Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome to the show. Today we're happy to share with you the second half of a wide ranging conversation with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician John Lennox.
The conversation originally aired on Uncommon Knowledge and we're grateful to host Peter Robinson and the Hoover Institution for their permission to share it with ID The Future listeners.
In the interview, Meyer, Behe and Lennox take turns pointing out the flaws in Darwin's theory and they report on the latest scientific evidence that points to an intentional design of the physical world.
As we begin the second half, the conversation is moving toward the positive evidence for intelligent design.
Peter speaks first, showing all three of his guests two images, Darwin's branching tree drawing and Haeckel's evolution of man. Tree illustration and posing a question of comparison.
Let's continue listening.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Now we begin, we approach. We're getting to this subject which I've been trying to hold off because we're now getting close to this notion of intelligent design. I want to show you two images.
Serious question, which image is more scientific? Which image contains more information?
Which image contains more reality? Here's image one and there's image two.
Serious question, which contains more information?
[00:01:39] Speaker C: I'll take a stab at that.
[00:01:41] Speaker D: Yeah, sure.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: I think we've been mainly offering criticism of Darwinism so far in this interview, but all of us are sympathetic to the idea that there is evidence in the natural world of the activity of a mind.
John puts it one way. He talks about a top down infusion of information into the biosphere. Mike and I talk about the concept of intelligent design.
But there is, I think, a powerful scientific case for intelligent design. And this was the question that seized me when I went off to do my PhD.
We've seen this problem of the origin of information, but could that.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: You watch him carefully because this is tricky material.
[00:02:20] Speaker D: Oh, I know it is.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Go ahead, go ahead.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Could this mystery of the origin of information actually be a positive indicator of a different type of cause at work altogether?
And the person who helped me most think this through was actually Darwin himself, because Darwin pioneered a method of historical scientific reasoning where he realized that if you were wanting to explain an event in the remote past, you should try to explain it by causes that you see now in operation. And he got this principle from the great geologist Charles Lyell.
So in eastern Washington, where I live, there are little patches of white powdery stuff still on the ground from an event that happened in May of 1980. And if you don't know what caused that white powdery stuff, you'd use a standard historical method of reasoning, known as the method of multiple competing hypotheses. And, and so you'd formulate some hypotheses. Maybe it was a flood, maybe it was an earthquake, maybe it was a volcanic eruption. Which of those explanations is best according to Darwin and Lyell's principle? Well, it's the volcanic eruption because we have seen volcanoes produce white powdery stuff and floods and earthquakes don't do that. So if you apply this principle of reasoning, if you look for a cause now in operation and ask yourself, well, what is the cause now in operation that produces digital information?
You come to one and only one type of cause, and that's a mind. Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. What does it take to produce software? It takes a programmer. So what we think we're seeing with the digital information that's in DNA is not just a problem for Darwinian evolution, but it's a positive indicator of the activity of a mind or an intelligent agent acting in the history and the origin of life.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: I'm coming to you with, I'm going to set this up with a quotation. Listen to this. And then the question goes to you, Bill Clinton.
If you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there by itself.
All of creation, all this complex world we see around us, is a turtle on a fence post.
Behe looks at complicated subcellular biology and says, this couldn't have happened randomly. Meyer looks at the fossil record and says, too many things just appear. And John Lennox runs the maths and says, if there's a code, maybe there's a coder. Now, it's one thing to observe certain limits to what Darwin and others may have been able to explain. The explanation stops here. That's as far as we can get.
And it's something quite different to cross that line and say, oh, I think I see what's on the other side.
Are you in for intelligent design?
[00:05:04] Speaker D: I'm in for answering your question about the two pictures. First of all, you asked me how much information is contained in those two pictures.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Yes, I did.
[00:05:15] Speaker D: I suspect it's almost equal. I think the question you should have asked is how much truth is contained in those two pictures. Now, to come back to your precise question.
The first picture shows what people commonly call the ascent of man from lower animals. Now, here's where Darwin helped me massively by expressing in a Letter a profound doubt.
He said, you know, and I'm only paraphrasing because I haven't got the quote in my head. He said, you know, I'm troubled by the fact that if my explanation is correct, then how do we account for the human capacity for rational thought? He said, after all, if we started with lower animals and a monkey's mind. He said, well, is there any thinking in a monkey's mind? Now, hold that just for a moment, because I have lots of fun with my scientific friends. I sometimes ask them, what do you do science with?
And of course, they name some expensive machine. I say, no, no.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:06:22] Speaker D: They say, you mean your. And they're about to say mind, when they realize that's not politically correct. And they say, your brain. I said, okay, I believe the brain, the mind are separate, but we're in your brain.
Give me the brief history of the brain. I ask them, and I've done this many times. It's fascinating. And they say, well, the brain, in the end, is the end product of a mindless, unguided process.
And I smile at them and I say, and you trust it?
I say, now tell me honestly, that computer you use every day, if you knew that it was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it? Now, here's the thing. I have spoken with dozens of leading scientists and pushed them on this, and everybody, every single one, has said, no.
I said, you have a problem because you are giving me an argument that undermines rationality. And they turn to me and they say, where did you get that argument? I said, well, firstly, from Charles Darwin. They say, I don't believe you. And then I quote, darwin, Darwin's doubt.
That's his other doubt, Darwin's doubt about the reliability of human rationality. Now, this, to my mind, goes to the heart of the implication of the whole business.
And it's why I believe that there is an intelligence behind the universe. I'm a mathematician.
All mathematicians and scientists are people of faith, not necessarily in God, but they believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe and the ability of the mind to perceive. Yes, exactly. And therefore, what do they base that on? If you base that on a mindless, unguided evolutionary process, you're destroying rationality. C.S. lewis saw that in the 1940s. He said, Any theory that undermines rationality cannot be true because you're using your rationality to get to it. Alvin Planting has worked on it. But the most interesting person who brings it now to the fore is Thomas Nagel, the philosopher in New York, and he says there's something wrong here because if you follow evolutionary naturalism, it undermines the very rationality you need to believe, not only in evolutionary naturalism, but in any theory at all.
So my major problem, Peter, in all of this is not the mathematics. That's just an interesting bit of evidence. It's that here I am engaged in a rational discipline of mathematics that all dissolves if the evolutionary naturalistic account is true. In other words, I often say to people, shooting yourself in the foot is painful, but shooting yourself in the brain is fatal.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: By the way, Darwin actually, even though this discussion is tending to discount heavily, if not to dismiss his theories, Darwin is emerging as a fine writer, a wise man, and in all kinds of ways, an honest man.
He recognized the problem with the Cambrian record and then he recognized this huge question of where does the mind come from?
All right, Michael, I'm quoting you to yourself. Intelligent design can happily coexist with a large degree of natural selection. Antibiotic and pesticide resistance, antifreeze proteins in fish and plants, and more may indeed be explained by the Darwinian mechanism. The critical claim of intelligent design is not that natural selection doesn't explain anything, but that it doesn't explain everything.
Explain.
[00:10:11] Speaker E: That's exactly right. Because if you posit that natural selection produced all of life, then it has to have produced not only trivia, but the profound molecular machines that are found in the cell, the genetic code, the, the wings of a bird, and much more.
And we don't see that.
And yet it can work on DNA, for example. It can break genes.
A random mutation can break a gene and say, cause a brown bear to lose its coloration and become a white polar bear and eventually a new species. And it can break apart.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: But that's baby stuff by comparison with the original Ames.
[00:10:58] Speaker E: That's exactly right. So just like you driving down the road, there can be nicks, stones can bump up and nick your car and you can get a scratch on it and so on. You can recognize that the car is designed, there are random nicks and bumps and so on. So random things can happen. But can they explain this elegant machinery that has been discovered by science at the foundation of life? And of course, the answer is.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Now, I'm going to quote you one more time, listen carefully, because this one comes back to the two of you.
Michael Behe continues.
Take a deep breath here. This is big.
There could be, quote, a root open for a subtle God to design life without overriding natural law.
If quantum events, such as radioactive decay are not governed by causal laws, then it breaks no law of nature to influence such events.
Further, although we may not be able to detect quantum manipulations, we may nevertheless be able to conclude confidently that the final structure was designed. So here we start, all three of you.
There are very serious problems with Darwin.
Then we go to step two, which is if there's a code, maybe there's a coder.
I see that everybody recognizes we're on tricky territory. But all three are still there. And now Behe here goes to step three.
Actually, I think I see a mechanism by which the coder may have operated in this material world.
Am I being fair to you?
[00:12:42] Speaker E: Yes, that's true.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Okay, boys, do you go for that?
[00:12:45] Speaker C: I don't.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Steve. You don't?
[00:12:47] Speaker C: No. I think that when we invoke the action of a mind, we're invoking a non material cause. And we don't need to play by the rules of scientific materialism to invent a mechanism to explain the origin of information.
Because we know from our uniform and repeated experience that information always arises from a mind. We don't understand the interface, the mind body interface. In the case of human intelligence.
We know that we can affect the material world by the choices we make and by the thoughts that we have. I'm going to choose to move this water glass right now. But I don't know how my volitional act of my mind to initiate that act affected the material world. That interface is unknowable to us at this point. But we can infer from certain sorts of effects back to the activity of a mind. We know that a distinctive artifact or effect of intelligent activity is the production of information. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source. Whether we're talking about computer code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal, we always come back to a mind.
[00:13:55] Speaker E: If I could interrupt Steve, a second. I think we're talking across purposes here. I wasn't saying that radioactive decay is responsible for because it's a random event. The quotation that Peter Read was saying, could a clever God or clever mind use something that was undetectable to scientific instrumentation to affect the results that he wanted?
So it's not a mechanism, it's a tool rather. And it's a tool wielded by a model.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: I'm not so much disagreeing with Mike Behe. I mean disagreeing with the requirement that many of our evolutionary colleagues want to place on the theory of intelligent design. That it formulate its alternative explanation as a mechanistic cause. We're proposing a different kind of cause, a mental cause, which is something we recognize from our ordinary experience.
But somehow when we get into the science lab, we want to say, well, everything has to be explained materialistically, even information which we know doesn't come about by undirected material processes.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: I'm going to go to John Lennox as the referee here.
Isn't it in the nature of science, even among, perhaps even especially among believers, Newton was a, I think it's fair to say he was a Christian. He was certainly a dean. He was a Christian.
[00:15:14] Speaker D: Of course, all the pioneers of mathematics were believers.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: And Newton understands himself to be exploring the mind of God.
[00:15:20] Speaker D: Yes, that's right.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: And at some basic level, Newton, faithful Christian, is saying, how did he do it? How did he do this? How did he do that? He's not saying, well, it's the mind of God, therefore no more questions to follow. He's in search of specific mechanisms. And that's a good and noble thing which endows us with nine tenths of what we know about physics in some basic way. Right? So here's the question that presents itself to me, layman, that I hear stand in for baffled people the world over.
Science.
The question in science, how does it happen?
Charles Darwin says, here's how it happened, okay? And if you guys want to say, well, Charles Darwin was wrong, then I say, okay, if it didn't happen that way, how did it happen?
And the answer can't just be God or it can't just be designer. There's some sort of human impulse in us to say, well, how, how, what's the mechanism? And that's a fair question. And B, he's taking a shot at it. And Stephen's trying to say, no, no.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: I will come back at you in a bit.
[00:16:27] Speaker D: When Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he didn't say, now I've got a scientific explanation. I don't need God.
What he did was to write Principia Mathematica, most famous book in the history of science, and expressed in it the hope that his research would lead thinking people to believe in God. In other words, he believed his science was showing evidence of an intelligence, intelligent input into the universe, beauty, design, predictability. But the important thing here is that a huge confusion comes up through Richard Dawkins suggesting that the God explanation is the same as the scientific explanation. That's like saying that the Henry Ford explanation for a motor car is the same as the explanation in terms of physics and automobile engineering, there are different kinds of explanation and we need both to give a full explanation.
[00:17:31] Speaker C: And there are different kinds of questions. Peter. Yes, the question of how the internal combustion engine operates can be answered using principles of mechanical and electrical engineering. But the question of the origin of the car can't be answered apart from invoking activity of an intelligence. In the Principia Newton developed, he described the ongoing regular process of gravity. And he used a law, a mathematical law to describe that process. But he also believed that the fine tuning of the solar system gave direct evidence of the activity of a designing intelligence. He said this most beautiful system of sun, planet and comets could only be the product of an intelligent and powerful being. So he actually made a direct design argument.
When we're talking about the origin of life or the origin of the universe or the origin of the Cambrian animals, there's another way of framing the question. It is what type of cause best explains the origin of these things? An undirected material process or an intelligent cause and science.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but why do you object to Michael's attempt to find a mechanism?
[00:18:30] Speaker E: Yes, Michael, let me just.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: Yes, Michael, Let Michael come in.
[00:18:34] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: I feel as though I've set things up so that the two of you have been able to beat him about the head and shoulders.
[00:18:39] Speaker E: When Isaac Newton developed his wonderful law of gravity, he was asked, what the heck is gravity?
He said, hypothesis non fingo.
[00:18:49] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:18:49] Speaker E: I feigned no hypothesis.
[00:18:52] Speaker C: He had no mechanism.
[00:18:53] Speaker E: He didn't have a mechanism. What's the mechanism for the Big bang?
I don't know. What's the mechanism for radioactive decay?
So there's lots of things that happen. People don't know what the mechanism is, but we see patterns and we can deduce explanations from the patterns.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to quote you, and I begin by quoting someone you quote. This is more behe here.
Biochemist Franklin Herold in his 2001 book the Way of the Cell.
We should reject as a matter of principle the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity.
But we must concede that there are presently no detailed accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful explanations. Close quote.
And Michael says, well, to begin with, that's quite a breathtaking concession and congratulations, the science has moved along enough to recognize the limits to Darwin. And then Michael continues. Harold never spells out his reasoning. That is to say why we should reject intelligent design in principle.
But I think the principle probably boils down to this.
Design appears to point Strongly beyond nature. All three of us are down for. Everybody's down for that. It has philosophical and theological implications because some think that science should avoid a theory that points so strongly beyond nature they want to rule out intelligent design from the start. Close quote. This is the question of drawing lines. And I pose the question to Michael Behe. What the heck is wrong with that? We just say science goes as far as it goes with our five senses and what we can reason there from. And when it hits a dead end, it says, dead end.
Haven't got it. Radioactive decay, gravity. Don't know, don't know, don't know, don't know.
Go ahead. So what's wrong with drawing these very sharp lines? Why do you want to include intelligent design in the scientific enterprise?
[00:21:02] Speaker E: Well, for a couple reasons. First, if scientists claimed that they did not know how life developed, that would be good with me, that would be a step in the right direction. Because they don't, unfortunately, people pretend that they do. On the other hand, we can tell, we conclude design. We. We infer design from physical evidence. It's not from some vision or anything that people have. If you look at a mousetrap, if you look at a mousetrap, you can tell it was designed. And you can tell because you see how the parts are arranged, the relationship of the parts with respect of each other to perform a function. When you look at an outboard motor on a boat, you see the same thing. You see a purposeful arrangement of parts.
Now, we see that in the machinery of the cell, we see outboard motors in the cell, we see trucks in the cell, and so on.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: But your life would be so much easier if at the end of your article you said, but less fun. You said, if you would like to pursue this further, go to the Department of Philosophy, go to the Department of Theology. Here the science ends.
[00:22:13] Speaker E: I say that after we conclude design, I do not infer to God.
And as I write, some people have approached me and said, yeah, I'm with you. I think it's intelligent, but I think it's, you know, space aliens have visited us.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Fred Hoyle's explanation.
[00:22:29] Speaker E: Exactly.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Go ahead, John.
[00:22:30] Speaker D: I think the basic question here, there are several, and they're very important, is what is an explanation?
That's a crucial question. And Michael cited Newton.
Hypothesi non fingo, his gravity. When I was taught in school, I thought the law of gravity explained gravity. And I was an adult before I discovered it explains no such thing. So that even a scientific explanation within its own terms is rarely Full. It's almost never full. That's the first thing. Secondly, we admit at all kinds of levels, explanations in terms of agent, like if we want a complete description of the motor car. Now, your earlier question to Michael, could God have done this? There is a sense in which God can do things any way he likes, but the issue is, how does God do it? And secondly, is his activity detectable scientifically?
Now, I'm putting those words together very carefully. Not is his involvement detectable, but is it detectable in terms of science? In other words, if you set up your definition of science as restricted to the five senses, so that you're not. And here comes the principle, the Socratic principle that is often violated. That the late Antony Flew saw that when he came to conclude that there was an intelligent designer behind the universe on the basis of DNA. And they said, oh, but you can't do that. He said, I follow the evidence where it leads. And this is the clash that arises.
You can either say, well, science has come to an end. It cannot answer this question. There are very few people want to say that.
Or you say, science is limited. We must open the field to other kinds of questions, like the why, questions of purpose, like teleology and all this kind of thing. And the underlying mistake that we're forced to think is that science and rationality are co. Extensive when they're not.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: And also that they're.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: That is to say, science doesn't. Science doesn't. Science does not cover the full field of rationality.
[00:24:55] Speaker D: History is a rational discipline, so is philosophy.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: There are different kinds of sciences. And this is what my PhD was about. There's historical science, there's historical science, historical scientific reasoning, which is all about abduction. Abduction. Inferring back to.
To explain causal origins. Imagine that you walk into the British Museum and you look at the Rosetta Stone and someone says, well, how did those inscriptions come about? If the archaeologist is governed by a principle that you alluded to indirectly, it's called methodological naturalism. We may only infer materialistic causes. Whatever the evidence, the scientists would miss the obvious explanation. This was produced by scribes, right? By intelligent agents. There are distinctive indicators of the activity of intelligence. And therefore that allows us to infer.
There was one. One of the early pioneers in the information sciences named Henry Quassler said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. In other words, our uniform and repeated experience affirms that there's only one type of cause that produces information.
But uniform and repeated experience is the basis of all historical, scientific reasoning. So there is a basis in historical scientific reasoning to infer intelligent design. There's no need or reason to limit the conclusions that we can consider in that branch of science.
[00:26:15] Speaker D: Because unless, and here's the bottom line for all of this, unless you presume a naturalistic worldview and imprison yourself in.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Its contents, that's not fair. If the evidence leads beyond a naturalistic view, you must pursue it, correct?
[00:26:32] Speaker C: Why shouldn't you?
[00:26:33] Speaker D: All right, but why shouldn't you? That's exactly what I'm saying, okay? Otherwise, you're closing yourself within a prison.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: All three of you strike me as well. Of course, you're rather argumentative, but you, all three of you strike me as rational men. And yet look at the lives you lead.
Steve Meyer wrote an article on the Cambrian Explosion for the Proceedings of the Biological Society at the Smithsonian Institution, and his editor was harassed and finally left the institution.
Michael Behe has evoked from his colleagues at Lehigh University, which is a great university and especially strong in the sciences, a statement on their website that Dr. Behe is entitled to express his views. But we, his colleagues in the Biology department, do not view them as science.
[00:27:25] Speaker C: He's been disclaimed.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: He's been disclaimed.
Why academics espouse all kinds of crazy ideas.
Why should these ideas, why should the challenge to Darwin and the suggestion that if there's a code, there's a coder, the suggestion of an intelligent design evoke such singular hostility? What is going on? I'll start with John, because I didn't.
[00:27:56] Speaker D: Give you the what is going on as the domination of naturalism and materialism in the academy, which is so ironical. I'm from Oxford University.
Its motto, and it's been there for a long time, is Dominus illuminatio mea. The people that founded the great universities of the world had no problem with the idea of an intelligent designer of the universe. But now, somehow, in the academy, anybody who espouses the idea that was the foundation of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries, arguably as a historical thesis, is out.
That strikes me.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: And that idea is the founding idea is.
[00:28:40] Speaker D: The founding idea is. Well, Let me quote C.S. lewis. Men became scientific. Why? Because they expected law and nature. And they expected law in nature because they believed in the legislator. There it is encapsulated. That's Whitehead's thesis, if you want it. North Whitehead. And the point is, these gentlemen here tragically have been subject to an anti intellectualism that has lost the spirit that lies behind the modern science. That these universities claim to teach two quotations.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: And then I'm going to ask each of you to comment.
Here's quotation number one. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, your sometime debating opponent. Richard Dawkins.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. If there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.
Here's the second quotation from a man who, at the time he wrote this, was known as Cardinal Ratzinger. He would later become Pope Benedict xvi.
Let us go directly to the question of evolution and its mechanisms. Microbiology and biochemistry have brought revolutionary insights here. We must have the audacity to say that the great projects of living creation are not the products of chance and error.
They show us a creating intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before.
Who's the better scientist? Who has a better grasp?
[00:30:18] Speaker D: Well, the first statement is not a statement of science at all.
Dawkins is giving his own atheistic belief and doing a spin on morality which he contradicts in his own life. So it's of no consequence.
[00:30:32] Speaker E: I think I'd like to, you know.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Remind me never to cross you, John.
[00:30:36] Speaker E: I sometimes quote the same quote from Dawkins that you just read previously and followed up by saying he must be a lot of fun at parties because he has this. Such a gloomy view, but he supports nothing. And Cardinal Ratziger later, Pope Benedict is talking science. He wasn't talking about how he really is.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: He's not overshooting.
[00:30:59] Speaker E: No, yeah, that's. He was talking. He was, I should say. He's talking the latest science. He's talking about what has been discovered by molecular biology and biochemistry and cell biology. He's not talking about, you know, how squirrels are so cute or things like that. He's saying, holy moly. These are machines.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Holy moly is a technical term.
[00:31:21] Speaker D: Ratzinger's voice was very important.
He was in a school of very interesting German philosophers led by a man called Speyman.
And one of the best deconstructions of Dawkins was written by one of Spemann's pupils, a man called Reinhard Loew. Unfortunately, it's only in German, not in English, but it is absolutely brilliant. But Ratzinger, really, before he became Pope, he wrote a lot on this kind of stuff and influenced the present cardinal in Vienna, Schoenborn, a great deal.
[00:31:57] Speaker C: Can I say something in favor of the Dawkins quote? I like the framing. He says, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should observe if at bottom there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. I love the way he frames the issue. Question is, is he right?
Are the things we makes a testable assertion. He makes a testable assertion about his materialistic philosophy. But then last summer, interestingly, he confessed to being knocked sideways by the digital information processing system of the cell. There was a new animation that was put up about it by an Australian group and he said he was shocked by the intricate complexity. There's something extremely surprising. The universe doesn't look as it should. From a strictly materialistic point of view, we should not expect the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics. We shouldn't expect a beginning to the universe. And from a materialistic point of view, we certainly shouldn't have expected to find the intricate nanotechnology and information technology that is evident in the living cell.
[00:33:02] Speaker E: He's concluding from physical evidence whether he thinks there's purpose or not in the universe. And he's got his opinion. But that means that that's a legitimate thing that one can ask.
Is there physical evidence for or purpose in life in the universe?
[00:33:19] Speaker C: It actually implies that it's legitimate to consider the question of design.
[00:33:22] Speaker D: Yes, but it's worse than that. He's denying the existence of good and evil and that destroys morality. And he does believe in the problem of evil because he rails against it. So there's a total disconnect at the moral level.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: Gentlemen, last question, last question. I'm going to set it up one more time with two quotations.
Quotation one, Michael Behe.
The strength of intelligent design derives mainly from the workaday progress of science.
The cell is not getting any simpler, it is getting much more complex. Progress in 20th century science has led us to the design hypothesis. I expect progress in the 21st century to confirm and extend it.
Close quote. Here's quotation number two from a colleague of many of you, mathematician David Berlinsky. The theory of evolution is unique among scientific instruments and being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks.
There are in Darwin's scheme no special creation, no divine guidance or transcendental forces.
Darwin, the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude. Berlinski continues, made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
No doubt, David Berlinski concludes, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played.
It's not a question of the science. What you're up against is a worldview.
And Michael, very cheerfully says, science is science, they'll come around in this century.
The hypothesis of design will be extended and confirmed. And Berlinsky says, oh, you silly boy, what do you think?
Tell who's more likely right, the optimist or David Berlinski.
[00:35:21] Speaker D: I'm not a prophet, but I'll tell you what Dawkins has done for me.
He's made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian.
[00:35:32] Speaker C: Stephen, I love what Mike said about the way the hypothesis of intelligent design is being confirmed and extended by 21st century science. We're seeing that with many important experimental results and new discoveries. For example, a few years ago, the discovery that only a certain portion of the DNA codes for proteins and the rest doesn't led many Neo Darwinists to develop the concept of junk DNA.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:36:01] Speaker C: The 97% that doesn't code for proteins, they said, is just the leftover flopsum and jepsum of the random trial and error process of natural selection and random mutation.
Several of our leading ID proponents in the 1990s and early 2000s said, well, we agree that there should be some evidence of those random mutations accumulating, but not 97%. So, so we're going to predict based on our theory that those non coding regions of the DNA aren't junk DNA, but rather they are importantly functional. And that prediction has now been confirmed by the ENCODE project and a number of other interesting developments in bioinformatics. And we now know that the non coding regions of the DNA are functioning roughly like an operating system in a computer. They're controlling the timing and expression of the coding files. And so we actually this is a prediction that was made by proponents of intelligent design that's been confirmed by new discoveries.
[00:36:58] Speaker D: I didn't answer your question. Am I an optimist? Actually I am not a biologist, but reading the stuff from the so called third wave of biology really does make me quite an optimist that there will be an intellectual breakthrough. There was a meeting at the Royal.
[00:37:15] Speaker A: Society under the weight of accumulating scientific work.
[00:37:17] Speaker D: Under the weight of evidence. Yes, they, it's, it's a very heavy ship, but it's beginning to turn, I think. And there was evidence at the Royal Society meeting just at the time.
[00:37:26] Speaker C: John's referring to a meeting in 2016 that was convened by members of the Royal Society and evolutionary biologists who doubt the standard Neo Darwinian model and who are saying we need a new theory of evolution. And they called a meeting to explore new evolutionary mechanisms that could either replace or supplement natural selection because of its Lack of creative power.
[00:37:46] Speaker A: I said that was the last question. But here's the last question.
[00:37:51] Speaker E: Too much fun.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Here's. Here's you three of you lovely, cheerful, splendid men. And you say, if there's a code, there's a coder. And you say, well, there are mechanisms by which one could imagine a mind participating or intervening or participating, let's say that in the material world. All right, here's the objection.
Haven't you ever heard of the Inquisition?
Haven't you ever heard of the religious wars? Don't you understand the importance of the American settlement whereby we had the Puritans in New England and the Episcopalians in the south and the Catholics in Maryland, and the settlement was to each his own.
But there's going to be a public space here in which we can work together.
This is what gives us the American, modern American, the university, the modern research, let's put it that way, the modern research institution.
And it's the way you three are going. Maybe the three of you don't intend it, but the people who come right after you are going to be right back to put them in stocks. Old fashioned morality.
Religion is a very tricky and quite often in human history, baneful influence. And the three of you are kicking open the door to this dragon that we had very carefully locked up.
Michael.
[00:39:23] Speaker E: Well, opinions differ on that, I think.
But you know, the thing is that.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: You'Re undermining the Enlightenment.
[00:39:30] Speaker E: This is science.
And science doesn't care about your particular worldview. We have throughout history, scientific discoveries such as the microbial world and relativity and other things have upset our very notion of what reality is. And now it's the turn of molecular biology and biochemistry to make us sit up and take notice.
I can't stop science from discovering complexity and elegance in the cell. It's there. What people do with it is a different question.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: I'm saving the last word for John because he's the senior man at this table. As well you should.
[00:40:16] Speaker C: As well you should.
I have a friendly debating partner named Michael Ruse, British professor of philosophy and biology, Florida State. We've done a number of debates and Michael's written an important book in which he explains that Darwinism has functioned as a kind of secular religion for many people in the sciences.
And so people from different worldviews can at any time initiate inquisitions and cancellations of people they disagree with. I think we all have to be careful not to indulge in that. But this isn't.
The cancellations have not just come from one side or the other. In the debates in human history, on the other hand. And so I think one of the reasons that Intelligent design has been silenced, that Michael's been disclaimed and Richard Sternberg was persecuted at the Smithsonian Institution.
[00:41:10] Speaker A: I'm a little too close to you myself, come to think of it.
[00:41:11] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Is that when you challenge Darwinism, you are challenging not just a scientific theory, but a deeply held worldview or something that's functioning as a kind of secular religion. And people on that side of the aisle have been guilty of indulging in cancel culture. And I think we just all need to disclaim that and follow the evidence where it leads. And one final thought, and that is that in the history of science, a belief in a designer, a creator, inspired scientific innovation and development. You look at Newton, for example. He developed the calculus, the binomial theory, the developed the theory of gravitation, the laws of motion. His Principia was meant to reveal the principles of creation that had come from the mind of God. So a belief in a creator doesn't stifle scientific innovation, it can inspire it. And we think our modern theory of intelligent design is also going to lead to new discoveries such as the one I mentioned a minute ago. That junk DNA isn't junk.
[00:42:12] Speaker A: John Lennox, professor emeritus of mathematics, a noble and pure expression of the mind of man, at one of the greatest universities that has ever existed, the University of Oxford. Professor Lennox, you are complicit in rolling back the Enlightenment?
[00:42:30] Speaker D: Absolutely. I'm delighted to do it because the Enlightenment discovered that the best way to deal with opponents was to cut their heads off.
And the historians, particularly John Gray, who's an atheist, actually one of the top historians of the intellectual in Europe, points out that there's a direct line from the Enlightenment to the persecutions of Stalin and the horrific destruction of life in the 20th century. So you'll get nowhere with the Enlightenment. Second point, coming from Northern Ireland, I'm acutely aware of the reputation of religions, particularly Christianity, for causing war.
And that has led me to do a lot of investigating.
And I've come to the conclusion about which I've written, so I'm not going to it in much detail, but what has happened there is that people have failed to go to the heart of the issue. Now, some religions may generate wars, I'm not denying that, and they will have to speak for themselves.
But one of the most interesting things about Christianity is that Christ was tried.
And it's on public record that he was tried for being a terrorist. We rarely put it into modern terms, he was exonerated by the Roman procurator. And why?
Because when challenged whether he was a political opponent of Rome, he said, my kingdom is not from this world, otherwise my servants would have been fighting. And he stopped them fighting.
But now my kingdom isn't from here.
You're a king? Yes. He said, to this end I was born, and to this end I came into the world to bear witness to the truth.
And Pilate said, what is truth? And went out, declared Christ innocent, but then gave in to the crowd. The point of that is hugely important historically. I used to wonder, why is there so much in the New Testament Gospels about the trial of Christ? And suddenly I realized it's because of this precise question. Christ repudiated violence so that people in my own country who followed him using bombs on both sides, they weren't Christian at all because they repudiated Christ.
The obvious thing in all of this is the one thing you cannot do with sheer power is to impose truth on people. And I think Pilate saw that.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: John Lennox, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, thank you. Thank you for Uncommon Knowledge on the Hoover Institution, I'm Peter Robinson.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: That was Peter Robinson hosting Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe and John Lennox on Uncommon Knowledge.
The interview is reposted here at ID the Future with kind permission of Peter Robinson and the Hoover Institution.
To watch the video version of this interview and to find more great Uncommon Knowledge content, hop over to YouTube and search Uncommon Knowledge and Uncommon Knowledge. Meyer behe Linux for ID the future this is Andrew McDermott. Thanks for tuning in.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org.
[00:46:03] Speaker C: This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: Recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
