Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your guest host, Mike Keys. Today we get to have a follow up conversation with Dr. Robert Schedinger. I mentioned in the previous episode that he occupies an endowed chair at Luther College. Been there since 2000 after he got his PhD in religious studies from Temple University in Philadelphia. He also has a BS in Civil engineering. So he has his feet in science and in theology. The main question that has animated his research is what is religion? And we've noted how that has been very helpful as he's been reading through Darwin's correspondence and what others have said about him and published reviews of his various books. And we're getting better acquainted with Darwin's religious views or quasi religious philosophical views. So thank you for Joining us again, Dr. Schedinger.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Thank you. It's good to be here.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: All right, so we were talking last about Darwinian mythology. And some of this mythology might have its place in the way historians deal with Darwin. So could historians themselves have, have their own sort of mythologies about Darwin? In particular, I know you have thought carefully about the very influential book called Darwin's Sacred Cause, authored by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. And you question some of their historiographical methods. And you argue that because, see, they argue that Darwin's theory about the Origin of Species was primarily motivated by, by his abolitionist sentiments. But you've reached some different conclusions. How so?
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so I had read Darwin's Sacred Cause some years ago, early in my sort of exploration of Darwin. And it was a really interesting read, a very well written book, and I enjoyed reading it. But I wasn't sure about the thesis that Darwin was primarily motivated in his species work by abolitionist sentiments, the way they want to argue. But I put it aside and I did other work. And as I was rewriting my book, my forthcoming book on Darwin, I wanted to take up his issues or his beliefs about slavery and race in a final chapter. And so I went back to reread Darwin's Sacred Cause. And having read at this point so much of Darwin's correspondence, I just didn't see anything in the correspondence that seemed to support their thesis. Clearly Darwin did not like slavery. That's well documented. But I didn't see any evidence that that was the primary motivation for his scientific work, as they argue. But the book is so well documented, it has 820 endnotes reflecting hundreds of Darwin's letters that I thought maybe I must have missed something. So I decided to go back and reread the book very carefully and any place where they really sort of register Darwin's views on racial issues or slavery. And there was an endnote. I went to the endnote and looked at what the sources were and then I began tracking down the sources that they cite to support their thesis. And I was shocked to find out that most of the sources that they cite don't support their thesis, that they play fast and loose with the sources. Some of the sources they cite are totally irrelevant to the point that they're making. Some of them are just cited completely out of context. In other places they give the impression of something that Darwin said that's made up of brief snippets quoted from two or three different unrelated sources that they just sort of create Darwin's ideas out of, out of whole cloth in some cases. And so I really, really got interested in, because these are such big name historiographers and biographers of Darwin that I thought people needed to know that this book that looks to be so well documented is, I'm calling it now, historical fiction.
It's rooted in history. But their picture of Darwin I think is highly fictionalized. It's passed off as something that is fully rooted in the historical sources when it's not. So I find that as being very disturbing in terms of methodology, but also the ethical aspect of that. Creating something that looks like real historiography when it doesn't appear to be that at all.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: So they were in a sense creating the Darwin that they wanted, right? Yes, the Darwin that would be a crusader for a very admirable moral cause that we of course agree with Desmond and Moore that abolitionist sentiments were laudable. But as you say, we can't just rewrite history to make it a moral lesson. I mean, the moral lesson is morality is important, but history is also important, Right?
[00:05:04] Speaker A: To get the history more accurate. Yeah. So again, Darwin had anti slavery sentiments and I think lot of that was just due to. He was extremely sensitive to suffering, didn't want to see other people or even animals suffer. And you know, I think this is part of the reason why he had problems sort of dealing with issues of design in nature because he saw a lot of suffering in nature and couldn't see that as a reflection of some sort of a divine intelligence. So I think, you know, he was definitely against slavery, but I see no evidence that that was the primary driving force of his scientific work as they want to make him out to be. But by creating that picture of Darwin, in a sense what they're doing is, I think the Implication is Darwin was taking on this great cause that we can all support. And therefore, if you then become critical of Darwin's work, the implication is it's putting you on the side of the racists.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Oh my.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: And I don't think we want to go there. You can criticize Darwin. That doesn't make you a racist just because you criticize the Origin of Species.
And so I wanted to highlight this. And so I wrote a five part series for Evolution News to show the evidence of how they misrepresent the sources that they cite. The primary sources that they cite create a highly fictionalized picture of Darwin.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: So, Robert, you're a scholar of academic religion and I think our listeners would be curious to find out how you became interested in biological origins in relation to religion and especially how you became interested in the theory of intelligent design. But first, before talking about your interest in intelligent design, why have you found this work you've already described so interesting as a scholar of academic religion looking at evolutionary biology?
[00:06:53] Speaker A: Right. So I had my PhD in religious studies with primary focus in biblical studies. I had also done some work in Islamic studies and I do teach a course on Islam as well as biblical studies here at Luther. But when I came here out of graduate school in 2000, I very quickly made a connection to a member of the biology department and he and I taught a team taught course for a number of years on sort of religion and ecology type things. Now he was very much a Darwinian, you know, himself. And I hadn't really questioned Darwinian biology at all at that point in my life. I just sort of accepted it like most people do. But I had a colleague in the religion department who taught a science and religion class and had taught it for many, many years. And he was very much a committed Darwinian and he had relationships. He knew E.O. wilson personally and some of these big names. But then he retired and knowing that I had a background in engineering and that I was interested in science, he asked me if I would take over the science and religion class for him. He wanted to see it continue. So I thought, well, yeah, I'm interested in that, so I'm happy to do that. So I began in 2013 teaching a science and religion course. And that's what sort of prompted me to use the sabbatical in 2014 to read all these scientific works in evolutionary biology to be able to teach that course with integrity. But then I also knew that to teach that course I would have to deal with the sort of creationist, intelligent design, Darwinian biology Controversy. And in order to do that with integrity, I would need to know more about some of these other concepts.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Ah, so you actually started to read about Intelligent Design then, huh?
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Right, with great trepidation.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: It could be dangerous to get too interested in that, you know.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Right, right.
So that. That's what happened. I, you know, in terms of preparing to teach this course, I knew I should read some of these books about intelligent design. And I assumed at the outset, very much like the story that Gunter Beckley has told about his turning to intelligent design, that I really didn't want to read the books. I didn't expect I would find anything very useful in them. I expected to find tendentious religious arguments or biblical citations and not good science. But I knew I needed to be more conversant with what intelligent design theorists say themselves. And so with some trepidation, I began reading the books. And next thing I knew, I recognized these aren't anything like what the larger narrative out there had led me to expect. Now, it's interesting. Back in 1996, before I had moved here to Iowa and I was still living in the Philadelphia area and I was still in graduate school, there was a woman in a church that I went to who was kind of interested in some of these issues, and she knew I had kind of a passing interest in maybe science and religion issues. And I still remember the day she came to me all excited with Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, and, oh, you have to read this. This is a great book. And I just didn't give it much credibility, and I just kind of ignored it. And now here I am. Michael Behe's jacket endorsement is on the mystery of evolutionary mechanisms. So I began reading these books in intelligent design around 2014, 2015, and actually began to see that they were scientifically substantive, that their criticisms of Darwinian evolution were cogent, and that I couldn't easily just sort of dispel them. And then as I started reading the biological literature, as we talked about earlier, and began seeing that that literature itself was not particularly coherent, I became much more interested in understanding, you know, some of these intelligent design issues and have found myself quite surprising to me, starting to very much lean in that direction of there having to be some sort of intelligence driving biological organisms.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: Well, it's funny that late in your career, Intelligent design was still a black box to you. You didn't know what was inside it. So then you opened up the box and surprise, you found some things you didn't expect. What do you find most convincing about the theory of intelligent design?
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. I mean, there's. There's a number of aspects, but I think the issue that, you know, Stephen Meyer has, has been bringing up, and others too, the origin of biological information. The idea, it looks to me like, you know, the difference between inorganic and organic matter is that organic matter not only uses information, but is built on information, you know, digital code, DNA. And I think the argument that information itself has to have an origin, there's a cogent one. And as Meyer has pointed out, and I can't refute this, the only force we know of that has the ability to produce digital, semantic information is intelligent minds. Humans do it all the time, and we see that kind of information in biological organisms. That information had to come from somewhere, as Meier says, and I don't know of any physical process that could produce that would have the power to produce that. And so if intelligence is necessary in the origin of life, then there's no reason to think that intelligence does not continue to operate at some level in the continuing evolution of life. So I think that's the idea that I find most convincing. But certainly there are others that I think are helpful too.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: And as a scholar in the humanities, exploring texts from the past, when you encounter a text, right. It's complex, specified information that has a communicative function. And now after you opened up ID's black box, you found out there is biological function and it's coded for by complex, specified information. So it's interesting, this crossover from the humanities into the natural sciences was a. Well, I guess retrospectively, it was kind of a natural transition because you saw something similar. As a historian of religion, you encounter a text and you figure out what was the communicative function, what was the intention of the author. Right. But, you know, it was written. That text was not just randomly assembled by ink molecules splattered on paper. Right. You knew that it was somehow there was a mind behind that.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: So would you say that that's part of what kind of gives unity to your professional experience, spanning both the humanities and the sciences?
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Yeah, oh, definitely. I mean, as you said, I know where the information in books comes from. It always comes from a mind. I know where the information in my computer comes from, comes from an intelligent computer programmer. So when I see that kind of information at biological organisms, it has to come from somewhere. And I've never seen it come from anywhere but an intelligent mind. So that has been, I think, the most convincing argument for intelligent design that I've encountered.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Right. Well, that's wonderful. I am so grateful that we had this conversation. It overlaps with some of my own research in the history and philosophy of science. So it's good to rub shoulders with another colleague on this topic. So thank you so much for joining us today at ID the Future. Dr. Sheddinger yeah, thank you for the.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Opportunity to share my work and for our listeners.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: I am Mike Keys. Thanks for joining us here at ID the Future.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Visit us@idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
