[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I want to encourage people that they can make contact with their common sense again, that it's okay, and that the loony ideas around you really are loony.
You're not crazy, because if you don't agree with them, that it's possible to stay clear of them, that all is not lost, that you don't have to despair and wonder if you're going nuts.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Every day the news headlines are filled with conflicting versions of the same story. Biological facts are treated as opinions, logic is labeled as hate, and to speak up for common sense is seen as a revolutionary act.
And we're in this every area of life, and that includes science. Well, what is happening to the world? What is wrong with us? Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Helping us explore the answer to these issues and questions today is Jay Bujichefsky, a professor of government, philosophy and civic leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. Internationally recognized for his work on natural law, self deception, happiness, and ultimate purpose, he is widely read on the unraveling and possible restoration of our common culture. Among his 20 previous books are what We Can't Not Know, how to Stay Christian in College, and how and how not to Be Happy. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, First Things, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Well, Jay, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Well, thanks. I'm glad to be on.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, my introduction to you and your work, besides hearing your name mentioned by colleagues at the Discovery Institute, was actually reading your 2008 book, maybe a little earlier, True Tolerance, Liberalism, and the Necessity of Judgment. And in that book you tackle the myth, one might say lunacy, that to tolerate one must pretend ethical neutrality. But you argue that true tolerance is not the forbearance of judgment, but actually the fruit of it. In other words, since tolerance by definition means to bear something, I love the idea, the etymology of that word. You know, you're literally having to carry to bear it.
Since that means to bear something you consider bad or evil, then before you can tolerate something, you must first know if the thing is good or evil. That flies in the face of the very modern idea that the act of tolerating is the act of allowing or accepting everything without judgment. You hold that this idea of neutrality, of judgment is wishful thinking at best and a type of bad faith authoritarianism at worst.
Well, anyway, we're not here to talk about true tolerance, but I want to thank you for writing that book. And actually, I do see similar and Related themes explored in in Pandemic of Lunacy. So I'm looking forward to jumping into the insights of that book today.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Obviously one can look around at the state of our culture, the state of our nation, indeed the state of the world, and see much cause for concern.
Why did you write Pandemic of Lunacy now? And what's your main goal with the book?
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Well, I wrote it to reassure people really, and to help them to re establish contact with their common sense. You know, it's a funny thing. The classical philosophers. Take Aristotle when he was philosophizing, he always began with common sense. Now needless to say, common sense can be wrong. And he didn't necessarily end with common sense, but it was the starting point. And you tried to elevate common sense. You had tried to ennoble common sense. You tried to find out what was true in it and what, if anything, needs to be discarded. And even if you found something that wasn't true in it, usually, often it was by comparison with something else in common sense. Some nut might, might think that happiness is just having all pleasure all the time.
But you know, you can point out that you can be having a lot of pleasure and still be unhappy. And people will their common people. When you remind that of people, another piece of common sense kicks in and says, oh, I didn't really think that other thing. So common sense is a good thing. We need to purify it, not throw it out. Unfortunately, a lot of our college education now is pumping us full of all kinds of theories that have lost that connection. And sometimes the ideas that we are, that we imbibe are loony. The ones that we read in the newspaper editorials, the ones that we hear in the nightly news, the ones that we, that we see in our podcasts or on TikTok or something like this, or that we hear people talking about in the, in the, in the neighborhood bar and grill. They, they, they, these ideas really are loony. So I want to encourage people that they can make contact with their common sense again, that it's okay and that the loony ideas around you really are loony.
You're not crazy. Because if you don't agree with them, that it's possible to stay clear of them, that all is not lost, that you don't have to despair and wonder if you're going nuts.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Wow, that's a great message of hope. And that's something I think we need right now.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: I think so many people are in despair, especially when they see their kids being entranced or ensnared by some of these things, some of these ideas.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: And it's sad when you actually have to pay for that privilege, you know, as in saving lots of money to go to college, that that's no longer a safe bet. You have to really think that through these days.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Yeah. But you know, on the other hand, I speak of parents worrying about their kids. A lot of young people though, come to me and say I feel like I haven't really been educated. Can you suggest some things to me to read?
That's so refreshing, that's so encouraging. And of course I'm glad to suggest all kinds of things to them.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Well, you know, one point is anyone can hold a bad idea. All of us can fall prey to delusions.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: In your introduction to Pandemic of Lunacy, you write that many who hold delusions, which are false beliefs accepted as truth, are deadly serious about them and often pour out a lot of labor in maintaining the self deceptions and trying to get others to believe them. Does this mean that bad ideas, like good ideas, have real world consequences?
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Oh, sure. Now that's one of the real world consequences is that the bad ideas spread. But even if you were the only person, there are, there are going to be consequences. If you think, for example, that marriage can be whatever you want it to be, that open marriage, having two people, having a throuple, having any group of people walking in the door and walking out the door, and we call ourselves a marriage, it's going to disorder your life, it's going to disorder your children even more than it disorders you. And ultimately, because this, this process of turning the wheel of the generations or raising up our children is so important to the foundation of the whole society, it's going to disorder the society too. So things do have real world consequences.
I picked out the 30 lunacies I talk about in this book partly according to whether they spread, but partly also according to whether they're dangerous in that way. And that's why I call them lunacies most of the time rather than simple mistakes. There are simple mistakes sometimes that don't make a lot of difference, but some are really crazy. We should know better or we do know better, right?
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah. 30 Luna says you unpack a lot of different ideas and we'll be going into a few of them over the course of a couple episodes here. Now here's a question. Every age has its lunacies. So what makes our age different?
[00:07:20] Speaker A: I think what's different about our age is partly that there are so Many lunacies floating around, running around, running amok. And partly also that they are exceptionally dangerous, that they are inter, that they are often interlinked with each other. So that one, if you accept one of those lunacies, you're predisposed either by logic or by psychology to accept another one, partly because they are so contagious. This is, you know, we've had other periods when one lunacy or another spread. But these lunacies go right down to the fundamentals. It's like, is there a reality at all? Do you have a different reality than I do?
Maybe we all have a different right and wrong.
Men and women don't need each other. These are, these are, these are dreadful and much more. Even, even some pretty crazy cultures like the Aztecs knew that there was a difference between men and women. We seem to be even losing sight of that. So I think that, I think that, that these are, these are pretty darn consequential.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And another difference about our age, of course, is the prevalence of social media.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Which brings all of the ideas closer to us. And any Tom, Dick, Harry, Jane, you know, can just get on and be in your face and do that TikTok style video saying, well, this is what I think. And you, you know, and just, it's coming to us, you know, I think that's got to be a major factor.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Well, TikTok and all those other forms of social media reach a broader audience. Any person can now have a loud, a loudspeaker to reach, to reach potentially millions of people.
On the other hand, I think that if we weren't already ensnared in a lot of these lunacies, if the mode of our interaction with each other hadn't already degraded, if in so many elements of our social life we weren't already losing touch with each other, so that we fall for this phony intimacy of the social media. The social media probably wouldn't have such an amplifying effect, such a megaphone effect, and people would be, when they heard something on social media that was, that was loony, they would be more ready to say, oh, that's loony. I'm not going to pay attention to it. And it wouldn't get 10,000, 16,000 likes.
So, yes, lunacy, that's already going on, it amplifies it. If we weren't so loony in the first place, maybe it wouldn't be so dangerous.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Great point. Well, you acknowledge that people are very logical, but they're logical slowly, which accounts for how lunacies can spread. In the meantime, you lay out some of the ways the spreading can occur. Can you review one or two of those for us?
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Well, let's take that point about people being logical slowly.
That came up in the context of a tale I was telling.
I had sent an article to a journal and I had made the logical point that the premises that people use to justify abortion, for example, they'll say, this isn't a human person. Yes, of course it's wrong to take the life of a human person, but this isn't a human person. The unborn child, because he can't communicate, he can't form complex plans, he can't carry out complex plans. I pointed out that these premises would also justify infanticide.
And my editor said, well, that's true, but people are not that logical.
So he didn't think that infanticide was going to be the next big thing.
Well, I'm sorry, people are logical, but they're logical slowly when the conclusions of their premises that they might not accept in generation A, their children are accepting in generation B. And then it's taken for granted in generation C.
Already in bioethics journals, infanticide is sometimes called after birth abortion.
And of course we're talking about other forms of killing too. And you know, it's not just infanticide that would be justified by these premises.
If your criterion of human personhood is you can make and complex, you can make and carry out complex plans, well then toddler side too, and well, you know, maybe even teenager side. Teenagers aren't very good at carrying out complex plans. This is part of growing up. Even some of my colleagues, I think, might, might have trouble if we say communicative ability is part of it. What about people who stutter? Are we going to then have a hierarchy of people? You're more human, you're less human because you don't communicate as well.
I notice that all these kinds of criteria favor the kinds of people who are developing the theories. We always think we're the most fully endowed with personhood of all of them. This is one thing leads to another. There are other ways that something leads to another. For example, if we already buy into the idea, if we are already buying into dividing up the world by sex. Men are enemies of women, women are enemies of men. Some people do think this way. Then we're going to be predisposed to start thinking dividing up the world into warring camps in other ways. We'll say, you know, it's the rich against the poor, it's the blacks and the whites against each other.
There are still Other ways beyond these, including one that I talk about later on in the book that I' explored in earlier books called the Revenge of Conscience. Sometimes if we know that we've done wrong and we, and we.
Well, if deep down we know that we've done wrong, but we really don't want to face the fact, then you can either face it and repent or you can dig in. And if you dig in, you're going to have to tell yourself all kinds of lies to convince yourself that that was okay. And those are going to propel you into yet further lunacies and further bad deeds.
Those are just a few.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah. You do make the point that it's exhausting to uphold self deceptions.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: It is.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: And that exhaustion can actually lead to more irrational types of behavior.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Of course it can. And you know, in some ways we try to exhaust ourselves because some of the things that we have talked ourselves into are disturbing to us. If we think about them, we try to avoid giving ourselves opportunity to think about them. There's not a lot of quiet in modern life. There's not a lot of. And people, if things are quiet, so many. This is especially true the younger you get.
The children who a generation ago used to be able to sit quietly with a coloring book need constant stimulation. Now the television, this, that, and the other teenagers, adults too.
If you're still, if you're silent for yourself, it's not just an attention deficit. If you're silent for too long, you may start to think about things.
You may start to have to face yourself. You may have to start facing some of the disorders in your life that you'd rather not face. It's better to face them and clean all that stuff up. And it can be done. But we even try to exhaust ourselves in this way. Oh, I'm too tired to think about that. I'll think about it tomorrow.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I came across a study a couple of years ago that caught my attention. You know, I study technology and how it affects our flourishing. And it was the benefits of just thinking. You know, the daydreaming and the future thinking and even, even the looking back and the nostalgia can help you build a sense of purpose in your life and cherish, you know, positive experiences and memories. And there's just all kinds of good, good things you can get out of just sitting there and thinking. But how often do we do that when we have these phones in our hands?
[00:15:03] Speaker A: Sure. Sit there with a cup of coffee, just, just think, just, just think about things. It doesn't have to be purpose. Driven thinking. You don't have to be making a plan for the next day. You don't have to be adjusting your social calendar. You don't have to be answering that. That email message. You're just thinking about it. Or I should. I would hope that. That some of that would also be. Be. Be praying. But.
But that requires some silence, too.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Yeah, well, some may look at our culture wars today and just say we're polarized. You know, we're a polarized nation.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: But while that polarization may be an obvious symptom, at bottom we're caught in what you call, in your book, a spiraling vortex of error. It's a great way to put it. Is it possible to turn from that error? And if so, what's the first step?
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Oh, I think it is possible.
One thing is that we need to learn, those of us who are alarmed by the loony ideas going around in our culture, to look at ourselves honestly, to not just point the finger and say, they're crazy. I'm okay.
I was speaking once to a psychotherapist. He says, you know, there's that book out there that's called I'm okay, you're okay.
He says, part of my job is to tell people, you're not okay.
And we need to sometimes look at ourselves and say, you know, I'm not okay. I need to think about this differently. So that takes courage.
Talking to other people about these things, needless to say, takes courage, too. But it's not just talking about them that can be scary. Talking to ourselves, facing ourselves, saying, I need to think about this differently.
That's crucial in turning away from these things.
Learning to think clearly is helpful.
One of the things that I try to do is model how to think about some of these issues.
I try to help people reconnect with their common sense. I'm not just dumping a bunch of Bujievsky's wise thinking on them from above. I'm saying, look, doesn't this even make better sense to you?
And I'm hoping that people are going to say yes. I think that another thing that we need to do is to not fall into despair and think, oh, the world is going crazy and there's no hope for it. The world want, you know, a lot of people in the world want us to think that. They say, history is against you. History is against you. It's like when Nikita Khrushchev in the old Soviet Union said, we will bury you. And, you know, the Soviet Union went down and these kinds of lunacies ultimately cannot survive, although they may survive long enough to bring down a civilization. We don't want that to happen. So I want to give people some hope, some encouragement that they can think clearly, they can maybe help their friends think clearly, help their children think clearly, help their families think clearly, model better ways of living instead of falling into despair.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Well, your book lays out 30 lunacies, as we've said, in brief, and these are very accessible chapters. You know, I think you mentioned not, not much longer than an op ed in a newspaper, perhaps, or, or a short essay, you know, and I appreciate that.
Let's start zooming into a few of the lunacies that relate to science and in particular the debate over evolution and the evidence for intelligent design.
So Lunacy number nine is titled. Scientists, scholars, and experts are neutral authorities.
We're indeed living in the age of the expert. What's the difference between neutrality and objectivity? And which one should experts be striving for?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: You know, to say that you're neutral seems to imply that you have no preconceptions, no bias, no opinions about anything. When you walk into the. Into the matter. Well, that's crazy. Everybody does. People sometimes tell me, as a teacher, I should be neutral in the classroom. Nonsense. If I was neutral about everything, I wouldn't even know whether I should be a teacher. I wouldn't know whether the. This is a subject I should teach. I wouldn't be able to decide how to teach it. Of course, I have some ideas. What I should be is not neutral, but objective. I try to teach my. I don't. I try not to beat down my students. If they disagree with me, I tell them they can. I say, look, the rule here is not that you can't disagree with me, but that if you disagree, you have to give your reasons. And I'm going to give my reasons to you, too. And my hope in teaching you is to teach you well enough so that if my thinking is distorted or wrong in any way, you have a fighting chance of finding out.
Now, that's objectivity. You know, we see it in other. In other realms too. Objectivity in, in trials, in court, you have an opportunity to confront the witnesses. You know what the charges are against you. We should treat opposing opinions that way, too. We have. I should have an opportunity to hear the arguments against me. I should. I should have these. I should have the assistance of counsel.
This is. So we should be objective. But even to be objective is to have a certain bias. It's not to be neutral because the objective person is biased toward truth. And fairness.
And he is committed to certain procedures that he believes with good reason help to find what is true and to do what is fair instead of just shutting other people up.
You mentioned the ID controversy. And of course shutting up has been a large part of that. Ignoring the arguments against you, not even engaging them has been a large part of that.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Right. And I've always thought, well, gee, why are you trying to shut down the other side if you feel so strong about your arguments? You know, let the arguments stand by themselves.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: What's wrong with teaching the controversy? I was at a conference once, it was the funniest thing. There was a fellow, he's one of these, he was one of these people who wears his opinions on his sleeve.
I'd only just met the guy. We were having a glass of wine before the conference dinner and he introduces himself, I introduced myself. He says, I'm an atheist. Okay, fine, are we going to talk about that? And he says, and he also explained to me that he, that he's a Darwinist and all right, fine. And he says, and he says, he says, what do you think of all those intelligent design people? They're just crazy. And I say, I think that there's, there's much to be said for those, those, those arguments. He said, let me recommend an article to you that critiques them all. And I said, well, have you actually read the arguments of the intelligent design people? Have you read what they've written? Have you seen their arguments for themselves instead through this critique? And he said no, but he didn't. That confession didn't embarrass him a bit.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Wow.
Yeah. Well, there's something to be said about people who are ready to engage in discussion.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: Even though they might be willfully unprepared to understand the other side's objective and point of view. Now, speaking of the objectivity, okay, we should be objective rather than neutral, but that can be excruciatingly difficult, as you point out in your book. Tell us a few reasons why it's hard to do that.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Well, one reason it's hard to do that is that we may want certain opinions to be true before even going into it. We may want something to be true. Sometimes there are self interested motives in that. For instance, I suppose that selenium miners would probably be very happy to do away with petroleum based energy because selenium, the selenium industry booms when you're using batteries to store electricity that perhaps you've generated in other ways. But on the other hand, petroleum companies might not be Too happy about, about, about. About the hyper. And so the selenium miners might be more, more disposed toward the hypothesis of global warming because it gives them the argument, oh, we need solar cells, we need this, we need that which may be true, may not be true, but there is some self interest involved. There's also some self interest involved sometimes in just in the fact that you have an opinion.
One philosopher, Thomas Nagel, once remarked about a certain controversy. It had to do with God.
And my point isn't about belief in God per se, but it was about the difficulty of the interest in one's own opinions. Had. I think it took guts for him to say this, but he remarked once that he's some of the most intelligent people that he knows believe in God. And at the time that he was writing he didn't. Although I think there's been some shift in his opinions since then. And he said, but it disturbs me profoundly that these intelligent people do believe in God because he says it isn't just that I don't believe in God and that naturally I hope that I'm not mistaken but that I don't want there to be a God, I don't want the universe to be like that.
And this disturbs me.
As I say I think it took a lot of guts and self honesty for him to say that. But we're all like that a little bit. You know, we have these things that we're committed to and that can be a problem. There's also the fact that we're lazy.
We may think, oh, the only question is, is the climate warming? Maybe, maybe not. You look at the evidence. Is the climate. But there are all kinds of other questions.
Has it warmed before?
Do human beings have anything to do with it?
Whether or not they do, could human beings do anything about it?
If human beings could do something about it, would it actually be a good thing for them to do something about it? Could warming have any good effects? Would the good effects outweigh the bad effects?
Would the cost of the correctives outweigh the cost of the warming itself?
If it was a net loser.
When I was in elementary school, I'm getting pretty aged. This is a long time ago, but I was in elementary school. All of our teachers in science class told us that it was the consensus of scientists that the earth was getting colder.
And so I've seen these things change and it takes a long time. People have an inertia and they even there's. I talked about just the inertia of saying it is my Idea I've talked about wanting to be right, but there's also the fact that we perform certain vested interests.
All right? Now I'm in this organization that campaigns to say there's no such thing as global warming. Now I'm in this organization that campaigns to say there is such a thing as global warming and we've got to completely reorient government spending order to. In order to save us all. Well, maybe I'm getting a drawing, a salary from that corporation. I'm probably not going to tell myself, gee, I'd better not tell the truth because then I might lose my. My job. But subtly, unconsciously, those kinds of things are influencing us.
And, and it's humiliating to be shown wrong when somebody has a better argument that you have.
So we naturally resist that and want the other guy to. To look like a fool, not us. All these things make object very, very hard. Very, very hard.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: But a necessary goal nevertheless.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Well, one case you mentioned is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the White House Coronavirus task force during most of the COVID 19 pandemic. Tell us why Fauci's claim of neutrality in the name of science was deceptive as well as perhaps dangerous.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yes, Fauci made it personally. He personal.
He said at one point to the microphones that those who are doubting me are really doub science because I represent science.
Well, no, he didn't represent science. There were other health professionals who had other views than his.
Hundreds of thousands of them signed a certain petition suggesting a different method of slowing the transmission of this disease called focused protection.
And they squashed them and just didn't pay attention at all. Later on, he admitted to a select committee of the US House of Representatives. When asked about the COVID distancing guidelines and the masking guidelines, he said they. Well, they just. What was the evidence? What was the science for them? He says, well, they just sort of appeared.
So look, we want to be able to say I represent science, capital S.
But oftentimes we're trying to wrap science around our thin. Our. Our finger or put it on as a cloak in order to like, you know, like we speak, people wrapping themselves around the flag. Sometimes we wrap ourselves in science.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of like the New Zealand premier that around the same time said that she or the government represented truth, capital T. And if you don't hear from the government, it's not truth. That was literally kind of what she was saying in her comments around the pandemic. So, yeah, so.
So that's pretending neutrality. And what you're saying is we need to. To move toward objectivity, because that can be difficult, and it's a challenge.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: And it means taking your critics seriously, answering them, not trying to deny them a forum. But, I mean, it's true that some people who are crazy say, I know that this is the cause of the pandemic because aliens landed in a flying saucer in my backyard and told me, okay, some people don't deserve the same access to the microphone. I know, but there are many, many serious critics.
We speak of expertise, but, you know, expertise. There are experts who hold different opinions too.
There is such a thing as groupthink, but that's not a good thing, because now all the experts agree because of groupthink. That's a bad thing. It prevents the normal process of scientific debate from being more likely rather than less likely to come to the true conclusion.
And so we want to listen to those. And, you know, even the expert, even if the experts come up with all the exactly correct answers to this is what causes it to spread. This is what retards the spread of the pandemic.
Policy decisions still have to be made. All right, what are the costs of doing that?
Taking kids out of school for a year?
Shutting down industry?
Are we worse off doing what you say or not? The expert, if he's an expert in epidemiology, he may be right about the epidemiology, but those are not. Those questions are not epidemiological questions. They've gone down to the next step.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: Yeah. It's often true that when an expert shares some knowledge, that can lead to more questions than answers, you know, and you're saying the questions can be good to get you on that road to objectivity.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
Ask those questions. Encourage those questions.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, when we're evaluating scientific claims, particularly around the origin of life in the universe, what signs can we look for to tell whether an expert is striving to be objective versus pretending to be neutral in their conclusions?
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Well, one thing that we can look at is whether he does do what we've just suggested. Is he even aware of the competing hypotheses?
If he is aware of them, has he read them? Does he take them seriously? Has he made any effort to respond to them?
Some people obviously haven't done that. Some people have, and they make much better conversational partners. They'll have a real conversation with you. You might discover that you are wrong. Okay. He might discover that he is. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between. I'm wrong about this, you're wrong about that. But I mean, that's the first thing to look for, I think, is, does he engage the opposition? You know, when there was the heliocentric hypothesis, there's the heliocentric hypothesis that the, that the planets go around the sun. There was the geocentric hypothesis that the sun goes, goes around the Earth and the other planets go around the Earth too.
When the heliocentric hypothesis was first proposed, actually the evidence wasn't very clear.
They didn't have the same observational means. It took quite a while to sort it out and decide what the truth of the matter was. And there were episodes when people on one side or the other were trying to shut down shocks, shut down the opposition. I wonder how that might have proceeded if those efforts to shut it down hadn't. Hadn't happened.
We know of some famous episodes in that the Church didn't want to silence Galileo because.
He believed something that contradicted the Bible. They said the Bible doesn't really teach this. They complained. They criticized Galileo because they said, you're running ahead of your evidence.
Well, maybe he was running ahead of his evidence, but that wasn't the Church's department of expertise.
Right.
And this is, and so a matter of, you know, they should have said their matter, their area of expertise was what is the theology here? So the, the, the Church heard its own witness then.
And other times, people, critics of the Church have done that kind of thing. They've, they've, they've slammed it for the wrong reasons. The, the. We have to look at the state of the evidence and we have to be aware of the evidence. Not trim the evidence, not trim the. Trim the. Trim the, the cloth to cut our own, to cut our own purposes. The climate gate thing some years ago was a, was a terrible scandal. People were shutting down some of the evidence. We've seen that in Covid. We've seen that in intelligent design critics. We've seen that in all kinds of things.
So the first thing I would say is get it all out there.
Get it all out there. Don't be afraid of the controversy. Talk about it.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Controversy seems to be a natural progression as you're seeking the truth and not to be afraid of it.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it also helps not to have false definitions of science in a very famous article or a very famous quotation anyway. Probably not very many people have actually read the original article.
Richard Lewontin said that he thought that he was in favor of a purely materialistic conception of the evolution of species because he says we are on the side of science.
But what he meant by science should have been following the evidence wherever it leads.
Rather, his definition of science was accepting only material causes, even if they lead to worse explanations. And he more or less admitted that.
So I think that we have to say no. Science is following the evidence wherever it leads. All of the evidence.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, in part four of your book, you take on several lunacies about human nature.
Why do you think confusion about what it means to be human is so central to the wider cultural confusion that your book's describing?
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Well, people treat each other very badly today. And the, you know, the standard of humanity is. Is getting worse. I talked about infanticide, for instance.
Canada is now in this so called assisted suicide, killing all sorts of troubled people. Now by the. By the tens of thousands. The. And there are states in the United States where that happens too. There are hospitals where, where children who were not supposed to be born are shoved into janitorial closets to die of dehydration and starvation rather than being cared for. We're losing a sense of humanity. But why? Why? Well, partly because we think human beings are just stuff. We're the meaningless and purposeless results of a process that did not have us in mind.
I may feel like I'm important, but that's just because of certain hardwired tendencies in my neurons or inclinations built into genes. I might want to take care of my children, but, you know, if I devolved a little bit differently, maybe I'd want to eat my children like guppies do, instead of. Instead of taking care of them. Why not? That would be okay. The. The.
The murderer, George delorey, who. His wife had Ms. He. He stuffed her full of pills, put a plastic bag around her head and suffocated her to death. He went to prison. Afterward he wrote a book called but what if she wants to die? He diff1 an odd pat I was asked book. An odd passage in the book is where he says he felt terrible, terrible guilt over what he had done. He felt terrible remorse. And then he finally realized this isn't really evidence of guilt. This isn't really real remorse. This is merely the primate inhibition against taking the life of its own kind.
So therefore it was okay and he could ignore his conscience.
These are the kinds of things that mistakes about human nature. In this case, are we just animals? Are we meaningless and purposeless results of something it didn't have in mind? Does our conscience actually tell us something now? We are animals, of course, but we are profoundly different. Than the other animals. We are rational animals. From the perspective of faith, I would say made in the image of God. But even if somebody doesn't allow me to say that, bring that into the conversation, I can say, look, rationality is something that none of the other animals have. There are very clever animals out there. Maybe we will find rational animals on Mars or something, but so far we haven't found any here. The mere fact that a dolphin has a really big brain or an elephant has a big brain doesn't mean rationality. The fact that an animal can find its way out of a cage or that a cat is very good at finding mice doesn't mean that it's able to ask questions like why am I here? What is the meaning of things? What makes that sunset so beautiful?
Is there a meaning to things? Is there a God?
My cat, Chesterton. I was very attached to him, but he didn't have a mind of a rational kind. He couldn't form universal concepts. When I stroked him, he didn't say, this is good in his mind, he just went, and we are in this respect unique and should take our uniqueness seriously. We are bodies and souls. We're not just stuff.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Yeah, and you do quote GK Chesterton on those lines, saying it's the monstrous scale of man's divergence that requires the explanation.
So as you're saying, that is what makes all the difference, not just some of the surface similarity.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Right?
People sometimes say, actually what percentage of our DNA really is different has fallen into controversy recently, partly because of some things that have been reported at Discovery Institute. But suppose we bought the line that the difference between us and the higher apes is only a couple of percent.
Fine. People treat that as though it meant we're just like them. All you have to do is look at our behavior. All right? Are they building cities? Are they founding religions? Are they asking what the meaning of things is?
The question isn't how much of a difference is there in our DNA, but how come we're so different, even if that difference in the DNA is so small?
And that's exactly what Chesterton was saying.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: And God is a 1% myth and it's closer to 13 to 15%. But your point still stands, right? Even if, even if, even if the differences are monstrous, as Chesterton said? Well, the differences between us and the rest of the animals also comes into play when we respond to claims or complaints that humans aren't as gentle or loving or peace making as other animals. Why is that naive to think that way?
[00:38:52] Speaker A: Well, in fact, it isn't true.
The animals, even pet animals, can. If we just do the wrong thing, you get between a dog and his food dish, for instance, and he's going to grow. He may growl even at his very gentle dog, may growl even at his master. He's, he's.
They learn to behave in certain ways. They can be domesticated, but animals can be extremely violent and destructive too, in the, in what are called the Gambi chimpanzee wars. I think a couple of decades, decades ago, one clan of chimpanzees wiped out every single male in the other clan of chimpanzees over a period of time. Jane Goodall, the primate expert said, wrote that before this happened, she had been inclined to think that chimpanzees were rather nicer than human beings, but she'd seen from the evidence.
Well, no, we also miss the point that. But if an animal behaves nicely to us, if an animal behaves, doesn't behave nicely to us, there's no moral fault there. The animal that behaves nicely doesn't have the virtue of kindness. The animal that doesn't, doesn't have the virtue of malice. It doesn't rise to the level of moral responsibility, whereas I do. And if I treat the animal badly or treat you badly, I have to answer for myself in a way that the animal doesn't.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're just warming up here as far as unpacking the insights and arguments in your book. We're going to continue the conversation in another episode as we unpack more lunacies about human nature, what is real and unreal, and even a few about God and religion and how that figures into things like science. So, audience, look out for the second half of this discussion in a separate episode. Jay, thanks so much for your time today.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: Glad to be with you.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Well, I encourage you to get your hands on a copy of this book, which for me is proving to be the perfect companion to help me understand the crazy times we're living through.
The best source. Jay, would you say that's your website, undergroundthomist?
[00:41:02] Speaker A: Thomist.org well, people can find it at my website. There is a link.
Many people will prefer to go to their favorite online bookseller, whether it's, you know, whether it's Amazon or some. Or something else they can go to. Some people prefer brick and mortar booksellers. If your book, brick and mortar bookseller doesn't carry it, they will almost always be willing to order it for you. And so there are a thousand ways of getting it they can also go to the publisher, Creed and Culture. Creed a n d culture.com and if they use the discount code pandemic15, they can get a 15% discount.
So that's a nice little thing.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, thanks for telling us that. Better hurry, audience, before that one runs out.
Jay, thanks again. We'll be back. Until next time. I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the Future. Thanks for joining us.
[00:41:53] Speaker A: Okay, thank you.
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[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
