[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
The Future, a podcast about evolution and
[00:00:08] Speaker B: intelligent Design welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Today we bring you the first half of a recent conversation with geologist Dr. Casey Luskin and his wife, science educator Kristin Murray, that originally aired on the Apologetics Profile podcast.
The conversation, hosted by Daniel Ray, begins by touching on the recent sensational headlines of UAP sightings to ask a deeper how do we scientifically distinguish between random noise and meaningful information?
The conversation explores the scientific theory of intelligent design and in particular the intuitive ways we recognize patterns in life. From forensic science to archaeology to the search for extraterrestrial life, Cayce touches on the evidence that suggests the universe was intentionally designed to be discovered by us.
The episode rounds out with discussion of some of the attempts by scientists to explain how life could have arisen on our planet, including the famous directed panspermy idea of aliens from elsewhere in the universe seeding life on Earth.
It's a great setup for part two, which will dive deeper into the question of alien life and whether alien life would be a product of intelligent design or blind evolutionary processes.
Here's Dr. Casey Luskin and Kristin Marais in conversation with Daniel Ray.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: The United States government has recently released previously classified videos and imagery of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.
Many of the videos show luminous entities in the sky maneuvering in ways that defy our current knowledge of the laws of physics far beyond the capabilities of any known human technologies. Many individuals have also since come forth publicly to share their eyewitness accounts of such sightings. Social media is rapidly filling up with people's personal encounters, not only with these ethereal lights in the sky, but with but also about their experiences with nocturnal alien visitors who seem to appear in people's bedrooms.
So do aliens actually exist? Is it a for granted conclusion that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe? If aliens are here, from where did they come from? How did they get here, and why haven't they disclosed themselves to the world?
Those who accept a traditional Darwinian account of how life allegedly evolved here on Earth also happily accept that life could have, and probably did evolve elsewhere in the universe. If there the universe is filled with stars and planets, surely, the argument goes, there must have been other planets and other galaxies where life also evolved. But the size of the universe or the number of stars and planets within it do not have in and of themselves any actual causal powers to create life.
There are a myriad of other factors that must be considered when discussing not only the origin of life life, but its subsequent growth, speciation and sustainability. Evolutionary scenarios finally do not explain how extraterrestrial life could have evolved. And they also fail to account for the innumerable, precisely fine tuned constants and quantities required not only for the origin of life, but for its subsequent development and sustainability.
The odds of not just life, but sentient, intelligent, carbon based life arising elsewhere in the universe are astronomically, outrageously incalculable. But let's just say that intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe and that they could somehow successfully navigate interstellar travel. Why is it, though, that these alleged advanced races of beings often seem to crash their craft here on Earth?
So what exactly are these lights in the sky? Could there be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? No one has yet specifically identified the nature and origin of the lights in the sky. And no one has yet to provide any physical, tangible evidence of actual alien beings, such as the little grey beings often depicted in Hollywood films and in science fiction novels.
On this episode of Apologetics Profile, I had the opportunity to sit down with science educator Kristin Murray and Dr. Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington to discuss Intelligent design theory, evolution, and the alien question.
Does evolution favor the existence of extraterrestrial life, or does extraterrestrial life pose a significant problem for a Darwinian account of the origin of biological species?
We tackle these and a host of other fascinating topics related to intelligent design on this episode of the Profile. We hope you'll join us. As we begin our conversation. Casey explains a little bit about what Discovery Institute is all about.
Here is Casey Luskin.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Discovery Institute is actually not a religious organization.
I have coworkers at Discovery Institute who are certainly not Christians, even not religious. And the reason for this is our primary focus with Intelligent Design is not trying to promote or prove a religious worldview, but to show that there is real scientific evidence for design in nature. And, and you can have people who recognize this regardless of their worldview or background. There are folks, certainly Muslims love Intelligent Design. In many cases, folks from, you know, who believe, you know, Jewish background or Christian background or even Eastern religious worldviews who believe in some kind of a creator or a mind behind the universe can all agree with Intelligent Design. Because at heart, all we're saying is that there is real evidence in nature for, for an intelligent mind for a creator and intelligent designer, and that is not specific to one particular religious worldview. Folks from many different backgrounds can see that.
So, and this, you know, if you're a Christian, you're wondering, well, does this mean that Intelligent Design is anti Christian? Well, I would Say that for me, personally, as a Christian, what we're really saying is in the tradition of the verse Romans 1:20, where Paul writes that God is clearly seen, is in what has been made. And that's really what we're saying. You can see in nature evidence for a creator, for a mind, for intelligence behind what we see. But Intelligent Design tries to take a scientific approach and not get into questions about who the designer is or identifying the designer. We're trying to say, look, all we're saying is that there's real empirical evidence in nature for Intelligent Design. I shall also add the Discovery Institute does a lot of things not even related to Intelligent Design. And we have programs that deal with things like trying to solve regional transportation problems in the Pacific Northwest. Not exactly your stereotypical, you know, religious topic. So Discovery Institute is actually a diverse organization with a lot of different programs, with other programs that deal with economics, the homeless crisis, foreign affairs, technology, things that, you know, may have intersections with, with worldview or faith, but are not faith oriented. And even our ID program is trying to take a scientific approach. So Discovery Institute is not a religious organization. We do a lot of different projects.
[00:08:23] Speaker C: I asked Casey here about the concept of Shannon information developed in the late 1940s and how it became foundational in current Intelligent Design theory. Here again is Casey Luskin.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Claude Shannon was basically a. An information theorist, a mathematician who did a lot of work back in the 1940s and 50s. He was also an early computer scientist.
And he wanted to measure whether or not a signal was being faithfully transmitted across a channel. That was a very important question or issue that needed to be resolved early on in telecommunications, computer science, all those kinds of things.
And so he came up with a way of measuring information and whether or not it was being faithfully transmitted. And it was. He basically, I believe that he invented the term bits or started measuring information in bits, which basically reflects the probability of a particular sequence or string of symbols or, you know, information characters being transmitted.
When bits basically are measured as the negative log base 2 of the probability of the sequence of characters. And so this always was being done kind of like in a communications channel environment, a computer environment, something like that, where you're sending.
You're sending discrete digital numbers or characters or symbols along a channel. And you want to ask, you know, is it being faithfully transmitted? But what. What people realize pretty soon is that Shannon, the way that he measured information doesn't tell you anything about whether that information is meaningful or functional.
So if I were to say, like, you know, have a 22 character string that just read out nonsense, you know, then that would have the same, you know, just a bunch of random letters that would have the same number of bits as a 22 character string that had actually meaning. Like if you had something, something that said this is a non random string, that's 22 characters. If you take out the vowels, you would have the same amount of Shannon information from a random sequence as you would have from a sort of a functional sequence of information.
And so we needed a measure, a way of measuring information that could distinguish between functional and non functional information.
And this is really where intelligent design got involved with the question of measuring information and, and the idea of complex and specified information.
So complex and specified information is a way of measuring whether a string of characters is both unlikely but also specified to match some meaningful pattern. And it's basically complex, meaning that it's an unlikely sequence. And then specified, meaning that it matches a pattern that means something, there's something meaningful there.
And so what ID theorists have decided when or have determined is that complex and specified information is not only a good way of deciding whether there is meaning in a sequence, but also a good way of detecting intelligent design. And it's actually a general method of determining whether or not there is a pattern or a sequence or a set of scenario that reflects the prior action of, of an intelligent agent.
[00:11:55] Speaker C: Okay, Kristen, you are an educator who engages with young minds about this topic of intelligent design. I know your background is in chemistry, it seems like from, from kindergarten all the way through, you know, college and beyond that. One of the foundational aspects of education is pattern recognition. I mean from number systems to the Alphabet students, it's intuitive. You don't have to tell kindergarteners that there's patterns. They recognize it. Right. They know when something's wrong. They will point that out quickly.
In your classroom you can tell us a little bit about what you do and then you know, how do we distill down to the simplest level of helping students unpack what Casey said in a more simple way, like how do we do design detection education?
What are some things that you do there?
[00:12:54] Speaker D: Yeah. Early on in the course, as students are getting an introduction to what intelligent design is, we do need to pretty early on distill for students. What do we mean by that convoluted term? Casey used complex and specified information, csi.
And we're fortunate. We, we've got a pretty good resource. I know Case was, I think, a co author on this, but Discovering Intelligent Design, it's a well written book that works really well for students. And one of the first ways that they learn to distill that is with three examples.
I think I'm referring to what the text talks about. But students look at, you know, if I see a series of repeating ones and zeros in a discrete pattern, and is that complex and specified? No, that's clearly got a pattern. It's specified, but it's not very complex.
And then students might look at just a gibberish combination of numbers and letters, and they look at that and, okay, is. Is that complex and specified? No, it's complex. It's really unlikely. But it. It doesn't have a discrete pattern to it. It's just gibberish. And then they might look at, you know, a specific text that is in a paragraph form and starting sentence, ending sentence, and is clearly conveying meaning. And they can see that the arrangement of the letters in that particular example is unlikely, but it also conveys meaning and matches a pattern, namely our English language. And so they quickly realize, okay, actually, of those three examples, that's the only one that we would invoke or imply, or I should say infer.
Design. Right, that's the only one of those three examples.
Um, and I think I really appreciate that you use the word intuitive because design inferences are very intuitive.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: It.
[00:15:06] Speaker D: It's like going with your gut.
And I. It's not difficult as a student since it's your natural instinct to be like, somebody wrote that versus that was just generated through some random computer, you know, spit out, you know, it's very intuitive.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So in a sense, it's kind of the difference between recognizing 26 letters of the Alphabet with which kids get really proficient in very quickly at a very young age. They can see the letters of the Alphabet, but they can also detect an arrangement of those letters in a story.
Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh.
They know there's a difference. Intuitively, at five years old, they know there's a difference between a Winnie the Pooh story where they see words and the Alphabet that they learn in class. But in both instances, there's pattern recognition.
That kind of is what you're saying, I would think. Right?
[00:15:58] Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, not only.
Not only, as you say, does that start at a young age, and it's intuitive. But, you know, in the course, again, probably in the same context of introducing csi, it's helpful for them to see that this is not a new practice in the workplace level and professional level. You know, they. They get introduced to the idea that their favorite, you know, Forensic science shows are. Are using this type of design thinking. You know, they're. You're arriving at the crime scene and you're distinguishing between a natural death and some creepy, you know, grotesque murder, right? That there's a distinction there.
And, and likewise, they're understanding that archaeologists are using this kind of thinking. You know, was this a naturally eroded piece of rock, or is this a stone tool that was carved, carved for a specific purpose, and matches patterns of other tools that we find?
All of that is very intuitive, and it really does resonate with students. They're like, yeah, I do this in my daily life.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: Right. Seems like we're wired for the intuitive sense of recognizing design.
Casey, I want to take this up a notch again, back to the science, something I'm sure you're familiar with, that we're talking about information bits.
In 1974, a group of astronomers got together and decided to send a message to the globular cluster M13, the Herculean globular cluster with thousands of stars, apparently believing that around one of those stars might be a planet with some intelligent life. So we beamed, and I'm quoting this from the SETI website, the search for intelligent.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And the assumption of SETI is that whatever intelligent life is out there would recognize hallmarks of intelligent design. So what's in the Arecibo message? Well, here's what they say.
1679 bits. Shannon information there arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line. Those are both prime numbers and may help aliens decode the message. I'm quoting here. The ones and zeros were transferred by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes. The message consists of, among other things, the telescope, our solar system DNA, and a stick figure of humans. We beamed that for three minutes at the Hercules globular cluster.
Now, I've always marveled at this because when we want to talk to aliens, we send out a picture of our DNA and say, intelligent life.
But when the aliens come and start reading our textbooks, they soon quickly discover that most of us don't believe that DNA is the sign of intelligent design.
How can this be, Casey?
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So, first of all, it's really interesting because when they did beam that signal into outer space, that was actually quite controversial because people said, well, we don't know who might be on the receiving end of that signal. Are they going to be friendly or not? Are they. Are we basically telegraphing our. You know, it's like a Little bunny rabbit, you know, telling all the predators, hey, come eat me. You know, like, like, we didn't. We don't really know who was going to get the signal. Thankfully, nobody has come yet. But as we all know from the, you know, Independence Day, it takes a few years for them to get here. So. So maybe they're on their way. We really don't know.
But. But yeah, so that was. That was very, very controversial. But what you're talking about right now is classic design detection, okay? We're sending out a signal that does not have any natural mechanism of being produced. And so we're assuming that an alien civilization will see that signal, if it exists, and immediately recognize that this did not come from a naturally produced phenomenon like a quasar or a pulsar or whatever.
And this actually gets at the psychology of detecting design, Daniel, because this is really, I think, an unrecognized principle at the heart of all methods for detecting design.
And it's that minds are very good at recognizing when other minds have been at work.
Okay, just kind of ponder that. Minds are very good at figuring out and recognizing when another mind has been at work. So, I mean, as Kristen was saying, like, we know how to recognize when a rock was carved into a shape for a purpose. We know how to recognize when there's a pattern of shells on the seashore that didn't happen by chance, but was put there to spell out, you know, SOS or Bobby loves Mary or whatever it may be.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: So.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Or we're assuming that alien minds would be able to recognize, okay, this was set by another species trying to get our attention.
So this is at the heart of design detection. And so what we're doing in the intelligent design research community is we're saying, well, can we recognize if a mind was at work in the history of life or the history of our universe? Looking at the complexity of, of the laws of nature, looking at the complexity of information and DNA or the complexity of the cell, can we also recognize when a mind was at work? So this is kind of the basic task that we're set out to do here.
[00:21:34] Speaker C: Kristen, when you talk to students, you're talking to high schoolers. A lot of people have a, just a fear of trepidation, of, is there intelligent life among high schoolers anymore? But of course there is, right? Jokingly, anybody who's taught high school, there
[00:21:48] Speaker D: is no worries on that front.
[00:21:51] Speaker C: Yeah. And it seems like people are like, you know, the younger generations, we just kind of write them off as stuck staring at their phones but as we've talked, when we talked last year, we were talking a little bit about how you got into chemistry, and you were enthusiastic about the subject matter. And so you're passionate about telling these kids what you're learning.
How do you see them? Like what Casey was just saying that it's. That it's obvious what design is to them.
But how do you awaken that intuition to something beyond?
Because I think a lot of us struggle with this. We know something so well, so intuitively we take it for granted.
But. But ID is something more like awakening people. I read a lot of the literature you guys put out, Discovery puts out where, where people come into intelligent Design. They have a eureka moment where it's either something in the stars or something in biology that awakens them to, oh, my gosh, this is designed. It goes from an intuitive sense to a wonder.
How do you ignite that in high school students?
[00:22:59] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I should preface as I answer that that that looks very different in a chemistry course than it does in, say, my colleague Summer Edwards biology course. And both courses have an intelligent design lens to them.
In my course, one way that you, quote, awaken that, as you asked, is having students consider the alternative.
Right. So if, if it's not designed, then it is the product of a purely blind, unguided chance, you know, materialistic process.
And students need to grapple with whether or not that is sufficient.
And that's kind of. I think one of the initial awakening moments is actually grappling with whether or not such a process could account for what we know. And so in the context of chemistry, we, we lurk, if you will, in the land of the origin of the first cell.
And how likely is it that we could, that we could produce that first life?
And I, I can see that for students.
I think that they find that question interesting because, of course, if you can't answer that question, you're a long shot from then dabbling in the land in which my colleague Summer dabbles in which is further down the pipeline, which is how do we then evolve, you know, plants and animals and fungi and like, you know, that much further down the line.
I think in a chemistry setting, you're setting students up and awakening them to the need to use design reasoning at the very, very beginning. Can I form that first cell? It's a highly relevant question. Because if we can't, we've sort of bottlenecked, you know, we can't go on and discuss the later questions of plants and animals. We need to start at Least with a living cell, you know.
And so I do think that that's a hook that kind of gets students to jump on board, really.
[00:25:23] Speaker C: I mean, even for adults, the question of origins is, is enormously fruitful in terms of like the grist of having an intelligent conversation with somebody. Where does this all come from? The big existential questions can begin with a simple chemistry question. How did we get the first carbon? How do we get the first cell?
And how does. How. Where do we have Eureka moments of recognizing design in these original entities?
How do we get that? Casey, I want to take us back a little bit more. Some, some astronomical history. You might be aware of this, you might not be, but you know, there's a couple of telescopes atop Mount Wilson in California that have been responsible for understanding the shape and the size of our universe.
Edwin Hubble gets a lot of credit for those discoveries. But Edwin Hubble had a helper. You may or may not know of Milton Humaison, who started at the Mount Wilson Hotel and then later observatory as a janitor. He was cleaning toilets atop Mount Wilson when he was given a position of an assistant. He was instrumental in helping carry the lens of the 60 inch telescope that preceded the 100 inch.
That lens was. Was made in France by a wine making, a wine bottle making company.
And that lens went up the backs of pack animals that Humisen was, was helping to drive. Now that telescope later when it was being built, became one of the, was the largest at the time in 1908, before the Hundred inch was built.
But one of the things that it did was pioneered studies in recognizing the spectral classification of stars. And so you have this output of light that stars have a thumbprint just like we have thumbprints. Stars have thumbprints. And it's remarkably distinct. I mean, with the science that has come out of spectroscopy in stellar observations has basically given us insight into the entire universe as we go forth.
The other thing that Humason did with that telescope was help us pinpoint our location in the Milky Way.
And so it seems like Casey, like taking some glass on the back of a pack animal, putting it up on top of a mountain and looking out into the cosmos like the cosmos was, was designed to be discovered. Why could we even. Why could Humason go from cleaning toilets to discovering our position in the Milky Way and the spectroscopy of stars without this being an intentionally designed way for us to exist in the cosmos?
[00:28:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, so as soon as you clearly know a lot more about Mount Wilson and the telescope there than I do as soon as you start talking about Mount Wilson, what I thought of was a very famous story in my family where my grandmother was a war bride and my grandfather invited her to come over from England to marry him after World War II was over.
He was in Los Angeles. So she came over, they settled in la and she came over with nothing but, you know, her bag of clothes and return fare in case things didn't work out. But they got married and the very next day he took her up on a hike up Mount Wilson. And my grandmother probably never been on a hike in her entire life. So that's famous story in my family. But anyway, so that's cool. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. The universe is, seems to be designed to be discovered. But you have to appreciate that if we were, if Earth was in a different location in our galaxy, we wouldn't know this because there are many places in the galaxy where there's too much dust to be able to see starlight from far away stars or galaxies and to be able to appreciate this incredibly vast and finely tuned universe that we live in. And so it's actually partly because of the position of Earth within the Milky Way, where we are between these spiral arms, which is both the right location and not have too much dust. So you can see other parts of the universe, but also between the spiral arms, you don't have too much radiation. So it's a good place to live.
And this gets into a thesis that was developed by two of my colleagues at Discovery Institute, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer, and Jay Richards, a philosopher, called the Privileged Planet, where they argue that Earth is privileged not just because it's positioned in the right place for life to exist, but also for scientific discovery. And they argued that there's a convergence between the requirements for life and the requirements to actually make discoveries about our universe. And that's also part of the design of the universe, of the universe, as you, as you said, just Daniel was designed to be discovered. And if life is able to exist, then that's also where you, you, you, you're best suited to, to study the universe.
[00:30:19] Speaker C: Really quickly before I go back to Kristen Case, I know you're you, you talk extensively at Discovery Institute about DNA deoxyribose nucleic acid, which is the double twisting helix that conveys or carries information for cells to create certain parts of whatever living system they're a part of. And I was thinking about this today as I was preparing for our talk. The double helix was in the early 1950s, discovered by Watson and Crick, and I think it was Watson. It was either Watson or Crick who speculated that the double helix was perhaps the result of panspermia, which. Which is a concept of intelligent design, actually. But it doesn't attribute it. The attribution is that of some alien species that was seeding our planet in some capacity.
How seriously, you can tell me if it's Watson or Crick. I think it's Francis Crick. How seriously is Pan Smyrnia taken today in naturalism for an explanation of. Of DNA?
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Sure. So. So, and we also have to distinguish the. There really are two different versions of panspermia. There is sort of naturalistic panspermia or natural panspermia, as you might call it, and then there's directed panspermia. And that's the one where the aliens are supposed to be intentionally seeding the universe with life. And it was directed panspermia as the one that Francis Crick believed in. And what's interesting is Crick took that view because, you know, so of course, who's Francis Cricket?
Francis Crick was the co discoverer, one of the co discoverers of the structure of DNA. He won the Nobel Prize for that right along with Watson. And probably other scientists who deserve to be recognized also should have shared in that discovery. But Francis Crick famously wrote that an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.
So many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. So Crick was an atheist and definitely not, you know, a believer in God. He was definitely a believer in a naturalistic, you know, origin of life history of life in the universe. Yet he recognized that it would have taken a quote unquote miracle for life to get going on Earth at least. Okay, so because of that, Crick was forced to look elsewhere for where life could have arisen, and he turned to panspermia, namely directed panspermia, the idea that aliens basically seeded our universe with life. Now, it's also interesting that he turned to directed panspermia rather than what we might call natural panspermia. Natural panspermia would be where life somehow rises somewhere in the universe, and then through natural mechanisms, life spreads. You know, maybe life evolves on some planet, and then that planet gets hit by an asteroid which ejects some life on a rock on that planet out into space. That life on the rock travels through space for gazillions of years till it finally lands on a new star system, and then life colonizes that new star system, and that's how life spreads slowly. I don't know if Crick commented on that, but he didn't even go for that. He, he said that the only way for life to spread around is it had to be intentionally spread by aliens because he saw that it was too unlikely to happen on Earth. I find that very interesting. You know, Francis Crick is basically a skeptic of the. Or at least he's willing to, you know, say this is highly improbable, the origin of life on Earth, but he's okay with it being intelligent design as long as it's aliens. All right? Richard Dawkins said much the same thing in the documentary film Expelled. There was this incredible interview at the end of that movie, this documentary, where Ben Stein is interviewing Richard Dawkins, and he says, well, are you okay with intelligent design? And Dawkins basically says, yeah, I'm okay with ID with intelligent design, provided that it's not got that it's aliens, okay? So I just find that very suspicious. They're only okay with intelligent design if it's aliens. Now, we could also talk real quick about, you know, so is directed panspermia possible? Well, who am I to say, you know, like, well, aliens have to exist first. To my knowledge, we don't have good evidence of aliens existing yet, despite a lot of the fanfare that's been media lately. But we also have to appreciate that this idea of panspermia is not really the consensus view in mainstream science. Although we'd love to think that scientists believe that, you know, alien life was seeded on Earth from another planet. Yeah, that makes for great sci fi. That's a lot of fun. But scientists, they think about these things. They don't rule it out out of hand. But panspermia is definitely not widely accepted, especially either version of panspermia. Natural panspermia or directed natural panspermia has a lot of problems. Namely that if you were to somehow blast life off into outer space, well, it's going to be incredibly unlikely that, that life is going to find its way through just some random, you know, blasting of a rock into space, finding its way to another planet. You have to appreciate that most of space is empty. That's why it's called space, okay? And when I say most of space, I mean like, like only a miniscule, miniscule, minuscule fraction of space is occupied even by stars and planets.
So the likelihood of you randomly blasting a rock out into space and then it finding Its way to another star system is infinitesimally small. And even if it could find it, you're going to be talking about, you know, many millions of years traveling through space. Well, space is full of something, not matter. It's full of a lot of very harmful radiation, which tends to kill life.
[00:36:12] Speaker C: Right?
[00:36:12] Speaker A: So a lot of scientists have said, look, even if life did find its way to another planet, it would probably be killed by, by interstellar radiation, cosmic rays, et cetera, long before it got there. And then if it could find its way to that new star system, it's very unlikely that life would survive the impact. Okay, yeah, so. And there's kind of a catch 22 here, like a damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you're. If you want to protect the life from interstellar radiation, you need a big rock. So maybe you could encase that life in a big rock. Okay? But now when that big rock hits that planet that it wants to colonize with life, you're going to get a huge, huge, massive explosion. I mean, even a modest sized rock hitting the Earth has as much energy as a nuclear bomb. Okay? So that is not a good way for life to gently survive the reentry into a new star system. Now, another option, though, is maybe life could be carried on little particles of dust. That's another idea people will come up with. And maybe those dust particles could gently float their way into the atmosphere of another planet and not have to deal with this big sort of nuclear bomb sized explosion when you enter that atmosphere. Well, now you've lost your ability to insulate that life from interstellar cosmic radiation because the dust particle doesn't have any sort of shielding. So there's basically not a good solution to this problem for natural panspermia. And for that reason, a lot of mainstream scientists, I would say, are very skeptical of natural panspermia. Could directed panspermia work? Well, maybe, but we haven't seen any evidence of it yet. All bets are off. I think that, you know, whether they actually exist and they're doing this. But we have to understand just the motive for these scientists like Crick or maybe even Dawkins. The motive behind wanting to appeal to directed panspermia, at least for Crick, was a recognition that the origin of life here on Earth was incredibly improbable. So we have to take that into account, too.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: That was Dr. Casey Luskin and Kristin Murray with host Daniel Ray on the Apologetics Profile podcast discussing intelligent design, evolution, and questions of alien life.
Don't miss the second half of the conversation in a separate episode, diving deeper into the alien question.
For more about Dr. Luskin's work, visit caseyluskin.com that's Casey Luskin. L u s k-I n.com for ID the Future I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
