[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Eric Anderson, and today I'm pleased to be joined again by Dr. Eric Hedin to continue our discussion of his new book, canceled what Some Atheists Don't Want yout to see. Dr. Hedin earned his PhD in experimental plasma physics and has taught physics and astronomy at Taylor University in Ball State University in Indiana and at Biola University in Southern California. His research has focused on computational nanoelectronics and higher dimensional physics. Eric, I'm glad we're able to have you back again.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Thank you so much. It's always great to be with you here.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: So we had a couple of conversations previously, maybe a month or so ago, right when the book came out, and we were able to talk through some of the important issues raised in the first half of your book. And I'm really thrilled, Eric, that you've agreed to share a little more with us today and take some time to talk through a couple of fascinating topics in later chapters of the book. Just because it's been a little while since our last conversation, maybe you could take just one minute to set the stage for any listeners who might be joining us for the first time. Why the title Canceled Science and what was the impetus for writing this book?
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Well, I can give a brief description.
When I was teaching at Ball State University, I developed a course called the Boundaries of Science taught in the Honors College at Ball State that was basically a cosmology astronomy course, and yet it gave room for looking at the implications of scientific evidence. For example, science tells us the universe had a beginning. They call it the Big Bang. So we talked about the implications of that beginning. And it came about that outside atheists and atheist organizations who had nothing to do with the university. And by the way, none of these people who complained about the class from the atheist organizations had ever had any firsthand experience, meaning they were never in the class. But they threatened to sue the university, claiming that I was pushing religion because we were allowing students to explore the consequences of scientific discoveries. So, long story short, the book Canceled Science. What some atheists don't want you to see is an overview of what was taught and discussed in the course and then also taking it a little bit deeper, elaborating on some of the points. So there you have it.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah, and I know this was quite an experience that you went through there, and certainly nothing that we would wish on anybody. But the silver lining is we get a great book out of it. So I'm Glad you were able to take some of the material from your course and also add to that to give us this great new book. So I want to encourage listeners to go ahead and listen to the prior podcast. But just to bring everybody up to speed, we've touched on some of the evidence for design and purpose in nature that you discuss in the book. Starting with the origin of the universe, then as I kind of see it in my mind, zooming into our galaxy, zooming in further to our solar system, talking about our own kind of star, the sun. And finally, we talked last time about several uncannily convenient, quote, unquote aspects of our own planet, including the stable circular orbit, our moon, the axial tilt, and other factors that contribute to the remarkable habitable planet.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Today, Eric, I'd like to dive into two topics that are near and dear to my heart, information and the origin of life, which you discuss in chapter nine.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Well, thank you very much for that kind of an overview. What I could maybe talk about is just briefly, the connection between living systems and what we might call complex, specified information.
We know now from studying the biochemistry within the cell that the cell is made up not of random arrangements of atoms and molecules, but specific arrangements, specific conformations of these molecules that contain information.
For example, the DNA containing the coding necessary to make all of the proteins within living systems. So it's more like living systems, such as the cell, are libraries and information storage and retrieval systems and manufacturing plants.
So the idea here is to analyze what we know about nature and the laws of physics and ask the question if they are up to the challenge to account for all of this information, and we have to find enough information to be able to account for the origin of the first living organism on Earth, and then also to account for the increase in information over time that is required to explain the existence of the multitudes of more advanced species of life that we find on Earth today.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: So, yeah, in chapter nine, as you mentioned, I'll be in the book discussing the origin of life.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So maybe we can focus on that aspect today. But if we step back for a minute, Eric can take kind of a broad view of the naturalistic creation story. What's the claim that's on the table as it relates to information?
[00:05:25] Speaker A: So from a naturalistic point of view, meaning that there's nothing that exists apart from nature, nothing outside of this universe besides the forces and the matter and energy we have here, it means that these natural processes will eventually transform the raw materials of the universe, which, if we go back early enough Basically it was just hydrogen and helium gas at that time, before even stars existed. And then with time and the action of the laws of nature, transforming those gases into living cells and eventually into people. So if we think about it from an information content perspective, the jump from non life to life involves an exponential leap in the information content of the universe. And such an occurrence, this sudden increase in the information content of the universe at the moment the first living organism appeared actually contradicts what we know about nature as we've been studying it. The uniform evidence of nature has only one conclusion for how life comes to be, and that is that life comes from life. We've never seen any counter examples.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Right. And life comes from similar life too, but we won't go there for today. But yeah, life comes from life. And I know this can get a little bit technical, but in layman's terms, help us understand what physicist Arthur Hobson meant when he talked about information content of a natural system doesn't increase over time, but can and in fact often does decrease over time.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So to answer this question, we maybe need to discuss just briefly and not with too much detail, what is known as the second law of thermodynamics. A lot of students who have been in physics courses or chemistry courses may have encountered this law, and it usually has to do with what we call entropy. And that entropy of a system that is closed increases over time, perhaps stays constant, but doesn't decrease.
But when we talk about the information content of a system, we can invoke a more advanced law of thermodynamics, a generalized second law of thermodynamics based upon quantum theory and statistical mechanics that applies also to the information content of a system. Basically, it says that the information of a system cannot increase over time. There are no natural processes that can systematically increase the information content of a closed system over time. And that's very significant for the question of the origin of life, because with the advent or the appearance of the first living organism, the information content of the universe did just that, it increased. But what we know of natural law says that it can't have happened naturally.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And this increase of information at the origin of life was not a small increase. Right. I mean, this is an incredible quantum jump in the information content. If you compare something like the information content of even a single celled organism with the information content as the, say, the proverbial primordial soup, you have this huge change in the information content of the system.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Yes, that's exactly right. It wasn't just a Little uptick in information, but jump in information which far exceeded the previous information content of the entire universe.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Now, some people say, well, gee, if the initial conditions had been tweaked a little bit, maybe that's the way that things were set up, where you, you tweak the initial conditions of the system and then it can give rise to this jump in information. What is Hobson's view of that?
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Well, actually, this statement that the information of a system can only decrease in time rather than increase remains true no matter how the initial conditions or constraints of the system might be changed. So the bottom line is left to itself. A natural system will tend to have its information content decrease rather than increase. More time won't change the outcome.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and that really speaks to one of the key things that people often throw in the mix, which is, hey, yeah, it's a hard problem, but give us more time and it'll resolve it. But what you're saying is that in fact, more time, if anything, will hurt rather than help this process because the system is going to lose information over time.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Just briefly, one could speak of it this way. In physics, we understand that anything we can know about the physical universe is sort of held within what's known as the quantum wave function of the system. This is a term from quantum mechanics. And for a system that is not tightly closed, that wave function spreads with time and it essentially decreases the ability to gain specific information of the system over time.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you're getting pretty technical for us there, Eric.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I better stop while I'm ahead there.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: No, this, this is great. I really appreciate it. I'm going to stop there for today. Eric, I think we'd love to have you back to continue talking about this a little bit more. If you'd be willing to come back one more time for us, I'd be.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Happy to do that. Thank you so much.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: We've been talking with Dr. Eric Hedin, author of the new book Canceled what Some Atheists Don't Want yout to See. Pick up your copy of Canceled Science Today at online retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble in paperback or ebook format for ID the Future. I'm Eric Anderson. Thanks for listening.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Visit
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