[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Can evolution and design be wedded in a happy marriage? I'm Casey Luskin on id the future. And today we have with us Dr. Stephen Dilley. Stephen Dilly is academic mentoring Centaur's coordinator and senior fellow fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Arizona State University and was professor for 14 years at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas. So, Dr. Dilly, thank you very much for coming on the show with us today.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: It's great to be here, Casey.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: I hope you don't mind if I call you Steve, which is what I call you 99.99% of the time.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Sounds just fine.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. And please call me Casey, which is what you call me 99.99% of the time. So we're here today to talk about a paper that you lead authored last year along with Brian Miller, Emily Reeves, and myself in the journal religions. And we were discussing a book by a theologian named Evie Rope Kajonin. He is a theologian at the University of Helsinki. And it's a very thoughtful and serious book titled the Compatibility of Evolution and Design, published by Paul Grave McMillan and Springer Nature. And we decided to review this book because this book basically tries to syncretize evolution and design and to show why they are compatible at a very deep level. And you took the lead in helping us to investigate and examine this thesis, this model, this attempt to sort of marry evolution and design and to help us think about whether or not this marriage that Professor Kajonin has proposed really works. So thank you so much for coming on the show with us. By the way, from the podcast description, we're going to link to the paper that Dr. Dilly lead authored. It's published in the Journal of Religions. It's titled on the relationship between design and evolution. It's a very erudite take on this attempt to synthesize design and evolution. And we're going to dig into Professor Kajonin's ideas and what this paper is all about today with Steve Dilly. So, Steve, thanks for coming again here on the podcast with us.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great, Casey. Look forward to it.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: And I should also note before we get started that this is the first podcast in this little series that we're doing on this topic. And we're starting with Steve Dilley because he's a philosopher and this is highly philosophical topic. And Steve is going to help give us sort of the philosophical framing of Kajonin's argument and why this matters why are we having this conversation? Why is this so important? So, Steve, you can maybe just start off by helping us to understand what is the basic argument of Professor Kajonin's book, the Compatibility of Evolution and design.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Casey. As I see it, there are a few key claims in the book. The first is what one might call the Harmony thesis.
And that thesis is that mainstream evolutionary theory, if it's taken as true, is still fully compatible with not just design, but empirically detectable design in the biological realm. So you get robust design arguments from biology, robust design perception in biology, and all of that is perfectly harmonious with full blooded mainstream evolutionary theory. That's the harmony thesis of the book.
What I call the evidence thesis of the book is that the biological world itself, according to Kajona, provides notable grounds for belief in God. So if you want to use the word objective, I suppose you can provides objective grounds for belief in a creator. And evolutionary theory doesn't explain away these grounds. It's not a defeater at all.
That's the evidence thesis. So, Harmony, the two go together. There's good evidence from biology for a creator. And then the last element of the book is what we might call an audience thesis, that the model here presents a really nuanced and sophisticated argument for specialists, but it also defends the theist on the street, the everyday theist, who has perceptions of design when they see, say, a hummingbird, but may not have studied the design argument in a technical sense. So the model tries to defend the rationality and the reasonableness of the theists on the street's design perception as well. Even if, again, mainstream evolutionary theories is true.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: I think that's a really good way of sort of categorizing professor Cajonin's arguments and his thesis overall, that he's got this harmony thesis, this evidence thesis, and this audience thesis, and we try to tackle all of those in the book. I think that you really helped us, especially to deal with the harmony thesis, because that digs into the philosophy side of this more than anything else. So, look, if we're trying to marry evolution and design, I think that the extent to which that marriage works really depends upon how you define evolution and design. I mean, some definitions of evolution design would be very easy to synthesize. For example, if you're defining evolution as just change over time or common ancestry even, it probably is not all that hard to wed evolution and design together into a thesis that works. But Cajonin wants to wed evolution and design at a very deep level, deep in the sense that he really wants to take mainstream evolutionary theory. Of course, mainstream evolutionary theory describes itself as adopting sort of a blind and apparently unguided mechanism to produce a series of mechanisms to produce all the complexity of life on earth. So let's be very clear about the terms that Kajonin is using here. What does he mean by design, and what does he mean by mainstream evolutionary theory, and how does all this work?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah, so your question is very good, Casey. What Jonah has in mind is that God started off the universe. He created the universe. He created the laws of nature, and, in effect, set up the universe such that once those laws of nature and those initial conditions were in place, then eventually all flora and fauna evolve and are produced by natural processes. And, of course, evolutionary processes are a key element of those natural processes. So by design, what Kajonin has in mind is that the locus of design is really at the very beginning, and his model is not interested in any kind of miraculous intervention. In some sense, it's compatible with miracles, but it doesn't invoke them. And indeed, the project is, in a sense, how to harmonize front loaded design in which the design is still detectable in the biological realm, how to marry that version of design with mainstream evolution. So that's the version of design he has in mind, a very particular kind. And then, as you were mentioning, he wants to take evolutionary theory as it is in the peer reviewed literature, as it is, in a very real sense, the mainstream understanding of the view and show how these go together.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: I think that's very important to Kajonin's project, is he wants to take mainstream evolutionary theory unadulterated, no deviations, no changes of it, and to show that that somehow can not just be compatible with design, but actually makes for. He would argue, we might disagree, but he would argue it makes for a robust design argument to take mainstream evolutionary biology. Again, no changes, marry it with design. And you still have a thesis that works and even preserves a robust case for design. And, of course, we dig into this a lot more. We'll talk about this more and some reasons why we think that that thesis doesn't work. But you did a great job in the paper of explaining exactly what Kajonin is arguing. For example, if you're a theist who believes in some kind of miraculous intervention in the history of life on earth, that's not going to work with rope based thesis. You use the word front loading, Steve, and that really is not just a front loading model. There's various, many different potential versions of design models out there. But what Kajonin wants to propose is sort of the ultimate front loading model, where everything is front loaded, sort of at the very moment of the origin of the universe. And from that point on, whether you want to call it a deistic model of design or whatever, but from that point on, the universe was set up to produce everything we see in nature, all the biological complexity, and preserve a design argument. Am I sort of getting that right here, the way that he formulates his thesis?
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's right. And one of the examples he gives, he borrows from Del Ratch, nicely illustrates this. So imagine if, when we first saw the moon, or at least when we first saw close ups of the moon, there were a series of asteroid craters on it that spelled out John 316. And as we were able to trace the trajectories, the past trajectory back of each of these asteroids, suppose we found that their lineage and their history extended back all the way, say, to the beginning of the universe.
We would still infer design on this view. When we see the message, we'd still infer design, even if John 316 wasn't directly etched, as it were, into the moon by the finger of God. Even though there are these mediating natural laws, these mediating natural processes, all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos. So that's an analogy, I think, of what's happening here. God started things off. He created the laws of nature in a very particular way, which we'll get into. And flora and fauna eventually unfolded. And the idea is the beauty, the complexity, the diversity of flora and fauna are such that it triggers a design inference or a design perception.
And that inference or perception is reliable, even if the way that these things were mediated by all these natural causes going way, way back.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's dig into this more. And I think, before we say anything else, Steven, I think you would agree with this, that we might disagree with Professor Kajonin's model, but we do think it's a very thoughtful treatment of the subject. And our disagreement does not necessarily mean we think that he know. Uncareful or sloppy or not really putting forth a really serious, challenging effort here. Would you agree with that?
[00:11:28] Speaker B: I would. I think very highly of the scholarship, the nuance, the comprehensiveness of Kajonin's work.
In all my interactions with him, he and I have gone back and forth, corresponded quite a bit. He's a scholar and a gentleman, and his work very much reflects that.
It's current and thoughtful in epistemology and theology and science. My own view is, if one is interested in what you might call a kind of theistic evolution project, then this is the best of its kind. I think it's quite well done and praiseworthy in so many.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: No, and I would agree with everything you just said. I've also interacted with Professor Kajonin quite a bit, and he is a gentleman and a scholar and has really tried hard to think this through carefully, even though we ultimately feel that it doesn't work. That's not a reflection upon him and the quality of his scholarship. And, yeah, if people are interested in this, we would encourage people to look his book, which is titled the Compatibility of Evolution design. Okay, so I guess a big question then, is, why does Kajonin's model matter? Why should listeners care about this? Why are we having this conversation today? We did a book club in 2022 where you and Brian Miller and Emily Reeves and I, we read Kajonin's book, and then we decided that we wanted to write a paper about it. Why did we take all the time to invest in this? Looking at this, why does this matter?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question, Casey, and I think it matters for a couple of reasons. One is there are a number of people, and who have different loyalties, who nonetheless think that mainstream evolutionary theory, if true, really would explain away design, or explain away certain kinds of design, particularly, of course, in the biological realm.
If natural selection can account for, say, the eye of an eagle, then why invoke a designer? It looks like you have to fight off Occam's razor in a pretty serious way. And I think what Kajonin wants to do is to show that evolutionary explanations, mainstream evolution, doesn't explain away design, that you can have full blooded evolutionary explanations and full blooded, detectable, biologically detectable design without running afoul, without getting cut by Occam's razor. So if he succeeds in that, I think, I personally think that would be quite a notable intellectual accomplishment.
And second, and closely related, there are folks who are very much interested in making a robust case for design, including in biology, and also having peace, as it were, or fully accepting what they regard as mainstream evolutionary science. It would be a way of having one's cake and also having one's cake.
Having chocolate and vanilla, I guess you could say. And if that intellectual endeavor succeeds, then again, I would think that would be quite worthy of paying attention to.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely a bit of an unorthodox thesis, and it definitely challenges some of the categories that a lot of folks have on this debate. So that's one reason we wanted to look at it. I will also add that I think that although he does some very accurate descriptions of id arguments, he's very careful to not misrepresent what intelligent design theorists are saying. He was critical of some leading id theorists in his book, folks like Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, William Dempsky, Steve Meyer. And so for that reason, we also wanted to take a look and say, okay, well, this is a very thoughtful critic. Again, the book was published by Paul Gray McMillan, Springer Nature. And we wanted to ask there, has he shown that we're wrong? And so we looked at it very carefully, and that obviously was relevant to the credibility of his thesis as well. So, again, you myself, Brian Miller, Emily Reeves, have written an extended analysis of Kajonin's model. Let's start with its strengths. What is attractive about Kajonin's model?
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Well, I think it's worthy of consideration at a number of levels. I think it's really well thought through, and he's really well versed epistemologically, and it is a philosophical model about trying to reconcile two seemingly quite different and perhaps intentioned types of ideas, and to show that not just sophisticated thinkers who can follow the nuances of his argument, but everyday folks, everyday theists, what he calls the theists on the street, are also well justified in their design perceptions or in other cases, design arguments.
In terms of a comprehensive and very careful attempt at that, I think it's quite well done.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Okay, so our team raises some pretty serious criticisms, however, of the model. Some of these focus a lot on the scientific data, and I believe that one of the questions that's come up in this dialogue with Professor Cajonin is, oh, well, are we just critiquing his science and not really tracking the philosophy of his model? Why do we talk about some of the scientific problems with his model? And isn't his model, his project, a philosophical model about how to harmonize design and evolution? So if that's the case, why is the scientific data so important to look at?
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question, because we raise not just philosophical objections to it, but also scientific ones. And you're quite right that it may seem curious to raise scientific worries to a model that's fundamentally or primarily philosophical. And I think understand why one element of our criticism is scientifically oriented, requires looking at the model in particular. So what, Kajonin, he has quite an interesting argument. He thinks that, interestingly enough, evolution on its own is insufficient, believe it or not, to bring about biological complexity and diversity, and that for evolution to succeed, for selection and mutation, they do have some powers of searching out and finding, arriving at successful biological forms and functions, successful proteins and so on. But he thinks they have fairly limited search powers. And so what needs to happen is that nature itself needs to be favorably oriented, that the deck, as it were, needs to be stacked so that this fairly limited ability to search selection and mutation can still find these viable biological forms, proteins and so on. It would be a bit like, you know, those old fashioned pinball machines.
It would be a bit like that, where the machine is tilted in such a way that when the ball rolls around, it ends up scoring lots and lots of points. The ball is just going to go willy nilly, as it were.
But if there are certain contours in the machine, then the ball will end up going in a way that will, as it were, score some hits. So what he argues is the limitations of evolution require this careful setup, and the careful setup, fine tune preconditions, laws of forms and so on. That careful setup is best explained by design.
So design steps in where evolutionary theory is inadequate, and then the two together can jointly explain how we get biological complexity and diversity. Okay, so that's some of the background about what he's up to. Now, more directly to your question, why do we raise scientific concerns? Here's why. What he says is that for evolution to succeed, it requires these fine tuned free conditions. The laws of nature have to be arranged in a certain way, the environment has to be arranged in a certain way, that pinball machine and the contours of it have to be arranged just right, so that ball will hit, so that the ball will score, so that selection and mutation can find viable forms. So the question is, if evolution requires fine tuned preconditions, then when we go and look at nature, do we actually find the fine tuned preconditions that he specifically says are needed?
So yes, it's a philosophical model, putting design and evolution together, but the way he frames design and understands design is empirically detectable. When we go and look at fitness landscapes, when we go and look at proteins, when we go and look at the laws of nature, do they have the properties that are needed to allow mutation and selection to function? That is an empirical question, and that's why we've analyzed some of the scientific evidence that's relevant to that question. And ultimately, we think the scientific evidence points strongly against the view.
What does that mean? Well, if you're going to say, look, I accept evolutionary theory, but I also want to add design to it, right. Then if you want to add design to it, design better have some teeth. A design argument that doesn't have any empirical evidence behind it is not a good design argument. When we look at the empirical evidence for his design argument, the design element there, the empirical evidence, is thin. In fact, it moves in the other direction. And that means his attempt to marry design and evolution together has a problem, because one side has some severe explanatory deficits.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: We'll definitely get back to that, but I want to make sure that our listeners don't miss a key point that you raised about Kajonin's model, and that is that Kajonin essentially recognizes in his book and in his work that evolution is going to struggle to build many of the complex features that we see in living organisms in the average universe, so to speak. Okay? And so that is why it's really important that he sees that the laws of nature are fine tuned to allow for evolution to work. Specifically, what we're talking about here is the origin of new proteins. That it seems like getting a very complicated protein sequence is going to be difficult. For a blind and unguided search. Mechanisms like random mutation and natural selection to be able to find and to be able to evolve from one protein sequence to another without going through some non functional sequence space is going to be very difficult. So he argues that the fitness landscapes, basically the pathways through sequence space, have been fine tuned in a very special way, fine tuned by God, essentially, he would argue, to allow for these protein sequences to be able to evolve. And so inherent in his argument is this. And he actually makes this explicit. He talks about the need for fine tuning. But inherent in his argument is this idea that evolution actually is going to struggle to work, and you got to have all this special fine tuning from God, basically. Essentially, if he's arguing that God chose to use random mutation and natural selection to build the complexity of life, but that's actually not a very good mechanism for building the kind of complexity we see in life. So God had to stack the deck in favor of evolution in order to get it to work. It's a very interesting thesis, and it's also scientifically testable, philosophically and scientifically testable, because you can ask, does this fine tuning exist? Are there pathways through sequence space to allow for one protein sequence to evolve into another? So maybe we're sort of already getting at this a little, you know, why is the scientific evidence a problem for Kajonin's model? Steve?
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
Casey. When it comes to proteins, and the setup, the deck stacked in favor of proteins being able to change by selection and mutation into other ones.
You and Brian Miller are the guys to address that.
Do you want to take a shot at that? And then I'll come back to a really interesting section of the book in which Kajonin argues about convergent evolution, is he sees that as one of the key elements of evidence for his view. And I can come back to that as well.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Sure. And we're going to have a podcast with Brian about the protein evolution aspect of this model and the questions that it raises. So our listeners don't need to fear. We're going to get into that in a lot more detail. But to keep it very brief, as I said earlier, the question is whether or not functional protein sequences can evolve in sequence space. Basically, all the possible sequences of amino acids that proteins can adopt. How common are functional sequences? And the data shows, and empirical research shows, that functional protein sequences are very rare. This suggests that it would be very difficult to evolve from one functional sequence to another without going through sort of a non functional stage or a non functional fitness valley. You might put it in sequence space. And what Brian Miller will argue, and we'll get into this in a later podcast, is that not only are functional protein sequences rare in sequence space, but they are isolated. And that that rarity actually entails isolation. And the isolation means you can't get from one sequence to another without going through a non functional sort of stage in your evolutionary pathway. That's going to make the selection mutation process impotent in being able to get you from one sequence to a very different sequence in sequence space. It's just not going to work. So we'll get into this in more detail. But essentially, what this means is that the fine tuning that Kajonin's model proposes has to exist for proteins to be able to evolve. The empirical data, the empirical research, shows that that fine tuning doesn't exist, that protein sequences are rare and isolated in sequence space. We don't see evidence that one protein sequence can evolve into a very different kind of protein sequence. And that's a serious challenge to darwinian evolution, mutation selection as an explanation for how new proteins evolve or new protein types evolve. And this sort of is a barrier to both Kajonin's thesis and to, frankly, mainstream evolutionary.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Let me, before I move on, let me give an analogy that may. I mean, you and Brian are the science experts, so correct me if this analogy is way off, but the thought that comes to mind about the argument you're just making is, suppose we had a haystack and there were maybe half a dozen needles. Okay? And on Kajonin's view, he envisions the laws of nature, really, the setup, the preconditions for life. They're set up such that instead of the needles being scattered, as it were, rare and isolated, there are only a few needles. So they're rare and they're isolated. They're scattered throughout the haystack. His sense of the laws of nature and the fine tuning of the preconditions is that the needles are, as it were, clumped together. So once you find one needle, the other needles, even though there are only five others, are close at hand. In other words, the laws of nature are set up. So even though selection of mutation is a blind process and it can't find much, it doesn't have much in the way of creativity. Nonetheless, as it were, the environment, the laws of nature force it in certain directions, or allow it to move in certain directions so it can find viable proteins and evolve them and so on.
So that's his vision. We've got this huge haystack, but the needles are.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: That's a great analogy you're giving. I love that he would even say, like, maybe you've got one needle on one side of this haystack and another needle on the other side of the haystack. But when you sort of dig into that haystack through x ray tomography or something like that, you'll find that there is a pathway of needles strung end to end, that would allow you to get from the needle on one side of the haystack to the other side of the haystack simply by following needles the whole way. And if you were to find such a string of needles in a haystack like that, you would be like, wow, somebody really built this haystack very carefully, and that's really interesting. So the question we can ask is, does this string of needles in the haystack really does? Is it there? Are we finding the string of needles? And we don't think we are, but regardless, it is very interesting proposal that he's making. I love. That's a great analogy. Very, very helpful.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And I take it what you and Brian are saying is, in fact, there, number one, are very few needles in a given haystack. They're rare and they are scattered. And the very best data we have show there are no connecting pathways between.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's basically right. And Brian is certainly more the expert on this than I am, but that is also what I would, I've read the papers as well, and I think that's what the data is. Know, Steve, we are running a little bit long for this first podcast. So would you be okay if we come up with a second podcast about this paper and we can pick it up and finish off the conversation?
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be great. I love that.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, I'm Casey Luskin with id the future. I have here with us Steve Dilly. We're talking about a book titled the Compatibility of Evolution and Design by a University of Helsinki theologian, Professor Rope Kajonin. We're going to come back with more on id the future on whether design and evolution are compatible. Thanks for listening.
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