[00:00:04] 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 a panel discussion reviewing the recent debate between Rice University chemistry professor Dr. James Tuhr and University of Glasgow professor of Chemistry Dr. Lee Cronin. In November 2023, Dr. Stewart and Cronin participated in a roundtable at Harvard University on the origin of life with a live audience of Harvard faculty and guests. If you missed it, the debate is available on YouTube. But even if you haven't seen the debate yet, you're still likely to find this review helpful because it teases out a number of points from the debate with useful insight and a variety of perspectives.
The panel features three of our own, scientist and attorney Casey Luskin, physicist Brian Miller, and Center for Science and Culture Senior fellow Dr. Stephen Dilley. It also features Arizona State University professor of philosophy Owen Anderson. The discussion was recorded by the Kirkwood center and hosted by Kirkwood president Anthony Costello and Vice President Lenny Esposita. From time to time, you'll hear brief clips from the roundtable event as well, including the voices of Dr. Tuhr, Dr. Cronin, and physicist Dr. Randy Isaac. The second half of the discussion begins with some more insight into the limitations of natural selection. Is it an adequate causal process responsible for life's development or something else? Then the conversation returns to Cronin's materialism and discussion of the positive and negative aspects of methodological naturalism. Brian Miller explains why biology is in the early stages of a revolution in thinking about living things, and the panel weighs in on what effects Dr. Tour's challenges have had on the origin of life research community.
Enjoy the second hour of the panel discussion, you know, and let me just.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Now go to know. But Casey, this is exactly what the sense I had was, that he was pushing selection with a big s, far back, before biology, before chemistry, even into physics. And this is where I start know we had Melissa Kane Travis on not too long ago, and she was talking about Max Tegmark, I think, who's got sort of this heavy platonic view of almost like where it's the math that does the causation, let's say.
[00:02:47] Speaker D: Hawkins.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like hawking. So it did seem to me like he was using selection in a prebiotic, pre chemistry sense that selection is this physical force. I mean, I have a quote here, he says at around 111 55, which is in his opening talk, selection is the force that produces our stars.
And I'm like, I mean, this is like math, I guess, producing things and generating things. So I think he did do that. That was his move, was to make selection like to use brian words. I think Brian's word, a demigod, is a good term for it.
Steve, you had your hand up.
[00:03:31] Speaker E: Yeah. Just two quick footnotes about selection. One supportive of Casey's point.
Some origin of life researchers have termed prebiotic natural selection as a contradiction in terms. In a prebiotic context, there can't be the type of selection that is meant with the phrase, with the concept natural selection. So I think you're right.
Apparently Cronin is using it in a different way and kind of stepping back and thinking, well, how is the term selection being used? I think he runs into something of a dilemma, sort of a universal, nominal kind of problem. On the one hand, if selection as he's using it, if it's to be an identifiable and unified, a mind independent cause, if it actually makes a causal difference and it's an identifiable cause that's recognizable from instance to instance of selection, whether it's the formation of stars, as you're saying, Tony, or it's the reason why polar bears with longer fur survive, or eagles with very sharp vision, why they survive.
If it's an actual cause and if it's in a unified thing or unified process, then all of those different types of organisms or instances, there has to be some kind of unified cause selection that unites all of them. But it's very difficult to see what that could be when it comes to things like formation of elements necessary for stars. When it comes to thinking of, say, the formation of the eye of an eagle. If we just say something like, well, we mean adaption to environment, probably what we've given there is just a description in a sense, but even that wouldn't apply to the formation of stars, I don't think.
But at most we've given a kind of straightforward description, but not an actual identifiable and unified cause or causal process.
So if we don't have that, then selection seems to function kind of like latitude and longitude do. Just a helpful way, a helpful point of reference, a helpful fiction, a useful fiction for us to organize our own thoughts. But in that case, selection wouldn't actually be something in the world that actually is a cause that unifies all these many very disparate things that are supposed to be subject to selection.
There's a problem here in terms of what it is we're talking about. You need a unified account on the one hand, or you have a useful fiction on the other hand. There is no unified account particularly with everything from the cosmos to biology that Cronin's talking about. And if it's just a useful fiction, then that means it is explanatorily empty.
And, of course, that is unattractive from his point of view as well.
[00:06:43] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great point.
One thing I'd like to add is about funding. Come back to the funding issue.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I wanted to shift a little bit from that into some of the social and political aspects that came up, especially in the panel discussion.
[00:06:58] Speaker E: You need to break down these silos. And it starts at school, because chemistry and biology are producing radically new disciplines for inventing vaccines and producing composites and making materials that compute. So we really need to challenge that in a new way. And by breaking down these boundaries, we're going to develop new technologies.
[00:07:18] Speaker C: So go ahead.
[00:07:19] Speaker D: And I think this might be really important for the discovery institute also. It's one thing for a private school like Harvard, but at Arizona State University, we have an origins center that studies origins from these purely materialistic perspectives. And in fact, I think that's. I'm out of date here because it's been probably ten years, but our anthropology department got changed to something like origin of human development or something like that. We don't even have anthropology anymore, but it's funding philosophical materialism and all of the religiousness that you hear in this. It's really fascinating to me that humans just can't avoid being religious. Whether it's Richard Dawkins believing that the aliens did it, or personalizing natural selection, they just can't avoid those things. And so this old division of saying, well, we're a private school or a public school. We're not going to fund religion. That's for a seminary. We're just going to fund science. Well, if you mean by that, the development of technology, great. Or even scientific theories about how laws operate, great. But when you get into something about the origin of those laws, you're really getting into these problems that all three of you have mentioned, because using the laws to explain their own origins has a self referential contradiction in it. And it's different than just studying, say, gravity. But studying the origin of gravity really gets you into what we've all always called philosophy and religion. And so then for a state university, the question is, why would we use state funds to support that? And the answer is always that. Fallacy. Modern Bailey Fallacy. Technological development. And it just doesn't follow, because the sciences doing technological development can do it perfectly fine without materialistic philosophical origin theories.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Yeah, and that was something that Peter Craft was pressing in the panel at the end around the two hour, 28 minutes mark of the video. And we'll put these clips in there.
[00:09:17] Speaker D: But I think that is it utility.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Or is science in it for its own sake? So, Casey, there was this question that came up during the panel discussion, and one of the guys there was the Randy Isaac, I think was his name, and he explicitly asked about Jim Tour's association with Discovery Institute, with intelligent design advocates and discovery Institute by name, and how some of tour's work had been used there. So I don't know if we got you guys here, if you wanted to comment on that question by Isaac, your.
[00:09:56] Speaker E: Website that you do not agree with the intelligent design conclusion, yet your work.
[00:10:02] Speaker F: Is widely used by the Discovery Institute and many other creationist organizations as support for the view that the failure to have a naturalistic origin of life helps to support the idea of a creator. Could you comment on that?
[00:10:24] Speaker G: Yeah, well, I absolutely believe in a creator for sure. And I say that on my website.
And in six days, God created the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. I don't know what the length of the day is, if we can quantify it based on our perspective today.
So I certainly believe in creation, and I'm very explicit on why I don't support the intelligent design directly. I say I'm sympathetic to it. It's just that I don't have a tool to assess design. Show me the data. And so if I can't generate data that says, yes, this is the signature of an intelligent design, I am not going to support that in the sense that, yes, this has been intelligently designed because I don't have a metric for it. I say I'm sympathetic to it, but I don't have this metric. That's why I don't embrace intelligent design, although I'm sympathetic toward it. If people take my written material and publish it in their papers, I can't restrict them. It's published, so I can't, no, no, you can't publish.
That's up to them. So I've never given permission and I've never denied permission.
[00:11:33] Speaker E: Use it.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Sure, Tony, I'd love to say a couple things. First, let me say Randy Isaac is a longtime friend and sort of colleague in the science faith dialogue. He's been very involved with ASA, the american scientific affiliation, which is a christian organization that tries to bring people of different viewpoints to have conversations about origins, other issues of science and faith. And Randy is a Christian and I'm not in any way here to question his christian commitment. And in know I've had some good interactions with him in the past. What was a little bit disheartening, or actually very disheartening, actually, about that interaction with Jim Tor during the panel discussion is that Randy clearly wanted to make it look like we at Discovery Institute and those in the ID movement are disreputable. And if you affiliate yourself with us in any way, or align yourself with us in any way, then you are a Persona non grata. Now, what really struck me as ironic, and I don't think it's wrong for me to say this, because this was an invitation that Randy gave to me to a public event at ASA. He's actually invited Discovery Institute people to participate in ASA events in the past. But then when you're before an audience of academics at Harvard, you want to make it sound know, Discovery Institute is this disreputable organization that you should never affiliate with, or else you are the crazy one in the room. Okay? And in that moment, there was a lot of pressure being put on Jim tour to publicly disown any association with Discovery Institute before a live audience at Harvard. Okay? And so I think that that was sort of intentional on Randy's part to try to make Jim look bad by having some connections to discovery. Now, Jim has made it very clear that he is not supportive of intelligent design. I think Brian has made the point. Know Jim is not necessarily hostile to us. He just is doing something different. He's out there trying to pose reasonable questions within his own area of expertise as a synthetic chemist to the origin of life field and challenging them to actually come up with reasonable scientific explanations. He's not doing intelligent. Fine. But, you know, Jim does have various connections to us. I'm not saying that he supports ID, but Jim has spoken at our Dallas conference at science and faith. He contributed a wonderful chapter to an anniversary edition for the rerelease of the book, the Mystery of Life's Origins. Brian has been on his podcast. We've interviewed him for our podcast. He's interfaced with Steve Meyer quite a bit. I interviewed Jim for our podcast a couple years ago, and we contributed to a volume with Jim, science and faith and dialogue from South Africa a couple years ago. So, I mean, certainly we have lots of friendly associations with Jim behind the scenes, and we're very happy to do that. And I think he's very happy with that, and that's fine. Jim doesn't agree with everything we do, and he doesn't have to. Jim's his own man. We're not trying to claim that Jim agrees with everything we do. But I think what is interesting here is the rhetorical dynamic that was created in that moment by Dr. Isaac, who is a physicist. And I think he'd probably describe himself as a theistic evolutionist to try to portray and posture ID as if it is this disreputable discovery institute is this disreputable thing. If you have any connections to it, then you two are disreputable. And it shows the pressures that people face to disassociate themselves from intelligence on. In fact, in the great interview that Jim did with Hector Zanile later on, Jim actually talked about these pressures. And he said, this is what he said. He said there is an establishment. It makes it very difficult on people who make these kinds of claims. He's talking about those who question the mainstream origin of life. And Jim, he said that he has had people reach out to him privately sympathizing with what he's doing. But then he asked them to go on his channel. He says, quote, they don't want to go near my channel. So there is a lot of pressure. And we saw that pressure on display in the kind know, don't you dare associate with Discovery Institute. Don't you know, when did you stop beating your wife? Kind of question that Randy Isaac posed to Jim Tor. But again, what's interesting is that behind the scenes we have seen Randy Isaac actually asking Discovery Institute people to participate in ASA events. But when you're on stage before Harvard, all that goes out the window and you have to act as if discovery ensues. A bunch of crazy nutcases.
[00:15:45] Speaker C: Well, boy, I did want to bring this up.
There was sort of a very political sort of social kind of in the atmosphere there in the air. And look, I would, I don't know who Randy Isaac is from the man in the moon. I'm just watching the debate because I know what Jim Tour has been doing and I'm curious.
I thought Randy Isaac was a died in the know atheistic materialist alongside with Cronin, and that this was sort of the typical kind of attack that we've seen done before on discovery Institute by your scientists who are beholden to methodological and even metaphysical naturalism, like a Lawrence Krauss type thing. So I would not have pegged him just from what was captured on as, as a Christian or theist even point that out.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very interesting that you had that perception, Tony, because he definitely is a Christian. He definitely does not support ID. He's critical of ID. Brian has had dialogues with him where Randy has criticized ID. So have I. I was at an ASA event where he was critical of ID, and I defended ID. I was there at.
But he probably would say he's a theistic evolutionist. But you can see that even folks from the christian perspective sometimes want to try to enforce this sort of suppression of the intelligence line viewpoint through certain social pressures.
[00:17:17] Speaker C: Well, that is something that I do, and, I mean, this is frustrated. I grew up with academics. My father was the department chair of engineering at Notre Dame. Electrical engineering. And those technical fields, maybe not so much, but when you get into these issues, these fields that do touch on philosophy and have religious implications, it really frustrates me. This. In private, I do this, but then when I'm in public, I do something different.
I know that sometimes I don't know that caving into that kind of pressure, it bothers me. It bothers me at a deep level. But thank you for clarifying that, at least, because, again, people can watch the clip. It explicitly mentions Tor's association with Discovery Institute. So thanks.
[00:18:12] Speaker F: You think we will figure it out? Yes, but it was a very brief statement. So just to be close, you do believe, like, in the end, there's a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of life?
[00:18:21] Speaker G: Yeah, I think that we're going to see, just like I'm using the analogy of the genetic code where we're going to go, oh, Lord, that's how you did it.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: And at the dinner table conversation, at the panel discussion, when the word God comes up, people, they, they brace. Right.
You know, with Jim tour, the thing is, sometimes you can get away with mentioning God generically, just the term God, because people can fill in God with all kinds of content. They can fill it in subjectively, whatever they. You know, Tor gets up there and he talks about, I mean, he's. He's laying it out there. He's talking about my lord and savior, Jesus. So, I mean, he's very explicit. He's very courageous in that sense. I find it very.
[00:19:10] Speaker E: That it does affect the way that.
[00:19:12] Speaker F: We think about, because I think we.
[00:19:15] Speaker D: All know at this point the myth of the scientist who's just an objective person studying science, neutral viewpoint. So we're all past that. That's one important thing that we've come to understand through really postmodern critiques.
The human element.
[00:19:32] Speaker H: I would say it goes before that. I think Thomas Kuhn and his structure of scientific revolution show that bias is a leading indicator in all of this.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:19:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:41] Speaker D: Well, that'd be part of the postmodern critique, but the spiritual side of it is so important. Casey just got that, which is your relationship to God comes into it. You have one one way or the other.
Nature does reveal God. And so if you have this negative relationship with God, you're going to want to cover that up and not pay attention to it. And that's a factor, even with scientists.
[00:20:04] Speaker F: One thing I wanted to mention about tour, too, he's really demonstrating a bit of humility, because he says, I'm not an intelligent design advocate. I'm sympathetic, but this is not my thing. And I think that's really helpful, because it's an issue of expertise in many ways. Because when you're looking at design in biology or nature in general, you're not using the same toolkit or the same methods as you would look at, let's say, a chemical reaction. And that's important. And Jim Tor has never criticized us. He's never said we're pseudoscientists. He's never opposed us. He just says, that's not my thing. I'm working in this framework. I'm playing by the rules of the secular academy, and that's my thing. And you go do your thing, and I trust you, what you're doing on that. And I think it's interesting you see the same thing in biology at large, because when you look at the design conversation, who controls it? It's people who don't have the expertise to really address it. They're not engineers. They've been trained to see the world through this materialist grid. So they assume on faith that there's no evidence to design, and then they find various reasons to justify that belief. In contrast, what you're seeing in biology is really a revolution that's at its earliest stages, because engineers are working more and more with biologists. And what you're seeing is when they do that, they use design language, they use design assumptions. It's really quite remarkable. In fact, one paper I just wanted to mention is called a survey of engineering models for systems biology, and it's by Gregory Reeves and Curtis Herschach. And my understanding is, one is a systems biologist and the other is an engineer, and what they talk about is how the cell looks like an embedded computing system. You don't just simply see the same mechanisms, like information processing, error correction, but you see even the same overarching design logic. So what happens is, when engineers work with biologists, what they see is it's not a God of the gaps. But it's the evidence pointing to not just design, but the same design logic humans use, but at a much higher level. So I think we're seeing the pendulum in a very slight way, starting to switch away from this materialist epicurean assumption back towards the design perspective.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: No, I would agree. And I haven't read this book, but I know Rob Coons wrote several years ago now. He wrote the book the waning of materialism. Yeah, I think it was an edited volume. Correct.
And this is where I think we've talked to.
Where is that evidence going to lead people? A lot of times it's going to land people into something more like an imminent sort of view of causation and.
[00:22:49] Speaker D: Even basically what we call in my field process theology.
[00:22:53] Speaker C: Process theology.
[00:22:54] Speaker E: Process materialism.
[00:22:55] Speaker C: Right. Right. Yeah.
[00:22:56] Speaker D: Harry, I have to run, I'm afraid.
[00:22:58] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:22:58] Speaker D: Owen, it's been great to meet you all. I hope we can join again.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:02] Speaker E: Good to see you.
[00:23:03] Speaker D: Thank you all for your insights. They're marvelous. Hopefully I'll see you soon.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: We will. Thanks, Owen.
Steve.
[00:23:10] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:23:11] Speaker F: I just.
[00:23:11] Speaker E: When you asked earlier, Tony, about question, you know, and pressing tour, as Casey was pointing out, and a couple of thoughts. First is, in one way, I love the question. I love that at an exclusive origin of life debate at Harvard, that clearly.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: Harvard has also been in the news recently, by the way, many other things.
[00:23:36] Speaker E: But that ID is in the back of the room.
I think that's significant.
There is no need to throw any castaneous versions on astrologers or flat earthers.
They don't pose a threat.
So I think it's flattering, frankly, that the question came up. And I do also think there's a delicious irony here.
I saw from Cronin and others clear worries about God of the gaps, a strong commitment to methodological naturalism.
And yet, at the same time, if I think we take his methodologically naturalistic orientation seriously, he ends up doing the very thing he's worried about. He's worried about ID and creationism because he thinks they're fundamentally anti science and they'll bring science to a close to an end. You'll insert God as a cover for ignorance. It'll later be discovered that there's a natural cause and so on. But the irony is under MN, and I think under his project is natural explanationly ones you ever consider as a category of what counts as a valid explanation. So no matter what the data are now, no matter what the data are in the future, as a category, naturalistic explanations will always be the leading choice you have. And of course, I think that's interesting, because one of the elements that came up was falsifiability, and a lack of falsifiability. Natural theories as a category are, on that view, unfalsifiable.
I remember one time when I was attending a conference as a graduate student.
A gentleman gave a paper in which he was critiquing ID because he said it was unfalsifiable, and he thought we should only have naturalistic explanations in science. And I was a graduate student with the EQ that young graduate students like myself had. So I asked in Q A, well then, are natural theories as a category, are those falsifiable?
And that really caught his attention, because the answer was clearly no.
But think about so in the practical way this played out in this debate. Remember when Creef asked the question, well, suppose we in a few hundred years, we send out space probes and we realize that there's only life on know. This was in response to some of the table talk that life may be inevitable, its development may be inevitable.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: Right?
[00:26:18] Speaker E: Suppose there's only life, one place in the universe that we know about earth. And the response to Creek's question was fascinating. Cronin immediately said that we can't rule out that there's life somewhere else or that there's very different kinds of life.
[00:26:33] Speaker H: Right?
[00:26:33] Speaker E: So in other words, on his view, to falsify his naturalistic orientation or assembly theory or whatever, requires critics to prove a universal negative, that there's literally no other life of any kind anywhere in the universe.
[00:26:49] Speaker C: Right. You'd have to search every location in.
[00:26:51] Speaker E: The universe that effectively makes it completely unfalsifiable, which means you get to ignore the evidence we have in the present.
[00:27:00] Speaker C: For the alternatives, right?
[00:27:01] Speaker E: Yes. And in effect, you become the very anti science disposition that you're worried about by virtue of what, regardless of the evidence, current, past, present or future, you limit yourself to an overly narrow range of explanatory options. And keep in mind, this is all in the context when Cronin's own explanation of his view required invoking agentive.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: That's. Look, that's one of the reasons I support the Discovery Institute, because I think methodological naturalism, or the beholdenness to it as a dogma, it hinders the scientific project, it hinders the intellectual project more broadly, the curiosity that we have about the nature of things.
Let's stay on that briefly, though. But then is there a place to keep some modified form of methodological naturalism?
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah, in the sense that methodological naturalism wants you to have science that is reliable and predictable and testable. I think that those are good aspects of methodological naturalism. I think, though, that when methodological naturalism says that the only explanations that can be reliable or predictable or testable are those which invoke purely naturalistic, mechanistic causes, I think that's where it sort of adds a superfluous condition that is not necessary. You can have reliability, predictability, and testability through non naturalistic or non materialistic causes like intelligence. And so in that respect, I think that methodological naturalism has highlighted some aspects of science we want to have. But ultimately, it adds a condition that is sort of superfluous and unnecessary to it in order to have those. Reliability, predictability that we want to have in science.
[00:29:09] Speaker H: Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a whole field of science that works on the idea of intelligent agents and biology, and that's forensic science. That's exactly what they do. They distinguish between natural causes and intended causes or agent based causes for things like death or any other thing, I think it's a little dishonest to say that you can't posit intelligent agents or that's not real science, because just in that know, we do have good ways of determining the difference between those two kinds of ideas.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:50] Speaker F: I think an analogy I'd like to use, I use this with James Tour and his podcast. That's really helpful to clarify this. And I'll preface it by saying a fundamental misunderstanding of biology is they see it as a science no different from chemistry or astronomy or geology. But really, biology is reverse engineering a technology far more advanced than ourself. That's what it is. So when people talk about a lot of the language people use, a lot of the conversation is a category error. And to use an analogy, why that's important. Imagine that people find a crash spaceship near area 51 in the United States, and two groups of scientists and researchers want to study it. And one says, I'm going to assume this only happened through natural processes, that the spaceship is simply a product of physical laws and chemistry. And they go about looking at, let's say, how it could have happened. Maybe volcanoes could have produced molten metals which fell into the cracks of rocks and turned into spaceship parts, and then tornadoes brought these spaceship parts together to form a spaceship. Now, obviously, that research program would go nowhere, and that's where the origin of life is, versus people that are engineers saying, well, maybe the spaceship isn't a product of natural processes, but it's designed. And now suddenly you bring in engineers, you try to reverse engineer it, you look at logical similarities with our design, and you would make enormous progress. And that's exactly what you see in life, is that there's no question that life did not happen naturally. If you're just looking at the evidence, if you read Stephen Benner's paper I mentioned, he believes it had to be natural, but he acknowledges that all the evidence suggests it couldn't have happened naturally.
This idea of self replicating molecules is completely implausible because Casey talked about the challenge of having the information in one molecule. But when you look at origin of life research with RNAs that quote unquote self replicate, you've got to have literally trillions of copies of those copying molecules in a liter of water, or else the breakdown of the molecules would be faster than their ability to replicate themselves. And there is no way you can imagine that a trillion polymerases occurred in the same liter of water on the earlier. That is completely implausible. And other origin of life researchers have pointed this out. The other issue is self organization, because I talked about how that's the other demigod. And everyone who talks about origin of life and self organization references Jeremy England. He was the most popular figure. He had a lot of news press. He's a physicist from MIT who then moved, I believe, to Georgia Tech. I had a very nice exchange with Jeremy England, and he acknowledged that no evidence supports the view that the sort of research he does could help any specific stage of the origin of life, because self, and I apologize for getting a little in the details, but this is important. Self organizational processes happen when you've got an energy source that's properly matched to a system. The heat of the sun causes air to expand, which changes its velocity, which creates a funnel cloud. It's matched. But there's no energy source on the early earth that's properly matched to useful biochemical reactions. So the energy on the early earth cannot self organize a cell because all it will do is break apart a half formed cell into simple molecules. So the science is not complex, it's not ambiguous, but because people refuse to consider design, they have to keep going through the same research over and over again. That doesn't really lead any place. In contrast, when you look at the cell from an engineering perspective, you see indisputable evidence of design, not just in the generic sense of molecules with information specified complexity, but in the specific sense that you look at a cell and it has the same design logic we use to a large extent the same hierarchy of systems and subsystems with tight constraints, but it just does it better and more sophisticated than what we do. So I would argue there really is no debate. If you're willing to step outside of the realm of scientific materialism and just look, put on the design glasses, even for a moment, that's where we are.
[00:34:10] Speaker C: Right. Excellent. That's great.
So I want to then move to sort of kind of wrapping up some thoughts and pulling together some threads on what happened there in November 20 eigth at Harvard.
So I think it's safe to say that the things that Cronin talked about in his talk and then, of course, at the dinner table and also the panel discussion, it's safe to say he didn't really address tour's challenges. Right. Those were not addressed. Those challenges that Jim Tour has issued still remain unaddressed. Right.
There was a lot of talk about rhetoric and Jim Tour's personality and being too aggressive and sort of can't we all sort of get along and make progress together as scientists?
One of the things then that I want to ask you guys here as we wrap up is we've talked about the philosophical presuppositions that maybe are driving this, but is Tor really pointing out some kind of systemic problems in this area of research?
What can one do about that?
[00:35:42] Speaker G: Has the public been misled on the origin of life claims? Well, one third of the public, and this is 80% of this public, had a college education, some level of college education, college degree. One third of the general public thinks that scientists have made frogs in their lab just by putting molecules together and built frogs. Two thirds of the general public think that scientists have made bacteria in their lab a bacterium. Both of those are false, in case you didn't know.
Well, because there's mixed messaging from origin of life researchers. Professor Cronin, at a TED talk in 2011 said, what I'm going to try to do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive. After the talk, Chris Anderson said, just a quick question on timeline. When you believe you're going to be successful in this, when Lee Cronin, hopefully within the next two years. That was in 2011. So we're about ten years overdue, and maybe Lee is going to tell us about this life today. Is it any wonder that the public has been misled on the current state of origin of life proposals who, perchance, might have misled them?
[00:36:57] Speaker C: I guess what I'm getting at is I don't want to use the word corruption. Corruption is maybe too strong, maybe not. I don't know if it's just a philosophical lens that needs to be shifted, but how does tours challenge the origin of life community? What do you guys think it'll do in the near future, if that makes sense?
[00:37:20] Speaker E: Yeah, I do have some sympathy, a little bit, for Cronin's view, at least as I understand it, or I should say, some sympathy for an element of his view.
I think he believes that we'll solve the origin of life eventually by a reference to purely natural processes. And it seems like Jim thinks that may happen as well.
So I think in Cronin's view, there's a little bit of.
Maybe a sense of Jim, would you stop annoying us? We both think that this will be solved in due course. We think there will be natural explanations that are sufficient.
Suppose I started a research program in science. I won't. And five years into it, Casey shows up at my doorstep and tells me all the things that know all the explanatory deficits.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: I would never do that to you, Steve.
[00:38:27] Speaker E: You would never do that to me. But he thinks fundamentally, we both agree fundamentally, that the types of explanations that I'm seeking will be found.
I think from Cronin's perspective, it's like, yes, I think you're right, Tony, that he hasn't met the challenges that Jim has laid out. And I also think at some level, he thinks it's premature or inappropriate to keep hammering on these challenges, from his view, when this is a nascent discipline, when we have lots of decades and even centuries to go on it, in which science itself, in his view, is actually a fairly new enterprise. So I have some sympathy with his, I think, feeling annoyed.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:39:23] Speaker H: Yeah.
[00:39:24] Speaker E: Well, George, let me just finish the point.
But I think you're quite right that what animates it in his case, is this materialist commitment, and one is entitled to a materialist commitment. But I do think that those of us who are listeners, we should get to hear at some point what that materialist commitment is built on. It's not built on origin of life data. That's clear enough, because there's the concession that these problems are unexplained. So what is it built on? And is that materialist commitment and the grounds for it? Is that commitment and its justification strong enough to continue to adopt a materialistic point of view about science generally, about the origin of life in the face of the data we see of specified complexity, of incredible engineering feats? As Brian whatever your materialist commitment is, it better have really excellent justification in the face of the current scientific data we have. And that's what's not clear, and that's what was not even addressed fully. Creef was nicely getting after. Yeah, but there's more to dig there.
[00:40:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:40:40] Speaker F: Brian, there's a really nice book out. It's called the trouble with physics by Lee Smoland, and he's a physicist, and he's talking about how this whole conversation about tour and Cronin is not unique to origin of life. A concern that this physicist pointed out was that there tends to be political insiders in science, and they're able to direct funds in a certain direction where other people that might have more valid approaches will be left out. Let me use the example of string theory versus quantum loop gravity. One of the biggest challenges in physics is how do you combine general relativity, which talks about the very large, large, massive gravitational fields, and the very small, which is quantum mechanics? It's a hard problem, it's unsolved problem, and a large proportion of the funding has gone to string theory, which is basically taking particle physics and then trying to add gravity as an afterthought. And what happens is people in other fields, like quantum loop gravity, that start from another premise, are pointing out that this is not very productive. It's not doing much, it's not making predictions. So we think our framework deserves a little more funding. That's the logic. So what ToR is pointing out is the approach, the fundamental approach of what origin of life researchers are doing. We take incredibly complex, sophisticated chemical protocols to produce a molecule that be produced for life. He's saying that fundamental approach is not helpful. He says, if you want to do real research on the origin of life, you need to address this problem of information. You need to address this issue of assembly. So he's saying real research needs to focus on these fields and stop exaggerating your results. And he has had an impact. There are now research papers coming out saying we really need to not make these extravagant claims. We really need to recognize that if we're dealing with origin of life, the conditions need to be more realistic. So he is already making a positive impact. And I want to answer the question that the physicist name I forget asked at the dinner table. How would you use the money?
I'll tell you exactly how I'd use the money. I would pour research into engineers working with biologists, because that research produces real results. You gain real insights about how life operates. You gain real technology. Like Stuart Burgess is copying the engineering design of life and applying it to things like prosthetic limbs. I would say that's the future of biology. That's going to be productive.
[00:43:18] Speaker C: No, that's good. Thanks for putting endpoint on that, because that question did come up a couple of times, and especially at the end, if you did have the money, what would you put it into? Where is going to be the productive project here in this origin of life? Casey, let's finish up with you.
Origin life issues. I mean, one question I always try and ask because this is a podcast on theology and ethics and we're trying to connect some of these higher level discussions going on in the culture, especially in the academy, with the church. Origin of life. How does this relate mean? Tour even spoke about, hey, I have these Christians coming up to me and they're wondering if these people are just in the tank, they're just corrupt. They just don't want God in the picture and he's saying, no, I don't think scientists are waking up in the morning and trying to like how can I exclude God from my scientific endeavors today, but speak to the relevance of this issue as it applies to the church living in the culture that we are right now?
That's a big question, but how is this relevant? How is this pertinent to the life of the church right now? Oh my.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: I don't know if I have a lot to say on that. I was going to give you a summary of a series of blog posts that I've written about table but this probably isn't what you're looking for here. Tony, I apologize for mean, my background is in the sciences. When I talk about suppressing the truth, I think that it is actually the same dynamic that we see. Owen mentioned the famous historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, and he talked about how scientists tend to be intolerant of new ideas. I think Lenny, you also mentioned that scientists tend to be intolerant of new ideas that challenge reigning paradigms. And I think that we see that at work in the origin of life paradigm. Although, yeah, it is a boutique field, it is a small field. Criminal might argue we've got a long ways to go, that's fine, but this is a field that's been around for, it's been multiple decades, probably close to 100 years since Oparin first put forth this hypothesis that life arose in a little pond somewhere. And that was also Darwin's view. People have been working on these questions for a long time and Jim Tour would say that we are really no closer to answering how basic biomolecules than we were. Well, we were a little bit closer, but we really still cannot explain how fundamental biomolecules arose. So I want to read just this summary about this roundtable that I'm going to be posting on a series of blogs on evolution news very soon. Is that okay, Tony? And I think this is, again, I.
[00:46:05] Speaker C: Didn'T want to put you on the spot there, but I didn't mention this at the outset, but the organization that put this debate on, I believe, was called like the Cambridge Roundtable for science and religion. I think in the wasn't, the debate wasn't just about science, and Randy Isaacs brought that up. It was also about religion.
[00:46:31] Speaker H: And I have a secondary story that I can kind of more answer your question once.
[00:46:37] Speaker C: Let Casey talk about the blogs that you're going to put up, and then we'll let Lenny tell that story. All right.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: No, I'll keep this brief. I'm really interested in science communication and how we can understand in these complex debates that are going on before the public, how can a non expert sort through what the different experts on different sides are saying and find out who has a better argument? It can be a real challenge. And a few years ago, somebody sent me an email called, titled War of Words, and they wanted to ask this question, how can I tell which expert is right when I see different experts with very strong opinions but yet diametrically opposed views? It's very difficult to sort through the science. And I said, look, I sympathize with that. Even though I have a PhD in science and I've studied a lot of these topics, it can be very difficult to do that. And so sometimes you can look at the rhetorical dynamics of a conversation and see who has a better argument. So this is how I would title my post another war of words. Reflections on the tour Cronin roundtable at Harvard in November 2023, rice chemistry professor James Tour and University of Glasgow chemistry professor Lee Cronin had a roundtable on the origin of life at Harvard hosted by the Cambridge Faculty on Science and Religions. There were far fewer fireworks than tour's previous debate against YouTuber Dave Farina, held at Rice University in May of 2023, but the rhetorical dynamics were strikingly similar. Tour spent most of the evening talking about the science focusing on chemical obstacle to producing polypeptides, polynucleotides, polysaccharides, spicefied information, or how to assemble these components into a, quote, integrated functional living systems under natural earth like conditions. While Cronin was far more civil and congenial than Dave Farina. Cronin nonetheless resembled Farina, and he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about Jim Tour and Jim Tour's alleged faults. This included making some strange accusations over and over again that tour was shouting or torn, was being overcritical, or saying that Tor was claiming, quote, everyone's an idiot, or that Tor called, quote, Cronin, quote, a bad chemist. Simply put, none of this happened. Tur didn't shout. He didn't call anyone an idiot. He never called Cronin a bad chemist or attacked. Cronin's scientific competency and Tor's scientific questions and challenges were entirely reasonable. Cronin's rhetorical strategy seemed designed to distract people from the fact that he had zero, and if we go by Cronin's statements during the event, I mean absolutely zero, answers to Torres'questions about how key biomolecules arose on the early earth. Instead, Cronin sought to use his charismatic personality to convince people that we're making progress on the ocean of life, such as they might have faith to believe that someday it will be solved. Perhaps it will be, perhaps it won't be. But Cronin gave us no indication what that solution might look like. Cronin did discuss assembly theory, but spoken vague metaphors and never tackled the chemistry of how life might have arisen on the early earth. So Cronin's performance during the roundtable showed that he had zero answers to Jim Tour's questions about how life might have formed naturally. And this helps you know, who had the better argument in this quote, unquote war of words. And that's all I have to say about that.
[00:49:39] Speaker C: All right, there you go. There's the summation. We didn't even need to do the 2 hours of podcasting here. We could have just had you read that, but that's great. Okay. And that was clear. I mean, Jim Jor's challenge, again, it still remains a challenge to the whole community.
[00:49:58] Speaker F: Could I share the relevance of why this matters? And I'll speak very personally, because I.
[00:50:03] Speaker E: Have a shock on that, too, after Brian and.
[00:50:07] Speaker C: Good, good. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:50:09] Speaker F: It's dangerously naive to believe this question of design is not relevant to the average person. It's just more of a philosophical question.
I went to MIT undergraduate as someone who was a Christian, but I became fairly convinced through the science that I wasn't deliberately created by God, but I was an unintended accident. I read Richard Dawkins'book the Blind Watchmaker I was exposed to these other ideas. I said, okay, well, if I'm an unintended accident, then most likely God doesn't exist and I have no purpose in life. And that threw me into great Depression. I was paralyzed. And I said, God, I don't know if you exist, but if you do exist, well, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to prove it to me. I'm a scientist. That's just the way it is. And just through God's divine intervention, I just met the right people at the right time. I met the Philip Johnson. I met people like Craig Keener, who helped me with other issues. I met people like Michael Behe. And what happened is I realized that the science didn't suggest I was an accident, but that I was actually designed. And that created the philosophical space for me to consider the truth of the faith again. And I came back to faith, and I have countless examples of that. But at a practical level, design will help propel science. The denial of design will retract science. Let me talk about a very practical example. Agriculture. We are destroying the soil because people assumed that plants were not designed, they were just in competition with other organisms. And as a result, what we really need to do is just kill weeds, add fertilizers, and life is good. But that's destroyed the soil, because the soil ecosystem is incredibly complex. And you have soils that send out signals to bacteria to come and help alter the ecosystem. You've got filaments, networks of fungi that act as communication channels where trees can warn each other about predators. So because we did not assume design and that we were smarter than nature, we're destroying our agricultural system. But it's a design perspective that can help save agriculture by applying engineering principles and logic to help deal with plants the way that God intended. If you look at everything from medicine, people assumed the human body wasn't designed, so it must have lots of bad designs. The knee is poorly designed. We've got this appendix. It doesn't work. So what do people do? They cut out the appendix. Well, guess what? It's part of the immune system. So what you find is this denial of design has hindered our medical system from doing the most effective treatments by cooperating with the way that our bodies are designed. And I could include countless examples of why. The knowledge of design can help us spiritually, give us confidence in our faith, but also help society by advancing biology more effectively and helping to create better technology by borrowing the designs from life and using them ourselves.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: Excellent points, Brian. Excellent. Yeah, I mean, if there's one thing I think we really need to awaken to, especially in the west, is that things are designed to include our bodies.
[00:53:25] Speaker H: So my thought is, first of all, we have to realize that the church has, for many decades, and somewhat not unwarranted, been criticized for not understanding where modern science has made advancements, uncovered certain things. There's kind of a fundamentalist supposedly reaction of, you guys go and do your thing. I'm just going to ignore it. I'm not even going to learn what these new advancements are, stick my head in the sand kind of thing. And that's been a criticism that's been laid at the feet of pastors and others since the fundamentalist movement and possibly even before. However, at the same time, as Brian has mentioned in others, there's almost a similar movement in reverse in the scientific community. Now, I recently had an interview with Dr. Syigart, who tells his story. Here's a man who comes from a communist atheist family. He describes himself as a militant atheist. He went to school, studied the science, and he understood that the science was the thing that had answers. That was his presupposition as he got into the weeds of know. He's a PhD biochemist, worked at the National Institutes for Health. So he's credentialed well. And as he studied it, he started to find out, no, you know what? There's just as many mysteries in the science, there's just as many questions in the science as there has been for some of these other factors. And it opened up his mind, first of all, to the idea that science doesn't have all the answers, that it doesn't sum everything up into nice, neat little boxes. And that allowed him to start an investigation, which, along with some other aspects of his life, led him to basically a belief in God. Very late in life, maybe, I think 49 was he first starts believing, doesn't get baptized till he's 65 years old, which is just amazing. But my point is to the pastor, who may have stuck with us this far and said, all of this is just intellectual ping pong. What does it matter? Well, it matters to individuals who are lost. It matters to these people who need to know that science isn't that much of a threat when you explore its deep recesses. If everybody understood the vagarities in the science and the things that we don't know, it does leave room for issues of faith. And I think we, to our detriment, ignore that on the church side.
[00:56:09] Speaker C: Well, that's a great story. And I tell you. That's why the exaggerations that tua was calling out were so frustrating to hear about. Right, Steve, I'm going to give you the last word and then we'll wrap it up.
[00:56:24] Speaker E: Okay? Thanks, Tony. And thanks for pulling all this together. It's been a fascinating conversation. I feel like we could keep going.
Your viewers might be fatigued, but.
Fantastic. So thank you. Thank you for pulling all this together.
[00:56:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:56:42] Speaker E: Just a couple of comments. Thinking about the Cronin tour debate as a whole. And I say these final comments as not a representative of Discovery Institute per se, but more on a kind of personal level. The first is, your question was, how does this matter to the church? And I'm a Christian, enthusiastically. So. I'd say a few things. The first is, it's important for Christians to see that, as Del Ratch nicely puts it, science has a serious, incurable case of the humans.
It's like any enterprise. That doesn't mean we should be suspicious of it, it just means we should understand it. And we should understand whether conclusions that are promoted by a scientist are really driven by the data or driven by deeper philosophical commitments. Those may be actually good commitments or they may not, but we want to tease apart what the data say and what the underlying commitments are and then ask questions.
What are the grounds for those deeper commitments, and are they justified?
I'd say a second lesson is for those who have deep religious convictions, say deep christian convictions, to not be overly deferential to mainstream scientific proclamations about what is so and so.
One ought to be attentive, one ought to take those claims seriously, but to really look at the evidence on one's own in a significant way, because sometimes the stated conclusions really are way over the skis of the data themselves. And there is a tendency, I think, even by some professional theologians and biblical scholars, to be overly deferent towards, say, darwinian biologists or others. And you rarely see it in the opposite direction.
[00:58:45] Speaker C: Right.
[00:58:46] Speaker E: And I think we should just be careful.
And whatever beliefs one has, one ought to check one's warrant, whatever beliefs that are offered to one, to check the warrant, the justification seriously.
The third element is what's exciting, I think, about a design approach is there's really a new narrative of the history and the trajectory of science. As Brian's emphasized, science is so beautifully intelligible from a design perspective, and that's the way modern science has arisen. If you look back at the pioneers, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Copernicus, they had a deep, deep understanding of a mind first view of the natural world. So the narrative of science has always been mind first. It's always been deeply oriented to design. And the trajectory in the case for design has just gotten stronger over time. If you have that view, then you won't flinch when you hear things that cronin and others say that turns out are not well justified by the evidence. You'll see those as anomalies, which they are, and you'll be able to think, have a fair minded assessment of, and that, I think will open ones up to taking the data seriously on its own terms and not being caught up in something simply because it's mainstream.
[01:00:21] Speaker C: Great point, Steve. Thanks again. Well, look, this has been an excellent conversation, gentlemen. I will encourage everybody to go watch the debate for themselves and review everything that we've talked about here. It was such an interesting conversation, touching on science, philosophy, sociology, politics. So it just seemed to me one of those events that we really had to dive into. And I think we've done a great job here. And I appreciate you guys all being here today to do this with us. So thanks again for your participation. And if there's another debate at Harvard down the line, I look forward to getting you all together again. So thanks so much for joining us.
[01:01:07] Speaker E: Yeah, thanks, Tony.
[01:01:08] Speaker C: God bless.
[01:01:09] Speaker A: It was a pleasure. Wednesday morning quarterbacking is always fun. Tony, thanks for having us.
[01:01:15] Speaker G: To close on a congenial note, I agree with Professor Cronin. I agree with Professor Cronin. Origin of Life research is a scam.
[01:01:26] Speaker F: Thank you.
[01:01:30] Speaker B: That was the second half of a panel discussion on the recent debate between Dr. James Turer and Dr. Lee Cronin held at Harvard University, featuring Casey Luskin, Brian Miller, Stephen Dilly, and Arizona State University professor Owen Anderson. If you haven't heard part one of this discussion, you'll find it in a previous episode. Again, I'd like to thank the Kirkwood center for permission to share the discussion on IDH the future. You can learn more about their
[email protected]. For idthuture. I'm andrew Mcdermott. Thanks for listening.
[01:02:06] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
