Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Well, welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermid, your host, and today my guest is attorney and author Doug L. Or Douglas L. To discuss his new graphic novel, the God Proofs. Doug is an attorney in Washington, D.C. with an undergraduate degree in math and physics from MIT and a master's degree from the University of Maryland in theoretical math. Doug's legal training and work, combined with his academic science background and a lifetime of independent study, make him pretty well qualified to untangle the confused and often emotional relationship between science and religion. Doug considered himself an atheist while at mit, but life events challenged him to examine the scientific evidence for God. And what he found and continues to find has amazed him. And he delights in sharing his findings in creative ways. And one of those creative ways is the topic of our podcast today. It's a new graphic novel that we're going to unpack called the God Proofs. Now. Doug, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Yeah, you're welcome. Well, let's start with your upbringing. When you were young, you really loved numbers. In your first book. Yeah. In your first book, Counting to God, you recall thinking of them as magic, as your friends. Their precision was comforting and their relationships beautiful. Now, as you got older, though, you read every book at the local library on math and science, and you still had this love affair with numbers. What was it, what was it like loving numbers and the natural sciences as a kid?
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, I like numbers because you count on numbers. You know, if they added two plus two always equaled four, you didn't have to worry about whether it was in a good mood or bad mood. And, you know, and there was just.
I found beauty in mathematics, the formulas, the different things.
I was a very nerdy growing up, but I just love mathematics. It just seemed to have a lot of good areas.
And as far as math and science, I mean, I wanted explanation when I was a kid of how the world worked. I wanted to understand it.
And it was the beginning, I think, of a search for God, search for meaning in my life. And so I figured if I read the math and science books, maybe that would help me instead of the fiction books.
It's been a lifelong journey.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: And no wonder you were in the library a lot. I mean, we didn't have the Internet a while back and you had to get physical books and look for them. And so you probably frequented your library a lot then.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
And right. And I'd read the books over and over again because it wasn't that big a library.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, well, so you grew up believing in God, but you wrestled with the details. You needed the details. The logistics of Noah and the Flood, for example.
So by the time you went off to college at mit, you considered yourself an atheist. What happened to the faith of your youth?
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Well, I didn't find, at least as I was told, that it provided a very good explanation for things.
You had Darwin's theory of evolution. And I didn't realize at the time that there were places like the Discovery Institute and others and other scientists that thought it was nonsense.
I remember reading in high school biology textbook about the Miller Urey experiment, which I know you're familiar with the idea that you zap chemicals with lightning and you get the building blocks of life, and that explains how life got started. Utterly preposterous. And as your colleague Casey Luskin has done a study about, at least at the time he did it a few years ago, it was still an enormous number of high school textbooks. Even though it's been totally discredited and doesn't. Even if you had all the pieces, you can't. You don't get life. But it. But I thought, well, if you don't need God for life and the story of Noah and the ark, I mean, how the heck did all the animals get on the ark? You know, I didn't understand the concept of kinds back then, and I turned away from it. It just. I felt like it was a superstition and I wanted to try. I thought of myself as a rational person. Circuit for answers, and I didn't find the answers at church.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It can be hard when you're that type that just has that inquiring mind that is constantly soaking in answers and seeking the truth in the bottom of things.
And you're right, the origin of life. I mean, back then when they were starting to put the Miller Urey experiment in textbooks, maybe it looks simpler, you know, but Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. James tour and others, they're fond of saying the more we learn about the origin of life and the conditions necessary to produce life chemically, the harder the problem gets. So.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
Well, after graduating from law school, you built a successful career as an attorney. Tell us about that and how that prepared you to write these books.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Well, I was going into theoretical mathematics, and that doesn't pay very well. And so I heard friends went to law school. They said it was easy. So I went to law school and my logical mind suited Law, because there were. There's a lot of logic in it and patterns, and I did pretty good. I ended up specializing in employee benefits. It's called pensions and health care.
A very growing area of the law at the time, still is, actually. Everybody needs health care and most people want to have a pension, so.
And, And I was very successful. You know, I was very fortunate on that. But it taught me, I think, how to prioritize my arguments, you know, put the best ones first, winnow out the arguments that aren't so important.
And I think it really helped me to think clearly and write clear.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And as you were saying before we started this session, knowing when to go for the jugular, you know, with your best arguments, put your best foot forward quickly. Well, the God Proofs is a graphic novel, so every page in it is just jam packed with color and awesome illustrations. Where did this idea come from? Did you ever think you'd be a graphic novel writer?
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Never. Never.
Well, I think, you know, my Andrew, the first book I wrote, 2014, was called Counting to God.
And I open. I opened it with a lecture at MIT, which is on YouTube, by the way, in front of MIT professors.
And I think it was a pretty good technical job, but my minister said, you got to put some pictures in it. You know, I mean, it's, it's. It's too hard for most people.
So then I came out with a second book called Proofs of God, a thinner book.
And it. It wasn't graphic novel, but it had. I hired a cartoonist, put some cartoons in. It was a conversation between characters I call Doubt and Reason.
And, you know, so I brought my doubts in as the Doubt character. And then Reason was kind of my older self addressing these issues and the objections. And I was invited by the Discovery Institute and to speak at Westminster Conclusion Conference for Science and Faith, I think it is, in Pennsylvania. And I spoke on the book. It was very well received to a younger audience. And it was suggested that we put this into a graphic novel form by folks at the Discovery Institute.
And they're the ones who found the illustrator who's just incredibly brilliant, what he did, I think, with the designs and incredibly brilliant. So I feel very lucky to connect with the Discovery Institute because I think it's a great concept to try to put this in pictures more to reach people.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And I was going to ask, I mean, behind every graphic novel is a capable illustrator. So how did you connect with Evan? You say it was the Discovery Institute. What was it like working with him?
[00:09:43] Speaker B: I didn't Work directly with, with Evan.
Daniel Reeves at your. At the Discovery Institute did that.
But Evan was. I do. All I know is Evan was very responsive, very creative, and did a brilliant job. So I spoke with Daniel Reeves and John West.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Okay. All right. So you had, you had a whole team kind of connecting the two of you, and you didn't actually sit in the same room at any point and say, well, what are we going to draw next? You left it to Evan to bring it to life.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah, he and Daniel Reeves really did a great job.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: That's awesome. Well, in the God proofs, we joined two friends on an epic journey to tackle the ultimate mystery. Does God exist? At the beginning, one character, a skeptic, kicks things off by declaring, everyone knows you can't prove God. His friend reason responds saying, sure you can. Actually, I can prove God in three ways with evidence, facts and logic. And so begins their back and forth dialogue. You divide the book into three proofs. The first is the numbers proof. And this proof you divide into three claims. Can you just lay those out for us a bit?
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Sure.
Using my legal training, I gave a lot of thought into how to nail down the first argument. I think a very powerful argument. And so the numbers proof, which I start out with, which is the longest part of the book, there's three claims to it. One is life runs code.
People don't think of it that way, but you hear about DNA all the time. People, you know, understand, I think the younger generation code from, you know, computers, smartphones, they know there's code behind there, but they don't always make the connection that DNA is an even superior kind of code and it's inside us.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: So you have life runs code. Then you get into things like you can't.
The. You can't get working code by chance. Not really. Only in your fantasy dreams. And that's mathematics. And for that I invented this concept of the probability wall.
You know, so because I imagine difficult events as walls you have to get over, and the lower the probability, the higher the wall. To try to illustrate the impossibility of coming up with working code by chance and building on some of the discoveries of Doug X and others that just putting these blocks together, the code together, right, to get to make sense is just impossibly hard.
And then the third part of the numbers proof. So all life runs code. That's one. Number two is you can't get working code by chance. And. And number three is every creature has unique sections of working code just for it that aren't. So it's not just like there's one set of working code, there's all sorts of sections of unrelated working code, thousands, millions of codes built into proteins that create life. And you put those three together, that's the numbers proof.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's very tight and very well coordinated. And it's just in the last 20, 30 years that we've been able to transcribe those genomes and discover the orphan genes that you talk about in there. And this is again where it gets good being able to illustrate this, especially for minds today who are so visual with YouTube and TikTok and all that, you know, I think this is a good way to communicate this stuff to the younger generation. And you did mention that sometimes they'll take for granted all this technology runs on code, but they might also be the generation or two that are going to be quicker to connect that, you know, connecting the technology they use in life to the technology that is life, you know, and using tools like your book, I think we can, we can really make inroads with them.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Well, I don't think people appreciate that all life runs code.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Right? Just that fact.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: The most people are backward. Charles Darwin was 150 plus years ago. Well, there's just some sort of goo that's magic that makes up our cells and makes us, makes life. No, there's code and there's fantastic machinery. And just to get that concept across I think is going to be eye opening for a lot of people, particularly younger readers, like, hey, that's what DNA is. I never thought of it as code.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And at the hands of a capable mathematician such as yourself, you know, you help it make sense really well. So now to illustrate how genes use DNA to build proteins, you liken ribosomes to 3D printers. And I thought that was a really helpful analogy. And later your character reason goes on to share with doubt the probability of life's code arising by chance. Now tell us again about the probability wall. It was really cool to see that in the graphic novel. They get so high they're insurmountable. Was that strong evidence for you as you were coming out of your atheist journey?
[00:15:22] Speaker B: It was. I remember because I used to commute long distances. I was on four or more flights a year and a week, excuse me, a week. And so I had a lot of time on planes. And I remember reading about DNA and amino acids. You know, DNA sequences tell the 3D printer, the rimosome, ribosome, which amino acid to pick out, that it snaps on another one and it folds it all together. And I remember being on a plane and thinking, well, there's 20amino acids, so if you have a 150 or 300 sequence, how rare is that? And all of a sudden it just hit me. The mathematics here are just crazy beyond a phrase. Some people use the probabilistic resources of the universe, which is a fancy way of saying it could never have happened by chance.
And I tried to use this probability wall as just a way to get people, because I think a lot of people have this idea that anything can happen, and that's kind of an atheist mindset. Well, anything can happen.
Well, you have to really understand the odds against, you know, in the history of the universe, you couldn't get one of these working codes by chance, even if everything was amino acids hooking up all the time. So to think there's millions of working codes out there, beautifully engineered, masterfully put together, is just nonsense. Yeah, And I. And, you know, I mean. And you think. I mean, 3D printers are an incredible human invention, and they're getting better all the time.
There's so much they can do, and it's. They're going to be so incredible and lice. 3D printers are better than the ones we have.
You know, it's. Where did that come from, that technology, you know, to say.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: So, Yeah, I mean, the Darwinian evolutionary theory has been orthodoxy for so long, but. But there have been people, you know, that have stood up and said, wait a minute, this doesn't really make sense mathematically. You know, Murray Eden, back in the 60s, was thinking along these lines, you know, challenging the idea that, yes, there's vast sequence space and, you know, lots of mutations happening, but, you know, in all that noise, are you really going to get something that can build? You know, and so he was asking those questions back in the 60s, and.
And here we are now, you know, even better in our understanding of the mathematical challenges.
Yeah, they're formidable.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: The numbers are incredible, just off the charts. And, you know, with Andrew and Evan's help, I think it's illustrated pretty well. Yeah, you just can't get over these in the real world. Doesn't matter, you know, really how many stars or planets are out there, and there's a lot or how much time there is, it just couldn't have happened. The numbers are just impossible beyond what could have happened in this universe.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Now, another cool thing that I enjoyed that you brought into the story was the. The orphan genes. Now, I've worked with Discovery Institute for 13 years. I'm pretty familiar with the different facets of the debate, and I've heard this term quite a few times, but I think it took your graphic novel to kind of really shove it into place for me and say, wait, this is something that is very special, you know, that goes with each species, and it can't be accounted for on a Darwinian level. So I thought it was really neat that you brought in orphan genes. I mean, this is only in recent decades, you know, we've been able to unpack the genomes of organisms and discoveries, these designer genes, as you call them in your story, that are unique to that particular species.
And we've also discovered through the work of Dr. Douglas Axe and others, that functional proteins are very rare in sequence space, which means getting an orphan gene by an evolutionary process, also extremely unlikely.
Tell us how you kind of work that into the story. Was that a big piece of evidence.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: For, you know, Darwinian theory is. Is sort of.
Well, you start off with something that's working and. But they don't explain how you get life to begin with. But, okay, let's step aside from that. You have life. So the Darwinian theory is, well, there's changes, and it changes gradually over time, and it grabs this fantasy that things get better and better, and that's how you get new species.
And it just doesn't. It doesn't work, because orphan genes, and that's the kind of. The definition is they're not. They don't look anything like any other genes. They're not another gene with just a few changes, accidental changes, or two genes stuck together. You know, they're unique sequences, and that couldn't have come about from slight changes. And when these unique sequences are found in every creature that are special for that creature, like the code in jellyfish helps them sting other animals. You know, we have 54 unique sequences of designer genes that build parts in our brains. So think about that. And to me, that's just overwhelming evidence that it had to be designed because Darwinian theory crashes on these orphan genes. That, as you say, Andrew, I mean, our science keeps finding more and more of them all the time.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
And we live in a technological age where we're just surrounded by gadgets and access to technological wizardry. And so I like how the God proofs incorporates technology sort of as a. As a. As a way to look at what's happening in life. I mean, the character reason puts it to his friend this way. We know that every app, every website, every program was created by a mind. Yet when we encounter the Most advanced code we've ever seen. A code so advanced and complex we are just beginning to understand it. The code of DNA, a code that builds technology far more advanced than human technology. We claim it arises by chance. And, you know, reason goes on to call that a crazy idea. And indeed it is. You know, it's a departure in reasoning.
And we're calling people out on that, you know. Now the next two proofs you unpack in the God proofs are the common sense and logic proofs. Why did you include those?
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Because I didn't want someone to say.
I just thought first I wanted to have stepped back from the numbers and just use common sense.
And for that, you know, building off what you just said, you know, all the technology we know, all this wonderful stuff, this was built by human beings.
But the technology of the human brain is far more sophisticated, and I go into that a little bit in the book, than any technology ever built. I mean, the processing power of the human brain. We have as many connections in our brain as stars in a thousand galaxies.
And nobody really knows how it works, how we think, how we're conscious. You know, you have fantastic technology that coordinates your body. The ENCODE project, we have found we have over 4 billion switches that turn parts all on and off. It's all controlled by the brain, the most fantastic technology in the known universe. And so common sense is if you can only get technology through a mind and the human brain is the best, then it had to be designed.
So that's, you know, that's just very simple and straightforward. And then I showed, and in my logic proof, the third proof is that just showing that if you believe things are real and people find DNA, it's real. In other words, we're not all living in some fantasy video game. If you take that things are real, and if you also take the assumption that if there's only one explanation for something, that's true, now that's an assumption, but it's a pretty good assumption that we all follow in our life. If we only can think of one reason, then we think that's the reason.
And so where did the technology come from?
And then logically, it had to come from a master designer, from God.
So that's how I started the book, with those three. Those three proofs.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Right. But that's not where it ends. You do include sections also that explain the faulty reasoning in Charles Darwin's main arguments. And I have to admit, I enjoyed seeing the man, Charles Darwin in cartoon form. I think it helps draw the frailty of his genius, that is to say, the faults in his intellect, intellectual thinking. And then the book concludes with a look at the fiendishly difficult problem of the origin of life and attempts by scientists to crack that nut. So pretty comprehensive in the amount of arguments you include in this graphic novel.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
And the origin of life, of course, is just as you and I were talking a little bit before. Like you said, the closer people look at it, the more, the harder it is.
You know, I think it's 2006, Harvard University launched this massive project with huge funding to figure out how life could have started by chance.
And it crashed and burned.
So now they, they call their Origin of life initial initiative, just, oh, we're going to look and see if there's other life out there. But they won't admit that they couldn't come up with a plausible alternative to God. It's.
The numbers are off the charts and that's incredible. And I also put in at the end of the book, I snuck in. You may have noticed the fact that the universe looks like it's designed. It's not just life, but all the forces of the forces that exist in the universe. The types of atoms that we have, the particles, what's commonly known as the constants of the universe, things like the speed of light and so on and so on, are all strength of gravity just all set exactly right.
The analogy that I love, and I didn't invent it, but it's like walking into a control room for the universe and finding every dial set exactly perfect. I mean, obviously somebody thought of all this.
It's overwhelming evidence. The science is getting stronger all the time, and yet we live in a society where I think people just don't open their eyes. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek and help from Daniel and the illustrators, I hope that the God proofs will make it easier for people to get past the nonsense that's thrown at them.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Right. And in a time when more and more folks are reporting as, you know, non religious, unchurched, not really interested in established religion, they may consider themselves spiritual to some degree, but, but there's, there's a lot less, you know, folks going to church and claiming particular religion at that kind of time. It's good for this to come along and us to share these details with folks just so they can get a better idea of what's actually going on under the hood. You know, we don't stop and think about it enough.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: I think that's absolutely true. It's a society where people are in denial or a lot of people think, well, all God wants is people to be happy, so it doesn't really matter anyhow, that's not what the Bible says. I now think The Bible is 100% true.
And I also think that getting a little bit off stream from the book, but a life without God is not worth living. I mean, you have no standards, you have no direction. And so I'm helping people find the truth. If there are seekers out there who are like I was when I was young, maybe this will help them evaluate on their own the arguments for a master designer.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: Right? Well, listeners, viewers, you can learn more about this book and get your hands on your own copy@thegod proofs.com a website has been set up to give you some easy access there. And I would suggest to give it, give it as a gift too. You know, if you have young people or adults in your life who are just wrestling with these issues, it's a great tool, I think, and a very visual one as well. Doug, it's been a pleasure to have you with me today. I appreciate your time.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: Oh, thank you, thank you. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Well again folks, the God proofs is a visual journey through mind boggling facts of the universe. And this format, the graphic novel, the comic book style is really a fun way to explore the evidence for intelligent design. There's a lot less words than your standard books and the colors and visuals keep it fresh and interesting. Get a copy for yourself or your friends at As I said, thegodproofs.com for I Do the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for watching.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: By its center for Science and Culture.
