[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, this is Jonathan Wells for ID the Future. I'm here today with Dr. Marcos Eberlen. He's a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Campinas. He did postdoctoral work at Purdue, then founded the well regarded Thompson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, expanding it into a highly distinguished lab and supervising some 200 graduate and postdoctoral students. Marcos is the former president of the International Mass Spectrometry foundation and winner of the prestigious Thompson Medal in 2016.
A year and a half ago, I'm happy to say, Marcos hosted me and my wife in Sao Paulo. We visited his newly founded McKenzie Institute for Intelligent Design and spent two weeks there speaking to various audiences and being shown the town. And I'd say probably what impressed me as much as anything else is that I used to be a New York City taxicab driver. And the way Marcos drove us around Sao Paulo far surpassed anything I could have ever done in New York. I'm thankful for that because I'm still alive.
Anyway, we're going to talk about chapter two of his new book, Foresight, how the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose.
And the second chapter deals with the fitness, the unique fitness of our world for life.
If certain things were even slightly different, life on Earth would not be possible.
So let's step back for a minute. You argue, Marcos, that to get the examples of ingenious engineering and foresight. Engineering, foresight and biology, which is your first chapter. In your subsequent chapters, there's also evidence of foresight in the very nature of chemistry and physics. You talk about fine tuning in physics and chemistry and about the miracle of water, about how our atmosphere appears to have been ingeniously fine tuned to allow for life, and how something as seemingly useless, even destructive, as lightning is part of this whole story.
Would you like to comment on the laws of physics and chemistry that are so finely tuned for life?
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Oh, yes, Jonathan.
As a student learning chemistry and physics, I was really much surprised by the precision of all the constants and also the precision of the laws and everything and how accurate those numbers were to make life in the universe stable and feasible.
And the numbers are so impressive that I concluded myself that foresight was really needed for those.
And tuning is really wonderful. It's a really strong evidence for intelligent design.
But we find much more than tuning actually in the life in the universe. It's not just setting up the right constants.
Life needs much more. And that's what I Comment on the My book is not just setting up the right values for the constants of physics and some conditions for chemistry.
Sometimes we life run into really serious problems, and then you need to bring new solutions, new systems, new molecules, new motors, new machines to solve those problems.
So foresight goes on and expand this fine tuning argument in a really strong way that speaks in favor of intelligent design.
It was not only the need of tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry and the constants, the numbers, the magic numbers that we see in chemistry for the electrons in orbitals and and so on, but some new solutions, new systems, new molecules, new filters, new gears and everything sometimes were required for life to stay feasible for the universe to operate.
And those solutions, they could not wait to appear because the problems, as soon as they happen, they require the right solutions.
So the solutions should not be inadequate, they should be perfect to solve the problems.
So only an intelligent mind able of foresight, able of visualize the future, to shape the future, could implement those solutions that we see in so many situations in life, in the universe.
That's why foresight speaks strongly in favor of a mind.
That's why I'm so much convinced for intelligent design.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Marcos, your specialty is mass spectrometry. Can you tell us briefly what that is and how it has revealed to you this type of foresight that you're talking about?
[00:05:46] Speaker A: Okay, Jonathan, Mass spectrometry, some people would define it as an analytical technique, but my definition of mass spectrometry goes much, much further than that. Mass spectrometry is a branch of science, I would say nowadays, because there are so many applications, so many different ways to do it.
But, but in summary, mass spectrometry is a way for us to handle molecules in the gas phase.
So you have, for instance, a liquid in a bottle. And if you would like to know the composition of that liquid, the best way would be to take one molecule for that liquid with your hands and investigate it.
So mass spectrometry allows you to do it.
And the hands is, is a mechanical hand of a mass spectrometer. So you go with the mass spectrometer there, you take one molecule for that liquid, you weight the molecule, you see how heavy or how light the molecule is.
You also investigate the connectivities of the atoms in that molecule, and you also can measure the properties of that molecule.
You have all different types of information from that molecule doing mass spectrometry. That's why the technique is so important, and that's why it shows so many different applications nowadays.
So Everything is chemistry. And I say also that chemistry is everything.
And to understand life in the universe, you have to do exactly what I just described.
You have to go there and take the molecules from life.
You have to go in the universe and take the molecules from the universe and characterize those molecules to see how they work together.
And mass spectrometry allows you to investigate the, the real composition of life in the universe. And when you go deep into the molecular level, when you investigate how those molecules work, you see many, many examples of foresight. And that's when you are convinced that intelligent design is by far the best explanation for life and the universe.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Marcos, one molecule in particular that you talk about in your second chapter is water.
Now, at first glance, water seems pretty simple and not as impressive, certainly as a cell membrane. But what would you say is so special about water?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Well, Jonathan, water is unique molecule. There is a list in the Internet that anyone can easily find that lists 74 unique physical chemistry properties of water.
Can you believe that A liquid has 74 unique properties and that liquid is the one that makes life feasible in this planet?
And when you look at the properties, those 74 properties of water, we see that all of them conspire to make life possible.
You know, water is kind of universal solvent, solid water.
Ice floats on liquid water. This is against the laws that demand solids to be more dense or denser than liquids. And ice should not float, but it floats.
And when we look at life, we see this is an essential feature of ice that makes life possible in this planet.
And there are many, many more weird properties of water that when we look closely at the molecular level, we see that somebody was planning for those properties. There's no way out.
Somebody was adjusting the 74 unique properties of water to make life possible in this planet.
And that's why water is so important for the discussion of our origins. How come those 74 properties conspire in favor of life?
And how come that if you remove any one of those properties, life is not feasible anymore? So I think water makes a really strong case in favor of foresight, in favor of intelligent design.
That's why as a chemist, I see water in a much, much more important way that ordinary man look at water may think, oh, okay, has no color, has no flavor, and it should not be a so important liquid.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: It is one other thing you talk about in your book in this context is lightning. Now, to many people, lightning seems pretty destructive, but you point out that it's actually an important part of this combination of qualities that the Planet provides us to make life possible. Would you like to say a word or two about lightning?
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Oh, yes, Jonathan. Lightning is something that if we would plan for Earth, we would remove the lightning because of the bad side of it.
But when we look at the chemistry, we see that lightning is essential because we have nitrogen on our atmosphere, we have oxygen on our atmosphere. And they should not react with each other so often.
That's good, but there should be also a way for them to react. They should not react all the time.
They should be there, stable gases. But sometimes you need some reaction, a little bit of reaction to occur between those two gases to sustain the nitrogen cycle, to sustain the oxygen cycle, and to provide nutrients for the microorganism in the soil, to provide ammonia for our proteins.
So what is the function of the lightening?
It provides energy, a lot of energy.
So you can break the nitrogen molecule into nitrogen atoms, you can break the oxygen molecule into oxygen atoms. And now those atoms can react with each other to make no substance, no x, the no 2, no 3.
And those molecules now can proceed reacting. And finally we have ammonia, we have proteins.
So lightening is essential because at the right time, at the right extension, it will make nitrogen and oxygen to react to each other. No lightening, no life.
And we should be grateful for, for the, what I like to call foresighter.
This mind with this ability to shape the future, to predict needs, to provide solutions.
This mind realized that a lot of energy would be eventually needed to make nitrogen to react to oxygen.
So lightening was the solution.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Many people say that our universe really is not that fine tuned or that special.
We just happen to be in the universe, among the infinite number of universes out there that has these properties that you're talking about.
What would you say to someone who says that we have a multiverse that is an infinite number of universes and not just this one?
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Well, Jonathan, I don't care if there are other universe out there. I care for the universe that I can see. I care for the science that I can do in this universe.
I care for finding explanations for the solutions that I see on life in this planet Earth.
And when I do it, I see that those solutions should be there from the very beginning and the solutions should solve, fully solve the problems. And I see that only an intelligent mind able of foresight could provide those solutions.
And that's why I conclude that intelligent design is the best cause for life in this planet, on planet Earth.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Thank you, Marcos. We've been talking today with distinguished Brazilian scientist Marcos Eberlin. Who has just published a book titled how the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. The book has been endorsed by three winners of Nobel Prizes and is available for
[email protected] foresight that's discoveryinstitutepress.com Foresight, or you can find it on Amazon.
This has been Jonathan Wells for ID the Future. Thank you for listening.
[00:15:48] 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.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: Sa.
