Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott and today I'm sharing the hosting mic with Nathan Jacobson, our director of media and brand at Discovery Institute. Well, we're excited to sit down today with Larry Sanger. Best known for his role in co founding Wikipedia, Sanger has developed a number of educational and reference sites over the years and he's currently president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, a non profit defining tech standards for encyclopedias. Sanger is also a longtime philosopher with a PhD in Philosophy from Ohio State University. Larry, welcome to Idea of the Future.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Hi. Well, it's good to join you.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Well, we do have a lot to talk about. You've recently written about your journey as a skeptical philosopher and your decision to return to Christianity. We want to unpack that intellectual journey with you and just how the arguments of intelligent Design have played a role in it. We also want to talk to you about Wikipedia, your foundational work on the well known site, as well as the challenges that Wikipedia has had and still has in presenting information about important or controversial ideas accurately and fairly. Something we in the intelligent design research community know a thing or two about.
So, Nate, take it away.
[00:01:30] Speaker C: Yes, I intend to focus a little bit more on some of your technological interests and your work at the Knowledge Standards foundation, your effort to make sure that we can decentralize and keep access to the world's knowledge and wisdom available for future generations.
You presented at COSM conference by Discovery Institute this last year and was very intrigued by that talk. So I'm excited to unpack some of your thoughts on that front.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let's jump right into it, Larry. You were born in our neck of the woods, Bellevue, Washington, not far from Seattle, where Discovery Institute is headquartered. At age 7, your family moved to Anchorage, Alaska. Tell us a bit about your early years, your parents, and what inspired your love of philosophy.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Well, that's right. When I was about seven, we moved up to Anchorage and already at the time I was thinking a lot about basically hard questions because I was just a curious kid, you know, just trying to understand things that people were saying. And we went to church regularly and my, my dad was an elder when I was very young in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. And you know, they would bandy about words like mind and soul and spirit. And I would ask, well, what's the difference between these things?
And I would also ask basic, I didn't know they were called this at the time, but philosophical questions about, you know, the origin of the universe and, well, if the universe had to have a cause, then why didn't God have to have a cause? And things like that?
So, yeah, I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church around the age of 12 or 13.
And then right about the same time, my parents got a divorce. So soon thereafter, we stopped going to church.
And, well, I guess that's when this story gets interesting.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, You've written that you stopped believing in God around 14, 15 years old. So you've alluded to some of it. But what was going on in your head at that time to bring about that change?
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Well, you know, just no longer going to church. And I started wondering, just sort of naturally organically, about philosophical questions. But I also took a class in the junior year of high school in philosophy, and that really inspired me to try to make sense of the basic features of the world, basically, and our place in it.
And, you know, the following summer, I fancied myself a novelist, and my brother told me, you know, how can you write a novel? You don't know anything. You're like, you're just a kid. You don't. And. And I said, well, okay, fine, I. I guess I do need to learn more about, like, the deep things of life. And so that's actually one of the things that led me to start thinking about philosophy. But when I did, I realized that the. The people around me had made all sorts of what I would call philosophical mistakes, which were just terrible. Explained some terrible practical mistakes in their lives, like drug abuse and crime and divorce and whatnot, avoidable errors.
And if they had simply had different beliefs, then they wouldn't have fallen into these errors, it seemed to me.
So I came to the conclusion that it's very important to basically jettison all of my beliefs that I didn't understand perfectly. In other words, I didn't know what I was believing or that I couldn't justify to a very high degree of, you know, logical rigor.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, man, Those teen years are just such an important time of development where you sort of turn inward, but you're also paying great attention to what's happening around you. And it's a very important time to be thinking about identity issues and just what you believe. It's a great refining time. Well, I want to bring out a story you share in a recent post.
It's the time when you were in your late teens and you made the bold move of calling up a pastor to ask some skeptical questions, and you didn't really get the response you. You were looking for. Tell us about that right.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: So I don't think he was my pastor in Anchorage at the time. I think it was someone else because I didn't want to put my pastor on the spot. But this guy, I probably sounded like a snot nosed kid and I might not have been as respectful as I should have been, but nevertheless, I had some well meaning, real questions. And he did have the opportunity to, as it were, pull me back from the brink, to actually take me in hand if he were able. But one thing that I have realized, especially in the last five years, but I think I learned it shortly after my teen years, that a lot of pastors really don't know that much about philosophy, even philosophy of religion, which I think is a shame. I think every pastor should have to take a class in philosophy of religion and wrap their heads around that stuff.
And not just apologetics, but actually try to try to understand some of the fundamentals of philosophy because their, you know, congregation is going to have to deal with that stuff. And he, he basically brushed me off.
The opportunity was lost and, and I was sort of confirmed in my, in my unbelief.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah, such a shame. Asking questions is really the beginning of the quest for knowledge, for understanding, you know, for that quest for truth. And it's really unfortunate that that happened at a time when you really needed it. You got some hostile unconcern, as you put it. Well, why is it a good thing to be asking those questions? Even if you do it in a, you know, cheeky way, you're really serious about looking for answers, especially at that time in your life. Why? Why is it good to have a questioning spirit?
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it's the only way that we can actually come to certain kinds of knowledge.
There are certain things we simply cannot ever really learn unless it begins with an admission of ignorance and a desire to investigate the truth. And this is especially true about philosophy and a lot of spiritual matters. I think it's true of how Bible study works. Also, just to take another example, like, unless you actually ask certain questions about the book of Genesis, you are not going to understand the subtext.
And so it can be scary. Something that I never really bothered me very much after my teen years.
Like I just always, you know, boldly go around asking whatever I think needs asking.
[00:09:56] Speaker C: So, yeah, it does sadden me, Larry, that that was your experience. I have a skeptical disposition as well and began my own quest around that same age. But unlike your story, I was really blessed with some highly intelligent people around me and we had so much fun, you know, Delving into the deep end of the pool.
And I still owe some of those people a debt to this day.
Now, you recommend a approach called methodological skepticism.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: And you know, dogmatic skepticism can sort of consign you to never arriving at knowledge. But methodological skepticism, why don't you explain how that is different and why you recommend that as a, or at least did as a truth seeking approach?
[00:10:52] Speaker A: It's. So methodology is basically, it means a procedure for arriving at a certain conclusion or beliefs.
So methodological skepticism doesn't mean concluding that we cannot know about an external world or that other minds exist or things like that? No, but what it means is we provisionally doubt we are provisionally skeptical until we have arrived at some adequate measure of evidence or investigation and only then making up our mind, or perhaps not even making up our mind at all, but simply leaving a lot of things undecided that don't really need to be decided because we ultimately are looking for only truth.
You know, there's the whole question, what's better to have a high density, high octane system of beliefs in which there are relatively few of them but much more likely to be true, or a much larger body of beliefs of which maybe many more of them are false?
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I like that. Well, in college you considered yourself agnostic. You withheld the proposition, as you say, on belief in the existence of God. Now you were studying to be a professor of philosophy at the time. Did you find others in that field to be on a truth seeking mission like you?
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Well, I mean, sure, fellow undergrads and grad students were very much interested in philosophy, obviously, but there weren't that many people who, who were really personally truth seekers and who were like, motivated to get into philosophy because they were on a personal quest for, you know, of truth seeking or something like that. I seem to be pretty unusual in that regard, although there are friends that I met along the way who were like that. They weren't necessarily philosophers. A lot of people in religion, actually, that's more likely to be descriptive of people who were religious studies majors seekers.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Now, as an agnostic, you were aware of and found many of the typical arguments for God's existence, you know, pretty unconvincing at the time. But then around 1994, a student in one of your intro to philosophy classes, because you were teaching at this time, presented to you a version of the argument from Design called the fine tuning argument. How did, how did that impact you? How did you find that?
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Well, I Think I'd heard it before, but he put it in a way that was very persuasive.
And I can explain a little bit about it for those who are not familiar.
So according to the fine tuning argument, we observe that if any number of physical, mathematical constants were other than they are, then the, let's say, the conditions needed for life to exist couldn't, couldn't be in place. So there is a sweet spot that the Earth is in as it orbits the sun.
And if certain constants were different, then we wouldn't be in that spot. But that's only one example. There are many, many other numbers of that sort. And so it's possible to imagine a literally infinite number of other possibilities for all of those things, even things like the existence of atoms and the existence of molecules. If certain values were not what they are, then all of those different levels of order would not be in place and therefore life wouldn't emerge and we wouldn't emerge.
And so then the question is, why is that the case? Why are all those numbers such that, well, being as they are, we do exist and the sort of level of civilization that we're at now isn't that remarkable?
And I had no answer to that sort of argument.
It hit me, I don't want to say it hit me hard, but I thought, I found myself even emotional about it, which I thought was strange. It's like, I think perhaps one of the reasons that I had for that is that I, I thought that there weren't any even remotely plausible arguments for the existence of God. And here a student was turning me on to one that I hadn't really considered too seriously before. It was relatively new at the time, you know, and so, yeah, I wasn't convinced at all. I said, well, you know, there are brute facts in the universe and I guess that's what these are. You know, it's easy to deny things if you're, if you're a methodological skeptic, you know, all that. The evidence doesn't really rise up high enough to. And besides, even if it's true, you know, who's to say that it's actually a mind that does this sort of thing? There's so many other conclusions that you have to draw after you say, well, there was a designer that, that selected the, the values.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: So, and in this journey as an agnostic, did you ever find yourself drawn to the, the new atheists, you know, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the like, or just atheism proper, you know, did you ever Declare yourself an atheist or were you still hoping to, to find the truth and therefore just agnostic?
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Well, I, I wanted to like them and you know, I looked in on some of those debates and picked up some of the books and I was very disappointed. I thought I could do better and I was a graduate student or a newly minted PhD because they did come start, start their business I guess right around 2000 or so, I guess, which is when I got my Ph.D. and well, I, I thought that they were kind of rude and crass and they used a lot more abuse than actual argument. And I thought that's not proper.
And I never was hostile to Christianity.
I didn't feel drawn to atheism at all. Again, this is because methodological skepticism, if you're actually a skeptic, then you don't take a position. And according to the philosophical understanding of what atheism means, the, that is the positive assertion that God does not exist. And well then that would give me a burden of proof which I would lack as an agnostic.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: So yeah, but they did do it with such flair.
In your follow up I really found interesting, you know, you're kind of told an intellectual diary of sorts following up on your initial story and in that you got into a little bit more detail about your exploration of the creationism and Intelligent design conversation. You read William Dembsky's Understanding Intelligent Design, Michael Behe's Black Box, and also Richard Dawkins Blind Watchmaker.
And you said, I was surprised both at how plausible Dembski and Behe were and at Dawkins utter failure to engage with their sorts of arguments. Do you recall your thought processes during that time and what kind of left that impression in your mind?
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I actually dropped Dembski a line at the time and got a little advice from him and, and he was, he was very nice.
And yes, I do remember quite well. In fact, I'd like to reread some of that stuff or just read more. It's, it's really fascinating and it appeals to somebody who is of a skeptical bent. I remember actually as a graduate student occasionally meeting like a fellow graduate student in biology at Ohio State and just asking them, you know, peppering them with basic intelligent design type questions because it's not hard to, you know, formulate such questions. You know, you just, how did it just so happen that the eye operates in such a fine tuned way so that if any one part of it were not as it is, then it would just fail to operate altogether?
And they are really befuddled in, as far as I can tell by this sort of question, they come up with reasons to not answer, to basically explain why they don't have to answer the question rather than answering the question. And of course, sometimes they will make a brave attempt to try to explain these things.
I didn't actually get all the way through the.
Yes, the blind watchmaker. I didn't get it all the way through it. I was just so disappointed because he, he wasn't, he wasn't actually engaging with the arguments and I, I looked ahead a little bit and it seemed to me he, he was being rather glib.
So yeah, that made, that made an impression. That's after I came to believe that God exists. I don't think that one needs to rest on the notion of the God of the gaps, God having to be there to explain certain, certain gaps in our scientific explanations. That I don't think is actually the best formulation of that type of argument. And I actually think somebody like Demski would agree with me that, that it isn't. He isn't committed to that sort of approach. That's what it looked like to me as a graduate student and PhD philosopher. And that actually is kind of hard to understand. Exactly how, how is this not a God of the gaps type of argument? Aren't you just saying, isn't this ultimate an argument from ignorance?
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Well, Larry, skeptics will sometimes criticize intelligent design arguments by claiming that they depend on the lack of any explanation other than divine design, leading to the claim that invoking God in the absence of scientific understanding is simply an argument for ignorance. Or from ignorance, I should say. But this argument has been handily refuted by Dr. Meyer and others in the intelligent design community. And as you were wrestling with the God of the gaps idea, you gave it further thought and I appreciated the style of refutation you gave it. What did you conclude about the God of the gaps and the evidence for the fine tuning of the universe that made a difference in your thinking?
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Okay, well, I've been working on a book called God Exists. And as I develop the arguments from contingency, causality and design in this book, I repeatedly return to the idea that there is no need to explain how certain complex states of affairs came into existence, like the existence of life, for example, or the bacterial flagellum, or any number of other things, or even for that matter, just the values of the variables that, that the scientific constants, rather these things are all part of and can be used as part of arguments for the existence of God.
I think validly but they do tend to suggest to people that the only explanation that can be given for such things is that God just made them that way. And that, and that does seem to suggest a kind of argument from ignorance.
The problem is, as I again repeatedly discovered, is that that doesn't do justice to the positive reasons that we have for believing that God exists.
The positive reason really that there needs at every level of the scaffolding of the universe, there needs to be an explanation of why more complex but ordered states of affairs emerge out of more fundamental states of affairs.
And you can explain it in terms of, you know, the reduction of equations to more fundamental equations. For example, every high school chemistry teacher can explain to you why the rows and the columns in the periodic table have the beautiful structure that they have in terms of orbital theory and some other things. But what they can't explain, they never try to. Because it's really not part of science as it is constituted is why all of those things are the case at the same times. Like what? Why should it be that the things that the states of affairs that we explain, emergent phenomena in terms of all occur co. Occur at the same time?
So you might say that, well, there's a gap there. Yeah, there is a gap there, but it's a gap that occurs at every level of the scaffolding of nature.
And what that really means is what there is a need for is an explanation of the order of the universe at every level.
And that's not a thing that scientists really propose any sort of explanations for. Because really.
Well, what is it? I mean, okay, if you want to say that there's a God of the gaps there, there's a big gap and it's right there. Okay, go ahead and explain and propose what, how to fill it. The only thing on offer though is that a mind like entity could anticipate the results of setting certain laws to, to act the way they do, setting certain constants and creating matter in a certain initial condition. Right.
Everything flows from that in a perfectly mechanistic fashion. Fine. You can believe that as far as this argument goes, right?
And even that life emerged in, in some stunningly coincidental way, or not, maybe it actually can be explained in some more mechanistic way. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
There is still a stunning order that there is a need of, of explaining. And that's the thing that's amazing to me, right?
I, I throw up my hands, you know, when people start talking about evolutionary theory. I'm not a biologist, might Be true, I suppose. Not really sure how they do explain certain, you know, how certain things evolve and they never really have explained, you know, how even a single molecular pathway, which, which explains the. Anyway, I don't need to get into all of that stuff, right? That's, that's that what this Discovery Institute does. I'm just talking about a very, very general perspective on, on the universe. So in sum, the thing that, that inspires me with the greatest admiration and makes me think that the universe is designed is not any gap in our knowledge but the entire order, the rational order of the universe. That's actually the thing that suggests a rational mind and that actually is what inspires the scientists themselves, believers when they do it is a contemplation of the order, not the gaps in the order.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you've got the power of that cumulative case. Well put, Larry. Thank you. Now, in your essays, how to End Western Civilization and Our Moral Abyss, you bemoan the decline of religion and its impact on Western moral culture even as a non believer. And this echoes the similar sentiments of folks like Richard Dawkins who see themselves as cultural Christians, rejecting the tenets of Christianity while desiring to hold on to its trappings and its positive influence on society. Can you describe the tension between your lack of belief and your appreciation for the moral influence of Christianity? At the time.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: I didn't actually regard them as in much tension. I thought that what the great things about Western civilization were all bound up in either common sense or the Enlightenment.
I thought that it was just a sort of accidental feature about Christianity that it happened to be, you know, pro morals, so to speak, and that, you know, if you look at the high civilizations around the world and like ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they also had some relatively, you know, high moral standards that sustained civilizations over, you know, centuries.
Now I have a little bit more fine grained understanding of such things, but that's what I would have said at the time.
And I will say though that I did admire Christians for taking those things seriously and that actually made a difference to me. And it did bother me actually that a lot of my fellow philosophers, for all of their work in ethical theory, and they certainly think that it's possible to defend moral obligations on purely naturalistic grounds. That's the whole project of ethical theory, after all.
But in another way, I didn't see so much in the way of true moral seriousness that was required to sustain a civilization. Now they would disagree with me. I'm very sure they would be, you know, in high dudgeon about such a thing. We're more serious, more morally serious than you are, you know, but that's how it, how it struck me that there is a certain kind of glib gamification of philosophy when it tackles these serious questions. And one of the reasons that I thought that I was kind of impressed with Christianity even before I became a Christian, was that sense of moral seriousness that just seemed to be part of the, of the Christian outlook.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, by 2019, you found yourself re examining some of those old arguments for the existence of God, sometimes in new versions. And at that time you came across a lecturer by our own philosopher of science, Dr. Stephen Meyer. He was discussing the idea that since the Big Bang originated the matter of the universe, there had to be a cause of the matter, a cause of the Big Bang that lay outside that explosive origin event. How did Meier's argument impress you?
[00:34:42] Speaker A: I'm not sure that it was that particular argument, or maybe it was that argument that sort of inspired the following sort of train of thought.
What I was impressed by was not so much the traditional first cause argument, argument from causality, which says there has to be a cause of everything that exists, otherwise we're just leaving one of the most interesting things about the universe unexplained. That's actually a pretty good argument. But I went a little bit further in asking, at least it seems like a variation in my mind, and I think it's a variant on the same argument.
There also has to be a cause of the, the, the fact that the, the laws of nature are in operation, that it seems to us, for example, that if I, you know, drop a ball, it will fall to the ground and it has to.
And this is a traditional problem in metaphysics that David Hume is famous for, for his, his thoughts about. And it seemed to me that if we're going to explain that this sense of necessity or the actuality of necessity, then we can't simply say that it's a brute fact that the law is in operation. It's like, where did it come from? And there are other features of the universe as well. And this is where the, you know, what is it, the fine tuning argument comes in as well. So I guess what I'm saying is the argument from causality shades into the argument from design in that one asks for a causal explanation of the fact of the universe existing, whereas the other is asking about an explanation of the laws of the universe and the constants of the universe. And I would also add the initial conditions of the universe all of these different features of the universe put together all need an explanation.
And ultimately there has to be an explanation of how new orders of complexity emerge out of the lower levels. You see, this is actually continuous with the argument from causality, because if you're talking about the Big Bang, for example, there, there is great complexity right from the first moments of the Big Bang. Just go and look at any explanation of how the Big Bang works.
And already there, there, you know, you've got these muons and leptons and quarks and whatever that they're talking about, and it's got all of this structure and so forth. It's not like a cosmic egg that is like perfectly simple and perfectly dense and like. And then it just, like everything just magically becomes more complex from there. The complexity was built in from the beginning. And if you're going to, if you think it's necessary to explain the existence of matter in the first place, then you're also explaining everything that is all the characteristics of the. The matter as well.
And then you're explaining the laws and you're explaining the constants and so forth.
And that basically thinking about that, that whole sort of problem area is what is one of the things that made me think that maybe there's more to the traditional arguments for the existence of God than I had understood earlier.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Well, Larry, with your permission, we're going to continue this conversation in another episode. We still want to discuss your work with Wikipedia as well as some of the challenges associated with online references like Wikipedia, maintaining that neutral point of view and avoiding establishment control. We'll also get your thoughts on how to separate truth from falsehood on the Internet and how to go about decentralizing and preserving human wisdom and knowledge. So, Larry, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: Sure. It's been a pleasure.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Well, in the show notes for today's conversation, we're going to include links to Larry's website and to the video of his talk at our COSM conference put on by Discovery Institute last year on the pressing matter of preserving our knowledge. It's a very interesting topic and a timely one as well, so don't miss part two of this interview, available in a separate episode. You know, we created Idea the Future to share the growing evidence for intelligent design in the natural world and to bring clarity to the debate over evolution. If you stand with us in that mission, help us with a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And also, it also helps if you share this episode with a friend there's always somebody in your life that could use some of the evidence that we unpack on this podcast. Well, for I D the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: And I'm Ed Jacobson.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Thanks for joining us.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
