Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Greetings. This is Robert J. Marks, and I'm your guest host today on ID the Future. We're going to be talking today with Dr. Walter Bradley about his very influential book, the Mystery of Life's Origin, that he wrote in 1984 with Charles Thaxton and Roger Olson. And the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence is really proud to announce that we are doing a reissue of the book.
Not only is the original text going to be there, but things have happened since 1984. And we also have chapters on updating the mystery of life's origins from such luminaries as Jim Tour, Steve Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzalez, and physicist Brian Miller. There's a great historical introduction from David Klinghoffer and a preface by John west and me. Something I didn't think about. Walter, when this book is issued, you will now have a Bacon Erdos number of six.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Well, I'm thrilled to hear that, Bob. You might want to explain for the audience what that means.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Okay. I have a Bacon Erdos number of five. And your Bacon number is how many movies you are in that are displaced from a movie in which Kevin Bacon has appeared. You were in Expelled with Ben Stein. Ben Stein was in the movie Trains, Planes and Automobiles with Kevin Bacon. So you have a Bacon number of two.
And your Erdos number is how many papers you are removed from this wacky Hungarian mathematician named Paul Erdos who published hundreds of papers, and he is very influential. Much of his work is very good. So the question is, how many papers are you separated from Erdos? Well, I have an Erdos number of three. This book will come out, and John west and I wrote the preface for it. So you will have now an Erdos number of four, giving you a total Bacon Erdos number, the sum of your Bacon number and your Erdos number of six.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: I couldn't be more pleased.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: It is. And guess what? I believe that ties you with Carl Sagan and it's.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: My. Oh, my.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's.
That's really interesting. We want to talk about the book and the reissue of the book and how it's augmented and the influence of the book. And I wanted to go over with Dr. Bradley a little bit of the history of putting together the book, because there were lots of things that happened, lots of kind of magical things that actually put this book into print. One of them was the search for the publisher. Could you kind of tell us about that?
[00:02:48] Speaker B: I sure can.
The timing was unfortunate in that we were at a place to be looking for a publisher in 1983.
Now 1982 was the year that they had this big nationally publicized trial having to do with what could be taught in public schools in Arkansas. And the net result of that was there was a kind of a hypersensitivity to any claims that people were trying to make that would seem to suggest that theism can be supported through science.
And I think that the reporting of the Arkansas trial and maybe even some of the testimonies given by well intentioned Christians, but not very scientifically good, it sort of muddied the pond and made it more difficult and it was a little bit, let's say, guilt by association.
So John had his work cut out for him because.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: John.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: John Buell. I'm sorry. Okay.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: One of the things that you did which was very interesting in the book is you postponed the talk of anything theological to an epilogue.
And in there you actually, I think, very fairly went through different explanations for the origin of life. There were five of them.
Could you go over those really quickly? Because I think it's important to realize the attempt to be objective in the book.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Our intent here was really not to rush to one conclusion, but to lay out what are some of the possible explanations. We'd obviously raised in the book some very interesting questions about how you can develop these sort of remarkable living systems and have it done in some sort of accidental way. So the possible explanations would be new natural laws that we haven't yet discovered. Panspermia. That life came here from some other place in the universe. Although that doesn't solve the problem, it just translates the problem to someplace else in the universe. Directed panspermia.
Special creation by a creator within the cosmos or special creation by a creator beyond the cosmos.
And so we thought this was as broad and comprehensive as it could be. These are all possibilities. They're not all equally likely.
But we were trying to be as fair as we could be in evaluating what are the implications from the science.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: Some people might think the direct of panspermia is kind of wacko. But Francis Crick, who was one of the co discoverers of DNA, and Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, both believed in directed panspermia. That we were actually planted here by some alien life form. And of course the idea of a special creator refers to intelligent design.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Of course.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Of course. Now we were talking about the publication of this. Buell actually approached a number of different publishers.
I forget the number. How many did he approach?
[00:05:40] Speaker B: 27.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: 27 before he found a publisher.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And you wanted to have a publisher, not in the main line of Christianity, but actually a secular publisher.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: We felt like that the audience we wrote the book for was not for Sunday school classes on Sunday morning.
It was really meant to be for the scientific community who was working in the area of origin of life.
And so we felt like that they would not find this book or maybe take an interest in it if it were published by a Christian publisher, because it would be presumed it's another creationist book that they would not feel like has a scientific merit.
So it was much harder to find a good secular publisher. We didn't want just a publisher, but a good secular publisher and one that had published other important scientific works so that this work would at least be read and taken seriously. That's all we really wanted.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Excellently. And again, if what one believes is true, it should be able to stand the scrutiny of objective analysis.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Precisely.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: I think that Discovery Institute has been at the head of this.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: And actually, actually putting these things together now, the people that you had endorse your book is pretty impressive.
Robert Jastrow. Tell us about Robert Jastrow. He was one of the endorsers of your book.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Yep. Robert Jastrow was a professor at Columbia University, but also was one of the founders of the Goddard Space center and was the first director.
A very, very well known and highly regarded scientist and a person who had previously taken some interest in origins questions. So he had some background to read the book and have a context what we know about this area in this field. And he gave us a very, very strong endorsement for which we were grateful.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: In fact, let me read it. Jastrow said, this is a valuable summary of the evidence against the chemical evolution of life out of nonliving matter. It presents a very well thought out and clearly written analysis of the alternatives to the accepted scientific theory of the origin of life.
Very honest, very positive response.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: We were extremely pleased.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: I guess so. You know, Jastrow is also famous for a saying which I've seen you use in some of your talks, talking about science, doing all of this work and kind of climbing up a hill. And then he ends it by saying, as the scientist pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
So much of the stuff of science actually does point to the things which have been taught for many, many years.
Another one of your endorsers was Robert Shapiro. I'm familiar with Robert Shapiro in his book evolution in the 21st century, where he actually admits the requirement of things such as teleology in the development of evolution, that that biology must be pre wired in some sense in order to see the emergence that we have in evolutionary processes.
Tell us about Robert Shapiro and what his recommendation was.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: First of all, he was a PhD chemist, educated at Harvard University.
He was throughout his whole career a professor at New York University in the chemistry department, working in particular in this area of origin of life. He wrote a book two years after our book was published that was already in process. Yes, at the time he reviewed our book. So he was a very knowledgeable person in this emerging field. And again, he, I think in his book was already prepared to take exception to a lot of the claims that were being made about how life began by people who were at it were, I think, making an awful lot of noise without very much data.
And so he gave the book again a ringing endorsement. He distanced himself from the epilogue in which we then talked about the possibility that this might be orchestrated by a divine creator. But the scientific part of the book he had essentially no disagreements with, which is pretty remarkable because we said a lot of things. And he's a very knowledgeable reviewer because of his own work.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: He actually said in the review of the original edition, the new work brings together the major scientific arguments that demonstrate the inadequacy of earlier theories. And then he politely goes on and disagrees with your epilogue. He said that I welcome their contributions. It helps clarify our thinking. I would recommend this book to everybody. And he does explicitly say in his review that he doesn't agree with all the philosophical results in the epilogue. So he was honest and was very high in his praise for the book.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: We can, I would consider his acknowledgment that he disagreed with the conclusion adds extra strength to his endorsement of the scientific work, because although he might have or could have been if he let himself be prejudicial because of the epilogue, he chose not to do that and to affirm the scientific work for the quality that it demonstrated without necessarily having some knee jerk reaction because of what we thought were some of the implications of that which we'd carefully put into the epilogue.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: And Robert Jastrow, who we just talked about previously, was also not a theist.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: No, no.
I think he was an agnostic, but he was also not what I would call a hostile agnostic. There are people that are hostile as agnostics and their hostility means that any idea of there being a creator God of some sort is just an anathema to them and it makes it hard for them to be objective about any evidence that happens to point in that direction.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: And then there was Dean Kenyon. Now, Dean Kenyon actually wrote the preface for the book or the foreword.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: He did okay.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: And he was very positive, too.
You mentioned to me before that he kind of changed his mind. He wrote a book called Biochemical Predestination, which he later backpedaled from.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Yeah, this was in 1968. It was, well, almost 15 years before our book was published. And at the time was considered maybe one of the most important books on the origin of Life. Obviously, in 68, we knew even less than we did at. By the time our book was being written. And so he wrote what I thought was a reasonable attempt to point out possibilities of how life might have begun.
But I think by the time that he reviewed our book, he had changed his mind. And maybe reading our book had, in fact, influenced some of that change.
But he was very clear, in a sense, distancing himself from his previous claims and speculations in 1968 and affirmed very strongly the ideas and claims that were made in mystery.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: And you speculated that might have cost him professionally.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: There's no doubt in my mind that if you get on the wrong side of this question, you probably will experience some amount of blowback or discrimination or whatever.
Sadly, we'd like to think that all scientific work is done objectively, based on the data and let the data do the talking. But in the real world, it is sometimes the case that some scientific questions get politicized because of their philosophical implications.
That may or may not be popular with some of the people that work in the field.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: So that's something that's not new. I think that that's something that we experience today.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's been true for a long time.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And then the book came out and the reviews started, and you got some really good reviews, some not so friendly.
Let's see. One of them is Clifford Matthews at the University of Illinois. He said, this is really a brilliant book. He is a chemist and Origin of Life researcher. He said, it's a superb reevaluation. It's fair, and it's not polemic. What's polemic mean?
[00:14:07] Speaker B: It means it's like debate. You're trying to make an argument, and you're maybe sometimes playing fast and loose with the truth. Right.
As opposed to making a honest effort to win your case based on evidence, as opposed to on cleverly designed ways of talking about it.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: I see. In other words, playing games, gaming the argument, in a way. Molecular biologist Jay Roth said he was greatly impressed and called it a fascinating scholarly work. There was a chemist, Walter Thompson, at the University of Alberta. He praised the book as a splendid book. And. And he said it offered very careful and scientific argumentation.
Physicist Graham Gootz of the U.S. naval Academy said it was outstanding. And he actually started to use it in his class, which I guess you can do at the Naval Academy, maybe not at some public universities. But then along came the naysayers, and one of them was a gentleman named Richard Lemon. He was a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory.
And in July 1, 1985, he wrote, the only people whom I can recommend the Mystery of Life's Reassessing Current Theories are the miniscule fraction of cenn's readers. Now, that was referring to the journal in which the review appeared are the fraction of cenn's reviewers who are religious creationists.
These also are people who are prone to write letters to the editor whenever anything touching on creationism appears appeared.
I look forward to the forthcoming complaints about this review.
So what was your response when you saw that review?
Was it the most friendly in the world?
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Well, I appreciated the fact that there was essentially no criticism of the science in the book. All of the criticism had to do with the epilogue. And so I felt like instead of dealing with the data and then allowing some latitude for speculation about what the implications were, no, he wasn't willing to do that. The very fact that there was some possibility that it might hint of a theistic creator completely ruined the book for him, as if there was no merit at all. The science had to be all wrong and so forth. I think what he did was to discredit his own review rather than to discredit the book.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Excellent.
Well, this is where you met the chemist Henry F. Schaeffer, also known as Fritz Schaeffer, who wrote a rebuttal to the review of Lemon.
He noted that the review was superficial, and he noted that the authors are not creationists. The author's referring to you in the sense popularized by the recent court case Schaeffer. Now, that was the Arkansas case that you're talking about.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Yes, the 1982 one.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Yes, since it's gone to fame. And Fritz Schaeffer, it turns out, is currently one of the most highly cited chemists in the world. So the credentials of the response to Lemon's review were really high. Now, this was the place where you actually befriended Fritz Schaeffer.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Fritz wrote really very much, very promptly, because it appeared in the next week's Chemical and Engineering News. This magazine comes out. I Think once a week or once every two weeks, more than once a month.
So I was looking to see what responses there would be to my further letters about my article or about the book. Excuse me, but are also other letters regarding the review. And so I was obviously very pleased that Fritz sort of gave what I thought was a terrifically fair but also very poignant review of the review.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: And it made the point that the review really didn't talk about the book. It only talked about the epilogue. And the epilogue was a small fraction of the book. And he said some other things that I thought were very positive.
So I simply sent him a.
I must have called him. I'm not sure we had email in those days.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Frit Shaffer.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Fritz Schaefer. Yeah, I think I just called him to thank him for the very nice review that he had written on behalf of the book. And we ended up having a nice conversation over the telephone. And I discovered that he was a full professor at Berkeley and one of their probably most outstanding professors in the chemistry department also found out that he had, as a full professor, become a follower of Christ.
And his review wasn't because he was a Christian. His review was because he thought the other review was bad.
But we did have that in common. And as a result we eventually became very good friends.
I've stayed at his home a time or two when I was at the University of Georgia. When he's been at Texas A and M, coming to speak either in the chemistry department or with a campus wide lecture on faith and science.
He stayed at our house. So we've really gotten to be good friends.
It was the only time I think I ever met a new friend by looking at the reviews of something I'd written.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Yeah. That's an amazing connection.
Let me finish. I'm going to read to you the impact that your book has had.
One is from Jay Richards.
Everybody who's familiar with the Discovery Institute knows that Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, co author of the Privileged Planet with Guillermo Gonzalez.
He wrote Walter Bradley woke me from a dogmatic slumber. As a Christian college student, I had tried to reconcile my religious beliefs with what I took to be the best origin of life science. Walter's work convinced me that the materialistic origin of life theories fell flat and intelligent design fit the facts much better. That changed my mind, permanently altered my career trajectory. And for that, I'll always be grateful.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Jay Richards. Yeah. You have not heard this before?
[00:20:06] Speaker B: No.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: John Damasa, who is a PhD and also has a Master of Divinity says, About 15 years ago, I was going through some books found in my church library when I stumbled on one entitled the Mystery of Life's Origin. He said, what does this chemistry book doing next to these Christian novels? And he responded, because his PhD was in chemistry, said I could not put the book down. Its impact would change my life forever and help me to redefine my career.
Another luminary from the Discovery Institute, Dr. Douglas Axe, wrote, luminaries like Walter Bradley paved the way for me to dedicate my career to advancing design thinking in biology.
And when my career was thrown into turmoil because of that decision, Walter was there to help with his broad smile, his inexhaustible wisdom, and his natural way of putting his influence to good use. And that's another thing about your history. It's not only for the visibility and the ministry of what you're doing, but the personal care and personal love that you gave to people like Doug. He says, gracious to the core. He's one of the few people I mentally summon when I find myself in a situation that requires. Requires unnatural calm.
So we have these accolades about the book the Mystery of Life's Origin.
And again, the Walter Bradley center for Natural Intelligence is reissuing the book. It's going to be available on Amazon.com or in print or Kindle. It has the original three Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olson. New chapters by Jim Tor, Steve Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzalez, Brian Miller, with an introduction by David Klinghoffer, with a preface by John west and me, which bumps Walter's bacon airdos number up to six.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: That's the best thing that's happened this whole project.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: It is. So, Walter, thank you for spending the time with us. This is Robert J. Marks. I'm your guest host today for ID the Future. Until we meet again. Be of good. Cheers.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com SAM.
