[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: For ID the Future, I'm David Klinghoffer. I have with me Dr. Ann Gager, who is the director of science communication for the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and a biologist and a friend.
Ann recently made a transition to a new home in Iowa. She moved from the Seattle area to Iowa. How is it out there, Ann?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: It's colder than in Seattle, but I find it quite friendly. The people here are very kind and welcoming, and the weather is not intimidating. It's mild compared to what some people led me to expect.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Okay. Well, we are going to talk about a really lovely essay that you wrote that
[email protected] entitled the Transcendental treasury of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
Dr. Gager, as I mentioned, is a biologist, but I also like to think that she has the soul of an artist or perhaps a philosopher.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Well, thank you, David.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Sure. And brings, I think, an unusual sensitivity to considerations of what might otherwise be dry science.
So we're going to talk about this article, and you can find it at evolutionnews.org, but you discuss three what you call transcendentals, truth, beauty, and goodness. First of all, what is a transcendental.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: It'S particular idea that is not material but is a value that we hold pretty universally, people around the world recognize beauty and truth and goodness, although the particular versions they take may differ from culture to culture, but they're abstract concepts that really don't derive from the material world per se.
It's hard to put into words, but they are essential to our life in the sense that we all need to be surrounded by truth, beauty and goodness. And we thrive best when they're in.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Our lives and we feel impoverished strangely without them, don't we?
[00:02:35] Speaker C: Yes.
I say in the essay that they are the foundations on which a life worth living is built.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: You say something provocative that.
Well, you say many things that are provocative in this article. One is that one can cultivate a spirit of gratitude, which we all need to do, by meditating on these things. Isn't that right?
[00:02:56] Speaker C: Yes. I believe that the appreciation for these three values, these three abstract concepts of truth, beauty and goodness, point us towards what is good in the world and what is worth living for.
And they point us towards the idea that the world is actually a good place and that we can strive for these ideals of truth, beauty and goodness in our lives.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: And you say that they're.
This may be the most provocative thing you say is that they are products of a Designer who knows truth, beauty and goodness. So that's what I want to try to focus on briefly here for our listeners. But. But first, what can you. Maybe this is almost impossible to say. I'm not sure how I would answer the following question, but can you define beauty?
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Well, we taught a course at the summer seminar this year, Jonathan Witt and I, he being something of an artist, he writes beautifully, and myself dabbling in music. And we tried to convey the idea of what beauty is by the choice of words that describe it. It's elegant, it's rich, it's deep.
The idea is that something that's beautiful captures our attention. Oh, that's another word. Surprising.
Things that are beautiful are surprising.
When you see something beautiful for the first time, there's this feeling of wonder.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very interesting. That's very true.
Speaking of truth, here's another easy one. Don't find truth.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: A correspondence with reality is my best stab at it. I am not a philosopher by training, and I know that there's whole fields devoted to these questions of the transcendentals and what justifies them and what they mean to us.
Truth is essential for our lives. We can't function in a society that isn't based on truth. It's just pure destructive to families, it's destructive to the culture, it's destructive to political action. If we can't rely on the truthfulness of those around us, we're bound hand and foot, basically.
We can't know what's true and what to act on.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: But the idea of truth has kind of fallen on hard times lately, hasn't it?
[00:05:30] Speaker C: Yeah. In our society, truth is often spoken of as being relative. That truth is defined by a person's own particular values. What they hold true may not be true for other people.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: What about goodness?
What is goodness?
[00:05:48] Speaker C: Goodness is even harder to define than truth and beauty.
It's a sense of someone who lives for the good of others, who desires to be a blessing to those around them, who will actually go out of their way to do loving, kind and transformative things for other people. You think of St. Teresa of Calcutta. You think of other great charitable individuals, Florence Nightingale, people who've lived heroically for the sake of others.
Even people who've lived perhaps in political situations for the benefit of their culture.
Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. Certainly their lives of service to the people around them were good.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Is there a difference between goodness and altruism or are they more or less the same?
[00:06:48] Speaker C: I think that there's a quality to Goodness, that's different. Because goodness goes more than skin deep. Maybe, maybe I put it that way. It's a quality of the soul, of the personality that pervades everything.
So if you. Can you think of anybody who would qualify as good by those standards. It's a rare thing.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Well there, I mean there are animals that are said to be altruistic, right?
[00:07:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: They don't have goodness. So they're. Or do they?
[00:07:23] Speaker C: No, they don't. They don't operate for the benefit of others out of a desire to be a blessing.
It's part of their programming. And they, they don't operate out of free will. They operate out of this being their nature to do such a thing and really not having any intellectual freedom to make a choice to do it or not.
There has to be that freedom to choose to be good as opposed to not good in order to qualify actions as good.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Can I ask, have you ever had a dog?
[00:07:59] Speaker C: Yes, more than one.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Sometimes I wonder if there is that special soul quality to some animals, in particular dogs.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: They certainly look soulful.
I have seen stories of dogs that act in a self sacrificial way to save their owners, to defend their owners.
I don't know the degree to which they operate freely.
For example, would all dogs under the same circumstances, would they all sacrifice themselves for their owners? I don't know.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Well, now let's assume for the sake of conversation that goodness, truth and beauty are, let's say that they are unique human qualities.
And certainly the ability to think about them abstractly is uniquely human.
Surely evolution has helped us to explain our ability to appreciate goodness, truth and beauty. There's surely an evolutionary explanation, isn't there?
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Yeah, there certainly is. There are different ideas put forward.
They say, for example, that our appreciation for beauty is because it allows us to make good choices in mates or in habitats to live. Those are some of the arguments I've seen that our appreciation for art comes from particular neural pathways that make some things look beautiful than others. I've also seen that my difficulty with those arguments is first of all, what makes a beautiful figure or a beautiful face varies from culture to culture.
Some things are proposed to be universal symmetry. For example, having a symmetrical face is thought to be beautiful. But somehow reducing beauty to simply mate choice is insufficient because then why should we transfer that sense of beauty to a beautiful piece of art or to a piece of Han dynasty China?
Secondly, the question of why we value certain landscapes as beautiful.
I've heard it said that it's because it resembles the landscape from which we came and therefore we think of it as a safe place and therefore beautiful.
This to me is a ludicrous argument because we, we value lots of different landscapes as beautiful that are unsafe, like mountaintops or a rugged seascape.
Those aren't safe places, yet we see them as beautiful.
Secondly, it's actually a fairly recent thing that human beings have started to view the landscape as beautiful. In the past it's been viewed as a rather unsafe place.
I think it was in the 1700s that the romantic era came on and the painting of landscapes became a big thing.
So the beauty of landscapes, we appreciate them now, but would I tie it to an evolutionary thing? No. Why would we suddenly develop an appreciation for something if it was an evolved trait that goes back millions of years?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You say towards the end of your essay that scientific materialism is no match for beauty, truth or goodness.
Is that just because there's an issue with the evolution of our appreciation of these things, or do you mean something more by that?
[00:11:42] Speaker C: Well, I'm trying to think who I heard say this, but basically the idea is if you are a materialist, a strict, thoroughgoing materialist, then you deny the truth of truth, beauty and goodness. You make them into constructs that are not based in reality.
And you have no means for justifying the nature of life as being special, worth cultivating.
So you're left having to create, out of nothingness, out of thin air, this sense of meaning and purpose that we can draw from a belief in the actual reality of truth, beauty and goodness, that there are abstracts that have meaning. The world is rich, purposeful and meaningful. I say in the article because we see truth, beauty and goodness in it, and that points towards a source that knows what truth, beauty and goodness is.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: So without that idea of a source or a designer, we are left in a situation where the things that we value most, beauty, truth and goodness, turn out to be illusions. False.
[00:13:00] Speaker C: Well, I've heard evolutionary biologists or materialists say, well, we just have to construct our own meaning. We have to make our own choices about what's good and what's not good.
We can live good lives.
We just choose it instead of believe that it was handed on to us.
The question then is, if this is the case, then why would people be willing to choose lives that are actually beneficial to others? Might they not in fact, choose lives that are selfish and self aggrandizing, looking to make the most of everything for themselves?
[00:13:39] Speaker B: So I think we're left with the conclusion that in the debate about origins, there is more at stake than just a scientific question, but also goes to much deeper questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of reality.
And to contemplate those questions, I really encourage our listeners to visit evolutionnews.org and look for Dr. Gager's article the Transcendental Sorry the Transcendental treasury of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Thank you for Talking with us, Dr. Gager. My pleasure and hope to talk to you again soon. I am David Klinghoffer for ID the.
[00:14:22] Speaker C: Future.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Most of us take the sunrise for granted, but not scientist Michael Denton. The more he learns about sunlight, the more he stands in awe of it. He reveals why in his newest book, Children of Light, the astonishing properties of sunlight that make us possible. There he explores the many astonishing coincidences of how sun and air are fine tuned for creatures like us. As he puts it all together, these coincidences convey an overwhelming impression of design. Get the book at Amazon now in paperback or Kindle. Just search for Children of Light Denton. That's Children of Light Denton.
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.
[00:15:25] Speaker C: SA.
