[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to Id the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Hi, I'm Andrew McDermott. How does an intelligent design theorist work effectively in a naturalistic culture? Today I'm speaking again with Paul Nelson, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, an adjunct faculty in the Master of Arts program in science and religion at Biola University, Nelson is a philosopher of biology who has been involved in the intelligent design debate internationally for three decades. Paul, welcome back to id the Future.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: In a previous episode, you shared remembrances and lessons you learned from philosopher of science Adolf Grumbau, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 95.
Why was our discussion of Grumbaum in part one a good place to start a series on working as an id theorist in a naturalistic culture?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: That's an excellent question. You know, I trained academically as a philosopher of science, and part of my training was classical philosophy, reading, for instance, platonic dialogues.
And the model of philosophy that I find most appealing and I think is borne out by history is dialogue, dialectic conversation, where you have opposing viewpoints and in the bouncing of opinions off each other and the exchange of views, truth emerges, or it should emerge. It's very hard to have a dialectical exchange with somebody who agrees with everything you say, right? So you say proposition a, and they say, yeah, proposition a. I agree. You just can't get any traction, right? You want someone to disagree with who can help you hone and sharpen your own position.
So Grunbaum taught me the value of dialectic of I say a, you say negation a, and we struggle to find the truth in that exchange. It can be painful. I'll be honest. He was a very powerful intellect and would sometimes just knock me off my feet like a bowling pin. But in those exchanges that we had, I learned that I don't need to be afraid. I need to come prepared. I need to be ready to argue, and I need to defend my positions, and I need to listen. I need to listen to what he's saying, because there may be wisdom there that I want to incorporate in my own position. So that's why we started with Gunnbaum, because my experience with him provided me with a really wonderful foundation for my subsequent work, right on down to 2020, where we are today.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: And to have those dialogues that you say are so useful in reaching the truth, you do have to have a good measure of humility and, as you say, good listening skills and just an appreciation for your fellow mandarin.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yes, humility, the willingness to listen the willingness to admit error, all of those are skills that one can learn, and I try hard to convey those skills to my own students now because they have been so valuable to me in my own experience.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Well, in your evolution news article, trapped in the naturalistic parabola, you describe something you call the naturalistic parabola. What is that exactly?
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Well, I'll ask the listeners to try to remember some of their high school geometry. Parabola is a familiar conic section that has certain features, like an axis of symmetry, a vertex from which it extends. It's a curve, and it extends infinitely. So, from the vertex along the axis of symmetry, you have lines projecting that never stop.
Now that's the geometry. Why call it a naturalistic parabola? Well, think about it this way. If I tell you that there's a rule to the game of science that sounds like this, and I'll quote from the national Academy, the statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes. That is the best short definition of methodological naturalism as the doctrine has come to be known. That's the best short definition that I know. Now, the key words in that statement are the verb must, which is an imperative. In other words, it doesn't give you a choice, the logical modifier only, which says, that's all that you get. And the adjective natural, where natural is defined, if you unpack that adjective, it's defined. With respect to physics, ultimately, these are processes, causes, mechanisms that do not entail a mind. There's no agent involved, there's no intelligence involved, nothing that would possess, for instance, the ability to visualize a point in the future that has yet to be realized. So natural in this context means derived bottom up from physics.
Think of that as a rule, a non negotiable rule. Okay, so let me recount a conversation on this very head that taught me a great deal. When I was quite young, in October 1983, I had lunch with the historian of science, Ron Numbers, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin writing a book on the history of the creation evolution debate in the United States. He had a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation to do this, and in October 1983, he came to Pittsburgh to look at some of my grandfather's papers. My grandfather, Byron Nelson, was a scopes era dissenter from darwinian evolution who wrote a number of influential books. And I had in a box some of my grandfather's correspondence and some of his papers, which Ron numbers needed for his research. So he took me out to lunch after he spent the morning looking at the correspondence, and we got to talking about this very question, the definition of science, in particular the rule of methodological naturalism.
And I'll never forget the conversation. It's what, 37 years later, Ron was tucking into his lunch, and he didn't even bother to look up.
I said, ron, you know the rule because it looks like it tailors the shape of reality before reality has a chance to speak for itself. What if design is real? What if causation by agency or mind is part of the story of nature? This rule will keep us from finding that out, right? And without even looking up, he said, Paul, think about a game of baseball.
Why is it that if you hit the ball really hard, I mean, you really smack it right and it flies way down the third baseline and lands in the parking lot? In other words, on the left side of the third baseline, why do you have to stay at home plate?
And I said, well, that's a rule of the game. And he said, that's exactly right. Rules have a certain arbitrary character. They allow certain things in. They keep others out.
When you play cricket, the cricket batsman stands at his wicket, and whatever direction the ball goes off of his bat, somebody on the opposing team has to field that ball. So what would be a foul ball in american baseball is a live ball in cricket, and someone's got to field it right. You can hit a six from your position at the wicket as a batsman that goes back into the parking lot, so to speak, on an american baseball field. Anyway, his point was, there is indeed an arbitrary character to methodological naturalism, but that's just the way the game of science is being played. All right, so let's go back to my parabola.
Within the naturalistic parabola, because it extends infinitely out into space or temporally infinitely into the future. According to the rule of methodological naturalism, if you can't find a natural cause, let's say for the origin of life, you've just got to stay at the bench, keep looking shoulder to the wheel. The statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes. That dictum does not allow for exceptions.
So when you are within the naturalistic parabola, you are playing the game of science by that rule, and there are problems with that.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Okay, so how do you get trapped in this naturalistic parabola?
[00:09:18] Speaker B: You're trapped when you yourself do not accept that rule of methodological naturalism, and you think you're talking about science with someone, and it turns out you're not talking about science at all. So let me give you some examples, or let's focus on just one, the origin of life.
So let's say you're in a conversation with someone who accepts methodological naturalism, although they haven't said that to you explicitly. You're in this conversation. You think you're talking about scientific theories about the origin of life. So they propose the Opiran Paul Dane primordial soup scenario, and you critique that, and you say, look, proteins will never form from amino acids in an aqueous setting because water attacks the peptide bonds. Proteins will never form. And they say, okay, I have another idea. I got this idea of the eigen hypercycle, and you critique that. And then they say, wait a minute, I've got another idea, Cairn Smith's clay world hypothesis. And you say, well, I see some problems there. And then they say, wait, wait, wait, the rna world and ribozyme replicators, and you could critique n. Let's just take a variable, right? N. We don't know what the number is, but whatever it is, you critique n hypotheses for the origin of life. And they say, wait a minute, I've got n plus one. And this will go on indefinitely. It will go on indefinitely, because what they are committed to is not the truth of any particular scientific hypothesis. What they are in fact committed to is the naturalistic premise. They're committed to the naturalistic parabola. And it wouldn't matter how many hypotheses you successfully critique.
They're playing the game by a fundamentally different rule than you are. And if you look at the illustrations in my evolution news and views article, you'll see that once you're within the parabola, it continues infinitely out into space. And it doesn't matter how many particular hypotheses you critique. The game has been defined in such a way that you have to stay looking for the naturalistic scenario, whether you find it or not. In a state like that, you are trapped. You think you're talking about science, and it's not science at all, really. It's a naturalistic commitment that cannot be turned back by any finite number of falsifications.
So to me, it's Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill in greek mythology, and it comes tumbling back down, and he's condemned to do that for the whole of eternity. That's not a situation I want to be in as a thinker, because there's no hope for progress.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Well, listeners, you're hearing the plight of the intelligent design theorist here, indeed the living nightmare. But there is some hope, and we'll get to that in a moment in the article, Paul, you collect some phrases used by scientists who assume naturalism, which you said, diagnose being hopelessly trapped in the parabola. Can you give us one or two of those phrases and fill in the details for us?
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Sure. Right at the top of the list is the phrase God of the gaps.
Let's say a design theorist like Mike Behe says the bacterial flagellum, to pick the poster child of id, the bacterial flagellum is best explained by an intelligent cause. And a critic of Beh will say, oh, that's just a God of the gaps.
Now, what lies behind that objection? What lies behind that objection is the assumption that there's a naturalistic story to be told. That's the gap to be filled in, right? The gap is not provided by nature, because, after all, it might be true. It might be true that intelligent design is the best explanation for the bacterial flagellum. That's what actually happened. So the gap is not actually provided by nature or the evidence itself. The gap is provided by our assumptions about what should be true. In other words, our assumption of a background theory, or in this case, a naturalistic premise that defines the naturalistic parabola, that there should be a naturalistic answer. And until we find that, we have to keep looking.
So it really wouldn't matter what behe said, as long as he postulates design. If his interlocutor, the conversation partner, has in his mind the assumption that there will be a naturalistic process or mechanism that will fill in the gap in that person's own knowledge, right? In other words, the gap is relative to some background theory, then there's always going to be a gap. If anyone ever postulates design for anything, for the origin of the first cell, for the origin of human moral categories, for the origin of human language, for the cambrian explosion, this is a case where you can see the parabola in action, because the critic who says that's a God of the gaps is expecting that the future course of science will provide the natural mechanism or cause or pathway that's currently lacking. And postulating design is simply failing to play by the rules that define the naturalistic parabola. Let me give you another quick example. The objection that evolution has no target. So to falsify any evolutionary hypothesis, you have to show that it's causally insufficient to reach a particular target state. So in work that I've done on the origin of the animal phyla, the target state is a multicellular organism that can undergo a developmental pathway, because that's what most of the animals do most of the metazoa develop from fertilized eggs via a developmental pathway?
And to critique an evolutionary hypothesis about that, I have to assume a target state that the evolutionary process needs to reach. So I critique hypothesis one. I critique hypothesis two, I critique hypothesis three, evolutionary scenarios. And my interlocutor says, well, you don't understand. Evolution has no target. Since we know that these things evolved, your critique of the existing theories just deals with them. You haven't actually addressed how it happened because you're assuming that evolution has a target.
And really what he's saying is true. Evolution has no target. Evolutionary theory does. Evolutionary theory has to explain how the living things that we actually know and observe how they originated. So by saying evolution has no target, really what my conversation partner is saying is, I assume that there was a natural pathway to the first animals. Your critique of the natural pathways that we've already tried just deals with them. And because I'm within the naturalistic parabola, I'm waiting to find the natural pathway. Until I do, I just have to keep looking. So in the article, I give a number of examples of these kinds of statements that indicate that the two conversation partners design on the one side and a commitment to the naturalistic framework on the other. They're really talking past each other, because typically the design advocate thinks he's talking about science, whereas the naturalistic advocate is actually saying, my commitment to naturalism trumps everything that you say. And that, again, is a recipe for misery.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Well, do you see reasons for hope?
[00:17:19] Speaker B: I sure do. I sure do. But they're going to require a lot of work and creativity from intelligent design proponents because it's in the nature of an a priori commitment, like an a priori commitment to the naturalistic worldview that it cannot be turned back by any finite number of failures. Because if you're truly committed, those failures only indicate that you haven't succeeded at solving the problems that your framework sets for you. And it's in the nature of a priori commitments that you can take them to the grave with you. Right. So there's a famous scene at the end of CS Lewis's the last battle, which is the culminating book in the Narnia series, where Aslan and the children are of heading up towards heaven. They're on, I think, a mountain slope or a mountain ridge climbing up towards heaven, and they come upon a group of dwarves sitting in a circle. If you've read the last battle, you may recall that scene. And the children are mystified because Aslan is trying to speak to the dwarves, and they ignore him. And the children say, why can't you get their attention? And Aslan, paraphrasing Lewis's beautiful writing, Aslan says, when someone is committed to something, ultimately their will cannot be overridden. And the dwarves simply refuse to hear what Aslan is saying to them. And it's tragic. That kind of commitment is ultimately tragic because the will is thwarting one's ability to perceive.
So if you can't refute naturalism by any finite number of instances, and I really am philosophically convinced of that, what you have to do if you really want to engage the naturalist, is make your ideas so attractive he can't resist them. In my experience with intelligent design, it's made the most advances culturally from the late 1980s until 2020, when the ideas that we present are just more fun and more interesting than what's on offer from the naturalistic worldview. And really what you have to do is say to your naturalistic conversation partner, I'm giving up. I'm giving up. I am not going to try to refute every crazy hypothesis you throw at me, because that game we can play until we both die.
Instead, what I'm going to do is show you what intelligent design is coming up with and see if I can make my ideas more beautiful, more fun, more powerful, more attractive. And you give up, right? You'll have to let go of your a priori commitment, because I can't do it for you, and no amount of debate is going to do it for you. You're going to have to let it go yourself and come over here to use a metaphor from a previous podcast and play with my toys, because my toys are more fun than yours. So that's where I see hope. And I love meeting the summer seminar students who have the courage to try this and who see the intrinsic beauty of intelligent design as a scientific and philosophical position and have begun playing with the toys. So where's the best place to spend your time? What's the best strategy in the long run? And I think in the long run, turn back an a priori commitment to a naturalistic worldview is not the best place to spend your time, right?
[00:20:57] Speaker A: So don't convince, but rather show off some really beautiful arguments and try to attract them that way.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Well, I think it's a combination of understanding their position scientifically and why it fails, and showing that design helps us to understand why the naturalistic position fails. So, for instance, in the origin of life, a paper that I've recommended to probably thousands of people now is the leventhal paradox of the interactome by George Tampa and Peter Rose. That is a truly beautiful, inspiring piece of scientific writing. It's just filled with implications, and I can give that essay to a naturalistic friend and say, read this and think about it, and I'll come back in two weeks, or I'll come back in a month and let's talk about it. I am not going to try to refute the hypotheses that you put forward, because I see you committed not so much to any particular scientific theory as you are to answers of a certain form.
And I'm not going to play within the naturalistic parabola anymore. I want you to come over here and look at the world from the design perspective and see if it's not more, if it doesn't make more sense from that standpoint.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Well, in a third and final episode, you're going to discuss with us why you prefer to consider the evolution design debate a trialogue instead of a dialogue. You've told us of the value of a dialogue, but when you add this third element in, things get really interesting and the hope opens up more. So listeners come back to learn more about the trialogue surrounding the evolution design debate. Paul, it's always a pleasure. We have to stop for now, but we'll come back together soon and finish this off.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Yes, I look forward to it.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: You can read more of Paul's
[email protected] dot just go to the writers tab and click on Paul's picture. As always, listen to more
[email protected] or on your podcast platform of choice. Until next time. For id the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit intelligentdesign.org and idthefuture.com.
