[00:00:00] Speaker A: But looking in the rearview mirror, it's like saying that a Model T is really a fantastic car and I want to go and buy one now.
It was still incredibly primitive, but even though it was incredibly primitive, it was the state of the art at the time and people were seduced by it. And.
And that's how we ended up with all this false naturalism.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Purpose was once considered fundamental to understanding nature, but for the last few centuries, scientists committed to a Darwinian view of life have ignored it.
Now some materialists are reconsidering agency, function, and emergence in biology. Can they succeed, though, without acknowledging intelligent Design?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott.
Today my guest is Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, an award winning cancer researcher and practitioner of medical oncology for 40 years. In his personal memoir, the Undying Soul, he chronicles his spiritual journey and return to faith. And in his book, the Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose, he offers a unique reconciliation between faith and science. He also writes regularly at Science and Culture Today.
Stephen, welcome back to Idea of the Future.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, we had you on last year talking about some of the arguments and insights of your book Telos, and today we're going to look at a phenomenon that's been happening in the last 10, 15 years regarding materialists and their approach to purpose. Now, you've been writing a series at our flagship news and commentary site, scienceandculture.com on the science of purpose is what you call it, and I believe you've been writing it for four years. Is that right?
[00:01:59] Speaker A: I started 49 months ago and I put in a post about once a month since that time. Yeah.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Okay. Wow. So lots of things to read from Dr. Iacoboni on this topic, but let's start by providing a little historical background just to set the stage.
Now, first, we're going to be talking about purpose a lot here. So tell me, how do you define purpose when it comes to life?
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Well, it's very simple. It's so simple, it's intuitive, which is peculiar in the way that it was left out of science. But purpose is simply the fulfillment of a goal that benefits an organism.
And organisms have two overall goals. One is survival and the other is reproduction.
And so anything that improves either survival or reproduction is the ultimate goal of a living system, an organism.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Okay, now, when did purpose first start to get excluded from science and why did it happen?
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Well, it's very interesting and it's very important to understand this.
It actually goes all the way back to Descartes and Newton.
Prior to that era, Western thinking was dominated by what we call Scholasticism and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was fundamentally a reinterpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics, which was based on final causality.
The Greek word for which is telos. And the word we use now is teleology, meaning that everything is ordered to its end. In other words, everything in the universe exists to fulfill a purpose or an end. It even includes inorganic materials such as water and the solar system and so on, such that the reason the earth spins around the sun and is tilted on its axis is so that to fulfill the purpose of having four seasons, which then leads to the ability for life to emerge in such a way that it can exist. And all of the inorganic chemicals of the world, like calcium and water and heat and so on, are there to eventuate in the emergence of life on Earth, which led to of course, Homo sapiens.
Simplifying a little bit more is every, every person understands the idea of purpose. When you think about human artifacts, you have a phone so that you can communicate, you have a toaster so that you can heat your bread, you have socks to fulfill the purpose of getting your feet warm.
If you want to think about not human artifacts, but natural events pertaining to organisms, you know, every organism has to find a food source and it has to, if it's not a predator at the top of the food chain, it has to find a way to avoid predation.
And it has to.
Maintain its thermodynamic ability to, to get in enough energy to survive and, and go from day to day.
The single most inviolate characteristic of life forms compared to non living is that we exist in the, in thermodynamic disequilibrium.
Everything else that's inorganic, unless it's a combustion situation or something like that, is at equal thermodynamic equilibrium. Water flows downhill, ball rolls down to the lowest point and it's, it's in its landscape.
And when you apply energy, there is movement in the inorganic sphere, such as earthquakes and avalanches and rain, but those are episodic and depend on external forces.
Every organism, in order to live, has to be far from equilibrium through thermodynamically, meaning we are pulling in energy and we are consuming it and we are excreting the waste products and maintaining what we call homeostasis, the chemical systems that go on inside our body. When you drive a gasoline powered automobile, while you're driving is in a state away from equilibrium because you're taking in fuel and you're using that fuel to create energy.
But then you park the car and the car goes back to thermodynamic equilibrium. Machines. The big difference between machines and organisms is that machines can go in and out of thermodynamic equilibrium, whereas organisms have to remain in disequilibrium, far from a thermodynamic equilibrium, in order to stay alive. And once an organism fails to do that, the organism dies. That's.
It's absolutely fundamental. Every moment of an organism's life is in disequilibrium. With thermodynamics, we are consuming energy to stay in a highly organized state that allows us to have enough organization in our constituent matter to allow life to happen. And once we stop, life stops.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And so you're saying that purpose is behind all of that and demands an explanation. And yet, with the rise of Darwinian thinking, purpose got left in the dust. So you're saying for about 150 years it's been relegated, but it's starting to come back. Is that at least in the materialist sphere?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Well, like I was pointing out earlier a minute ago, science up until the 19th century had nothing to do with organisms.
It was all mechanics, mechanics and Newtonian mechanics.
And so it was very simple to not worry about purpose, because inorganic entities don't have a purpose.
If a rock slides down a hill, it isn't actually improving its chances of survival because it's not surviving in the first place.
And even water flowing down a stream is fulfilling the water cycle, but it is not.
Survival is not an issue, and disequilibrium is not an issue.
And so this led to the scientific revolution, actually, because it's so simple.
And that then became sort of what science was.
It was the study of inert matter in motion put into motion by external forces. So force equals mass times acceleration, and gravity equals attraction of two inert bodies towards each other by the force of gravity.
And up until the late 19th century, the whole notion on the part of sciences was that living things don't really even come under the jurisdiction of Newtonian physics, because living things have a soul, so to speak. They're.
They're. They have a vital energy we call what's called vitalism.
And it's way, way, way too complicated to imagine that science could ever understand organisms.
And we don't have to, because they have a soul. Animals are called animals because they're animated, and rocks and water and snow and Boulders and sand. There's nothing animated about any of that.
If you want to animate some iron, you have to put it in the shape of a sword and then swing it around and take care of your enemy.
And so in the middle of the 18th century, the chemists were looking at things, and they actually synthesized urea, which was known to be what hap. What you excrete when you urinate. And they said, oh, my goodness, we can excrete it organ. We can produce an organic molecule in the laboratory without having to first eat a cheeseburger and have it run through our kidneys.
That sort of makes it seem like biology could be reduced to the rest of science. And so, of course, that went along.
And then the other thing about the 19th century, of course, was the Industrial revolution, which was transformative in terms of the whole world.
The people who. The Western Europeans, who learned how to make machines, do what they wanted them to do, allowed Western Europe to colonize and dominate a large part of the world.
And so they had the narrative. They had the power of discourse because they had power.
And so that was sort of what science had become, was based on Newtonian physics. You have. Everything is based on objects that are inert, that get pushed around by forces. And when these objects bump into each other, things happen. You can actually cause objects to bump into each other to create a flame.
And it turns out that when you eat something, you digest it and turn the matter into fuel. And so maybe this works for organic systems.
All of this was going on at the same time that there was a debate about whether there actually is something called evolution, because before the 19th century, Carl Linnaeus had made it very clear that the Bible says that evolution is impossible. And a lot of people who study Aquinas would interpret his teaching to think that substantial forms can never change.
But there, of course, has been a lot of discourse and research and discussion about how to interpret Aquinas on the topic of evolution.
But it was.
Since you can never actually see evolution, since according to the theory, takes millions of years, why would anyone want to believe that something that takes millions of years and no one's ever observed, has any, is actually real? Well, as I think most of the viewers know, they were digging up fossils that didn't comport with any other living creature.
And then when Darwin went to the Americas, he ran into organisms that didn't exist in Eurasia and Africa, and they didn't know that the Americas were even there.
And the belief was, of course, according to the Bible, that every organism on Earth came out of a garden.
And then those that survived the flood were the ones that continue to populate the earth.
And so that as far as they were concerned, every organism that was existed, existed in Eurasia or Africa and that was the world. And then Darwin goes, they all go to the Americas and they run into orangutans and lobsters and moose and iguanas.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: Why?
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Where are these creatures come from? They don't exist in Eurasia or Africa. How could llamas. What's going on here? And so, you know, and at the time, Darwin was trying to use natural science to verify the teachings of the Bible. And he became so convinced that the Bible was misleading that, you know where Darwin went with this?
Lamarck actually had, 50 years before Darwin. Lamarck had said that there is organisms are changing over time.
Lamarck doesn't get any credit for being the one who first decided that organisms change over time. And he didn't come up with the word evolution either. And neither did Darwin, for that matter.
Right.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Wasn't it transmutation before that?
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well, they called it fixity of species and so on.
Darwin doesn't use the word evolution till the sixth volume of his of his book because evolution at the time was. The word was used as an unfolding of an orderly process, which was exemplified by gestation. That a sperm, a fertilized egg, slowly evolves within the uterus of a. Of an animal or an egg to become the formed creature. It unfolds over time in a very orderly process.
And so it was tacked on to what Darwin had said finally because.
And Darwin in Italy wasn't the greatest philosopher or he wasn't terribly literate. He got a lot of help. Like the survival of the species term or the survival of the fittest was not something he came up with. He was told, maybe you should call this the survival of the fittest.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: And so he goes, oh, that's a good idea. I think I'll use that.
The whole idea was still incredibly weird and controversial and shaking our ontology and our epistemology to the core because Darwin held off until he wrote one of his last books called the Descent of Man.
And he didn't want to write that book until he had much life left in him. And he figured, whatever they do to me, I won't lose much because I'm not going to be around much longer anyway. But he pointed out that if you follow his theory to its logical conclusion, at least the logic that he was using, which we now know is incorrect, but was that there was A point in time when there was a pre human hominid that gave birth to Homo sapiens. And of course that creates a very bad, real serious conflict for people who, in reading the Bible literally, which says we were made in God's image and likeness, we're, it's hard to imagine that we are the descendants of, of other primates. Yeah, he put that in his book, of course, and, but, and he got away with it.
Although a lot of debate ensued as to how this all could happen. But the reason Darwin is credited for the theory of evolution, as I think most of your viewers know, is because in the world of science, everything, every hypothesis that you have to make, like why there is gravity or why stones fall or why water melts at 32 degrees, has to have a mechanism that explains it. Because all of science was based on mechanism. The mechanism is the logic behind the, the observation. And if you can reduce, this is reduce reduction. If you can reduce a phenomenon to more fundamental lower level concepts and forces that could point court with Newton, then you more or less explained your theory. And so Lamarck tried to explain that and he came up with the idea that the reason why giraffes have long necks is because they, their parents were stretching their necks trying to get to the high hanging fruit and their offspring inherited that trait until their necks got really large and became giraffes.
That's called acquired characteristics.
And turns out that that's actually sort of true, although it's hard to observe. And so it was lost for a hundred years, but Darwin said no, the mechanism is that, and he took this from Malthus, that the population grows geometrically and the food supply grows arithmetically, which in more simple terms means that, that as populations fill up an environmental niche, their parents will have more offspring than can be supported by the food that's in that environment. And so the offspring and all the animals have to struggle for survival.
And the ones that succeed in getting enough food and reproducing, because again organism not only have to survive but reproduce in order to carry on their lineage, are the ones who will pass on their inheritance to the next generation. And even though no one knew what a gene was at the time, it was known that traits are passed on through inheritance in some way.
And so he came up with the idea that those that are more fit will be selected by nature to survive and the other ones alone. That's of course natural selection. That's the mechanism and that's what made Darwin famous. Even though Stephen Wallace came up with the same idea.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Sure yeah, so, okay, so all of that came into the 20th century and we. And you've written that the dominant paradigm of 20th century biology was built around chance and necessity.
And then purpose just gets left behind.
So maybe you can tell us just a little bit about chance and necessity and why you think that needs changed. And then let's get into what you've been writing about recently, about this dramatic shift in the core argument from materialists that's been happening over the last 10 to 15 years.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yes, of course, the reason why Darwin was popular, or his theory was popular, was because it maintained the dominant scientific paradigm on the ontology of science was that everything is mechanism.
And at the same time, towards the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century was the arrival of some of the more prominent literate atheists of Western Europe. So there was Nietzsche and Heidegger and so on, and Freud.
And so these intellectuals were saying that Judeo Christianity really isn't true.
And then the horrors of the First World War made a lot of people seriously doubt the goodness of the world we lived in and so on. And so there was among the intellectuals who wanted to dethrone Judeo Christian belief were looking for a way to, to show that even the most sacrosanct, complex things that we thought were impossible to understand, like the mind, are reducible to mechanism. That was why Freud was so popular, was because he thought, he explained consciousness point of view, saying that his, his acolyte or his, his student, Jung, of course, completely disagreed with him, fortunately. Yeah, but, and then of course, well, you have this mechanism called natural selection. And the nice thing about it is it's, it's all fortuitous.
In other words, you don't need the intention of a higher intellect or will to cause evolution. It's just lucky. You're lucky that you got the mutation that gave you a firmer beak so that you could eat seeds even during a drought, so that you as a bird lived through the drought and other birds didn't.
And you're lucky that as a cheetah you got slightly longer tendons so that you could pull down gazelles and the slower gazelles couldn't. And so the neat thing about it, if you wanted to promote atheism, was that there was no ultimate purpose to all of what was happening. It was still reducible to mechanics.
And then when they discovered the gene and found out that the proteins in our bodies come from these genes and that these genes mutate in a way that is just sort of random because they're Molecules in their, in their 98 degrees. And so they're shuffling around and breaking down and falling apart and reconfiguring that you get different genes which lead to different proteins, which lead to different organisms, and it's all reducible to physics and chemistry. And there's no God in that equation or in that hypothesis, as Stephen Meyer said. And so you just have organisms that come out differently and they, they out compete and they evolve and they survive. And, and there's, there's no science to it all. So that's the chance part.
And the necessity was that, that there are chances.
There are, in other words, there are random things that occur by chance, but there is the necessity that whatever the random change was in your phenotype, the length of your claws or your ability to smell seals as a polar bear, the necessity was that it was a good change which allowed you to gather more food and survive and reproduce.
So again, it was the chance and necessity, or the other side, two sides of the coin that explains how life could evolve without any larger designer wanting it to come out that way.
And so chance and necessity was taken from Democritus in ancient Greek, who said that that's what life was, that it's just the lucky people who find themselves in the necessary circumstances succeed and the others don't. And then Jacques Bendot, who really is, along with Francis Crick, the founding fathers of late latter 20th century scientific atheism based on biology, wrote that book Chance and Necessity.
And that became the bible of the explanation for why there can't. There's no reason to think that there's a God and that everything's explainable by reducible chemistry. And so that's where Minot had all these acolytes going all the way through till the year 2000 trying to support what he believed. And this was based on science at the time, that was spectacular.
But looking in the rearview mirror, it's like saying that a Model T is really a fantastic car and I want to go and buy one now.
It was still incredibly primitive, but even though it was incredibly primitive, it was the state of the art at the time and people were seduced by it. And that's how we ended up with all this false naturalism.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Iacoboni discussing some of the history of why purpose got excluded from science, especially after the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Darwinism that brought a mechanistic view of life into fashion.
Now we're going to continue the conversation in a separate episode as Dr. Iacoboni unpacks the dramatic shift in core argument from materialists over the last few decades as they're forced to grapple with the reality of purpose in living things.
We'll also talk about how the ID research community should respond to this change going forward.
You can read Dr. Iacoboni's ongoing series on the science of purpose at scienceandculture.com just select his name from the drop down menu of authors on the homepage, and that'
[email protected] now. You can even dig deeper than that, and that is by picking up a copy of his book Telos the Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose.
Well, for I do the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
