Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Today's episode is adapted from the Eric Metaxas show and features Eric Metaxas talking with molecular biologist Douglas Axe about his book Undeniable.
For more from this radio program, visit metaxastalk.com that's metaxas. M E T A X A s.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: The word talk.com this is the Eric Metaxas show, folks. I'm here at my microphone in the mountains, way up on a crag. Today I get to talk to a brilliant scientist named Douglas Axe. A X E Doug Axe, welcome to the program.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Listen, you do a lot, but you wrote a book. We talked about it at some point last year. It's called Undeniable. Well, you were telling us this story. This was in the late 90s, I guess, right? And it was a hard moment for you because here you're thinking like, look, I'm doing real science and I am showing something. Now, I think what's interesting, too, is that the implications of what you are saying lead us to think that maybe there's a designer, but there's certainly no proof or anything. You're just doing science and there's some evidence.
But the level of uncomfortableness in the academy around this issue of design is so tremendous that even somebody like Sir Alan, first on just giving the green light for you to do a project which it's not some sexy project like everybody in America is going to understand or everybody in Europe is going to understand the implications. It's very scientific science. I mean, you're talking about manipulating parts of enzymes. So it's kind of an amazing thing that this is so politically charged that even that was something that made him uncomfortable.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: It is amazing and was disappointing at the time.
I've seen a lot more examples of things like this since then and have become more realistic so that I think, knowing what I know now, if I were back in those circumstances, I would have expected that I would encounter that kind of resistance.
And I don't mean for that to sound cynical. I think it's a realistic view of how people actually work. When push comes to shove, if it's going to cost them something and cost their reputation, then they're going to be very reluctant to stand with someone on something like that.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, but I mean, again, it's a sad thing because, you know, we depend on that. It's sort of like you expect a doctor to do the right thing, you expect scientists to do science, and it's what we're supposed to be trained to do, not just to be political hacks blowing with the wind. And of course, we're all humans. But it's dismaying because we're in a situation right now where the whole academic establishment has seemed to have thrown its weight behind the ideology of strict materialism and blind Darwinism. And how sad, because they've moved away from science into political ideology. And that is bad for everybody. I mean, it's certainly bad for science.
[00:03:19] Speaker C: It is. I think you saw this with the March for Science. I mean, it was so polarized. So either you're with us on these issues and not just saying you're with us on science, but either you're with us and on board on these issues, or you are anti science. And that is a very unhelpful position for scientists to be taking. It's unhelpful for science to be portrayed that way, as though you have to believe certain things, you have to sign up to certain theories in order to be a scientist. No, science is about people who want to think about things, thinking about them and allowing other people to think about them, putting all the ideas on the table and letting them compete in a fair way.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: And the thing is, in a free society, I mean, how sick this happened in Nazi Germany. I mean, they began saying that science has to serve national socialist ideology, which is anti Semitic. So they started labeling science. They didn't like Jewish science, just like people today are labeling any science. They don't like creationist science. They're using these labels and these divisions. That happened obviously in the Soviet Union.
Science, it wasn't truly free. It had to fall under the ideology of. Of Soviet communism. But the idea that that's happening in England, that it's happening in America, we should be scared, we should be amazed and horrified that that's happening in an utterly, at least an ostensibly, utterly free society.
[00:04:46] Speaker C: Yeah, we should. And it is happening.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: And what are some other examples of this? I mean, when the book came out, did you get any particular criticism? When this book came out?
[00:04:55] Speaker C: It's interesting because the people I go and speak to when I go and I've been giving a number of talks on the book, they tend to be friendly audiences with a few skeptical people or people who come up to me afterward or I'll get Twitter or email. People being skeptics, I haven't gone before an audience where half the people are throwing tomatoes at me. In one respect, it's kind of an interesting dynamic. I've had a couple of very negative reviews, some of them from well established scientists. One of them is a guy named Keith Fox in the uk And I did a radio debate with him some time ago, and he wrote a negative review of the book that was published in the UK periodical. And he seemed to be leveraging the fact that he is a highly established scientist to say, I am a scientist. Doug Axe is wrong, but his field is entirely different. He hasn't actually done work on protein.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Today I'm talking to Douglas Axe. His book is called Undeniable, and it talks about how our intuition that the universe is designed, that things are designed, is probably something that we can rely on more than we've been taught. So you talk about that in the book. How can we pivot to that? We don't have a ton of time left, Douglas. But in your book, you talk about that specific issue.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: Yeah, it's acknowledged by everyone, both sides of this argument, that the intuition is there.
One side wants to say it's there. And we need to educate people to know that their intuition is false, saying, maybe it's there for a reason, and maybe if we tease this apart and see what's underneath the intuition, we can actually show that it's true. And so that's what I do in the book when I'm giving talks. I use a picture of origami crane and say, imagine that you're three or four years old. You have no exposure to origami. You come upon this folded piece of paper that looks like a bird on a table. You know right away you don't have to do a calculation, you don't have to sit and ponder. You know that somebody made that.
And so how is it that you know that? Well, it turns out that you have an eye for things that are not probable, that are not apt to happen by accident, and certainly an origami crane is one of those, but there's many of those. And you don't have to, again, do a probability calculation to know that since accidental causes can't make things like this, somebody made this. My brother, my mother, my father, someone made this, and I want to know how to make it. And it's that similar reasoning, that almost immediate reasoning that we apply to things that are far more marvelous than origami. Cranes, real cranes, animals, butterflies, plants. When we see those things, we see something amazing and improbable, and we know that those things don't happen by accident.
Now, anyone who wants to say, well, that's fallacious reasoning, or it's because we aren't used to reasoning on timescales of Billions of years. All these things that are brought up as counter arguments, it turns out you can show that they're all false. Billions of years don't make any difference. Natural selection doesn't make any difference. The intuition is correct.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Well, that's what's so funny, is that we're told to ignore our intuition. And there is a time to be educated beyond our intuition. But this intuition is such a powerful intuition.
The idea that we couldn't possibly be here by mistake, there's so many reasons that that's true. There's so many different lines of argument. I mean, the idea if we are here utterly by accident, it literally means there's no such thing as good or evil. That the very instinct you have to think that something is beautiful or true or good or bad, it's all garbage.
Who can face that? I think some people think they can face it, but they haven't really thought about it in depth. They have a shallow view of what it means. But when you really comprehend the depth of what it means, it means that the Holocaust was absolutely not evil.
In fact, nothing horrible you can think of is evil or wrong. Because all of these things are social constructs. We've created them. Now, most people would say that's ridiculous. They somehow know that there is such a thing as good and evil and love and hate. We sort of know that and justice.
But these ideas that the universe was absolutely an accident, every detail of the universe is just an accident, mutations, whatever, militates 100% against those ideas. But nobody ever seems to be able to follow that logic or be willing to face that logic. They always come up with kind of weird side explanations and then they change the subject. But I mean, can you imagine that the idea that the Holocaust was not evil or even bad, can anybody accept that? You know, you have to really twist yourself into a billion pretzels to accept something like that.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Yeah, there are very few people who go that route. You tend to have people going the route of Richard Dawkins who says, yes, this is a material universe and he can call creationists evil. And you're thinking, how do you get evil out of your materialist universe? So almost everyone wants to affirm that there is good and evil and that they're on the side of good and their detractors are on the side of evil. And including a militant atheist materialist like Richard Dawkins. There are more contemplative atheists like Thomas Nagel, someone I refer to in the book, who, as a philosopher of mind says that you really Cannot explain everything that we know is true in terms of a material universe. There's got to be more to this, and mind has to be at the center of it. And he admits, I just don't want there to be a God. I want to find a way to explain this that doesn't involve God.
So I have a lot of respect for his version where he recognizes that this is a problem that needs to be grappled with by atheists than I do for the Dawkins version.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Well, because you see that he's being honest, or he's trying to be honest and trying to grapple with what's in front of him instead of bat it away and be praised by his friends. And now I know that Nagel is here in New York at nyu, right?
[00:11:00] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Because I know Stephen Meyer has referred to him, and I ought to have him on this program just to.
[00:11:06] Speaker C: He's a fascinating guy. I would love to meet him. I have not. But I've corresponded with him briefly.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Well, if you ever end up coming to New York, maybe we can set something up, have a conversation in the studio. I would love to.
There are so many good books coming out by folks like you and Stephen Meyer and a lot of the folks at the Discovery Institute and so many other places. Hugh Ross has written terrific books. It really seems that the preponderance of evidence more and more is on this side of design now in the academic world. I know Stephen Meyer has said that some of the people at the very, very top, some of the best scientists in the world, are seeing problems with the standard Darwinian model, and that at conferences he's noticing this. So it seems to me that there are healthy things happening in the midst of the illness.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: I think that's true.
Steve and I were both and a number of others were at a meeting held by the Royal Society in London last November called, I think it was something like New Trends in Evolutionary Biology, which is not a very exciting title. But the reality was it was bringing together a bunch of scientists who are leaders in their field who think that the Neo Darwinian, the new version of Darwinism that was hatched in the mid 20th century is now really a failed theory and that it needs to be replaced by something else.
They're not favoring intelligent design, these people who were speakers at this conference, but they all are admitting that natural selection and mutation don't get the job done.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: I mean, that's huge. But that is so huge what you just said, that natural selection and random mutation do not get the job done well since the beginning of time, which is 1859. We've been told over and over and over and over, this is it. This is how it happened. We can argue about the details, but don't argue about this. This is how it happened. You're telling me now in 2017 that the top people are saying, no, we now know that it couldn't have happened that way.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Yes, that's true. I would say the brightest thinkers all see this now. They're all trying to come up with something cle that's a workaround that allows there to be a naturalistic explanation that's not, strictly speaking, a Darwinian one. But a number of us were sitting at this meeting thinking, none of these things are going to work. And you're all avoiding the big question, which is is there going to be a need for intelligence to explain life, or is it ever going to be plausible to explain life apart from intelligence? And I'm convinced in my book explains why I don't think that will ever happen. There will never be a plausible accidental explanation for life.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture.
ID the future is copyright Discovery institute.
For more information, visit intelligent design.org and idthefuture.com.
[00:14:16] Speaker C: It.
