[00:00:00] Speaker A: But it does seem to me, I would say, that there's a loss of swagger, a loss of a level of self confidence in the atheist position.
And I do think the ID has such a lot going for it that it probably makes atheists nervous that they might be outplayed at their own science game. And I certainly am finding that a lot in the kind of conversations that I have ID the Future podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today my guest is Dr. Alistair McKittrick, consulting fellow at the William Whewell center for Science and Natural Theology in Cambridge, England, and also a senior lecturer and program leader of the Master's degree in Practical Theology and Ministry at the London School of Theology.
I'll be talking with Alistair about how he got interested in intelligent design, his work at the Whewell center, and the state of the debate over evolution and intelligent design in the uk.
He's also a fellow Scotsman, so I'm excited to talk to one of my own today. Alistair, welcome to the show.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Thanks very much. Great to be here.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Well, this is your first visit, as I understand it, on the ID the Future Plan podcast. So one of my goals with this conversation is just to help our audience get to know you and your work and how you've come into the fray, as it were.
First of all, you do hail from Scotland, and as I do, I was born in Edinburgh, the capital city. Tell us where you're from and something about growing up in the motherland.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Well, it seems that all the best people were born in Edinburgh.
So yeah, I was born there.
And in fact my mom and my brother is still there.
So I've still got family. Go out and see them from time to time.
School was Stewart's Melville, Daniel Stewart's Melville College, which has the accolade of being, I think, the runner up in the Houses of Parliament competition. At least that's what I was told anyway.
But growing up between 5 to 10, I lived in Canada. My dad went out there as a gp, a doctor, and he had his own sort of a 15 bed hospital out in, in rural Saskatchewan. And so I'm actually also a Canadian citizen.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Oh, okay. All right, that's great. I finally took the step of becoming a US citizen in 2025 after many years.
So it's. You're a fellow dual citizen, right? More freedom of movement.
Yeah. Well, I read somewhere that you're trying to complete the Scottish hills.
That was in one of your bios I found online. Tell us what that means and how it's going?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Well, yeah. In Scotland there are a collection of hills that are all above 3,000ft or 914 meters if you prefer. And they were named after Sir Hugh Munro and therefore they're called the Munros.
He did most of the topographical work to identify them in the first place. Well, there are 284 of them and I've got about 11 to do, so I'm getting there. Unfortunately I did most of them when I was still at school so my rate of attrition is terribly slow. But my ambition anyway is to knock them all off before I can no longer walk.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Oh yeah, wow, that's quite an achievement. Yeah, I've heard about the Monroe's and how many people that attracts beautiful scenery. What. What has been, you know, kind of your favorite scenery or area to, to walk in?
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Well I mean as a Monroe bagger that's what you call if, if somebody is, you know, primarily concerned the scenery is secondary. It's getting the, the tick in the box to say you've climbed that particular one. So it is fair to say you get some absolutely gorgeous winter days where the sky is just eternally blue and you're walking along on hard snow and it's absolutely magical. But they are rather swamped by the other days where you can't see a wretched thing and you just get up and you get down. You have no idea if it was the right hill or not and that was that.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Well, sounds like an activity that's helped you remember you're alive.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Very much so. Good for the soul.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Now you studied physics at the University of Manchester and you taught math and science in Zimbabwe. Were you planning to pursue science as a career or, or be a teacher of it?
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Well, not really.
I did do it a little bit. So I studied physics. I enjoyed it. I was a fairly average physicist. I wasn't particularly brilliant at mathematics.
We call it maths over here by the way.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Just yes.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: To help you out there.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Gotta get the terms right.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: I knew enough to be a, to teach it in secondary school. So after university I wrote to a number of mission agencies and just to see what my options are. And in fact it Elim Pentecostal Mission that gave me the option of being a secondary school teacher in a school in absolutely rural Zimbabwe, in a village called Katari near the border of Mozambique.
And I became the head of department of Mathematics and I also taught science.
So I learned a lot about teaching while I was out there.
And so I'd never really felt that I was called to be a scientist. But it was out there when I was teaching maths and science, and I really felt that the Lord was laying on me a call to go and teach theology.
So that's where that switch in career happened, out there in Zimbabwe. And that was made possible by marrying my wonderful wife, Emily.
And I was able then to study at a place called London Bible College, or as it is now called, London School of Theology. So I'm actually back teaching at the place where I studied theology 30 years ago.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Okay, so that's part of how you got into practical theology.
Now tell us, what drew you into the science and faith debate. At what point did you start seeing the contention and the spirit to debate around these ideas in the science, the academic worlds, or the public at large?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, I actually brought both of these two things, practical theology, my particular discipline, and the science and faith, together in my doctorate.
I'd actually been very interested in the discussion for a long time before then. But my connection between my academic work and the science and faith debate really grew out of my interest in studying it as a doctoral level. And so I had a whole bunch of students who I was teaching apologetics to. Many of them were finding it difficult evangelizing and sharing their faith with those who held a very hard, materialistic worldview. And so the research project was really, well, what happens? Let's study and see what happens. If we were to teach intelligent design to these folk, does that open up the doors? Does that help people to reach folk that they otherwise say they're really struggling with? And the good news is then that's. That's exactly what happened. Students felt emancipated. They felt empowered. They felt. They felt that they had given a voice to share scientifically with their. Their.
Their difficult neighbors, and they felt that they were more effective at countering arguments and building relationships.
And so that was a really fantastic opportunity to bring my two disciplines together.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say. I've always appreciated the fact that intelligent design, you know, neither begins nor ends with a holy book. And so you have that freedom to reach out to people and have those discussions. People who wouldn't entertain religion at a certain juncture in their life, but they're curious about the science, or perhaps they're clinging to the idea that science defeats God or any idea of a creator. So I've found that useful as well. So what, what was your entry point into intelligent design? Was. What was it one of the founding books was a video or lecture?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Or did you meet somebody in 2005, I was teaching at a college down in the south coast of England and I was asked to deputize for a colleague onto a meeting of iduk. Well, they didn't realize that I'd been interested in this topic for the previous two decades anyway, so it was a real fantastic opportunity that was headed up by a great fellow called Peter Luce.
And I participated in several conferences.
I got to know many of the main ID speakers when they came over to the uk.
This was just after the Dover trial.
And so we were all very aware of what a hot topic ID had become.
But from what I had read, from what I'd sort of listened to the speakers, it just seemed to me to be the best engagement with science. And it had the sort of the smartest strategy of addressing the big problems of scientific materialism.
But I'd actually been involved in science and faith debate for the previous two decades as well, or ever since. Just before going to university, I was introduced to it in my church in Edinburgh by a lovely lady called Louise Braga. And she and I put on some presentations at the University of Edinburgh.
We even took out a display at the 7th International Science Festival. And so I've been interested in this topic for the best part of 40 years. Really?
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
And I was going to say Stephen Meyer had a famous lecture at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel in London about signature in the cell. Were you there that day he delivered that?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: I was not. No, no.
But I did come across Philip Johnson very early on, and so he influenced me a great deal.
And I was immediately impressed with the sharpness of his mind, the quality of his understanding.
It became very, very clear that in, in him, as, as we find with Steve Meyer as well, you know, we've just got one of the smartest insights. And you know, when, when people are able to articulate the problems and the solutions like that, you want to get behind people like that.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's a bit of a legend in these parts here at Discovery Institute. And of course, we have his books and videos and his many teachings and insights as we continue.
Well, some in our audience may not have heard yet about the William Whewell center for Science and Natural Theology in Cambridge.
Can you introduce us to this new initiative? For those who aren't aware, it's a program of Discovery Institute, center for Science and Culture.
Must be a bit of a dream come true for you to be a part of it.
Tell us a bit more about it.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: It's wonderful. Yeah. And first of all well done for pronouncing it right. We have all kinds of weird and wonderful pronunciation of poor William Whewell's name.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: So.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: William Whewell, yes. 1794-1866. He was a Cambridge polymath and he was the Master of Trinity College. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin.
He even received a copy of the Origin of Species from him. He wasn't persuaded by it. He wrote back to say thank you, but hadn't really got on board with Darwin's ideas. They walked, they talked together on several occasions. And in fact, Darwin acknowledges the influence that Whewell had on his own inductive methodology, which is really interesting.
So that's the origin of the name Whewell.
And of course, Cambridge is obviously such a historic center for scientific and philosophical discovery. You think about Sir Isaac Newton and his work on gravity, or more recently, Watson and Crick's work on the structure of DNA. And so the vision of the Whewell center is in many ways to sort of to return to the source and to bring back to prominence the study of science from a theistic perspective. That is to say, to reintroduce the value of a natural theology.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. For some it's an antiquated term. You know, it's not used, not in wide circulation anymore, and you've kind of broached it right there. But how would you put natural theology? How would you define that?
And can you speak briefly to the crucial role that natural theology, that enterprise, played in early modern science?
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
Natural theology is asking yourself, what can I know about God from nature, from studying the creation?
And in that sense, it is an application really of sort of wisdom theology.
If you think about the way Scripture encourages us to consider the lilies or consider the birds or look to the ant, you sluggard, or something like that, there's this encouragement to reflect on the natural order because it will point us to, first of all, how we might live our lives in a fitting way in it, but it'll also tell us about who produced it, who created it.
So that instinct that nature, first of all, is not something to fear, it's not irrational, it's not something that you have to offer sacrifices to sort of stay away from all of that came the Christian view of natural theology, that it is something that is inherently good, that it is for us, that it is to be discovered, and that more to the point, we fit it, we were made for it, and it for us, that comes out of a biblical worldview.
So it's not surprising that the great scientific establishment, centers of science come out of that Western Judeo Christian worldview that says it's worth studying nature because the God who created it is reasonable, rational, knowable.
And so therefore it's likely that as we apply ourselves to study of will produce fruit, it will yield its insights to us. We're not on a fruitless, fruitless voyage. So that worldview was stunning and was particularly important for the development of the sciences in the Western world.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Right. And that got swept up, or swept away, I should say, by sort of a wave of scientific materialism that, let's face it, came before Darwin.
You know, it was already something in contention, moving across Europe and in different other parts of the world as the ideas came to people. And then Darwin sort of jumped on the bandwagon and capitalized on that and rather gleefully put out his theory of natural selection. And off we went, you know, becoming a materialistic culture in the West.
But this natural theology sort of brings us back to the source, as it were. And you're saying it's kind of two parts. It's not just what nature can tell us about the existence of God and the nature of God or the characteristics of God. It also instructs us on, okay, what now? How do we live? You know, what is our response as a fellow creature in the universe.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Right, yes, exactly. There's a sort of sense of directedness, there's a fittingness to the way in which we live in nature. And that's something that we can see as we try and study the goals of nature. God seems to have imbued nature with a tendency towards flourishing. And so it's that notion of what would count for humanity to flourish in this particular world, in our particular environment. We know when a flower flourishes, which is where the term comes from, it's growing, and it therefore produces its fruit. And if a plant isn't growing, then it can't flourish. And if it's not producing its fruit, then it's not flourishing. So natural theology asks, what would it look like for humanity to flourish in this natural world?
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. Now, what do you do? What keeps you busy with the Whewell Center? I know you've just come off of a colloquium with Dr. Stephen Meyer and many other guest lecturers coming in, but what would you say are the main focuses of the Whewell center as far as engagement with others?
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Okay, well, the Huell center itself will be a study center, a place where students probably post grad or maybe even postdoc will come and have an opportunity to study in this just great location. It's a beautiful building, it's really well furbished. It's going to be an ideal place to concentrate, to have fellowship with one another so you can encourage each other.
Doing a doctorate or postdoc can be very lonely work and it's just great to have an environment where you're encouraged, where you're pushed and also where we can bring regular opportunities to meet top of the range scientists and philosophers who can influence your study, who can bring this theistic perspective, can bring a sort of fresh insight that you might not get in other academic environments. So that's the heart of the Wheel Center.
It has sort of other functions as well. It's got that sort of reach out function. So one of the things I've been really doing is hosting a series of lectures over the last couple of years or so just promoting the Whewell center. We call them the Whewell Lectures.
Once a year as well we have the John Ray Lecture who was an influence on Whewell and various others. And so we're trying to sort of reach out to those who have an interest in science and the way in which it overlaps with matters of theological faith.
We had an excellent autumn series last October and November with Meier and Tour and Burgess and Galloway and Fraser and various other people.
And these would be held in different colleges. We've held them at Jesus College, Christ College, Trinity Hall. And so it's great that we're got a really lovely presence within the city itself. And then as you say, over the summer I've been involved hosting this fantastic apologetics colloquium and that featured many of the key ID speakers.
And then the third thing that I think that Whewell Centre is going to be known for is as a sort of hub for European ID contacts. We want to build a network of like minded academics, those who are interested in research and presentations and promotion of ID thinking within the. The science and natural theology worlds.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Yeah, and what aspect of all that excites you the most as you're looking towards, you know, the next five or ten years of the Huell Center's work?
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Oh well, I think it'll be brilliant to see raising up young academics who are going to be significant in the future. That's already been, as it were, Discovery's strategy over the last few years, which has paid a lot of dividends. I mean that's fantastic work.
So that'll be exciting to see folk going through their research at the center. From my point of view, what I'll be contributing a lot is some more of these hosted evenings presentations and also I'll be involved in hopefully a new podcast that'll be starting up a Huell center podcast where we'll be able to take advantage of some of these great speakers and not only record their, their lecture, but then have a chance to do a bit more of an in depth conversation with them.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's going to be great because as much as, you know, a lot of our supporters and fans would want to go to the Heal center, some will not be able to make it there physically. So things like podcasts, having, having a channel where they can watch videos, that's going to be important to raise awareness about what's happening there.
Now let me switch gears here to just kind of looking at the state of the debate as it were in the UK right now. Stephen Meyer had an essay in the Telegraph this week actually that explained why the scientific materialism of the new atheists was waning slowly disappearing, kind of fading from view, while modern science is providing support more and more support by the year for theistic belief. So what do you think of the piece by Meyer and what has the reaction been so far?
[00:22:41] Speaker A: I mean, it's just a great piece.
What's really lovely is being able to reduce some of these complex arguments into a popular form with a sort of a clear point where people just have to sort of stop and take a moment and say, right, how am I going to respond to this? So it's really well written, it was a nice, it was a great opportunity. The fact that the Telegraph was willing to publish it, that's really fantastic. And boy did it spark a whole load of comments. I think last time I Look it was 1900 comments, which is just, you know, the chart.
So you can see that it's a topic of tremendous interest.
There was just loads of the sort of the usual suspects.
It was a real atheistic echo chamber. The comments to the article with people just saying this sort of simplistic thing, yeah, but who made God? You know. Oh well, you got me.
You just think it's such a shame that folk have this kind of casual ability to dismiss an intelligently put argument. But on the other hand, it is encouraging to read that most of these, you know, comments are just one liner, sarcastic points. They don't have an argument against it. So it's, you know, in that sense it's demonstrated the strength of the argument.
I think there's a real fragility in the kind of negative responses that were put. And it was fun the way that Meyer used the sort of the former and current atheists against themselves, you know, John Gray and Ian Hirsi Alley and of course Richard Dawkins himself and his desire to remain a cultural Christian. It was lovely. It was really fun.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's a good opportunity to engage folks and keep getting the word out and reminding people that indeed this materialistic view is a spent force, you know, and that it doesn't really reflect what modern science is showing.
But not surprising that there would be a spirited response now along those lines, gauging the state of the debate in the UK there, I mean, there's two components. There's the upholding of the evolutionary view and then there's the allowability of Intelligent Design as an alternative explanation. Would you say things are moving in a good direction? Is there more openness to giving the arguments of Intelligent Design a fair hearing? Or is there still, you know, are there still large pockets of resistance to the idea that mind played a role in life in the universe?
[00:25:44] Speaker A: No, I'd say the opposition to Intelligent Design specifically and to theistic ideas of science generally is still pretty strong. It's still pretty prominent.
And those in authority are still very keen to reject it in favor of either flat out atheism, which is less, it's less popular. I'd say there used to be a cachet to be an atheist. I don't think there is so much anymore, or if not that, then some kind of theistic evolutionary position.
But it does seem to me, I would say that there's a loss of swagger, a loss of a level of self confidence in the atheist position.
And I do think the ID has such a lot going for it that it probably makes atheists nervous that they might be outplayed at their own science game.
And I certainly am finding that a lot in the kind of conversations that I have. So often the arguments that the atheists use are not based on evidence. They're more based on faith, on what they hope will one day be shown. So they have faith that one day they'll explain how something comes from nothing, like a universe.
They have hope that one day they'll be able to show how information in a cell could appear randomly from just matter.
They hope that one day they'll be able to explain how matter just left on its own can suddenly become self conscious. These are not arguments, these are faith positions. And so it's very fun just to hold that up to these folks.
Good luck. But Notice where you are. You are not arguing from a scientific evidential base.
You're a faith person, which is often quite a shock to folks when they realize that's what's happening. And it's theism, I think, which has now got the sort of the best causal explanation for things. God is a properly sufficient scientific explanation.
It's not a God of the gaps argument. And people are quite sort of frustrated when they realize that we're not just easily dismissed like that. We use the same methodology as the historical natural sciences, namely inference to the best explanation. And so I'd say that sort of culturally people like. Well, Justin Brierly in his podcast talks about a process of re. Enchantment in nature going on. And I think that's right. I think that all the beauty, the majesty, the awe in creation was sort of hidden away when we only had to view nature through a sort of Darwinian adaptive lens.
But now that design is back on the agenda, I think it is much easier to rejoice in beauty and to praise God for the glory of his creation. That seems to me to be back on the table.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Well, that's very hopeful indeed.
That's great news. Now, what do you make of the idea that Richard Dawkins has offered up in recent years, this idea of decrying religion on the one hand and then being at home in the Christian ethos in the other? Let me read a quote from Dawkins. This is from a 2024 interview. For those who haven't come across these comments, he says, I call myself a cultural Christian. I'm not a believer. But there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian.
I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. We in the UK are a Christian country in that sense.
So what's his thinking there? And is that a common stance in the UK these days?
[00:29:38] Speaker A: Well, I think increasingly so, essentially. Be careful what you wish for, Richard.
You know, Dawkins wanted to get rid of religion altogether because he thinks God is so bad for the soul, as it were.
But then he bumps into the vacuous gray of materialism and realizes that, you know, all the good things that he's enjoyed in his life in Oxford, you know, the beauty, the music, the art, the architecture, the sense of community, trust, notions of loyalty, these are all legacies of a particular religion, namely Christianity. And he also really struggles with Islamic culture in particular, which he finds anathema to his Western values. And, you know, it's Similar to what Tom Holland has argued in Dominion, namely that the specific Western values that brought about such a flourishing culture for science and the arts, this is not a product of secular progress, but it's the specific fruit of Jesus Christ and his followers.
And these are the habits and the customs that are really hard to define.
But boy, you really miss them. They're very valued, they're hugely valued by those who have them.
And when people notice that they're starting to be eroded by the cultural despisers and the relativizers, they get nervous. So what you're seeing is Dawkins recognizing how some of his culture is slipping away and realizing that he's partly responsible for that. So I don't think it's any accident that the flourishing of science came from Christian cultures that believed that God was good, that he created a world for us to discover throughout the use of our God given minds and made it possible to know Him. Even though our faculties are fallen, they're imperfect and everybody could see the same world. But not all cultures developed this way. Not everyone, as it were, to use the parable of the sower, not everybody received the seed and began to grow and produce a rich harvest that was the culture of the Christian faith.
[00:31:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it is a hopeful thing, I think, to see folks like Richard Dawkins.
If one of the world's foremost atheists and supporters of Darwinian biology can feel those feelings, then there's hope for all of us. You know, in terms of those who have turned from Christianity or from a Judeo Christian framework in their signs, but they're finding it hard to turn away in other ways.
So symptomatic of that, that hope that you're suggesting is running through the United Kingdom right now. Well, as we wrap up for today, let's talk about where listeners and viewers can learn more about the Huell center and follow your own work. Do you have a website and what would the website be for the Huell Center?
[00:32:46] Speaker A: No, I've got some work that is on, I think is Academia Edu. So that's where some of my stuff is hidden away. You can get hold of that freely.
The main thing to look out for is the huellcentre uk, that's its website.
And just bear in mind that you spell centre the UK way.
So that's C E N T R E.
So and if you go there, there's a place where you can sign up for emails and you'll get told about upcoming lectures of which there will be some. Sadly they're not they're not live streamed. We will be recording, though, and at some point in the future, we'll get them up onto the website.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So Huell center, center spelled R E.uk would be the website and you have articles and papers published, and that's through academia.co.uk or I think it's edu.edu. okay. And we can actually link to a few in the show notes for this episode if you let me know of a few highlights. Well, Alistair, thanks so much for spending part of your evening tonight with me.
This was fun. Let's talk again both on camera and off as you prepare to launch a podcast on that side of the pond.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure.
[00:34:10] Speaker B: Well, again, to learn more about events at the Wheel center, don't forget, even discovery.org you're going to find out some of the things that are happening there. And then there's huellcentre uk.
So find the show notes for every episode, actually, @idthefuture.com however you get a hold of this podcast, you can always check additional
[email protected]. well, for the podcast, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next time.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture. Com.
