[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Does intelligent design matter and why? I'm Casey Luskin, and today I have on the show Doctor William Demski, a member of Discovery Institute's board of directors and one of the original senior fellows of Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. He holds two PhDs, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois Chicago, another in math from the University of Chicago, as well as a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has written many books that id the future listeners are aware of, including seminal id books like the Design Inference or intelligent design the bridge between science and theology, design revolution, which I read when I was a student, bill, and had a big impact on my understanding of IDK. And then some of your other work, no free lunch being as communion. And you've done quite a bit of research with the evolutionary informatics lab exploring how information is necessary to build new, complex features. So we're continuing our conversation today about a book that you have co edited along with myself and Joseph Holden titled the Comprehensive Guide to Science and exploring the ultimate questions about life in the cosmos. It came out in October of 2021, and certainly I hope that our listeners will check it out. It has contributions from leading id scientists, including not just Doctor Demski, but also folks like Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Bruce Gordon, Michael Egnor Guillem Gonzalez, Walter Bradley, Robert Marx, Brian Miller. I mean, the list just goes on and on. It's a very ambitious book. It was a lot of fun to work on this with you, Bill, and I'm really pleased with how it came out of.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Great to be with you, Casey. Yeah, it was a fun project and so nice to see how it all came together.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Okay, well, we want to talk today about your second chapter in the book titled why Does Intelligent Design matter? Well, Bill, one of my favorite parts of the book, the comprehensive guide to science and faith, is how so many of the chapters are very concise. They will deal with a topic from an expert in just a few pages. So if you're a reader and you want to come up to speed on something, you don't have to spend 5 hours reading some lengthy treatise to get there. You can read maybe a five to ten page chapter, and you have a chapter that I think is only six pages long titled why does Intelligent Design matter? And this is a very direct and to the point chapter. And you maintain that intelligent design is important because it refutes atheism. So why would you say that intelligent design refutes atheism?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Well, I mean, if you're an atheist, how does the world come to be? Well, there's no God. And the design that you see in the world has to be just an appearance of design. There's ultimately, if you go track back the causal history, it's just random material forces that are working themselves out over the course of natural history. Which is why somebody like Richard Dawkins, an atheist, will say that, well, one thing, he says that thara made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I don't agree with that. But he says that evolution gives us things that appear to be designed for a purpose, but it's just an appearance. So basically, if atheism, then no design, no real design. So if intelligent design shows real design, then this is standard logical inference. Then no atheism. If a, then b, not b, well, then not a, you know, so you learn this in most elementary logic, of course, it's called modus Tollens. So the atheist needs non design, that there is no actual design. Because as soon as the atheist starts reflecting on the world, that has to be a consequence. You know, it's interesting also. I mean, there, there was a wonderful interview between Ben Stein and Richard Dawkins in the film expelled, where they sit across from each other. And Dawkins is saying, when he's pushed on the question of design, well, might life on earth be designed after all? Because there are different ways of detecting design. And he finally says, well, yes, it could be that life was designed by an alien intelligence, but then that alien intelligence would have had to evolve through some undesigned process.
So at the end of the day, there has to be a world with no design. And this is why I think within the intelligent design movement, design is not just a theory of biology, it's also a theory of cosmology. So where we look at the structure, the fine tuning features of the universe and say these are features that do establish that there is real design. It's a logical point. Atheism. As soon as atheism contemplates the world and then has to formulate a science, that science must ultimately show that there's no real design anywhere. And as soon as we can find design someplace, we've refuted atheism. That's why intelligent design is such a powerful antidote to atheism. That's why it's so resistant. And that's why also the atheists try to describe it as a religious idea. Because if it's a religious idea, well, then it can't refute the science. That's their approach. And this is why we stress in the intelligent design movement that this is not a religion versus science issue. This is a science versus science issue. And this is why also, it's not fair to say intelligent design is creationism. Creationism is always a doctrine about a creator, an uncreated, infinite, eternal, transcendent, intelligent, all powerful being that brings the world into existence. Design is about looking at patterns in the world and then seeing. Are those. Do those patterns, are those the types of patterns that require an intelligence to account for that? Look at Mount Rushmore. Is that pattern there something that requires an intelligence? So it's a much more modest program. It's not a religious program. You know, you do intelligent design when you infer. If you could infer that there's an alien intelligence behind some radio signal from outer space. You do intelligent design when you look at some broken or some pieces of rock and infer that this is an arrowhead rather than a random chunk of rock. So we do intelligent design in a lot of contexts already, a lot of special sciences, a lot of forensic science that deals that it is essentially intelligent design. The reason intelligent design is controversial, though, is at the end of the day, what we're saying is there's no evolved or finite intelligence that's behind the world. You can't explain it in terms of some intelligence that arose from naturalistic processes. The ultimate resting point is an intelligence, a real intelligence, a real designing intelligence, and not some blind, purposeless, material process. And obviously, the atheist doesn't want to go there, and they resist it at all costs.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Bill, you kind of got into the second question I wanted to ask you about. When you write that intelligent design makes the question of design and nature not a religion versus science, but a science versus science question. Maybe you could use to elaborate on that a little bit more. How does intelligent design turn this question into a science versus science question?
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Well, I mean, as I said, if intelligent design were a doctrine of creation, then you're talking about what gives being to the world. I mean, where does the world come from? You know, there's a joke that used to be told, you know, scientists come to God and say, we can do everything you can do. And God says, oh, that's interesting.
Show me. And they say, well, we can produce humans from scratch. We take some dust, and, you know, and then God says, well, wait a second. Get your own dust. So where does that dust come from? So as soon as you're talking a doctrine of creation, you are in the religious world. But once you're.
Once you're just looking at design and patterns in nature. That's what scientists do. They look for patterns, they see certain connections, certain ways that things behave characteristically, and then they form theories, they draw conclusions, they get insight into how the world works. And I would say that's exactly what we're doing with intelligent design. The thing is, there are actual scientific mathematical theories that impinge on it. Information theory plays a big role in intelligent design. There's a lot of signal to noise stuff. Is nature sending us a signal, or is there noise that's drowning it out? Is that signal characteristic indicative of intelligence?
We are doing exactly what scientists and other special sciences are doing, but we're applying it to biology and to cosmology. And when we do that, though, the implications are much more radical than they are for a forensic scientist that shows that somebody didn't die by natural causes, that there was foul play. Foul play is a design inference. But if we look at the genetic machinery inside the human cell and we see that there is a Shannon information system, a coding system, that is taking us from one alphanumeric convention to another, going from DNA to protein, and we say, hey, wait a second. Our only experience with such systems where we know the causal story is that these are design systems. And you look and there's no plausible darwinian pathway to them.
This is well covered ground in the IB movement. Then, you know, it's certainly plausible to think that there's a real intelligence involved behind this. But going back to your point about methodological naturalism, if you define science so that you can't invoke or bring in intelligent causes, even though you can when they're naturalistically acceptable, as with humans or in forensic science, well, then you've effectively eliminated but I intelligent design. But you've done it by defining it out of existence. I remember Philip Johnson at an ASA american scientific affiliation meeting years and years ago. His point was, he said, it's like a jeopardy question, or jeopardy where the point is you give the answer and then you have to oppose the question. And so the answer is darwinian evolution. Well, what's the question? And the question is, what is the best naturalistic way of explaining how life evolved and came about on earth? But it's that word naturalistic. You know, if it's a question of what is the best way of explaining how we got what we have, it would be design. Because anybody who looks at this and the structure, the intricacy, the complexity, the functional interdependence, you know, the problems only get worse over time. You know this better than I do. You know where year by year, you know all the sorts of things where the Darwinists will say, this was obviously an example of poor design. Junk DNA. Where's Junk DNA now? It's crashed and burned, because all this junk DNA, which was expected on darwinian principles and shouldn't be there on intelligence, well, it's overwhelmingly non junk now. And yet the darwinian train keeps chugging along.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Well, Bill, you have a really nice conclusion to this chapter on why intelligent design matters. You first say the genetic code evinces a pattern that requires an intelligence for its explanation, and then you say, then there is the work on evolutionary informatics that shows that the evolutionary process needs to be infused with external information in order to produce novel functions and biological structures needed to support them. And then you say, and this brings me, after all, this stage setting to the title of the chapter, why does intelligent design matter? It matters because there are clear patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence, and where such an intelligence is not part of nature as conceived by the materialist atheist. Moreover, this inference to this intelligence outside nature is not a matter of religion, but of science. Intelligent design, in standing against chemical and biological evolution, is therefore not making a religious, but a scientific case. And, Bill, I think that this brings out why intelligent design has faced such intense opposition, is that we're not making a case that you can just dismiss by saying, oh, this is just religion. We're bringing forth real empirical data, real scientific arguments and evidence that people have to grapple with. And it's not easy to do that. I mean, this is obviously, the materialists thought they had the culture and the whole argument wrapped up. We've settled this. It's settled science. And then here along comes intelligent design and says that, no, that's not the case. That's sort of an existential threat to their power structure, to use the sort of terminology that's in vogue today. I mean, do you agree that you've brought out not just why intelligent design matters, but why intelligent design has also faced a lot of intense opposition here?
[00:13:48] Speaker B: I think you're exactly right. I mean, I was trained as a philosopher of science, among other things. And so you learned something about the history of science, and scientific revolutions are nothing new. I mean, think of Copernicus. Think of the quantum revolution. The quantum revolution is actually quite interesting because you have, within the space of a decade or two, a complete shift from a deterministic universe to one in which chancy things happen. At this quantum realm, you've got this uncertainty principle, and particles in the quantum realm behave very differently from the realm of medium sized objects. And yet there was a revolution. And it happened, though, without a lot of bloodshed, and the physics community largely came over. But why was that? Well, I would say there weren't such grave worldview issues at stake there. With intelligent design, there are grave worldview issues at stake. If we're right, if we are finding evidence of a creative intelligence in biology, in cosmology. Well, who or what is that intelligence? Well, you know, it's likely to be God in most people's thinking. So we're getting people to the edge, you know, with intelligence. We haven't maybe tossed them over the edge, but we're taking them to the edge. And it makes, makes the atheists, the materialists, those who have idolized science makes them very uncomfortable. And, you know, it's just a lot more comfortable for them to keep us at bay to try to ignore this, dismiss it. I mean, this is why to this day, you look at any article in Wikipedia on intelligent design or intelligent design proponents, and they make sure you get the world's words, creationism and pseudoscience in there in the first sentence to dismiss it. But, you know, truth will out at the end, you know, but I think we have to persist, you know, and we have to keep saying and demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes. Thing is, you know, they try to gaslight you. We're the crazies, right? We're the ones who see design, you know, in the world. But it's the absence of design and refusing to acknowledge it. It seems to me that's really the crazy position.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And Bill, you do make it clear in the chapter that you say intelligent design offers no doctrine about the designing intelligence ultimately responsible for the patterns in nature that are best explained as the products of intelligence. As far as the theory of intelligent design is concerned, it could be the deity of ethical monotheism that is the object of worship of the great monotheistic faiths, but it could also be a pantheistic deity, or it could even be nature writ large. So you make it clear that intelligent design does not necessarily identify the specific designer, but it certainly has those implications that you're talking about for a lot of people who would see the designer as the God of monotheism, of, you know, the western view of God. And so that obviously has worldview implications that a lot of people are not going to like. Some people are going to like them. Some people are not going to like them. It is what it is. I mean, the evidence is what it is. You have to just let the evidence speak for itself and not reject a viewpoint because of the implications that you take from it.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and it cuts both ways. I mean, there's, you know, the atheist is unhappy with. With intelligent design because it opens the possibility of God. But some religious believers may not be entirely happy with it because it doesn't go far enough in establishing their particular views. So, I mean, I've seen it where certain creationists have been disaffected with intelligent design because it doesn't prove the God of Christianity. I've spoken at the Oxford center for Hindu Studies, and they were very open and friendly to intelligent design. But, I mean, they're not theists in the sense that christians are. But I think most religions do see some deep purposiveness as underlying reality, you know, and that could even be a naturalism, but it's not a mechanistic naturalism. And it's where nature is in some sense personified or deified or, you know, it's so you can even see nature as. Or I guess I shouldn't say personified or neither, but I mean, where there's this, where teleology, purposiveness, and the outworking of those purposes are fundamental to nature. Purpose is not something fundamental within a mechanistic, materialistic world because all you have are particles in motion that are hanging against each other. Where do you get purpose out of that? You know, it's just however things happen to be arranged. So there are lots of, I think, philosophical and theological views that would be compatible with intelligent design. And I think it takes us a distance and it takes us away from atheism, takes us toward christian theism. It's friendly to christian theism, but it's also friendly to other things, other theological or philosophical religious views. So at the end of the day, I would say intelligent design, if we think of God in the christian framework as creator and redeemer, I think it gets us to God as creator, gets us somewhere there, not to a full doctrine of creation, but then we still need to argue for the creator God and then ultimately the redeemer God in Jesus Christ. So I guess what I'm saying is that there's still theological work to be done, especially for the Christian. Once intelligent design has done its work.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: People often come to us saying, well, you know, intelligent design doesn't go far enough. And as a Christian, my response is, I agree. I mean, it's not going to take you to Christ on the cross. It's not an argument for that. It's an argument for there being a designing intelligence behind life in the universe, looking at nature, finding patterns of intelligence as you have described. And that's all it is. So if you want to take the argument further to a specific view of who the designer is, you've got to use arguments from other fields, like philosophy or theology or history or all these different academic disciplines, and that's fine. People can do that. But intelligent design on its own is an argument for intelligent design. And that's why it's called intelligent design. If we take it further, then we're going beyond what the scientific evidence can tell us. And some people see that as a weakness of intelligent design, but I see that as a strength. I don't want to get into my chapter, but I have a chapter on what intelligent design is and comparing it to other common views like theistic evolution or creationism. And I say, I think that intelligent design, trying to remain faithful to what we can learn through a scientific investigation is a strength, because then you can take it to somebody who maybe doesn't share the same religious presuppositions or worldview presuppositions that you do. But we all agree. We can all look at nature, understand what we see, use nature as sort of a. And the world around us is a common language that we all speak. And we can get somebody to see there's evidence for design, regardless of their religious or non religious presuppositions, whatever they may be. And I think that's a strength of intelligent design. So, Bill Demski, I don't know if you want to comment on that, but we're getting a bit long here.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Yeah, just, I know we're getting probably close to the end, but I would comment just that. I think intelligent design does lead us to the conclusion, I think does so rigorously, that there's design behind the world, that there's actual design there. There's a designer, some designing intelligence. But I would say that's not the end of it. I mean, you know, I think for any purpose it purposes, it is gives us a scientifically based design argument. Okay, conclusion, there's a designer. But I think it's much more interesting and fruitful scientifically in that it says, okay, now what are we actually looking at? What are these patterns? How does this understanding of design then get us insight into biology, into cosmology? So there's actual scientific work then to be done? I mean, from my end, I mean, a lot has been the focus just on the information theory, and a lot of design inferences can be reformulated in terms of search, searching for targets. Targets are then the object of this designing process.
And so you can look at the nature of these searches and the information that's required for successful search. And so my point is just not just there's a design, there's a designer. Let's go home. Okay, we've established it. That is the beginning of an inquiry then, into nature and gaining greater insight rather than the end of the conversation. And I think that, I want to stress that because I think it's, you know, it's the classic design arguments were more, hey, these features of the world show that there's a designer. Okay, we can all go home. We're all happy.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Bill, I agree with you 100%. And to wet our listeners whistles, if you read my chapter in the book on the positive case for design, at the end, I go through how we can use intelligent design as a heuristic for guiding science. Talking about some of what you're talking about, how can we use intelligent design to open up new avenues of investigation in information theory, in genetics, in physics, and cosmology? In fact, the Engineering research group, which is a project of the id 3.0 research program here at Discovery Institute, is looking at how we can use engineering, basically a discipline that tries to understand how to design things, how we can use engineering principles to better understand biology. And I think they're having tremendous success in those efforts. So absolutely, there's way more you can do with intelligent design rather than the mere design conclusion that this, what this thing was designed, it can serve as a guide and paradigm to help us do better science. So, Bill, thank you so much for your time. Talking about your contributions to the comprehensive guide to science and faith. Again, it's a book published by Harvest House with Bill Demski, myself, and Joseph Holden as co editors. It's available on Amazon.com dot. We certainly hope you will check it out. I'm Casey Luskin with ID the future. Thanks for listening.
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