Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're sharing with you Casey Lukins recent interview with Daily Wire host Andrew Klavin on the Andrew Klavin show. Luskin is Associate Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He holds graduate degrees in science and law, and a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg. As many of you know, Luskin is a longtime and much loved voice on ID the future, both as a host and a guest. In this conversation, Andrew Klavan asks Luskin to unpack the debate over evolution and intelligent design for his viewers. Luskin reviews the basics of intelligent design and gives lots of examples of design from biology and cosmology. He talks about the scientists and scholars who have been censored for considering design perspectives in their work, and he gives us a good reminder of the limits of science and the ways in which science can guide us on a quest to understand events that occurred in the natural world in the remote past. Here now is Casey Kin and Andrew Klavan.
Speaker 3 00:01:39 Hey, it's Andrew Klavin with this week's interview The other night, I watched an interview, a really interesting interview with, uh, Richard Dawkins over at my friends at Trigger Nory, uh, constant in Keon and Francis Foster. What always interests me about Dawkins is there's so much I agree with him about, and I certainly love science, and there's so much I disagree with him about that he doesn't seem to know anything about. When he talks about religion, it, it's not that I think he doesn't have a right to his opinion, it's that <laugh>. I don't think he knows anything about religion. His basic argument is that Darwinian evolution explains why things look as if they were created by a gigantic invisible Jew in the sky. But no, that's all an illusion and everything is random, and I find that argument silly. It is, it's logically impossible for people within a system to determine whether that system is ultimately random.
Speaker 3 00:02:30 It might look random to you, it might look ordered to you, but if you're inside the system, what are you comparing it to? The order obviously would be outside the system. The order would be the mind of the creator or not, and you just don't know whether that's there or not. That's why we talk about faith instead of knowledge. But there would be clues. There would be things that would happen that would make you think, yes, this does look like something that was created, or, no, it doesn't. This does look, uh, like nobody cares what's happening here or does look like somebody caress. And those are the things that I think Theo theologians think about. And what I think with Dawkins is I think he's a very civilized, very interesting man, but I think he's guilty of d what I call displaced authority. You see displaced authority in our culture all the time.
Speaker 3 00:03:13 That's when an actor gets up and explains to you what you should think about politics. And you think, well, you know, you're a really good actor, but why are you telling me what I should think about politics? I may know more about politics than you do. You're just an actor. So when you make definitive declarations in a subject that is really outside your expertise, that's fine. You should be able to express your heartfelt faith, your opinion, the reasons for it. You should be able to explain your thinking so people can judge your thinking. But you shouldn't pretend that the authority you have as a biologist, for instance, transfers over to expertise in theology. I just don't think it does. Now, I'm a huge believer in science. I love science obviously is on so much for our civilization. It has, uh, changed everything. But it seems to me the reason we're struggling so hard to keep our faith, and the reason people who are atheists and Antifa have such loud voices is not because science has determined that religion is not true.
Speaker 3 00:04:08 It's because voices like Dawkins have been given more credence than they should have by people who oppose religion. This has really been going on since the Renaissance. I mean, even the word renaissance is a propaganda word. The word Middle Ages is a propaganda word. The people in the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, it was as it was called immediately upon the start of this, the so-called Renaissance. They didn't think they were living in the dark. They didn't think they were living in the middle of anything. Those were propaganda words meant to say, oh, yes, well, first there was Rome, and then Rome fell, and then we had dark ages, and now we are here and everything we say is going to be the truth. A majority of people in our country think that science and religion are in conflict, 59% of Americans, but I don't think so at all. So I wanted to talk to a dissenting voice on the issue of evolution design, whether things are random or not. And so I wanna speak today with Casey Luskin. He is a California licensed attorney and a scientist with a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg. He works as a associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, a collection of very intelligent folks. Uh, Casey, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4 00:05:15 Oh, thank you so much for having me, Andrew.
Speaker 3 00:05:18 Uh, you know, I, I wanna talk, you write about intelligent design and you fight for the right to speak about intelligent design, which we'll talk about the fact that that's actually a fight. But first, maybe you could start out by explaining exactly what intelligent design means.
Speaker 4 00:05:34 Sure. So at Discovery Institute, we would define intelligent design as a scientific theory, which holds that many aspects of life and the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than an undirected cause like natural selection. And so we would cite, uh, many lines of evidence in support of intelligence design from the fine tuning of the laws of nature, which are very carefully crafted to allow for advanced live to exist, or also the fine tuning in biology where we see that there is information in our d n A and molecular machines in our cell, which are very precisely ordered in order to allow, again, for you and I to be here having this conversation. So there's all kinds of fine tuning in the universe from the macro architecture of the laws of nature to the tiniest, you know, uh, nucleotide sequence in our D n A and the, the atoms and molecules that make up our cells. So we see evidence for design permeating the universe.
Speaker 3 00:06:27 If you believe in intelligent design, is there a place where the material world vanishes? In other words, what Richard Dawkins seems to be saying is that, uh, everything has a physical cause, a manifest physical cause, and therefore there can be no cause outside of physical causes, which doesn't seem to, that argument just doesn't ring true to me. But if you believe in intelligence design, is there some place that you're going to get to where you don't see a physical cause? Or will you always, there always will be that chain of physical causation?
Speaker 4 00:06:59 Well, a big part of intelligent design is to look at nature, to study nature, to do science, and to ask exactly what are physical causes capable of producing. And so, for example, when we see that our, that our d n A is full of a language-based code, and we see all this information in our d n a, what intelligence design theorists ask is, where did that information come from? And are physical causes capable of producing this very precisely ordered sequence of nucleotide bases in our D N a, which then encode all the proteins? And if there's just a, you know, one nucleotide that is out of sequence, in many cases, you'll end up with some kind of a disease. A protein don't, won't work, and you will die. So we ask the question, are physical causes, are natural mechanisms capable of producing that information? And if not, where does that information come from?
Speaker 4 00:07:46 Um, and all of our experience, when we know the origin of a language-based code, which is exactly what we see at the very heart of life, these sorts of things always trace back to a mind or an intelligent, essentially an intelligent agent. And so we see that, yeah, there are many places where physical mechanisms are not sufficient to account for the information in the complexity that we see in life in the universe. But you might be alluding to something even bigger than that. I mean, let's talk about the origin of the universe, right? Um, obviously, you know, you, every single worldview, whether you are an atheist or a theist or where, you know, whether you're coming from an intelligent design perspective or more of a materialistic perspective, every single worldview has to ultimately explain where our base reality came from, right? And so, intelligent design looks at the universe and sees, you know, all this evidence that has been discovered by modern physics and cosmology, that all of the galaxies are receding from one another.
Speaker 4 00:08:38 And we see this evidence essentially that the universe, if you rewind the tape of the, the motion of the galaxies, everything basically collapses back to a infinitely small point in space and time where everything looks like it was sort of exploded out from, we call that the Big bang today. Um, now materialists, atheists and so forth, they try to explain the big bang by saying, well, the universe just created itself, right? And so the question then becomes, do we have experience with universes creating themselves? Is there such a thing as a self-creating universe? Can material causes explain the origin of the universe? This gets into some sort of deep philosophical territory. For me. I have always been persuaded by something called the colo cosmological argument, which, which you may have heard of this Andrew, but it basically goes by this, it says, anything that begins to exist has a cause.
Speaker 4 00:09:25 The universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a first cause. Now, we know from all the evidence that's been discovered from the Big Bang model of the universe over the last, you know, essentially century of, of physics and cosmology, we know that the universe began to exist. It is infinite in space and time, and it is, it is not infinitely old. It, it had a beginning point. So if the universe began to exist, that means that we have to account for its beginning. And in order to account for its beginning, we need to appeal to some cause essentially, that exists outside the universe that is capable of producing all the, you know, and incredibly unimaginably great matter and energy that is existing within the universe. And doing this from an infinitely small point. It's, it's essentially, you know, from a theistic perspective, uh, it essentially sounds like it is creation out of nothing. You're seeing, you know, the universe just banging, exploding into existence. And you need a first cause that is capable of accounting for that. So I'm not a physicist, I'm not a cosmologist, but to me, this, this very much points to what we would classically say is sort of the idea of a first cause and the need for some kind of a God, essentially to get the universe going with a bang.
Speaker 3 00:10:29 I mean, it is interesting. I've, I heard, I've heard the argument that the laws of nature alone would account for this, but that just raises the question, who wrote the laws of nature? It always seems to go back. I, it always does seem to me that that mind must come before matter. But I, I understand people not having faith in that. And I, you know, I respect it. I just don't see the, the logic of it. Talk about evolution itself. I mean, evolution caused people to lose faith, not just because it showed a physical mechanism for the development of species, but also because it seemed kind of cruel that entire species would rise and fall apart. I mean, if you go back and read, uh, you know, poetry in the 18th and 19th century, people were very disturbed by the kinda mass destruction. That evolution, um, implied is the theory of elu. Do you believe in the theory of evolution? I mean, you must believe in some of it, surely.
Speaker 4 00:11:21 Yeah, whenever we talked about, you know, evolution in faith or evolution in science, and what's, what's right, what do we accept? We have to define evolution very carefully. So I would note that there are three general definitions of, of evolution, the way the term is used in the scientific community. I took a lot of evolutionary biology when I was in my undergraduate and graduate courses, so I've got some background in this. Um, the first definition of evolution would simply be change over time. The idea that species can change over time. You, we can observe change within species. We can observe antibiotic resistance occurring in real time. Uh, we can see that there are species that are, are alive today, that were not alive in the past, and vice versa. There were species that were alive in the past that were not alive today. We obviously don't have dinosaurs running around today.
Speaker 4 00:12:01 So this form of evolution is what we might call, you know, in some sense it's microevolution, it's change within a species and known disputes, this first definition of evolution, the second definition of evolution is a bit more complicated. It's the idea of universal common ancestry, the idea that all living things are related. So not only are of course, you and I related Andrew, but uh, you would also, I dunno if you have any pets, I have a pet cat. So if you go back far enough, uh, I would be related, uh, genetically related through a common ancestry with my cat. Go back a bit further. I'm, uh, related to the plant that's sitting in the window behind me. I go back even further and you know, you are related to the fungus that's growing on the bottom of my foot. Not a very pleasant thought, but everything is related.
Speaker 4 00:12:42 Um, so this definition of evolution, I would say it's, it's not necessarily incompatible with theism, you know, belief in a personal God, because certainly God could have created a life through a meth, a mechanism that used common ancestry. Now, I certainly am a skeptic of common ancestry on scientific grounds. I don't necessarily think that it's fundamentally incompatible with belief in God, but for very scientific reasons. I don't think the scientific evidence supports universal common ancestry, this idea that all life is related. Then we get into the third definition of evolution. And this is the one that is the most controversial, both among scientists and also among, you know, probably folks out there with a theistic Judeo-Christian worldview. And that is the idea that the mechanism which drove evolution, the mechanism which basically created all of this vast complexity of life, is an unguided and undirected purposeless process that primarily involves natural selection acting upon random mutation.
Speaker 4 00:13:35 And of course, there are other mechanisms like genetic drift, but the whole show is an unguided, mechanistic process that happens on its own. And this created you and me, not just our bodies, but also our brains, all of your deepest longings and impulses. You know, why do you love your wife? Uh, why do you enjoy, I don't know, uh, check cereal for breakfast, whatever it is that you like. It's not just your body that was created by this process, but even your deepest psychological impulses. Why do you believe in God? Your religious impulses are said to be explained by natural selection. And this is what philosopher Daniel Dennet, one of the four horsemen of the, of atheism these days, um, he has called, uh, natural selection and Darwinism a universal acid. 'cause basically it eats way through everything, and it tries to explain everything that we see in life until basically there's no room for any other worldview.
Speaker 4 00:14:25 Any other explanation, whether it's religious or otherwise. Darwinism is the final and ultimate answer according to many folks who adopt this viewpoint. So that is certainly where actually the evidence, I think, for evolution is the thinnest. Uh, we, we have actually at Discovery Institute, we maintain a list of over 1200 PhD scientists who say that they are skeptical of the ability of natural selection and random mutation to account for the complexity of life. And you can look at the mainstream scientific literature and find many papers that have been critical of the ability of natural selection to explain all the complexity of life. And, and essentially this is why in in evolutionary biology today, there are people saying we need something called an extended synthesis synthesis. Or they're calling for new models of evolution because they say that basically evolutionary biology lacks a theory of degenerative. This neo Darwinian viewpoint natural Selection act upon, uh, mutations in our D N A does not have the ability to account for new complex features like body plans or wings or eyes. And so there are a lot of problems with this neo Darwinian model of evolution and the strictly mechanistic view. Um, we can go into this in more detail if you want. No, I probably can leave it there for now. The
Speaker 3 00:15:33 Thing, the thing that always bothers me about this part of the argument is that once they start talking about evolution accounting for everything, the the proof is not there. I mean, there's just the, the simple evidence. What what they accept as evidence is a story that makes sense and is random. So the randomness is built in to the proof. It begs the question essentially whether things are random or not. So if I can explain why people love to look at sunsets in some evolutionary way that makes sense and is random and is, then that constitutes proof, that's a just so story. I mean, Rudy Kipling could have done that forever. And I, it, so it doesn't seem to make sense. So here's, here's the question that really bothered me. 'cause you're an attorney and you have been involved in some of these cases. There are cases, the, the one that you were writing about, uh, recently was Kiss Miller versus Dover, uh, in which essentially courts have said, you may not teach this, uh, that, that this is not something that can be included as, as even speculation really in a school. Is that fair? Is that a fair description?
Speaker 4 00:16:37 Yeah. There was a court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, sort of in central Pennsylvania back in 2005, where a federal district court judge ruled that intelligent design is unconstitutional to teach in public schools. And this was very unfortunate because it deprived students of the opportunity to learn about this fascinating scientific debate. Uh, we at Discovery Institute would really call this censorship. It's people who do not want students to be able to hear about scientific evidence that challenges a Darwinian, uh, viewpoint. Now, I I should also add that, you know, intelligent design is more than just a critique of Darwinism, right? It's actually affirmatively saying that we can, using the tools of science, using the scientific method, we can infer that there is an intelligent cause that is the best explanation for many of these complex features that we see in life. Now, if we just wanna critique Darwinism without getting into sort of an alternative or replacement theory, the good news, Andrew, is there actually are a number of states in this country that have adopted policies either requiring or permitting teachers to simply critique evolution without getting into alternative theories like intelligent design.
Speaker 4 00:17:39 In fact, in 2009, I was one of a number of scientists who testified before the Texas State Board of Education. And Texas obviously is a huge state, has a big influence on, uh, textbooks and the national curriculum in this country. And Texas, uh, ultimately did adopt policies which required students to learn about scientific critiques of evolution. And those policies are still on the books today. Now, they don't get into intelligent design. And actually this is the kind of approach that Discovery Institute would recommend, uh, for teachers in public schools to, to look at the evidence for and against evolution without getting into intelligent design. We find that when intelligent design is taught, it tends to actually cause so much politicization of the topic, Hmm, that it ends up, uh, resulting in persecution of pro ID scientists and faculty. And that's sort of the other side of this coin, is that we don't just see that courts are trying to ban intelligent design. We see that, um, academics and universities are trying to basically, uh, have witch hunts against pro ID scientists and faculty. And we want, uh, the scientists that are in our ID research community to be able to do their research and grow and develop the theory of intelligence design. We think this persecution is just fundamentally inimical to the progress of science and the values of what science is supposed to stand for.
Speaker 3 00:18:53 More from Casey Luskin in just a moment. But first, are you a few years or maybe decades out of school and wondering, what the heck did I even learn? And what was the point? You might think to yourself that you don't have the time to learn something new. If that describes, you know, this, you're not alone. It's not too late. Since 1844, Hillsdale College has been providing education in faith, freedom and character. They've taken some of the core classes they teach on campus and made them available for free online for anyone who wants to learn that is right for free. There are 39 free courses to choose from, ranging from the US Constitution, the Book of Genesis, to Free Market economics. They're easy to follow and they're self-paced. So you can start whenever you want. In fact, you can start right now. It's everything you need, all in one place with no long-term commitment. Let Hillsdale College be your guide, learn when and where you want. You know, I love these guys. Hillsdale is not just having a moment, they're just absolutely terrific. Go right now to hillsdale.edu/claven to enroll. There's no cost. It's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu/claven to register hillsdale.edu/klavan. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, how do I spell E D U? It's K L A V A N. Obviously I need an education.
Speaker 3 00:20:08 The, the hostility. I, I've always been really puzzled by this, actually, the hostility toward God. I mean, this, this, this mythology that science and religion have been in a kind of, uh, Sherlock Holmes Moriarty death match. It, it really is a mythology. I mean, most of the people who invented the scientific method were religious people and invented it out for religious reasons, because they were trying to understand the mind of God and the, and the works of God. When <laugh> when a scientist in, in a university comes in and says, look, you know, I, I agree with evolution, for instance, but I, it doesn't seem to me to be an accidental process, or even as I say, how would you know if it was an accidental process? Since we're in the process, it doesn't make any logical sense to me that you can tell from within a process whether a process is random or not. You have to be outside the process to see the design. So when is the excuse for penal, how, let me start here. How badly are these people penalized when they speak up in university settings?
Speaker 4 00:21:10 We have seen people denied tenure. We have seen people denied jobs. We have seen people have their labs taken away from them. They, we've seen them lose funding. I mean, you name the potential academic, uh, penalty that you can incur, and we've seen it happen to proponents of intelligent design. I can give you one example that I think really paints a picture. Um, there was a professor of physics at Ball State University a number of years ago. This happened in 20 12, 20 13, named Eric Adeen. He was, uh, very well respected by his colleagues. He had quite a good cv, many peer-reviewed publications, and he offered a one unit elective seminar for seniors where they could explore the broader intersection of science and society. Okay? And so he would talk about all kinds of various scientific topics. And in a short section in this course, he would very briefly talk about the, the intelligent design evolution controversy.
Speaker 4 00:21:58 And he would talk about some scientists who support intelligent design. He would also cite scientists who were critical of intelligence design, like, like Richard Dawkins for example. And this was too far for his administrators at Ball State University. There's a, an evolutionist, a Darwinist at the University of Chicago named Jerry Coyne, who sent a letter with a freedom from reli, from Religion Foundation to Ball State University, basically demanding that they cancel his course. And unfortunately, not only did they cancel the course, but they imposed a speech code on the university where ball state's then president said she declared that intelligent design is quote, non appropriate content for science courses. So we literally see universities passing and enforcing speech codes to prevent ID from being mentioned in the, you know, a, a senior elective seminar where you're supposed to explore the intersection of science and society.
Speaker 4 00:22:46 I mean, where else could this be more appropriate than at, at the university level where students are responsible, they can think for themselves. And this was not proselytizing, this was an, an academic professor, you know, just allowing students to be exposed to different ideas. So yeah, there are a lot of folks that have a real allergy to ideas that they disagree with, and any scientific evidence that challenges their materialistic worldview, they have to have it centered from students because they, I i, I assume at least I, I mean, I don't like to psychoanalyze people, but I assume that if they felt comfortable that the evidence was on their side, then they would not have to resort to these kinds of tactics. And the fact that they are resorting to these tactics, I mean, as you said, how do they really know that the entire history of life is one, one long string of unguided evolutionary mechanisms?
Speaker 4 00:23:29 They don't really know that. And when we look at the complexity of life, I mean, I think it was Francis Crick, the discoverer of d n a who run, uh, who co-discovered the structure of D N A and won and co won a Nobel Prize for this, this is sort of a para phrase, but he said that biologists have to keep reminding themselves that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. Okay, so why does he have to keep reminding himself of that point? Because when you look at the evidence of biology, it looks designed, and this is why we, in the ID community, we say the reason that it looks designed is because it really was designed. So let me, let
Speaker 3 00:24:00 Me see if I can play the devil's advocate here, because I'm, I'm not sure I quite understand why they wanna shut the debate down, because as I say, it seems to me an unprovable thing. But here, here's one thing that occurs to me. As you were speaking, as I was listening to what you were saying, at some point, if I'm training a camera on the moment when life began, if I, you know, if I'm in a kind of world, uh, an alternative universe where I have a camera that can look back to the moment when life began, I assume that I'm going to see some material process creating life. We have no idea what it is. We have no idea how inanimate things become ate things, but I assume that I'm, what I'm not going to see is a gigantic hand coming down out of the sky that looks like it was painted by Michelangelo and, uh, you know, a couple of Hebrew words. And then life is gonna be there. I assume I'm going to see a physical thing, same thing as if I'm training a camera at the beginning of the universe. So would it be, is it at all a fair argument to say, Hey, you wanna believe in intelligence design, that's fine, but it's not science because it can't be proved and it can never be pieced together, uh, from the evidence. Would that, is that a fair argument?
Speaker 4 00:25:05 Well, I, I would respectfully disagree with that argument. Um, I think that intelligence design is a science. Uh, you mentioned earlier, my background is in geology. What geology does is it studies events of the past and we can use science to study events of the past. We're never going to have 100% certainty. If you're looking for 100% absolute certainty, then science is the wrong place to go. Science never gives us under any conditions absolute certainty. What it can allow us to do though, is we can use the methods of historical sciences to infer what the best explanation for a given situation is, given what we know about how the world works. And so let me very briefly explain how this works with intelligent design. Um, intelligence design uses the scientific method to make its claims. If you think back to your high school biology class, the scientific method is usually composed of a four-step process of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion.
Speaker 4 00:25:55 And Id uses that exact method to make its claims. It starts with observations about what intelligent agents do and where information comes from. For example, whenever we see a language-based code in all of our experience with the world around us, it always comes from an intelligent agent. Um, ID theorists call this complex and specified information. We can unpack that jargony term some other time, but it's basically the type of information, and that would include a language-based code. It's a kind of information which in our experience only comes from intelligent agents. So we can then make a hypothesis that if a natural structure was designed, it will be rich in information complex and specified information, and it will contain language-based codes. And so then what do we do? We go out and we test life to see what it contains. And we find that at the very heart of our D n A is a language-based code.
Speaker 4 00:26:43 The c as I said earlier, the ordering of those nucleotide bases has to be just right. And we have machinery in our cells, molecular machines that can read the information in our D N A and process it much like computer-like information processing, where we have commands and codes in our, you know, on your hard drive, which are then interpreted by the machinery of your computer to perform some kind of an output in the exact same way. In our cells, we have commands and codes that are encoded within our D N A embedded in the D n A molecule. Those commands and codes are then read by machinery in our cells, which then produce some kind of an output. And the machinery is then producing this output that is actual machines. We have machines in ourselves, molecular machines that are running the show, performing all kinds of key functions like energy production, uh, raw materials production, transportation, waste disposal.
Speaker 4 00:27:32 We have cell membranes that are like smart barriers that let, uh, what you want in and keep what you don't want out. And then we have central processing, like a C P U, all kinds of molecular machines in our cell that are running the show. But where in our experience do these kinds of things come from? Machine-like structures, information, computer-like information processing and language-based code. And all of our experience, those things only come from intelligence. So we might not be able to rewind the tape and go and see exactly what happened at the, at the moment of the creation of life, but we can use our knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world we live in. Today's to say that intelligent agency and an intelligent agent is the best explanation we've got for all this complexity we see in life. Alright,
Speaker 3 00:28:13 One last question. I have to ask you to keep this brief, 'cause I'm running out of time, but I I would like to know this, this is a, a, a broader question. Maybe. Uh, I assume you're a person of faith. I, I mean, I'm listening to you. You seem to be a person of faith. Does it ever bother you? The, you know, we talk about it looks like it's, everything looks like it's designed, but there are ways also in which it looks like it's kind of a mess. I mean, these species grow up and they get destroyed. We die horribly. Each, each and every one of us, uh, men have a sexual desire to be with a lot of different women. Women have a desire to be with one man. It all seems like a terribly troublesome, uh, world that has been kind of randomly thrown together. Do you ever <laugh>, does science ever give you theistic doubts, doubts about the just of God or the, or whether God was really looking out for our best interest when he created the world that, does it ever seem to you morally random, I guess is the question I'm asking?
Speaker 4 00:29:08 Sure. So, so I am a, I am a Christian theist. Um, and I would say that the, the question you're asking right now, Andrew, is a, is a crucial question that everybody on the face of this earth, whether you were an atheist or a theist or whatever, we all have to grapple with the problem of evil. Why is there evil in this world? And it's something that touches us all. Um, I love what c s Lewis said about this. He basically said that the problem of evil is a, is a theological question, but we can, we can give theological answers. In fact, theologians have had answers to the problem of evil for millennia. And so I would say, you know, this is a question that really can only be answered, answered theologically. Science is not going to tell. We could look at the evidence in nature and see there's evidence for design.
Speaker 4 00:29:46 I mean, something could be designed to have an evil purpose. I mean, guns and bombs are designed, viruses look like little, you know, lunar modules that that can land on a cell and deposit some, you know, their d n a and then the cell is destroyed. So viruses are designed right, they're designed to kill. Just because something is designed does not necessarily mean we like the purpose. The question of why there is a purpose that we either like or don't like is a larger philosophical theological question. And C s Lewis said that, look, I can give you the logical solution to the problem of evil. You know, that ultimately evil in this world is the result of human sin. God gives us free will we rebel against him. He allows sin to enter the world. You know, otherwise we, we end up essentially, you know, living in the sinful state forever.
Speaker 4 00:30:28 And you know, this, this is sort of almost a mercy that, that we are allowed to die and not have to live in this, you know, sin tainted world forever. But you know, that, that's a theological explanation. And again, theologians have been explaining the problem of evil, in my opinion, with good answers for millennia. But what he says is, look, I can give you the logical solution to the problem of evil, but nothing is going to hold a candle to the least tincture of the love of God touching your heart. And that really is the only true solution to the problem of evil, is to find God's love and to know that he loves you and ultimately, you know, has a, has a, a hope for you belong beyond this supremely messed up world that we live in. But despite the fact that there is evil in this world, does not change the fact that we see evidence for design throughout it.
Speaker 4 00:31:09 Again, many of the things which even cause evil in this world, they appear so intelligent. Design is a science does not get into these larger moral questions of do we like the design or not like the design. It just asks the question, what is the best, best explanation? Is it intelligence or something else? And you know, the reality is there are many things in this world that are design, but I do think that this problem of evil question is a, is a very important question. It just goes beyond the theory of intelligence science. So talk to your pastor, talk to your rabbi, talk to your imam. They're gonna have you good answers to the problem of evil for you. But I don't think science is where you go for answers to these questions. Fair
Speaker 3 00:31:43 Enough. Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, where can people find your work?
Speaker 4 00:31:47 Uh, they can go to my personal website, casey luskin.com or uh, discovery.org is our website. Um, and also our main news site is evolution news.org. A lot of got great material on all those websites.
Speaker 3 00:31:58 Thanks very much Casey. Really nice talking to you. I appreciate
Speaker 4 00:32:00 It. I enjoyed it. Andrew, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 00:32:15 That was Andrew Klavin chatting with Casey Luskin on the Andrew Klavin show. With thanks to the Daily Wire for permission to share this interview, learn more about lufkin's
[email protected]. That's casey luskin, L u s K I n.com. For ID the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 00:32:39 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
