[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Is intelligent design a viable scientific theory? Why do some in the scientific community still consider it pseudoscience?
Maybe you're wondering these things yourself or you have a friend, family member, or co worker who has these types of questions. Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott.
Today, these questions and more will be answered by Dr. Casey Luskin and his wife, Kristin Murray. This is the first half of a recent conversation the pair had on the Apologetics Profile podcast with host Daniel Ray.
Kristen teaches an online high school chemistry class for Discovery Institute Academy.
Casey is a scientist and attorney and associate director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture.
In part one, they offer a broad overview of intelligent design as a viable scientific theory. They also discuss why it isn't considered mainstream science by its critics.
And they review the state of how science is communicated to the general public. Today.
As the conversation begins creating Kristen explains how she became interested in science and how she gets her students interested and motivated to explore the wonders of chemistry.
Here's Casey and Kristin now.
[00:01:29] Speaker C: It's not hard to get teens interested in a subject that you're already fairly enthusiastic about yourself.
Casey will be the first to attest that I'm somewhat obsessive about the subject matter of chemistry and it goes back to a young age.
So I think starting I was just sharing this actually in another podcast I did recently, going back to my high school days. Daniel I absolutely loved chemistry at an early age and devoured it and actually have shared the story that I actually got in trouble in my chemistry class because comically, I did not pay attention in class. I kind of tuned out the instructor and the discussion and so forth. And I had a chemistry textbook on my desk and I just chose to dive right into the textbook during class and just read and study and practice problems. And so the instructor one day pulls me after class and he says, Kristin, I have noticed that you don't participate in at all in class. And he said, I I would like to know why that is.
And honestly, Daniel, like I'm not and I wasn't the kind of student that was snippety or obstinate or difficult. I was the ultimate goody two shoes. But I will never know what came over me that day.
But I, I basically very presumptuously commented, well, do you really want to know? To which he said, yes, I do want to know.
I said, I don't think that you lecture very well.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Oh my gosh, that's a good way to start a science career.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: I mean, I don't know on what authority I made this accusation. I have no idea on what point of comparison I made this point, but I.
And I felt absolutely terrible because this was. This is one of these terrific science teachers that taught multiple subjects and ran all kinds of extracurricular activities. Like, not the kind of person that you would ever want to say something like that to.
But I think I only share the story as a glimpse into the fact that when I teach students now, I can barely contain myself with the way that I approach the subject matter because I do like what I teach. And it naturally just kind of bubbles over, you know, when I'm teaching them because I like this subject, I want them to understand it, you know?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. How old were you when that happened?
[00:04:05] Speaker C: Probably in 11th grade.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. I've taught middle and high school and I've had students just like that. Mr. A, we love you, but sometimes you get a little long winded or, you know, and 12 and 13 year olds don't quite know how to package it with gentleness. And so you're like, yeah, they're pretty honest and they'll tell you exactly how they feel about things. So you're like, oh, that's a great pedagogical tool, is to put your knowledge before teens and preteens to see how it flies. But, Casey, I was talking. I was. You know, as you know, I'm in the discovery thing for the summer, and I'm thinking about C.S. lewis, of course. And one of the things that I learned from Lewis when I studied him in grad school was kind of what Christian was alluding to here, that there's a need as a teacher and as a communicator of science, not, you know, you hear the phrase, we all hear the phrase dumb it down. Right? We're dumbing stuff down or something. We have to dumb it down for people. But I think with Lewis's approach to understanding language and trying to convey difficult concepts, his whole idea was translation. So we're not dumbing it down. We kind of have to know two languages. We kind of have to know the language of our audience, and we kind of have to know, obviously, like Christian, to be passionate and knowledgeable about the subjects that we're teaching.
And so in your field of communicating science to people, do you find that to be true, that you're translating difficult concepts into a way that can enlighten people and interest people in this subject?
[00:05:39] Speaker D: It's a constant battle to try to translate the science for a popular audience. Daniel, let me tell you, because on the one hand, you want to be accurate.
[00:05:49] Speaker C: You want to.
[00:05:50] Speaker D: You want to get things right, okay? On the other hand, it is. You want to make sure people can understand what you're saying. And so we walk this balance constantly of trying to figure out how can we communicate science in a way that is accurate and you're not making mistakes or, you know, fudging the information, but also packaging it in a way where the public can understand it. And this is not a problem that is unique to folks in the intelligent design, you know, sort of evolution issue. I think that people all over the scientific community come up against this and really have to think hard about, okay, how can we discuss and talk about science in a way that is both accurate and comprehensible?
And it takes a lot of practice, a lot of time, frankly. And I don't always get it quite right. I do my best, but I think that this is a problem that a lot of folks have all through the scientific community. Yeah, it's a very, very important topic that you've raised there. This actually gets talked about a lot of in science. If you go to, you know, science conferences, big research conferences from scientific societies, there will be a couple of breakout sessions on communicating science and talking to the public. And so this is something that actually the scientific community is aware of, and they have become, I think, more aware of in the last couple decades, the need to communicate science better to the public.
I've got a story about this, by the way, we can talk about later, where I think that the scientific community is not doing a good job communicating to the public. But that's another story.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's okay. No, this is a great topic because I think it involves all of us because we swim in a science culture. You know, when I think of science communicators, I think of. I grew up with Carl Sagan.
That's how I got interested in science myself. Was Dr. Sagan when I was 12, watching Cosmos with my father.
But now we have Neil DeGrasse Tyson, we have people like Bill Nye and Richard Dawkins and, you name it, and eloquent spokespersons. I mean, whatever you think of Carl Sagan, you have to concede he was a masterful communicator. I mean, that's how we got to where he was.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's fun to listen to, despite what you might think of what he thinks.
But these science communicators have that ability to craft a narrative that makes you interested in science? And so it's not just like, I know all the chemistry, but it's like, Christian, you have to have this passion and zeal for what you're doing. So that seems to be a component. I mean, everybody that I think is a good science communicator loves science and has that childhood story of what, what got them interested. So, Kristen, in your field, in communicating your passion to people, how do you do that? I mean, I know it's not necessarily a method. That's like asking a first chair violinist at the, you know, Dallas Symphony Orchestra how she plays violin. It's like, well, I could tell you, but you're not going to be able to pick up a violin after what I've told you what you're doing. But what goes on in, in your practice as you're doing, does it just come naturally or how do you do that?
[00:08:48] Speaker C: In the curriculum that I get to do with students?
And, you know, you're aware of this. I'm teaching a course for chemistry over at Discovery Institute Academy. And one of the unique kind of elements of that is that I do get to integrate into the curriculum questions about intelligent design and purpose and meaning. And so I feel like right off the bat, like, one way that you're kind of inviting students into science is that I'm not just teaching you chemistry, which of course I'm passionate about, but I'm also helping you kind of flesh out the bigger questions that emerge from some of these topics.
So, you know, for example, I think in your traditional kind of typical science course for a high school student or even for college, it's kind of just the assumed paradigm that we're going to live in, a materialistic paradigm. And that everything that we're discussing in this science class, if it's a biology course, could be explained through some kind of purely blind and guided process like Darwinian evolution, or in the case of a chemistry class, that these molecules assembled and then polymerized. And then eventually we, you know, over a period of time, we get, we get our first life, that chemical evolution can explain all of this, you know, and so one, one way of kind of hooking students, if you will, Daniel, is to introduce them to the fact that there's actually an overwhelming and growing body of evidence that suggests that actually these features you're encountering in biology or chemistry are not best explained by a materialist perspective. You know, and that in that, in our experience, these things look like they might have been designed. You know, I think that's kind of captivating you know, I think that's a very interesting thing to think about. Even at a high school level.
Those are questions that students are asking. I certainly was at the high school level, you know.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
It's like I shared an article with you guys.
I was thinking about this and, like, how could I simplify what I'm learning? Because the Discovery Institute summer seminar homework we're getting is kind of, whoa. It's a lot, but it's great.
And I want to make sure I'm understanding this because I love science. I'm not a scientist. But I'm thinking, Casey, that in a simple example, you know, Winnie the Pooh comes to Christopher Robin and asks for a balloon. And Christopher Robin wants to know why he wants a balloon. And so he asked the question. He says, what do you want a balloon for?
Of course, Pooh's idea is, well, I want to get some honey. Christopher Robin's like, you don't get honey with balloons. But that question that he asks Winnie the Pooh, that seems to be the heart of science. That makes it interesting. What Kristen just said, that makes. What is a star for?
What is a molecule of carbon? What's it for?
This is a fascinating question that we've lost touch with asking that basic question. In fact, if you ask a materialist, what's the star for? What's the universe for? They're just going to look at you with a raised eyebrows. It's not for anything. You know, but that seems to be so counterintuitive. It's like saying, coming home to your living room filled with helium balloons. You're not going to walk past that and not ask your husband, what is that for? Or your wife, what's that for? And then imagine one or the other of you saying, it's just helium.
Are you going to be satisfied with that answer? You want an explanation? What are the helium balloons there? What's that for? Right, Casey, that seems to be the gist of intelligent design arguments, right, in terms of how you approach things, certainly.
[00:12:44] Speaker D: I mean, intelligent design assumes that there are purposes in nature. There's teleology.
There are reasons for why things are the way they are. And you're absolutely right, Daniel. If you ask a materialist, you know, what is the heart for? Okay, there are literally, I have literally read articles from mainstream evolutionary scientists writing in biology journals saying we should not say that the heart is for pumping blood, because in their view, there are no purposes, true purposes in nature. And this is, in my view, this is crazy. You're basically having to Deny and everything that your eye sees. And if that's what you are telling yourself to do, then surely that is not the way science is supposed to work. Right? So you will hear evolutionary scientists writing in their journals saying, we've got to get away from purposeful language in biology. We can't say that eyes are for seeing, that ears are for hearing, that the heart is for pumping blood. And this is just. This is the fruit of materialistic thinking that has basically caused people, in my view, to lose the plot of what science is supposed to be about. You know, getting back to what you said earlier about those science communicators, I want to make a point about those guys, since we're. We're talking about materialists. I agree with you 100%. They were all, all the four that you mentioned. Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. They are all brilliant science communicators. But there's. And I really enjoyed watching them like Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos 2.0 that came out a number of. A few years back. I enjoyed it. I mean, I didn't agree with all of it, but the. It was very well done. But, Daniel, there's something else about all four of those guys that unites them besides the fact that they're very good science communicators. Do you know what it is? You probably do, but what is the other thing that unites all four of those guys?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Well, there's. I could think of a lot of things, but I think it's. It's the, the materialism.
[00:14:34] Speaker D: Yes. They are all materialists.
So it's unfortunate that basically you nailed the four leading science communicators in the culture today and over the last 30 plus years have been those four guys. Why is it that they are all materialists? I think it's time to see a shift in the science communicators who are being lifted up as the spokespeople for science, because frankly, science is going in a direction that's away from materialism. And I think as that happens more and more, my hope is that people will be able to have science spokespersons, communicators who can say things like, the heart is for pumping blood. Okay. And it was put there for a reason, for a purpose. We can see that. Okay. That is not a crazy thing to say, even though some people don't like the implications of where that's going.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Right. Well, Brian. I think Brian Greene comes to mind.
He's a pretty decent fellow. I think he's fully materialistic in his outlook.
But in one of his books, one of his popular books, he's talking about this very thing giving all the dimensions and the distance to the sun, its diameter, its luminosity and all of this stuff.
And he throws you all these facts about the sun and they're all quantitative facts. There's nothing about beauty or anything like that. And at the end of it, he goes, it's a fool's errand to ask what it's for or why it's there.
And there's A quote from G.K. chesterton and I wish I could remember what book it came from. Kristen. It reminded me of.
He said something, he's like, well, he's talking about astronomers and materialism. And he said something like, well, you. Or it may have been, I don't know, it may not have been Chesterton, but the quote stands nonetheless about what we're talking about. He said, you teach your daughters the diameters of planets and then you wonder why they don't want to spend time with you, right?
And so to your point, Kristen, you can give numbers and facts to kids about chemical structures, but I think the element that's on everybody's mind and almost the question that everybody's afraid to ask is this very question we're talking about one of teleology or purpose. And it's so much more fun to me when I go, when I look at something like Jupiter or a carbon atom, like Fred Hoyle looked at carbon atoms and he's like, somebody monkeyed with the physics. I can't explain this. It looks like a put up job.
And he's just dumbfounded, but he can't say. Fred finally couldn't say this was for anything.
But you add that what's this four question? And suddenly you and Christopher Robin are off on a journey trying to get bees away from their honey.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: You know, Daniel, I read your honeybee.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Oh, you did? I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
[00:17:21] Speaker C: No, it was clever and it was well written. I'm not trying to make a plug for you, but there it is. But it got me thinking when I was reading through it that connections even in my own class, you know, when students, for example, in the early introductory units of chemistry study the atom, we take a moment to kind of pull some excerpts from a wonderful book by Weicker, Benjamin Weicker and Jonathan Witt, a meaningful how the arts and sciences Reveal the genius of nature.
And by no means do we do the whole book. We just, I pull out some relevant quotes that kind of Fit.
But I bring this up because I think it's interesting when I work through this lesson with students where we progress through how chemistry developed as a field, one of the things that you will notice is that, and I think Weicker and Witt do such a great job of describing this in a lot of ways, the roots of chemistry just start with people finding thing as things aesthetically beautiful and. And useful. Right. So various metals that they have access to to make different ornaments or weaponry or helmets and so forth.
Or again, the love of beauty or just the love of utility? Right.
And naturally, naturally, people start asking deeper questions other than is this beautiful? And does this have use for me is, well, is there patterns? Can I find out more?
Are there connections? And so, you know, at one point, when we finally make it to Dimitri Mendeleev, kind of sequencing all the elements in the periodic table into this beautiful, organized, you know, chart.
I love this quote from the book on. On page 143, Mendele refused to allow that the pattern of increasing weights and chemical properties would be disrupted. Thus, when there was no known element that had the requisite properties to fit into a particular group, when there was a suspicious leap in atomic weight, he boldly left a blank. And I think that is in step with kind of, again, an approach that we're kind of trying to do with students, which is, yeah, we naturally start to suspect that there might be a purpose, a teleology, a. A pattern. And this was part of the draw to like, put all these elements that we had now defined. We'd finally defined what an element was. That took a long time too. And now how do we organize them? And we did that because we anticipated that there would be patterns. You know, that's cool.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: That's amazing. Casey. It seems like since you guys both read the article, I'll kind of talk on a little bit and then maybe have to explain it to the audience in my introduction. Because people listening don't know what we're talking about, but that Winnie, they're like, why are they talking about Winnie the Pooh Pooh Bear? But when he first hears the bees, he's like, where. What could. What could possibly mean? What could this buzzing sound mean? Honey. Right. So he sees the nest and he starts climbing the tree. And then he starts singing a complaining song because he. It's. This is not working out exactly the way I want it to. And so in some sense, I see materialism as trying to climb this tree, trying to attain the honey, but it's singing a complaining song. Because it's not.
It's not being able to explain the stuff that is being discovered. So the better tools you build. I'm sorry, but you're not going to be able to keep your paradigm if you want to build bigger space telescopes or better microscopes or delve into the nature of reality more.
It just seems like it's an effort to maintain the materialist paradigm rather than to actually advance science.
So do you find that to be the case, as you're advancing id, that people would just rather. It's almost like they see what you're talking about, but they would just rather. Like Richard Lewontin famously said, you know, we can't let a divine foot in this door of our materialistic worldview.
[00:21:42] Speaker D: Yeah. The way that you see materialists coping with the evidence for design in nature is they try to explain it away. And we could call that them singing their complaining song if you want to. They're never gonna let on that it's a complaining song. They see it as, oh, well, this must be true, because they start off as Luanson did, with the premise that you can only invoke material causes. I mean, for those who are not familiar, Richard Lewontin was a very famous zoologist at Harvard, and he has this quote where he says, basically, science is only allowed to invoke materialistic causes because we can never allow a divine foot in the door. Okay. So if you're. If you're a scientist and a materialist, you have to maintain that sort of airtight, hermetically sealed box of materialism no matter what evidence is knocking at the door. So this is how they do it, right? They look at the complexity of life and they say, oh, maybe Darwinism can't explain this, but maybe features, you know, something like a wing was not originally used for flying. It was originally used for insulation to allow dinosaurs to stay warm at night, I guess, or something like that. You know, it just happened to be very well adapted for flying. The dinosaurs got lucky, and then they were able to take to the skies. Or why does the fossil record not have these transitional fossils that are predicted by Darwin's theory? It's not because Darwin's theory was wrong. It's not because common descent is wrong. They will say, oh, it's because of punctuated equilibrium. The evolution took place so rapidly that there was no time to leave any transitional fossils. Or with the fine tuning of the universe, where we see that these physical laws and constants are exactly what you need for life to exist. They will say, well, there's no design behind the universe that was intending for life to exist. This is because there's a multiverse. There's actually an infinite number, a near infinite number of universes out there that you can't observe. And we just happen to live in the one that got really lucky with just the right parameters so that life could exist. You see, what they're doing over and over again is they are explaining away the evidence, the evidence that appears to be purposeful, teleological, and designed. They're trying to come up with reasons to avoid that conclusion. And it often goes to really absurd conclusions. Now we've got, you know, untold billions of universes that we can't observe. Or, yes, evolution happens. It just leaves no evidence of it in the fossil record. Okay, well, these are not very compelling hypotheses. They're hypotheses that are designed to prevent any quote, unquote, divine foot, as Lewontin put it, from coming in the door, that they're not actually about seeking truth. So, yeah, if you want to call this the complaining song, we can call it that. But I think that the writing is on the wall. When you see people going to these lengths to explain away the, you know, these things, then, you know, they don't have the evidence on their side. Let me give one other example.
There's a leading evolutionary biologist named Eugene Kuhnen. He's actually. I like him. He's quite frank. Frank and candid about many of the problems with, you know, evolutionary biology. And he's an evolutionist, and I believe he's a materialist. So don't get me wrong, he's not a supporter of intelligent design, but he can be very open about this. Well, he wrote a paper years ago looking at the origin of life and said, look, the origin of life is basically so unlikely that he sort of invoked a multiverse type argument to explain how life got started. He basically said, look, the universe is so big, maybe it's way bigger than we think it is, okay? And so if the universe is way bigger than we think it is, then maybe the origin of life actually would be possible if we have a big enough universe that could allow enough chances for something so unlikely as the origin of life to take place in our universe. Okay? So this is sort of like the multiverse version of explaining how the origin of life occurred. You're just sort of inventing probabilistic resources and opportunities even though we don't observe them. You're just assuming they had to have been there in order for this highly, highly, highly improbable event to have happened. The possibility of intelligent design is never even allowed or considered. And that's where science is at today.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a nice synopsis there, Casey.
Kristen, a lot of this stuff kind of, I know teaching high school, middle school just goes over the kids heads to some degree. I mean, every time it's difficult, whether you're a parent or a teacher or what Casey does with intelligence design, dealing with the public, it's a hard slog to get people to do this. I had just a couple of weeks ago, I had given a two sermons. I was a guest speaker at a church in Houston.
And the church was a lot of people. It's about 5, 600 people there, two services and a lot of people. And I, you know, I knew this, but I didn't know it. I'm glad, glad I didn't know it as I was doing it. But there were a lot of former and current NASA engineers in the congregation. And I'm doing a sermon on Psalm 19. Now. I didn't do that sermon thinking, oh, I got to talk to NASA engineers. I just, that's my favorite topic to talk about. But it wasn't until like afterwards, literally afterwards, I'm like, oh yeah, there's NASA people that work here. And I had a couple of them come up to me afterwards. We actually had a couple of flat earth people come up and have a chat. That was interesting.
But I realized that, you know, I strove to try to reach everybody and do it the way the, the pastor had done that. But I was exhausted and it was fun and I certainly was passionate about it because I love it. But it was the idea of taking a difficult topic and bringing it to your audience and being passionate about it.
And yet you probably anticipate this too. You both, you know, the kind of questions that are going to come, you know, the kind of opposition that's going to come. And sometimes you're thinking, okay, I know what's going to come out of this. And you're trying to anticipate what people might say. And when we're dealing with people that don't see Design Christian, why do you think that we're even like, I talked to a lot of atheists, why is this not obvious to people? I mean, we're still like atheists will say to me, if this is so obvious, Dan, then why are 95% of the professional scientists in the physical sciences? Why can't they see it?
And we might. And I don't mean to be disrespectful to the adults in the scientific world. But sometimes we all are like middle schoolers and high schools and we just don't want to see it to some extent. What is your experience in that? What do you think is blocking people young and old from embracing what does seem obvious to us?
[00:28:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I face a bit less opposition at the high school level at which I work. And some of that might be that these students haven't yet kind of been immersed in closing the door to a design perspective. Like it's still a bit fresh and new for them.
For many of them, they're still trying to get their head around just what is intelligent design? What does it mean to have an openness to the idea that, you know, certain features in life, in the universe are designed?
It's new for them. And so there's not always a tremendous amount of pushback as much as there is.
I don't understand what this is. What is ID reasoning? What, what does this mean? How does this change the way I approach science? You know, which is cool, right? So there's just an openness to learning about this. But I think when you do encounter opposition or as you say, like just kind of a commitment, that no, it, it might walk like a duck and quack like a duck, but you know, it's not, I think for whatever reason, like it's for opponents of id, it is not a lack of intellect on their part, you know, that they have that perspective. You know, I, I would be quick to say, and I'm sure all of us would on this group, that you run into some very intelligent atheists out there who have horrific things to say. You know, I think it's more, it's more a situation in which that common sense tendency to look at examples in everyday life and make design inferences is excluded in this one domain of your life. You know, in, in, you know, the example sometimes, I know case is mentioned in various talks that he, you know, you know that, that he does is on a regular day to day basis, people are making design inferences. They're, they're distinguishing at a murder scene between a natural death and a calculated murder. They're distinguishing between, you know, naturally eroded rock material at a site versus, oh, this was clearly a carved human tool for a specific purpose. You know, and nobody blinks an eye about making those design inferences in those contexts. In fact, it's natural, it's intuitive, we just do that. Right?
It's only when that highly educated atheists who again, we're going to give them that credit that they are so, you know, intelligent and well spoken and so forth. It's only when they suddenly encounter that type of design reasoning within science that they just have to hit mute. You know, like, I can't invite that into this discussion. The implications, I just don't want to go there.
I'm going to hold out that there's a multiverse. I'm going to hold out that there's a chance, you know, that this could have come about in a random process.
But I like to tell students, I like to tell students that the way that it is a good approach when we're dealing with science like anything else, is to ask in front of me right now, with the evidence that I do have, what is the best explanation?
Is it to hold out for the multiverse or the, you know, infinite amounts of time that we're eventually going to get this thing to come about? Or does design make sense?
[00:31:52] Speaker B: That was Kristin Marais and Casey Luskin discussing the theory of intelligent design and the state of science today.
Don't miss the second half of this conversation in a separate episode. We're grateful to the producers of the Apologetics profile podcast for permission to share this exchange here for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:32:16] Speaker D: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
