Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: And I think if you, if you look at it that way, namely the way in which we think about the, the mind manifesting itself in nature, you know, as a form of creative agency. Right. It is through a kind of, you know, execution of a code, let's put it that way. And, and I think that's a very, again, a very distinctive specification of the kind of intelligent mind we're talking about.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intell and design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Casey Luskin, Associate Director with the center for Science and Culture. And today we have a real treat for the show. As many of our listeners may know, the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmuller versus Dover ruling is soon upon us. And we have on the show today with us Professor Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick, who was a expert witness in the trial supporting the dover School District's ID policy.
Professor Fuller earned his MPhil at Cambridge University in the history and philosophy of science and then his PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is now Auguste Compti Chair in the Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. He's a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Steve, it's great to have you on the show with us today.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Well, thanks for having me, Casey.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Well, I'm going on about four hours of sleep and a nasty cold, so this should be an interesting conversation about the 20th anniversary of the Dover trial. But I think it's long overdue that we've had you on our podcast because you've said so much about the ID Evolution conversation over the years. What is your background in the ID evolution debate and what first got you interested in this subject?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Well, I mean, there's a lot of ways to begin the story, I suppose. I mean, I'm someone who, in terms of my, my training, even before going to university, I was trained in, in Jesuit schools. And so I was very familiar with the, the sort of, the intimate connection between the histories of theology and science. That's something actually, I was quite aware of when I was in high school and when I went to university, I became more interested in the topic.
And, and it was also during this period, and this became really clear when I went to Cambridge to do my master's degree, that there was a kind of, you might say, a kind of revisionist understanding of the history of science taking place, one where theology was, in fact, playing a greater role than it had been previously, because I think if you look at the period, let's say, let's say starting in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, so shortly after Darwin's book Origin of Species starts to get high visibility, you started to get a lot of these histories of science, both in the UK and the United States, that basically portrayed a history of war between science and religion.
And, and this was a very common frame, actually, you might say, for about 100 years, you know, so going into, let's say, the 1960s.
And then historians started to take a sort of a second look at the situation and realize that that kind of understanding of the relationship between science and religion as being antagonistic was very much an artifact of the reception of Darwin's work, but in fact did not reflect the overall arc of the history of science, let's say, going back to the 17th century, which is when we usually see to be the origin of modern science. And there what you basically have, if you're looking at people like Copernicus or Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, all these people, is you're basically looking at, you might say, dissenting Christians, right? That is to say, Christians who in many way were taking their faith in. In sort of directions that went against the established churches of their time, especially the Roman Catholic Church, because in a way they wanted to pursue their faith through what we would now call the scientific method, right? Through experimentation, through logical reasoning under controlled circumstances.
And in fact, this is very much part of the story that in a way was being left out. And this got very much reintegrated starting in the 1960s. And certainly by the time I was at Cambridge in the late 1960s, 70s, it was there. And in the 1980s when I was doing my PhD, it was very much there. So in a sense, you know, if you were like taking qualifying exams for PhD in history and philosophy of science in the early 1980s, as I was, you would be asking, you'd be asked questions about the relationship between science and religion, and the answer would not be antagonistic. The answer would be very nuanced and would have to do with how certain kinds of religious ideas, in fact, influence certain kinds of scientific ideas and the extent to which they proved to be fruitful or not, because often there were, you might say, competing religious ideas for scientific understanding.
And so that's kind of my background, you might say, going into this. So this is not, from an intellectual standpoint, a terribly surprising place to be. I mean, I think the tricky part, which I'm sure we're going to go Into. In a moment in. Is the political, as it were, the political aspect of this. Right. The way this gets played out, you know, in the public sphere, especially in the United States, and that's where things start to get difficult. But as an intellectual proposition, right, that, let's say, intelligent Design is quite integral to the development of modern science, I think that's kind of unproblematic, actually. I think that's sort of unproblematic at the level of history and philosophy of science.
I think what one wants to do with that statement when it comes to things like high school textbooks and what you teach at university and the standing of these things in the public sphere, that's when it starts to get controversial.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Great comment, Steve. And I want to actually hang on what you just talked about for a moment here. You're obviously an American who has spent much of your professional career in the UK living abroad, so you have both sort of a US perspective and a European perspective on this issue.
Obviously, in the us, The Scopes trial was hugely influential in the way that people view the sort of overall conversation about evolution. You've got the conflict thesis sort of was crystallized into our cultural psyche after the Scopes Trial. And of course, those books that you talked about in the late 19th century, those would be for our listeners who may not be aware, the History of Conflict between Science, Religion and Science by Draper, and then A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom by Andrew Dixon White. And those two books had a huge sort of impact on the way people view this issue. They came out just a couple decades before the Scopes trial. That conflict thesis, that religion and science are at war were very much in people's minds. And of course, this year, we're not just celebrating. I don't know if we're celebrating, but we're not just remembering the 20th anniversary of the Dover trial, but it's also the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial. I know that you also have made some comments about that, Steve. And so as we reflect upon that, you're absolutely right. There was sort of a reformation away from that conflict thesis. I remember when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego, I was actually a history minor, and I took some courses in the history of science and religion. And we read about John Hedley, Brook Holmes, Rolston, who are bringing in that new perspective that you were just talking about, that we're not saying that science and religion were always, you know, best friends, but in many ways they had a lot of collaborative opportunities to work together. And in many ways, Christianity was very crucial and the Judeo Christian worldview was very crucial towards giving rise to science initially. So there was definitely a move away from that conflict thesis. And I think, and I'd like to be interested in your take on this. It seems like with the advent of intelligent design in the 1980s, 1990s, id kind of grew up in that Reformation period, during that period where there were very prominent scholars. I mean, John Hedley Brook, you don't get much bigger than he is in the, in the field of science and religion.
Id grew up in that period where there was a sort of a reformation of seeing science and religion as being more friendly towards one another.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: That's correct. I mean, you know, Hedley Brooke, who you mentioned, has a very interesting kind of overall history of the relationship of science and religion that I believe Cambridge University Press published. And.
And he was the first chair that Oxford gave on science and religion. Right. So Oxford actually has a chair in science religion. He was the first one to hold it.
And this was in the. In and this was in the.
Around 1990, maybe.
So I remember this because I was, I, as I was an assistant professor at the time at Virginia Tech. And, and it was kind of a big deal.
And, and that definitely indicated a certain kind of turning point.
I mean, the thing I would say here, you know, one of the things that you're alluding to is that when we think about what exactly is, you know, the Judeo Christian, and I would add Islamic as well, because I think it's a, it's part of the Abrahamic tradition generally, the kind of input that it's had in the development of science. I think there are a lot of things that we take for granted about science that in a sense would not be the case were it not for this heritage. So, for example, the idea that the universe is intelligible, okay? So intelligibility, what that means is that the human mind can understand it. Okay. I think if you look at the cosmologies of a lot of the other, especially of the great religions of the east and so forth, there is a sense in which you get a kind of a block. You might say, right, so in other words, there's a recognition of a creator, you might say, you know, and there's a recognition that there is a kind of order to the universe, but that the order is in a way elusive to the human mind. Right? So in other words, what you don't get coming out of, let's say, Confucianism or Daoism or Buddhism or any of these things is the idea that there might be a law like regular universe. Right. Which is something that you start to get very clearly in the scientific revolution, largely because it's based on the idea of God as a lawgiver. Right. So, and God is a lawgiver who thinks about the universe as this one realm, you might say, that he has created and which he governs according to, you know, a unified set of rules. And of course, if we think about Newton's three laws and the principle of gravitation, that's exactly the model, right? Now that model is a very distinct model of thinking about reality. Okay. And I think this is where, you know, if you do a com. A cross cultural comparison of cosmology across, across the world, you will see the distinctiveness of that kind of view. Because that's the only way you really get science off the ground. You have to imagine that somehow the human. That, that whatever the, the Creator has done is tractable to the human mind. And why is it tractable? Well, because the human being is created in the image and likeness of God. And that is a very distinctive Abrahamic idea. Okay.
I mean, you could say that human beings are privileged or whatever, privileged animals, whatever. But this is a much stronger claim because this is a claim about the relationship between the human mind and the divine mind. And it's that that actually launches science in the modern period. And then people actually, you know, try to kind of flesh this out. And I think for reasons, you know, for various historical reasons, mathematics plays a very important role in terms of providing a kind of framework for this. Right. In other words, for sort of realizing the intelligibility in some kind of fine grained detail that could actually get you things that you could call formulas for laws that then could be tested. Right. And experiments and things of that kind. But the point is, you would never have got this project off the ground if you didn't believe that there was something unique about the human being, that they were created in the image and likeness of God and that our minds are sufficiently tractable to what the Creator is thinking, that the universe is intelligible. Okay? And to this day, when we have all these physicists out there talking about grand unified theories of everything, Right. That is still kind of the gold standard for physics.
That's where it comes from. Even if the physicists who are pursuing it today are atheists.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: No, great, great comment. And I mean, obviously we can even. I agree with you. You know, Judeo, Christian, Islamic theology all propose that there is A mind behind the universe. We can take the theology out of it and just say, you know, philosophically, scientifically, the idea that the reason the universe makes sense to our minds is because the universe was, was designed by a, a mind.
And, you know, this. Maybe we could take the conversation in a slightly different tack as well, because if we're going to talk about the origins of intelligent design, you know, you obviously have a large amount of expertise in the history of science. So, Steve, what, in your opinion, are some of the key scientific discoveries that led to the advent of intelligent design in the last couple decades of the 20th century? What, what scientifically led up to the, the ID theory, you know, becoming a thing?
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Well, I think in a way, one of the things that you have when, when we talk about the scientific revolution of the 17th century, one of the things that we often say about it is that it's a sort of the triumph of the mechanical worldview, right? This, this phrase gets used a lot, right? And, and, and, and this actually covers a whole bunch of thinkers who more or less kind of thought this way that the. And what is, and what do we mean by this? Well, we mean that in some sense, and one needs to be obviously very sophisticated about this, right, that, that we can understand the universe as a machine, right? And what we mean by machine here is a kind of designed artifact where the designer is God, right?
And, and you see, that's not merely a metaphor, right? This is the point. Now, the, the other thing I should say as a kind of a side point with regard to the philosophy of science is that part of the record, part, part of this kind of renewed recognition of theology's impact on the history of science has been also a renewed recognition of the role of metaphor and analogy, right, as playing a kind of formative role in coming together with theories that are testable and so forth. So in other words, you have to imagine the world a certain way.
And in a sense, what metaphors and analogies allow you to do is to think about them concretely based on something you already know, right? And this is where the idea of thinking of the universe as a machine, right, is a very salient kind of thing, because when we're talking about, you know, the 17th century, let's say there are machines, right?
And we know how humans make them, right? We have, there are already kind of engineering techniques and so forth, right? From the Renaissance, right? We think about Leonardo da Vinci, right, And Galileo and all these characters, right? And the thing is, well, the whole universe might be this way now. Why Would you think this. Well, this is an extension of this idea we were just talking about, that we are creating the image and likeness of God. And so whatever we can do, what we sort of imagine is God is doing it on the grandest possible scale, right? By engineering techniques that go way beyond whatever we can do. But in a sense, you know, we can begin to understand them by, as it were, modeling the universe on these machines that we understand, okay? And this has a lot of, I think, very important consequences over the history of, over the history of science. And so Newton, Newton would be the great example of this. Newtonian mechanics, right? The reason why Newton's theory of physics is called Newtonian mechanics is because basically he's imagining the universe as a big machine, right? And he's doing it in enormous detail and with enormous success. I mean, the only thing he really can't figure out very well is, is the nature of light. And that ends up becoming the downfall of the theory 200 years later. But in any case, what he's able to do in the meanwhile is very impressive just by thinking about the universe as a machine. And of course, when we look at people like Descartes and, and, and, and William Harvey and you move into the 18th and 19th century, animals start to be seen this way as well, right? That the nature of life starts to be seen as in some way a kind of machine.
And, and this actually has a lot of very important downstream effects. If you look at something like what gets called nowadays biomimicry, right? And biomimicry is this idea that one of the reasons why you want to study animals is you want to study animals, as it were, as artifacts of engineering projects by God, basically. I mean, I think it's the most straightforward way of imagining how biomimicry works, right? You imagine every organism as, as kind of a hidden engineering project. And then you figure out what's the trick, right? How does it work? How does it actually do its thing, right? Especially when you have a very clear idea of what the organism is supposed to be doing in nature, right? So in other words, if you think about organisms as functionally interrelated to each other, right, they have certain kinds of, you know, powers and qualities and things like this. And then you can start thinking about, well, how do they do it? How does it all work like this, right? And then what you're doing is a kind of reverse engineering of God. I mean, I think that, again, that's the most straightforward way to do it. Of course, nobody writes about it this way because that would be terribly heretical. But I think if you look at guys, let's say, you know, this one guy from, from the 18th century, late 18th century, the natural theologian William Paley, right. William Paley, who's often seen as kind of the. The godfather figure of modern intelligent design, who, who was one of the people who, in fact, Darwin read at Cambridge, right, when he was studying natural history.
Paley thought about things this way, right. You know, in a sense, what we might call now a biomimicry approach, and thought that this was, in a sense, you know, part of the way in which we understand fully kind of the entire design of nature. Right. So whereas Newton gave us the scaffolding and gave us the framework, of course, we have to understand how the creatures all fit in with one another, you know, against this kind of scaffolding and framework. And that's basically kind of the intelligent design, you might say, research paradigm that I think was very much guiding most of the physical and even biological sciences going into the 19th century. And you might even include people like James Clerk Maxwell, right, Who, who is very important, you know, in electrodynamics and so forth, writing, you know, toward the end of the 19th century as kind of holding this general kind of viewpoint. So, so there's a sense in which there is a kind of research tradition that is reasonably called an intelligent design research tradition. And I think it's with the advent of Darwin's Origin of Species and the extent to which Darwin himself sort of rejected this approach.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: So. So in a sense, you might say that Darwin studied all this but rejected it. I think that is when you start to get the turning point and the way these histories that you were mentioning by Draper and Dixon White, that these histories in a way kind of airbrush out, as it were, the theological contribution or diminish them. I mean, I was looking at them recently, actually, and it's not like they're gone, but they're so diminished and buried. Right. That you don't quite see the full significance of the theological thinkers to scientific understanding. So you start to get this rather airbrushed understanding of the history of science that makes it look like intelligent design was never there.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, a great summary of how intelligent design has a rich tradition in the natural sciences. I mean, if you approach nature with the view that it was designed by an intelligent being, that it's there for us to discover how it operates. You know, obviously modern ID theorists, we're not saying that living organisms are literally machines, but there are engineering like principles at work in living creatures in the laws of nature, we can discover those. And I know you and I have talked offline about some of the research that's being done right now from the ID perspective that follows in that tradition of viewing nature as engineered. And we're making progress today, too. But let's, let's get to the point about that.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: But which, which I think is very important kind of for your viewers to understand one of the things that makes intelligent, that has always made intelligent design a very interesting kind of idea, but also makes it very difficult to implement. Now, it's not just the theological stuff. It's. It's the interdisciplinary character of it. Okay.
I think, you know, if you understand how the modern academy works with regard to scientific disciplines, right. Physics is one thing, biology is something else, chemistry is something else, engineering something else. Right. Information science is something else. Right. I mean, these fields sort of exist, you know, kind of mutually exclusive. I mean, it's actually quite hard, as it were, to promote an interdisciplinary perspective, you know, as science, okay, maybe a speculation, but as science is very hard because there's just not, you might say, there's just not the training, you might say, in some cases, I don't think people have enough breadth and, but certainly they're not the kind of the range of publications that would require it. See, Intelligent Design from the very beginning was very much a kind of an integrated science, right? And this is why the whole idea of thinking that you can understand, you know, biological organisms as engineering projects is not so screwy, right? I mean, in a sense, the, you know, it's, you know, to somebody who's just coming into this from a contemporary perspective, they say, what, Biology, engineering, what do these two things have to do with each other? But in fact, no, you know, the, the, you, you can, if you, if you think that the only way you can understand nature is through an interdisciplinary lens, where you're actually bringing in the resources of engineering, the resources of information science, the resources of computer science, right. As well as the resources of physics and biology and chemistry, right? Then you get something close to what the intelligent design perspective has always been about, which is why the sort of people who, who support and advocate and write about intelligent design tend to themselves come from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. And I think that's a really important thing in a way, because I think the problem with realizing intelligent design now is not just the theology, though I think that is obviously a big deal, but it's also the general lack of interdisciplinarity in contemporary academic culture.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: No, I mean, I love your comment. That idea is an interdisciplinary science. I think that's exactly right.
I'm thinking about this booklet that the U.S. national Academy of Sciences published years ago about how to define a scientific theory. And it said that it must incorporate many facts, laws and tested hypotheses. It's a comprehensive explanation for some aspect of nature. It's well substantiated, supported by a vast body of evidence. Well, I mean, they're basically describing intelligent design because you are drawing from so many different disciplines and you are drawing from information theory, from molecular biology, from cell biology, from cosmology and physics, and you're seeing that in all these different fields we're finding this common element that there is. Well, we would, we would argue it's complex and specifying information that is a rich, high information content that we're finding throughout nature, from the, the smallest features of the cell to the macro architecture of the universe, we're finding these same informational patterns. And this ties all that together within a theory that this kind of information only comes from intelligence. And, you know, you talk about theology, Steve. I mean, theology can mean a lot of different things. You know, obviously, you know, the, the Judeo, Christian, Islamic, Abrahamic tradition believes in a mind that is behind the universe. And you know, but obviously those different traditions have very different theologies at many finer points. You know, and in many ways it's a, it's a, it's a philosophical tradition that there is.
Mind is primary before matter.
And I would actually argue that and feel free to disagree with me on this, you know, that you don't have to come at this with any theological presuppositions. If you just look at the world around us, you understand what intelligent agents do. You look at minds, you see that they can generate information, they generate complex features, they engineer things. And then you, okay, you ask the question, well, you know, from those observations of nature, kind of in the Charles Lyellian tradition, you know, we're applying this known cause that's at work in the present day, intelligent agency. Well, what would, what would nature look like if that cause was at work in the past? And then we can go, as you said, kind of, we can reverse engineer things, see how they work and infer that a mind was at work. I don't see any necessary theological presuppositions behind that reasoning. But feel free to disagree with me.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Actually, I sort of do.
I mean, in a sense, I'm more of an ID guy than you are in that sense. I mean, I actually think that theology is really important.
And I think it goes to why the intelligent, you know, the scientific revolution, you might say, if it's a kind of intelligent design revolution, the original scientific revolution, why it leaned so heavily on somebody like Plato, okay.
You know, among the ancients who obviously Plato is what we might call a pre Abrahamic thinker.
But, but the thing is that Plato was kind of an interesting kind of pagan thinker for them to latch onto. And I think it's because the key thing, the key theological point that goes beyond just having a mind and intelligent agency is that the mind creates through what we might call code, right? Through the logos, right? In the, you know, that the word that the cre, you know, that, that as it were, the creation is happening through the word, right? And so whether we're talking about, you know, you know, the code of DNA, right? Or we're talking about the code that is the laws, you know, the physical laws, right? Or we're talking about various forms of information, code and so forth.
Now that, you know, the idea that we sort of hang on to that as it were, that, that as it were is the, that is the creative medium of intelligence, let's put it that way. I think that is very closely tied to the Abrahamic tradition, but it's also something that in a way Plato also has.
And of course Plato's way of understanding this also includes mathematics, right? That, as it were, the language of nature is the language of mathematics, which is the way Galileo and Francis Bacon put it in the 17th century. But in a sense, where they're getting that from is from Plato. And I think if you, if you look at it that way, namely the way in which we think about the, the mind manifesting itself in nature, you know, as a form of creative agency, right? It is through a kind of, you know, execution of a code, let's put it that way. And I think that's a very, again, a very distinctive specification of the kind of intelligent mind we're talking about intellectual. It's not just any old mind, right? It is a mind that creates through the word, right? And the word may include numbers, right? And so I think that's why, I think the theology can't quite be taken off the table that way.
And of course, I think you see, even today, as you know, we live in a very code obsessed world, right? Everything is code.
And very often the people who are very much tied to this kind of way of seeing the world do resonate with that kind of, you know, creative, divine kind of force.
You know, the Logos, right from the Gospel of St. John.
And I think we should hold on to that.
I think that's going to be quite important in a way, with regard to moving science forward in the future.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Well, I certainly agree with you. The implications of what we're seeing are very friendly to that Abrahamic tradition that, that we're talking about. 100% agree with you there. So we, we've done a great summary, I think, here of how Intelligent design has a rich tradition in philosophy, in science, in the great Abrahamic religious traditions of the world, that there's no reason that we should be sort of ruling this out of hand, you know, as, as inappropriate for discussion among the young minds of our civilization. So we're probably out of time for this first podcast, Steve, but maybe we could come back in a second podcast and actually get to the, the topic that brought us together today, the Dover Trial. How does that sound?
[00:28:54] Speaker A: You mean we don't have. You mean we've already run out of time?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Well, for the first podcast, we'll, we'll come back with a second one. Yeah. Great conversation, though. Really, really, really great stuff. Well, this has been a really fun discussion and conversation. Come back for more with Professor Steve Fuller about the Kitzenriller vs Dover trial. I'm Casey Luskin with ID of the Future. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
