[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm sitting down with Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt, co authors of a new young adult novel called the Farm at the center of the Universe, now available from Discovery Institute Press. Guillermo Gonzalez is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from the University of Washington. He has done postdoctoral work at the University of Texas Austin and at the University of Washington, and has received fellowships, grants, and awards from such institutions as NASA, the University of Washington, the Templeton foundation, the Scientific Research Society Sigma Z, and the National Science Foundation.
Jonathan Witt is executive editor of Discovery Institute Press and a senior fellow and senior project manager with Discovery Institutes center for Science and Culture. He is author or co author of several books, including a meaningful world, how the arts and sciences reveal the genius of nature, intelligent design, uncensored and heretic one, scientists journey from Darwin to design.
Whit is the lead writer and associate producer for Poverty, Inc. Winner of the Templeton Freedom Award and recipient of over 50 international film festival awards.
Gentlemen, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you.
[00:01:36] Speaker C: Happy to be here.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Yep, glad to be here, Andrew.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Well, you can both add to your impressive credentials that you're now young adult fiction authors. Now, how does that feel?
[00:01:47] Speaker C: Well, that's great. I never thought I'd be saying that or hear that said, but it's exciting to write in this genre.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah, we're looking forward to the rollout on, what, may 21.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is a genre that discovery institute has not really moved into quite yet. We have a lot of resources for adults. You know, we have a graphic novel, but we really have moved into this space. So I'm excited to see this new entry. So before we jump in, let me start by giving our audience just an idea of the book's story. This is from the official book description copy the farm at the center of the universe why did Isaacs father have to die so young? Isaacs older cousin Charlie, a science teacher, says he knows why nature is pitiless. Theres no God, no afterlife, just atoms and the void and the struggle for survival. Charlie says a week at their grandparents farm seeing animals get killed and eaten will prove it. But at the farm, both of them get more than they bargained for. And soon Isaac finds himself caught in a battle of wits between two men and facing a choice he alone can make.
So, Guillermo, let's start with you. What inspired you to write the farm at the center of the universe.
[00:03:02] Speaker C: Well, as you noted earlier, this is an area where the Discovery institute has not really had a book. And the books that are produced by the Discovery Institute are for adults, often college educated. They can be quite technical. In particular, the book I wrote with Jay Richards, a privileged planet, is rather technical, although we've tried to make it so that it's understandable by a wide range of people. And the documentary associated with it, dvd documentary called the Privileged Planet, has been seen by many people. And I've had young people down to five or six years of age say they've seen it and they like it. But of course, the documentary only scratches the surface of what the book is about, the privileged planet. And so my primary motivation was to try to get the ideas from the privileged planet out to a wider age range, in particular to young adults. Originally, the book, in my mind, anyway, was going to be starting at seven or eight years of age, but we decided that it would be more interesting. We could delve into some more deep issues about life and death if it were aimed at just a little bit older, say, 13 to 18 years of age. And so that was, I would say, my primary motivation for that.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Okay, now, Isaac is one of the central characters. How old is he?
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Isaac is about 13.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:32] Speaker C: And he has a mother, and he's got a couple of siblings, and they're not really present throughout most of the story, basically focusing on Isaac as the main character and then a few other people he interacts with.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Okay, now, can you introduce some of the other characters to us?
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Sure. So we have introduced first to Charlie, who's Isaac's older cousin, who's driving him to his grandparents farm in Iowa, which is how the book starts. And then Charlie, in fact, is Isaac's science teacher at school. And the other two main characters are Isaac's grandparents. So they live on a farm in Iowa, and most of the interaction is amongst Isaac, Charlie, and the two grandparents.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Now, Jonathan, what appealed to you about this story when it first came across your desk?
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Well, it's funny, because Guillermo, if you know anything about Guillermo and his work, he's just this absolutely brilliant astrobiologist. And if you know anything about astrobiology, you know, you have to be a little bit of a jack of many trades in addition to being a, you know, really rock solid astronomer, because you've got to know something about biology and chemistry and geology because, you know, they're looking for, you know, what would be required to have an extra solar planet that could actually host life, host complex life. So it ends up being highly player involved. And so he's this brilliant scientist. Okay, he wants to write a children's book. Oh, how's this going to go? Is he going to be able to reach that level? Well, as soon as I started reading it, I was taken by the character and the plot concept. But I thought, you know, he's gotten about three fourths. The way he's picturing a children's book, which would be, you know, eight to twelve, he didn't quite make it there. They're too complex. And I was like, how do you convey the privileged planet hypothesis, this complex, fascinating argument about how life in the universe seems to be designed both for life and for scientific discovery? How do you boil that down? Very easily.
And I thought, you know, if we made this a ya novel, our job would be a lot easier. And there's so much more we could pack in because the first version was about 10,000 words, and we can go a lot further. I know there's other things Guillermo would love to work in if he had some more space. I know there's some arguments I'd like to make, you know, bring in more of the biology, traditional id biology arguments. Bring a character that had been off camera, so to speak, on camera, the cousin Charlie. And so I suggested some of these things to Guillermo, and he says, well, why don't you co write it with me at some point? And I was like, well, you know, if you want. But, I mean, you know, if you want to keep going. He's like, no, no, let's do this together. And so he was really excited, and his enthusiasm was infectious, and so it kind of grew from there.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: And is it based on real life events, Guillermo? Or did you think of this story as a way to tell the bigger arguments that you've worked on?
[00:07:38] Speaker C: In fact, it is based on some real life events. It's in some places an autobiography of sorts. It's a biography of my family. And I'm not going to say specifically in which ways, except, well, maybe one way. My background is cuban. I was born in Havana. I came to the US as a refugee in the 1960s. And the grandpa in the story, who's often called Abuelo, is also a Cuban born. So that aspect is very close between me and the character, though, Guillermo.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Guillermo is much, much younger than the grandpa.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Yes, a little bit.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: A little bit younger.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: It is interesting when you put it into a novel form. You know, Jonathan, you were saying, you know, that it is hard to condense a lot of these scientific arguments, but I think you've done a good thing in putting it into a story. You know, like, how do you get teens to wrestle with this? Well, put it into the mind of a teenager who's going through some, you know, rough stuff in life and has the opportunity to think about these things and see how that comes through, see how it filters through in his mind. So it's a great experiment on that front. Now, Jonathan, what was the co authoring process like? I mean, we have an astrobiologist and a humanities generalist coming together to work on this. Was a lot of back and forth, or did you kind of get into a groove? You know, tell us more.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: There was a lot of back and forth, and I would have. Guillermo and I are friends. We got to know each other from working on the privileged planet documentary. I was the lead scriptwriter on that. And then he came to Lubbock, and we spent some time mushrooming up in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. And my kids, we have. We share a lot of. Share a lot of fond memories. But if he hadn't had, you know, just the basic kind of story, I would have had to, you know, we'd had to say no. And I also got John west to come in because I thought, if I'm going to be involved with this, I need an outside perspective. And John was like, there's a good story here. It just needs to be ripened and fleshed out. So we just kicked it back and forth. My wife, who's also a storyteller, she came in and helped some when she was like, well, the grandma kind of disappeared from this scene. And, you know, the voice here is a little too old sounding, and so she was really helpful. So. And we got other people to weigh in. We got some younger people to look at it. So there were a lot of iron. Sharpening iron. It was a fun process.
[00:10:09] Speaker C: I can add that he certainly spiced it up a lot.
If it were just for me, left to me, the book would be much more boring.
A lot of the conflicts that you see in the story, which make it interesting, I think, really are Jonathan's ideas, and I think they really help the story a lot.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, as far as ideal audience, can adults pick this up? Is it just geared towards teens? How young can we go with audience? Where's the sweet spot? Obviously, you want to go for teens, but is it accessible to others?
[00:10:45] Speaker C: Let me start on that. I think it's accessible for people just a little bit younger than, say, 13, but not too much younger, because it does deal with some issues with death of a close loved one and so question of suffering in the world. So I think those kinds of questions are kind of probably difficult for somebody maybe less than ten years old or eleven years old. Probably hard for younger people, but older people, adults, I think, would get a lot out of this book. And in fact, I encourage maybe adults with children in this age range, especially the younger ones, to read it to them, read passages. But yeah, adults would get a lot out of this as well, I think.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we were. If you've done any reading, if you're an adult, maybe you've had kids, teens, you know, those books where you can all sit around as a family and read them and whether you're 50 or 13, you're gonna enjoy it. That's what we were aiming for. Yes, the main character's 13, but you know, books where that's fine, the novel's interesting. They're not talking down to the kids, they're not yuck, yucking it up in a way that's gonna make the adults roll their eyes.
Adults, you know, 30, 40 year olds are not the target audience. It's, ya know, teens.
But yeah, I think they wrestle with some serious stuff in here.
There's some humorous touches, but yeah, there's some meat here. I think anybody that's hit that maturity level, teen it up could enjoy it.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: And speaking from a teacher's perspective, the importance of reading at an early age is well founded. But some people forget, hey, you can read with your teens as well. And in fact, they would appreciate that experience, just sitting down with them and having a couple copies of the book and sharing the reading aloud. It's a good experience. Now, Guillermo, you teamed up with Jay Richards on the 2004 book the Privileged Planet, as you've mentioned, which shared remarkable evidence of fine tuning and design from contemporary astronomy and physics that challenges this prevailing materialist narrative of our planet as an insignificant, accidental, pale blue dot in the middle of the vast, uncaring depths of space. So is farm at the center of the universe simply the privileged planet argument presented in story form, or did you want to take it further?
What were you thinking there?
[00:13:15] Speaker C: Well, at first I did want to present the privileged planet to a younger audience, make it more accessible. But as I started thinking about it and I started incorporating other aspects of intelligent design into the book, in fact, you can find bits and pieces of Bill Demski's ideas in there, like how do we detect things that are designed? You can see a lot of Michael Behe in there about the evidence of design in biological systems, even some Gunther Benchley in there on the fossil record. So we cover a lot of ground, and I'm happy to do that. It came out that way, rather, not just the privileged planet and everything covered there about earth sciences and astronomy, geology and so on, but basically, it covers all the bases, at least to some extent, from the intelligent design movement.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: And there's so many lines of evidence coming out of the intelligent design research community. I mean, you wouldn't be able to pack it all in, but it's good to hear that several strands are in there. Well, this is a really heavy story from what I've heard and what I've read. We've got a young man dealing with the loss of his father, and we've got some wrestling with the big questions of life, like why are we here? Is there a purpose to the universe? Does this story get into religion specifically or any religious elements in particular?
[00:14:36] Speaker A: Just glancingly, it's primarily design arguments, science based, but there are some kind of more philosophical arguments in a few places. The cousin Charlie pushes some theological arguments against belief in God. You know, if there was a good and loving God, you know, why would there be pain and suffering and death? And so they wrestle with some of that, but it's not.
There's never a Bible says this and therefore shut up kind of a mindset. It's. They're wrestling philosophically, wrestling with that scientific evidence. So that's the primary focus, the. The grandparents. There's little hints that the grandparents are christians. There's a bible on the coffee table.
They do read one passage of scripture at one point. So we don't try to hide any christian religious background from the grandparents. But that's not the primary focus of the novel.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Okay, now, one of the central locations of the story is the grandparents farm. You know, a lot's happening there. What aspects of farm and ranch life do readers get to experience?
[00:15:47] Speaker C: Well, you get the usual things that you would think. For example, there's a barn with cows, and Isaac gets to learn how to milk the cows, and he deals with chickens and how to gather the eggs, and he even helps Grandpa fix his tractor at one point. So there's a lot of that. They also have a greenhouse where they grow their own vegetables. But each of those, almost all those are, you know, we try to connect it in some way to evidence of design in nature.
Somehow they weave kind of very naturally into the storyline, and they also goes around exploring in different parts of the property. So it's not just the barn and the barnyard. But they have a pond and they have the woods that they walk into and so on.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And that is a way that kids can start understanding the deeper issues of life around animals, pets, when they die, when they pass, and just the life and death cycle outside in nature, kids get to be a part of that and explore that. So it's cool that you chose that as a setting. Does it ever get back into the city, or is it mainly just this visit to the grandparents farm?
[00:17:10] Speaker C: No, it really never gets back to the city. And it doesn't start in the city. It only starts as they're leaving the city. So it really takes place completely outside the city environment.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Okay. Now, I noticed the book is illustrated. Are these illustrations kind of what came out of your head, Guillermo, as you were visualizing the story, or did they come as you guys worked on it?
[00:17:34] Speaker C: We had a first set of illustrations that another artist did for us. And after he wrote a very early version, rough draft of the book, and they were pretty close to what I was thinking. I liked that. And then we ended up using a different illustrator in the end, and he started working with some of those original illustrations. Yeah, I really like how they turned out. They were pretty close to what I had in mind for those scenes that were depicted.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Yeah, we had the original illustrations, had the boy younger, and then as we revised the novel, and had him a little bit older and made an older novel for that and a couple other reasons having to do with color versus black and white, we had to make a shift. But that was all part of the creative process of getting. Getting those illustrations. Yeah.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Isaac grew up with the book over the years.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Yeah. That's understandable. That's going to happen. Jonathan, was it hard to put illustrations into a book? I know we don't do that very often at Discovery Institute Press, but we.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Ended up getting Marcos Eberlin. He's a brilliant brazilian chemist, and he has one of our books, foresight, that's been endorsed by Nobel laureates. He had an illustrator I knew from another project of his, and we asked him if he could reach out to him, a black and white illustrator. And so that's. We ended up going that direction since the interior illustrations are black and white, because we wanted the book to be affordable, and it just wasn't going to be affordable if we had interior color illustrations.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And is it going to be released in paperback only?
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Is there a hardcover, paperback and Kindle epub? I don't think there'll be a hardback. No.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Okay. All right. So digital copies and a paperback, if you're the type that likes to hold books in your hand. Well, here's a question. If Spielberg, you know, came, came knocking, would. Would you be open to a movie version? Could you see it as a movie? Does it have the dramatic elements for a good YA movie?
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Well, I would tell him I'm waiting for Christopher Nolan to show up and then we'll start the negotiation process with those two.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:19:52] Speaker C: I would certainly love to see a movie made from this book. Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be, it wouldn't be a blockbuster style movie because it's more thoughtful, but there are, I think, well rounded characters. There's humor, there's things at stake. So that would be fun. That's fun to dream about. Yeah.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah. But nothing in the works. No screenplay being worked out.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: No, nothing in the works at this point.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's see how it does as a young adult novel.
Well, what do you think is the take home message, Guerrell and Jonathan, that you would like young teens, young, young adults to be getting from this, to.
[00:20:31] Speaker C: Learn to look at the world with a new set of eyes, looking different way of looking at it, to be open to evidences of design that may be right under their noses and they've not really noticed it before. So that's one thing that the book, I hope, encourages people to do, is just look at the world in a different way.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And the grandpa character, Dibuelo, he's fun in that he enjoys friendly debate with the cousin. The cousin's a little bit more dour and has some issues, but the grandpa never gets shrill and worked up just because he loves, you know, pursuing evidence and working through arguments. So he's a fun character and he's a nice model for, you know, let's, you know, if you have a view and you have a perspective about some scientific issue, you know, hey, let iron, sharpen iron. You know, be happy to go in and listen to different perspectives and argue through, work through. You don't have to be afraid of the evidence. And so I think he's a good, that character's a good role model in that regard for any aspiring young scientist.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, I haven't read the whole.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: And the grandpa, by the way, is a scientist. He's a retired scientist. He's not a farmer. He's a retired chemistry professor.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. That makes sense. And as I said, I haven't read the whole thing, and we're not going to spoil it for people who want to read it, but Charlie is an interesting character. And I'm sure that kids, young adults who read it may have somebody in mind when they read Charlie's words, either a teacher or somebody in their life that just pounds that evolutionary perspective and even has that healthy dose of pessimism about life. So it's interesting. But does Charlie have an arc as well? Does he change over time or not?
[00:22:22] Speaker A: I would say not so much. Guillermo, is that your. Yeah. No, your take?
[00:22:26] Speaker C: Not really.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: Yeah, he's pretty set.
He has a little complexity. I mean, it's not a long novel, so you can't have zillions of highly round characters. But we did try to give him some texture. He gets in some good arguments. I mean, the grandpa at the end of the day, gets the better of him. But we tried not to make a kind of a flimsy straw man type character who never had any interesting arguments. So he's textured, but, you know, he's bleeding out of the farm, continuing to stick to his kind of darwinian nihilism.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that can definitely be hard to shake. But of course, the main thing is how Isaac wrestles with it and how he comes out by the end of the story. So again, we won't give too many spoilers because next step is to actually go get the book. So, Guillermo, Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to just sit for a while and unpack some of what you've put together. I know it's a risk when you release something new to the world, and so I congratulate you on stepping out of your normal bounds to put together this young adult novel, and I hope it does well. I hope we reach a new swath of young people with the evidence for intelligent design and life in the universe. Well, Jonathan, how can folks get ahold of this book?
[00:23:46] Speaker A: You'll be able to, beginning May 21. I think this podcast is going to come out after that. So you should be able to just pause the end of this. Go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and just type in farm at the center of the universe. Find it. You'll also be able to go to Discovery press. That's it. Just type in the URL, Discovery Press and it'll pull up all discovery institute books, and they're sorted by the most recent first. And this is the, the newest book, so it should be right there at the top. So that's maybe the quickest way. And then you can click decide if you want to buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, whatever, and it'll be, as I said, ebook, kindle, paperback will be available in all those forms, and.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: It won't be a princely amount. How much are we talking for the paperback?
[00:24:32] Speaker A: I think the paperback's $11.95, I think. And the kindles, 899 999. Like that.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Not bad. Not bad. Now, just one more thing on the title. It is an interesting title. It stands out. The farm at the center of the universe. Guillermo, tell us a little bit about why you chose that title.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: It was actually Jonathan's idea. My original idea for the title we thought gave away too much. It was Grandpa, why can we see the stars? Was my idea for the original title.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Which I think is a really provocative question. But I don't know if a 1213 year old boy would frame the question that way.
So we thought, well, okay, that's true, but the form center of the universe is evoking that idea. That, okay, we learned in the history of the west that the earth is not at the center of the universe with the sun and everything else revolving around it. And atheist types have said, see, look, we thought we were so important, but now we're just, as Carl Sagan says, we're just a pale blue dot. We're not the center of anything. We're just a unimportant little planet around an unimportant little star in an remarkable galaxy, in a universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies. We're dust. Who's the bill nye the science guy? We suck. We're pointless. So this novel pushes back against that and points out that, no, we're not at the geographical center of the universe. Actually, nothing in the universe is or everything is. That's a conversation for another time. But if you look at where in the universe is really, really, really good real estate for life and scientific discovery, we have yet to find any place better than planet Earth. And so, in one sense, it is prime real estate. So the earth is kind of the farm, figuratively at the center of the universe in this other sense. So they get into that conversation at one point in the novel. Yeah.
[00:26:36] Speaker C: So, yeah, we want to make it clear we're not literally saying we believe in neocentrism, right?
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah. But if some high level people want to attack and slam the book and get us into the public eye, then we'll be happy to respond.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: There you go. No, it is a provocative title, and I, for one, I'm happy to see the arguments of the privileged planet come out in a different format. I mean, I remember teaching several years ago, and I showed the privileged planet video that was made from your book. To the kids and, you know, they lit up. They enjoyed it. So, so these are the kids, these are the, the audience that we're, we're shooting for with this book. And I'm glad to see that you're continuing the arguments in this different form. Well, Guillermo, thanks for your time. Jonathan, appreciate you stopping by. And as you heard, audience, Discovery Press is the website for the publisher Discovery Institute Press, but you can hop onto Amazon or Barnes and Noble anywhere books are sold and just type in that provocative title, the farm at the center of the universe. Gents, thanks so much for joining me.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: Thanks, Andrew. Great being on.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Well, for id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. We'll catch you next time. Thank you for joining us.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and in intelligentdesign.org. this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
