Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello again. This is Tom Gilson bringing you the concluding half of a powerful lecture given at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. Political scientist John west is the speaker and and the subject of his talk, Darwin's Corrosive Idea. We join him near the 19 minute mark of his talk.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: Ideas do have consequences.
A second impact of Darwin's theory that has had on our view of human beings has been in the area of morality. In his book the Descent of Man, Darwin depicted morality not as something permanent or transcendent, but but simply as those behaviors and beliefs favored by natural selection because they promoted physical survival under a given set of circumstances. In the Darwinian view of ethics, morality radically changes over time based on changing conditions for physical survival. So if parental love promotes survival, then that becomes moral. But if selective infanticide promotes survival better in your situation, then that becomes moral. Darwin's reductionistic account of the development of morality leaves very little room for objectively preferring one society's morality over another because according to the Darwinian framework, every behavior that occurs regularly in at least some subpopulation is normal. Almost by definition, moral and immoral behaviors develop for the same reason to promote biological survival.
For the most part, Darwin himself didn't press this relativistic analysis of morality to its logical conclusion, but he certainly laid the groundwork for others who came after.
And again, it's had an impact on our culture. In the United States, some 55% of adults now believe that, quote, evolution shows that moral beliefs evolve over time based on their survival value in various times and places.
Perhaps nowhere has the Darwinian view of ethics had more severe impact than in family life and human sexuality.
It's not an accident that the thinker most responsible for the breakdown of traditional sexual ethics in our culture was a Harvard trained evolutionary zoologist. His name was Alfred Kinsey. Adopting a thoroughly Darwinian approach to sexual morality, Kinsey argued that any sexual practice that could be found somewhere among mammals could be regarded in his view, quote, as normal mammalian behavior, unquote, and then be regarded as all right.
Today, many evolutionary psychologists have gone beyond mere sexual relativism and are actually affirmatively arguing against monogamy. They claim that we were bred by Darwinian evolution to have multiple sex partners, which means that we are programmed for promiscuity and and infidelity. In their view, the very idea of faithful monogamous marriage contradicts our biology and therefore needs to be abandoned. One of the most prominent evolutionary psychologists to advocate this View is named Christopher Ryan. He is co author of a 2012 New York Times bestseller, Sex at Dawn. In the words of Ryan, marriage in the west isn't doing very well because it's indirectly confrontation with the evolved reality of our species.
Ryan says he wants to save marriage by making it consistent with Darwinian biology. For him, that means redefining marriage to include partners, multiple partners at the same time.
That's how he's going to save marriage.
Ideas really do have consequences.
A final impact of Darwin's theory has been the erosion of the idea that humans have have a spiritual purpose in the Judeo Christian tradition. In the biblical tradition, humans have eternal souls and their lives serve a higher purpose because they were intentionally created by a loving God. But if Darwinism really proves that life is the product of a blind, unguided process, then God is either impotent or likely, more likely does not exist.
And if God does not exist, there is no higher spiritual purpose to human life. Indeed, there is no likelihood that human beings have eternal souls. It should come as no surprise then that according to a survey by researchers at Cornell University of leading scientists in the field of evolution, 87% deny the existence of God and 88% disbelieve in life after death.
The claim that science somehow disproves the existence of God or the reality of the spiritual aspect of human life can have tremendous consequences. In 2013, National Public Radio ran a story on why young people are abandoning faith in God.
Among others, they interviewed 1:20 something who said, I don't believe in God, but I really want to. But looking right at the facts, evolution and science, they're saying, no, there is none.
Even those who don't lose their faith in God because of Darwinian theory may give up their belief in an active and all powerful God. Thus, it's increasingly popular among some Christian proponents of evolution to claim that because evolution is an unguided process, God himself doesn't guide it. Indeed, God may not even know how evolution will turn out. In this view, human life is no longer something specifically intended by God. Accordingly, Catholic priest George Coyne proclaims that not even God could know with certainty that human life would come to be. Not even God could know. And Christian biologist Ken Miller of Brown University, author of the popular book Finding Darwin's God, which was a favorite at the Evangelical Christian University that I taught at for 12 years, Ken Miller argues that mankind's appearance on this planet was not preordained, that we are here as an afterthought. A minor detail, a Happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.
This is from a Christian biologist, and it's actually a popular view among many evangelical Christian scientists.
The message of secular Darwinist, on the other hand, is that science shows that the spiritual side of life is a complete myth. You can believe God if you want to, but it's tantamount to a fairy story. The consequences of this Darwinian worldview are bleak. But thankfully, the story doesn't end there. And that's the story of this conference.
While Darwinism has eroded our culture's respect for human life in recent decades, scientists and philosophers at the highest levels have started to question Darwinian orthodoxy. One of these scientists was my friend, the late Philip Skell. Dr. Skell was a renowned professor of chemistry at Penn State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He spent much of the last decade of his life publicly raising questions about the evidence for Darwinian's theory. He wrote that Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis. This quasi religious function of the theory is why many scientists make public statements about the theory that they would not defend privately to other scientists.
Then there's atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who in 2012 published a book with Oxford University Press titled Mind and why the Materialist Neo Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
To be sure, Nagel is actually still an atheist. But after examining the evidence, he has become completely unpersuaded that Darwinian explanations for mind, morality and life itself hold water. Indeed, he derives Darwinism as, in his view, quote, a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense, unquote. And he concludes that the Darwinian worldview is ripe for displacement.
But it's not just that. Scientists and philosophers are now questioning Darwin's theory as never before. Science itself is revealing stunning evidence that life is the product of of intelligent design rather than an unguided process which we'll be teasing out for this whole day.
Science has been shedding light on how humans are truly special in this cosmos. One of my colleagues at Discovery Institute is Australian biologist Michael Denton.
Michael has both an MD from Bristol University and a PhD in biochemistry from King's College in London. His research into retinal disease led to the identification of the gene used in the first successful gene therapy trial at Moorfield's Eye Hospital in London.
Michael has increased my sense of wonder about both our universe and ourselves. He writes about how our world is exquisitely fine tuned for life to exist in ways that go far beyond what Chance processes could create.
For example, everyone in this room right now is breathing oxygen.
We likely take that for granted.
Here's just a little taste of why you shouldn't.
[00:09:42] Speaker D: As you're sitting there, you're breathing there, relaxing, you're using up 250mils of oxygen every minute. It's incredible. That's the amount of oxygen you need to maintain your energy levels. And you need about 20% or so oxygen in the atmosphere to get sufficient to feed your metabolic needs.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: The problem with needing so much oxygen in the atmosphere is that oxygen is dangerous because it's so reactive. If you have too much of it in the atmosphere, you can have spontaneous combustion. Fortunately, the form of oxygen prevalent in our lower atmosphere is diatomic. That means two atoms of oxygen typically combine together into a molecule. Diatomic oxygen happens to be much less real active so long as the temperature is below 50 degrees centigrade, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
[00:10:33] Speaker D: And this allows, in fact, quite a high level of oxygen in the atmosphere. Without spontaneous combustion.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: The properties of diatomic oxygen mean our atmosphere has just the right level of oxygen we need for living. Not too little and not too much.
[00:10:50] Speaker D: If you raise the level of oxygen much more than 20%, perhaps certainly more than 30%, you'd have raging spontaneous fires all over the place. Okay.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: An equally serendipitous property of diatomic oxygen is that it does not absorb heat, which has helped prevent a massive increase in Earth's surface temperature that would wipe out life as we know it.
[00:11:12] Speaker D: If it had been a greenhouse gas, forget it, we wouldn't be sitting here. In fact, oxygen absorbs no incoming radiant heat because it's a diatomic molecule. So it goes on and on and on, one coincidence after another.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: One coincidence after another.
But it's not just that nature is amazingly set up to make life possible and our lives possible. It's also that we human beings are unique and special and exceptional in numerous ways. Here are five, some of which you may not have thought of.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Our brains have intellectual powers, including mathematical reasoning, that far surpass the capabilities of other animals.
The physical design of the human larynx enables us to utilize a much broader range of vowels and consonants than any other mammal, facilitating sophisticated verbal communication of complex, complex ideas.
The human hand is better adapted than any other known appendage for the intelligent manipulation of the physical environment.
The human body and mind seem to be optimized in a variety of ways to make us the only animal who can harness the use of fire. Which opened the doors to technology.
Finally, humans live on a planet that seems optimized for scientific discovery.
Our clear atmosphere and location in the galaxy enable many of the observations that have fueled modern science.
Humans are not only equipped with a potential for self reflection and scientific reasoning, they were placed on a planet that allows for that potential to be fulfilled.
Far from being insignificant specks living on an insignificant planet, humans are truly a privileged species inhabiting a home that seems to have been prepared for their benefit.
[00:13:12] Speaker D: In my view, discovering the fitness of the universe, the unique fitness of the universe for carbon based life and beings like ourselves is one of the major discoveries of 20th century science and one of the major discoveries of all time in the area of design, religion, science and all these sorts of things. The human form is something significant in the cosmic order and that's a scientific finding. It's implicit in astrobiologists thinking about looking for carbon based life somewhere else and looking for oxygen on a planet. The 20th century has shown that human form is not some irrelevant, not some freak of nature. It's deeply significant for me, I think I can't think of any discovery that's going to come in the 21st century which could be more significant than this. Actually, it's a very significant finding.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: I love that. What Darwinian science tried to take away from humanity, new discoveries in the sciences have been restoring.
And when people encounter these discoveries for the first time, it can be life changing.
Every summer in Seattle, Discovery Institute brings together undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world.
From Africa, from Asia, from North America, South America, Europe.
They come to study the compelling evidence of design in nature. And each summer we see how the real evidence of nature, not the phony evidence offered by Darwinian ideology, the real evidence of nature, can give a lifeline to those who have been told we're just the blind products of, of a blind process that did not have you or I in mind. One alumnus of our summer program is now a Fulbright scholar at one of America's leading research universities. He shared with us how he grew up loving science. And he was actually in another country that I won't name. But he grew up loving science until he started studying it at a university in his home country where he was repeatedly told by his professors that the material universe is all there is and that science shows, in his words, we are the results of purposeless accidents.
Then he just happened on one of our videos online featuring some of my colleagues. And then this student, this young man said, and I'm quoting him for the first time in my life.
For the first time in my life, science does not mean materialism for me. And I started to see the signature of a designer.
I hope today the same will be true for you. Thank you.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: That was John west, senior fellow and Associate director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. To delve deeper into the ideas he laid out in his talk, get his book Darwin Day in America, available at Amazon. Or check out his documentary film Human Zoos, winner of multiple film festival awards and now with over a half million views on YouTube. Just search YouTube for human zoos or go to humanzoos.org for ID of the future. This has been Tom Gilson. Thanks for listening.
[00:17:03] 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.
