A little heartburn.
[00:05:22] Speaker C: He did get a little heartburn. Because this is 1996. This is after Dawkins and it's after what I would like to think of as the counter revolution.
The sense that properly understood Darwinism had returned to the pantheon as a triumphant theory was very strong. There's very little criticism in 1996, 1995, as far as I could see.
So I did this, I wrote this essay and it was One of those happy essays where I wrote the first draft and the first draft and the last draft were identical. I didn't have to do a lot of revisions. Neil Kazeroy was very happy they published it and caused a firestorm. It did cause a firestorm. And a lot of people wrote in saying, at last somebody is saying what we felt. There's a lot of the Commentary readers and of course a lot of the people are saying this is just appalling gibberish. How could Commentary be lending a voice to anti scientific nonsense like that? Including Richard Dawkins himself.
Who's that philosopher, you know the one.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Daniel Dennis.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: Daniel Dennis. Daniel Dennett. Richard Dawkins.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: No, the letters section.
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: In the aftermath went on for pages. It was extraordinary.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Geneticist collaborated with Jerry Coyne. Guy by the name of.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Or names or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A different art. No, different art.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: Yeah. The letters went on and on and on. Some of them were good, some of them were a mad dog rabbit. And none of them in the least made a sustained, substantial defense of the theory I was attacking. And it just reinforced my own viewers that I did touch a sensitive nerve. This theory is evasive, unclear, pretentious and basically devoid of substance, which is my view today.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: It's basically devoid of substance and essentially mathematically implausible in the extreme.
[00:07:05] Speaker C: Doesn't make any sense. Yeah, yeah, but it gave me some. A real sense of what cancel culture would become. Because it started. Please remember, it did not start on issues of sexual identity. The real origins were intellectual and scientific. What is permissible in the scientific theory? What is not permissible?
[00:07:24] Speaker A: As David Klinghoffer puts it, we got canceled before. Getting canceled was cool.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
I think it's really important to remember that.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's so interesting that you and I were talking last night. We had a parallel experience with this in that when I had the article published at the Smithsonian's journal, the Proceedings for the Biological Society of Washington, it wasn't I who was canceled or heard. It was again the editor. Yeah, of course, Richard Stewart.
[00:07:51] Speaker C: But that's obligatory.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: They came after him.
[00:07:54] Speaker C: Look at all the cancellations and all.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Of the escape scot free. But our colleagues, not so much.
[00:08:00] Speaker C: Not really. There is repercussions. All these acts of cancellation, all these acts of political correctness of woke culture, they have reverberating effects. I mean, the primary gong sounds for the editor in chief, but secondary chime keep reverberating for a long time.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm a pseudoscientist on Wikipedia.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: Well, look at that.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: That's just what I mean. Yeah.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Well, this is just fascinating, David. Well, this is how we got to know David was because of this article.
And perhaps ironically, a year OR 2 Later, 1998, I first met David at Biola University, an American evangelical university, and he gave a spellbinding talk there.
I first saw him holding forth in the lobby of the Holiday Inn in La Mirada with a whole bunch of. Of those of us who are quite young in this, kind of peppering him with questions, and it was fascinating. Two years later, we had an event at Yale University.
Six of us gave plenary talks, two a night on a three night conference that was hosted by the Rivendell Institute. All of us, Jay Richards and I, and Phil Johnson was there, Bill Dembski, we all came with our PowerPoints and Whiz Bang presentations. David got up in one of his elegantly tailored Italian suits with a piece of chalk and outdid us all. It was a spellbinding lecture. It was just fantastic. Jay and I took him out afterwards, told him how much we admired him and wondered if he would want to have an association with us, despite our disreputable backgrounds.
[00:09:44] Speaker C: Were guys disreputable then?
[00:09:46] Speaker A: I think so. We were getting. Well, the thing that was happening then was, of course, Phil Johnson was at the height of his powers. And having the two of you, in a way, spearheading this out front gave a lot of us, those of us who were younger, a lot of confidence. And we had. I just remember it was a magical evening with you after the lecture. And you said, sure, why not?
David was always just completely fearless. Whatever the truth was, was what he was interested in. And he didn't care about the associations. And of course, the associations have grown ever more rich.
This isn't a distinctively evangelical movement. It's not distinctively Catholic. It's not even a distinctively theistic movement. There's scientists from across the spectrum who are seeing these things that are true. And David, I think, was crucial to that. And that was year 2000. You became a Fellow of Discovery somewhere around that time. And then what was just so gratifying for us was just to see the books just continued to come off the presses. He had already established himself with a massive bestseller on a topic that you would think would be the last thing from popular. And that was the Calculus. His book, the Tour of the Calculus, published before we knew him. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think that was the book that really established that's the book that.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: Still is Closest to my heart, from 19, I don't know, 18, to roughly 1993 or four, I was teaching mathematics up and down the west coast outside of San Francisco. I taught at San Jose State College, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, University of Puget Sound. For your University of Puget Sound, I was teaching largely calculus, linear algebra. Calculus, algebra. That was. That was really it. I was teaching calculus year in, year out, year in, from the same textbook. Was a wonderful experience. Calculus was a. A beautiful subject, and I had nice students. Most of my students, strangely enough, were Vietnamese refugees with a lot of problems with English. So we communicated over mathematics. They were very bright, very willing, very dedicated, a little trouble communicating. And I said to myself in 1991, 92, you know, the experience of interacting with students, the Vietnamese refugees and the California natives.
And I said, there's a great book here. And I sent the proposal to my agent. She said.
But then a week later, she called us. We sold it. Everybody loved it.
She took all credit. I knew it was going to be essential.
And it came out, and I was just astonished. People had been looking for, I guess, a pop book about mathematics for a very long time, which actually addressed a true mathematical subject. And calculus is a true mathematical subject. That was intensely gratifying. The book is still selling. Every year it sells two or three copies. That's okay, but look, it's 30 years old now.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Maybe a tidbit better than that. I won't embarrass you by revealing the sales figures, but they're pretty impressive for a book about mathematics. But for any book, really, it's done very well. And what I always appreciated about it was just reflecting back on how badly mathematics was taught to me. And David explains it so beautifully. He's written a number of other books about math. 1, 2, 3.
Your book about Euclid. But you also wrote a book that I deeply admire because I share your fascination with this figure in history, and that's Sir Isaac Newton. Your book, Newton's Gift. Couple words about that.
[00:13:25] Speaker C: Well, anybody writing about Newton really has a choice. I mean, either to dedicate a lifetime to Newton's scholarship. The a certain number of great scholars have done ought to read as much of Newton as possible as feasible, always bearing in mind that the bulk of Newton's written work has not been translated. Neither has it been published. It remains in Cannabula right now and see whether you can get a persuasive, coherent feeling for the man. And that's what I try to do in Newton's gift, get a feeling for the Man. And the feeling is spooky. It's one of the strangest figures in the history of thought. Solitary, isolated, ferociously intelligent, commanding, but at the same time angry, resentful, quick to be provoked and merciless, absolutely merciless. Taught other ideas, taught individuals. He was master of the mint. He hounded people to death as the master of the mint counterfeiters. He made sure they were drawn and quartered, for example, little known feature of Newton's life. But just with Leibniz, one of these strange, completely commanding figures in the history of thought, who has set the agenda for theoretical physics ever since. I mean, theoretical physics consists of various epigenetics following the footsteps of Newton, 1687, Principia, all following in that tradition.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: I think when we were doing the conversation recently with Peter Robinson, quite a bit came up about Newton and we were saying that almost no single figure, maybe no single figure in the history of science has advanced science so much in one lifetime, maybe even in just a couple of years.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: I think that's true. The Principia appeared as a thunderclap. There was nothing in the Western tradition like the Principia when it appeared. And to be perfectly candid, there's nothing like it that's ever appeared since.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: David has recently introduced us to a French historian of science, Michel de Gaulle Michelin, who is working on Newton and including here in the Rennes Library, and who has recently discovered an extraordinary manuscript that was unpublished, illuminating how Newton's theology informed and motivated his work on the Principia. And that's a fascinating thing. And it turns out Yolande has been reading Evolution News and Science Daily for years and is very sympathetic to the Intelligent Design.
[00:15:59] Speaker C: Guards mention the conference he came and spoke to one about.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: He was in our conference just a couple months ago and we hope to continue to have a deep association with him. He'd like to write about the whole history of British natural theology and his connection to the intelligent design movement.
One more book and then maybe we'll talk about what you're writing now and then open it up for some questions.
The other book that many people here have admired and I admire very much was your 2009 or 2008 book, Devil's Delusion, Scientific Atheism and its Atheism and its scientific pretensions. You wrote this at the height of the popularity of the new atheism, which I think shows you a little bit about David's courage and instinctive, reflexive contrarianism.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: That didn't take any. They Were they were sitting there like fat peasants.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Do tell. Do tell.
[00:16:58] Speaker C: Well, yeah.
You know, my father once told me that every man can remember back to his adolescence and affirming to his rabbi or to he was priest. I don't believe in God. Every man has that memory. 16. At the height of your sexual enthusiasm, you suddenly discover you can do without the deity and you announce it by the time a man is 40. It's just embarrassing to be in that position because quite plainly radical atheism is an indefensible position.
These guys, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, who I like very much.
Richard Dawkins, who was Larry Krauss. No, there was a fourth one. Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Daniel, Dennis, Daniel. And you can rank them. Intelligence. Daniel Dennett the lowest.
I think probably Christopher Hitchens the smartest. I think philosophy was not what he did well, but he was a bright.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Very personable, extremely well spoken.
[00:18:00] Speaker C: Extremely well spoken. I met him when he was already very ill and I have to say I liked him. And I think basically despite his book God is Not Great, which is entirely piffle, he remained a decent guy, a nice human being. And I could have formed a friendship with him had he not been so terribly ill. He was at that point beyond forming friendships, beyond coherently thinking, understandably.
The other guys, who did we say it was? Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris will just strike. Canceled by zero. Richard Dawkins again. You know, it's such a strange history, all these guys. Richard Dawkins was strident in his atheism and just recently he announced himself. What was the phrase he used?
[00:18:52] Speaker A: As discovered.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: I'm a cultural Christian after all. Accept me back.
Heading back sheepishly to the flock.
So these are all strange trajectories. All these guys, except for Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennard, who are now dead, were on a trajectory from raucous affirmation to sober reflection, I think. And they would have changed their position. I think toward the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens was coming very gradually to realize that he had made many asseverations which he did not really believe in.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Yep, he acknowledged that he thought the fine tuning argument was quite compelling.
[00:19:35] Speaker C: Was it Hitchens?
Somebody recently acknowledged that it was not Hitchens, it was Bret Weinstein. Yeah.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, we'll share more about Bret Weinstein. I forgot these references. It's amazing the concessions that are now being made, which is part of the reason the new atheism is unraveling. And we'll be talking about that in the next hour a bit.
But let's talk just a little bit about what you're writing now because that's really fascinating. There's a little bit of a story behind it. David and I worked together behind the scenes to put together a conference every year or two in Europe. And in the fall of 2022, one of David's colleagues, a very prominent mathematician, came to the conference. And David told me that he had really liked my book Return of the God Hypothesis. And I wasn't sure if that was just David being kind or whether that was true.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: No, no, he really went out of his way to tell me.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: And when I met the mathematician, he told me that he'd like my book. I just read an essay that he'd written in David' Inference, which is a spectacular initiative that we haven't talked enough about tonight or this morning. But when the mathematician met me, he said, yeah, that he had liked it very much. His wife was an agnostic. He'd given it to her and that she was going wobbly on him, he said, which was very encouraging. But he said, I did have one problem with the book. You said there were three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. You forgot one. And I said, what was that? He said, the mathematics, the math.
So he and David had been working on manuscript and some ideas together and with a kind of critique of a materialist interpretation of math. And. Yeah, I wanted to hear a little bit more about that.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: Well, we both agree that when you consider the body of mathematics, mathematical theory, which stands to physical theory as Annapurna stands to a warp in terms of sheer mass of accomplishments, there are two questions that immediately arise. How did human beings ever know this kind of stuff?
How did they discover algebra, Arithmetic? How did they discover geometry? What epistemic connections are there?
How did they ever come to learn the laws of arithmetic when the numbers don't seem to be physical objects and thus incapable of causing anything at all? I know that two plus two equals four. So do you all.
But it couldn't be that that's causing you the numbers 2, 2 and 4 are causing you to form a belief because they don't have causal powers. Well, that's one question. How do we learn about this stupendous arena of accomplishment and theory? The second question, which I don't think has ever been properly asked, properly asked, let alone answered, why is it there? What's it doing there?
How can we live in a world where there is mathematics? That's surely an intelligible question. It's a little bit. Imagine yourself crossing The Gobi Desert on a yak.
And you see in the distance an enormous golden minaret, and you pass it by on yak, on a yak train, and you say to yourself, nothing to see, nothing there. Golden mineral, you know. So that's not the way. That's not the appropriate response. The appropriate response is, I'm in the Gobi Desert. Why am I seeing.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Where did he come from?
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Gold.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: Yeah. I remember you and I were having a conversation with a very prominent mathematician in the Bay Area.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: Oh, Ed Frankel.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Ed Frankl. And this whole issue came up of whether math is invented or discovered. And apparently almost all mathematicians think, no, it's not invented. Mathematical objects or structures have real properties that are independent of our minds, and yet they're not material. They're conceptual. And if their properties are independent of our minds, but yet they're conceptual, they must either issue from or reside in some mind that transcends our minds. And you wrote a little proof and symbolic logic on the back of a coaster, which I still have, but it sounds like you're now exploring a little bit of a different wrinkle on that with the idea that physical objects have mathematical properties that are inseparable from them. And that also provides a. Look, explain this a little bit.
[00:24:05] Speaker C: Hold up a finger right now, just asking the audience, could this finger be a different color?
Could it be slightly longer?
Could it be crooked?
Could it be anything else other than one finger? I'm holding up one finger. Could it be two fingers?
All right, so when we talk about fingers, we talk about counting fingers. We're talking about some of its necessary properties. To talk about a physical object such as the finger, it is necessary, obligatory to mention its number. And his number can't be peeled back. It's not something abstract that's been peeled onto the finger. It's something the finger essentially has. And I think once this is realized, the whole prospect of what philosophers very often imagine is a complete physical explanation of the universe collapses. And this is what I'm describing.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: Because every physical thing has a mathematical property which is itself immaterial. Exactly. That's extraordinary.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: So this is what you ask about the book. The book that I'm writing is called the Perpetual Rose, which is an interesting story. It goes back to a medieval story about medieval sage. In the 9th century, you know, there was some community of interest between India and the Muslim world. He talks about a rose, deepest crimson, whose petals bear the inscription, there is no God but Allah. So there is a rose. It's called a perpetual. The perpetual Rose, which bears the inscription, there is no God about Allah. And I like that idea. Perpetual rose and an inscription in a physical object saying, there is no God but Allah. It's not a particularly Muslim or Islamic idea. It's just the idea that the rose bears.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Must testify.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: That's the mind behind it. The rose bears testimony. You can see it. It's written there. So it's a book based on that idea. Juan Luis Borges has a very, very beautiful story called Averroes Search, where he says the same thing. And he has Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, saying, no, that couldn't be. I'd rather believe that all the testimony is false, then that nature can bear witness to the items of our faith. That's my modern. That's the modern. Modern scientific tradition.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: More of a noma separation idea.
But your colleague with whom you're writing confronted me and said, there's one more thing that is revealing the mind behind the universe, and that's the math. And that's what's going on.
[00:26:27] Speaker C: I think that's. We can name him Sergey Kleinman, a great, great general relativity theorist. He's a full. He's Hickson professor of Physics.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: Mathematics at Princeton. Yeah.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: And he's recently endorsed William Dembski's. Bill Dembski's second edition of the Design Inference. He's. This is this.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: Steve and I talk about this a lot. You know, when. When you just look at the Discovery Institute Intelligent Design, the various figures, you say, well, they're kind of an isolated Pacific island, no real influence. The culture proceeds like a sedate ocean liner, and it just avoids the island entirely. No hard feelings. It's not true. None of that's true. Just poking around because I had very extensive contacts in the scientific community. I found lots of people who have been reading Steve, been reading other people that discovered. Know this entire current of sentiment and find it deeply sympathetic.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: Deeply sympathetic, which I think takes us back to 2004 in the sense that we may indeed have come further than we ever hoped or dreamed. And, David, you've been an integral part of that, and I think maybe we should open it up for a few questions.
[00:27:39] Speaker C: Should we take a break?
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Let's just take a few questions and. Sure. And then we'll take a break. And thank you.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. David Berlinski in conversation at a recent gathering of Discovery Institute colleagues and supporters in Cambridge, England. Don't miss the first half of this dialogue in a separate episode where Berlinski discusses the plight of his parents escaping the Nazi threat, his upbringing in New York, how he learned mathematics, and why he became interested in the mathematical challenges to Darwinian evolutionary theory. You can learn more about Berlinski's work and order copies of his books at David Berlinsky.
That's davidberlinsky.org for Idea the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
