By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator

who is dead God or Charles Darwin Michael

behe

a biochemist John Lennox a mathematician Stephen Meyer a geophysicist filming today on fies alone Italy uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I am Peter Robinson professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University Michael B has a bachelor's degree from Drexel and a PhD in Biochemistry from Penn. He is the author of several books, including Darwin's Black Box. Emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford. John Lennox grew up in Northern Ireland, earned his undergraduate degree from Emanuel College, Cambridge, and went on to earn more than one. and not two, but three doctorates in an academic career of astonishing distinction.

Dr. Lennox is the author of many books, including the 2019 volume Can Science Explain Everything? Former Professor of Geophysics at Whitworth College Stephen Meyer is now a Fellow of the Discovery Institute He has a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, Dr Meyer has republished many books, including his 2013 volume on the fossil record Darwin's Doubt Michael John and Steve welcome the first question Darwin versus Einstein Einstein publishes the special theory of relativity in 1905 and in the 12 decades since that publication, one observation after another has tended to confirm his work just a decade ago, the Scientists discovered that clocks on satellites in elliptical orbits kept time almost as Einstein would have predicted.

Over time, to put it crudely, Einstein has become increasingly easier to believe in Darwin. publishes briefly on the origin of species in 1859, as Einstein also did with Darwin, has it become increasingly easier to believe? Not Michael, quite the opposite, John, the exact moment I heard, Stephen's theory has been progressively refuted by multiple observations in multiple sub-disciplines of biology, okay, you three come out swinging, uh, gentlemen, you're about to take a layman through three problems with Darwin that have arisen in recent decades. Problem one Stephen, this is for you, feel free to join, but this one. for Stephen particularly the fossil record the Cambridge Cambrian how to pronounce either the Cambrian or the Cambrian explosion what it was and why it is a problem for Darwin it was a problem that Darwin himself knew about in 1859 the Cambrian explosion is the uh Refers to an event in the history of life in which major groups of animals form new body plans exemplified by the largest categories of different types of animals that appear very abruptly in the fossil record with no discernible connection to ancestral precursors or intermediates in the lower Precambrian strata and this pattern of abrupt appearance of the main groups of organisms of biological or morphological innovation, as it is called, is repeated up and down the sedimentary rock column the first winged insects the first dinosaurs the first birds the first mammals the first flowering plants there are multiple examples of this type of abrupt appearance, so the fossil record looks very different from what Darwin anticipated.

He described the history of life as a great branching tree where the life forms we see today gradually emerged from one or more. few simple forms at the base of the tree on the tree trunk, but instead what we see looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees where the main groups of organisms appear abruptly without connections to those ancestral precursor forms , so the Cambrian explosion was the first to be noticed, as you say, Darwin himself noted this was a problem, but this is from my reading, please add to it or correct me as I have it, the record shows a abrupt of corrupted meaning a few million years ago, but in geological time that's a blink of an eye one abrupt event after another photosynthesis suddenly there the Avalon explosion the great ordovician biodiversification event whatever it could have been the Silurian Devonian terrestrial explosion fish appear Birds appear dinosaurs appear mammals appear well then the obvious objection to this is that we have really only been digging since Darwin's time, the Earth is big, geological time is essentially endless, There are fossils there, we just haven't found the intermediate forms, have we?

That is an objection to claims about fossils. discontinuity which is known as the artifact hypothesis, this idea is that the missing ancestral forms are an artifact, either of incomplete sampling, yes, or of incomplete preservation, right, the Cambrian explosion itself poses a very good test of that artifact hypothesis, the claim regarding sampling is that we have not looked enough or 160 years later since the Cambrian or since the publication of the Origin of Species and the Cambrian explosion from our point of view has become even more explosive, there are more new forms of There are no more new animal forms known now in that Cambrian explosion than in Darwin's time, and yet, as time has passed, we have not found more intermediate forms, so there are still more new forms, all of which still lack intermediate forms. ways instead of our findings returning to some kind of Darwinian meaning they are moving away from Darwin more and more rapidly uh one last notion here one last question about this um before I move on to my big math problem in life with John Lennox um punctuated balance Stephen J.

Gould, the late and, by all indications, great, seems to have been a dynamic teacher, was certainly prolific. The great biologist Stephen J. Gould, who remained well. Tell me what equivalent punctuated equilibrium was maintained and why it doesn't answer the question. The problem, well, it was a wonderful new idea. Gould and another paleontologist, Niles Eldridge, formulated this theory in the late 1970s and what they were trying to do is describe the fossil record more accurately and what they saw and what paleontologists saw then and see. Now it is even more distinctive this pattern of abrupt appearance and what they called stasis that the basic form of an animal, the basic body plan, will remain constant for long periods of time, whether becoming extinct or continuing to this day, there would be variations within the limitations. of a body plan but with limited variation, the crocodile appears appears and remains and remains well and um and what they suggested was that there are these punctuation events where you have this sudden appearance and then this long period of equilibrium of stasis um and uh, but they wanted to maintain that evolution comes in fifth place and fits and starts exactly.

Evolution takes place and fits and begins, so it was a wonderful improvement on our description of the fossil record, but the problem was that Golden Eldridge never thought of it. a mechanism that convinced his colleagues in evolutionary biology that such evolution could occur so quickly that there was no good description of the fossil record without a mechanism to explain how that amount of change could occur in those short numbers of meteors hitting the Earth. eliminate the dinosaurs and create an ecological niche yes, create space for new species to emerge and suddenly they spread well. I'm not convinced that these two are laughing, the problem is that you have to build the animal and this is the second part of When I wrote Darwin Stout's book I talked about two great mysteries, one is the mystery of the missing fossils, but The second is the mystery of how the evolutionary process generates the new biological form because what we know now is in our computer world.

If you want to generate a new way of life, you have to have a lot of new information on the computer. The world wants to get a new program, you have to have new code. The same thing happens in life, where does the code come from? Just opening the niche. does not explain the origin of the information necessary to construct a new animal form to fill everything now that we come to the mass of the mathematical problem mathematics was always my weakest subject and I am well aware that I am talking to the professor emeritus of mathematics at the Oxford University, okay, so let me put it in layman's terms as best I can and I have worked on it, which I consider to be the mathematical problem that has arisen in the last few decades.

With Darwin, we now know something about when life appears to have arisen. It emerged between four and five billion years ago. We now know quite a bit about the rate at which random genetic mutations take place. Darwin's theory suggests that evolution arises because random genetic mutations occur through acts of natural selection on them. We also know a lot about how complicated it is to create proteins that work proteins chains of amino acids of a couple hundred or more and the math just doesn't work from the beginning of time to the present there are a series of mutations that must have occurred to create life that we see around us and it just doesn't add up is like that, generally speaking, it's much worse than that because I think one of the most important things and I'm not a biologist, but I study biologists as carefully as What can be is that the Darwin's theory, whether done or not, says zero about the origin of life, he did not intend to talk about the origin, he always assumes the preexistence of a form that other things involve, but unfortunately for many years Richard Dawkins obscured everything obscured the whole situation this is Oxford biology that is correct because he said that the natural selection that Darwin discovered and describes it as a blind automatic process is responsible for the existence and variation of all life now he later admitted that it took too long to do so that evolution in the Darwinian sense cannot be responsible for the origin of life for the simple reason that evolution, whether it does or does not do it, presupposes the existence of life, so we have two separate problems here. one is the origin of the life that will come to that.

I promise to go back to the origin of the information as Stephen mentioned, but the second one is just pure calculation. Now you mentioned things in your question that have to do with the origin of the proteins of life and so on and one of my examiners at Cambridge was Sir Fred Hoyle and he came to Cardiff where I was a professor many years ago and he surprised everyone because He just stood up and told an absolutely packed crowd because he was famous, he said life couldn't have originated on Earth and there was a collective gasp and he said, "I did the math and mathematically it's impossible, there's not enough time." and I actually have a copy of those calculations at home and he just said it's pretty obvious that if you do the calculations and he puts it very simply and clearly, you know that rabbits produce rabbits and very little else, and I think that what is mathematics showed him that the innocent aspect of evolution that we can all accept is that minor variations result a topic that Michael has dealt with so successfully in his book The Edge Of Evolution that it is not controversial, but once. you go further and think about new animals, new body plans, all that kind of stuff, the book of affection is The Origin of Species, yes, that's it. the origin of species, but I think you already know what matters to me in all this now is not what mathematicians say but what mathematically conscious biologists say.

One of my friends at Oxford is a very distinguished biologist, Professor Dennis Noble, and he has been absolutely clear, he said that neo-Darwinism is the modern synthesis of the standard textbook theory that we all learn natural selection and mutation doesn't need to be improved, it needs to be replaced and I was almost quoting someone like Lynn Margulis, another very distinguished person who said that he is dead, so these are people who know the calculations and know the complexity. I say it from that perspective, he is dead, so Fred Hoyle we should add that he was a very famous character from the middle of the last century. astronomer, yeah, okay, Michael, problem three for this little cell biology layman, can you tell us about irreducible? this is your kind of thing, signal concept, irreducible complexity and the story of the mousetrap, sure, well, might start, might be good Start by saying that Darwin and the people of his time didn't know much about cells, they had poor quality microscopes, it looked like a little piece of jelly and they didn't know anything about molecules, and now we know that small and elementary also meant simple to them.

So yes, biologically that is correct, like gelatin or gelatin, they thought it could just come out of the sea, but modern science over the last 70 years has shown that this cell is run by molecular machines, real machines made of molecules and really sophisticated. . those where there are machines that act like propellers, machines that act like trucks to carry supplies from one side of the cell to the other side of the cell, so when you zoom in these days we don't know enough about cells to know that they are not little drops of gelatin, that's right, you enter a cell and you're looking at a city, uh, yes, more or less, yes, that's right, it has electrical devices, it hasvehicles, it has information, it has all kinds of things and the problem with the irreducible. the complexity is, if you think about it, machines are made of different parts, say, a lawnmower, it has a blade, you know, it has a motor, wheels, things like that, but Darwin always insisted that his theory had to function through numerous successive slight modifications. very, very gradual, but if you're trying to build a machine like a lawn mower or a mouse trap, I like The Mousetrap because it's so simple that even I can remember it, yeah, yeah, just think of a mechanical mouse trap, it has several different pieces.

Now if you wanted to build something like that slowly and have every piece or every job in between, you have a big problem because you need all the pieces to work, you need a spring and a piece of wood base a couple of other metal parts and I and just to capture that concept I invented the phrase irreducible complexity because it's complex you can't reduce it or take a piece off and it just doesn't work and the mouse trap doesn't work so it could No, the mouse trap, take a piece off one of these. fantastically complicated machines in a cell.

Okay, it doesn't work and therefore couldn't have conferred an Adaptive Advantage right and couldn't be gradually built up and improved every step of the way. The stages confer no functional advantage, therefore natural selection has nothing to select for on the path from simple to complex. Michael says what interests me a lot is that granule accumulation is a gradual ascent, whereas I'm right in saying that contemporary biologists like it. Dennis Noble, who I mentioned, is saying, but look, you have to keep in mind wholesale that this is top-down causation and that would frustrate any concept of building things anyway through numerous slight accumulations, it's fair to say that if you go like this, that way, you have left Darwin far behind, yes, you have left randomness far behind, but they are doing it, they are leaving it far behind, but from the top down it is actually a metaphor for the action of an agent when organizing things with a plan in mind, yes.

Well, you see John Lennox, just SWAT Starwin aside for you two, it's a much more agonizing process, he tries very hard to be fair to the man, it's two quotes from Michael, two quotes from Charles Darwin in the origin, if himself Darwin writes this, if it could be. he demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications. The theory would completely collapse. Close appointment. That's Darwin. He put the test right there in 1859. Here's Michael. The question then is: are there irreducibly complex systems in the cell? Yes, there are absolutely many, as I said, the cell is packed with machines that machines need in many places, they cannot be built by numerous successive slight modifications, but let me call the attention to a sneaky little trick that Darwin put into that quote.

He says that if it could be proven that something couldn't happen, then he is putting a burden on his opponents to prove something negative that science can't do and never has any theory. He has ruled out all rival theories being accepted, but we have great

evidence

and all. It can't and we have absolutely no

evidence

that natural selection acting on a random mutation can build much of anything so here's the objection the objection I'm saying is do I know enough to have authority here's an objection and the objection applies to everyone true, it is very difficult to see how a mousetrap develops starting with a small wooden platform and it is true, it cannot work until all the pieces are in place, on the other hand, suppose that You evolve it into two or three pieces and they stay sitting.

For centuries they do not confer any advantage to the organism but they do not harm it either, so they are just these strange accumulations on which natural selection is neutral, it does not select for them, but it does not select. against them and then after eons and eons we worry about the math later after eons and eons the final piece falls into place and suddenly it works plausible uh no that's ridiculous uh I mean so Realistically, he's being very careful in Durham I'd be turning away, not if If you think you know, let's say you didn't have a mouse trap, then you say, well, let me, what can I do?

I'll go into my garage and pick out some pieces that would work as a mousetrap when you say, well. I need spring, well here's one on this grandfather clock, you know you finish, I'm just going to use that and I need a hammer to smash the mouse. I'll use this lever here, but the pieces don't fit together, you can't just take random pieces and put them together, and natural selection, which as Darwin said, constantly examines life, wouldn't be expected to get things done. in the form they would need for some future use. they would only hone them for what they were doing at the moment.

Can I comment? I'm sure because there's a connection between what Mike is talking about in the math problems that John was referring to and that's what happens in these real systems. These Nano machines that Mike has made famous through his work, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor or the ATP synthase, one of one, one rotary, have turned the flagellar motor into a rock star, well, she has it because yes, but you know it's 30 parts. rotary motor ATP synthase is a turbine with multiple parts, but the parts are made of proteins and proteins are, in essence, the toolbox of the cell, they perform specific functions in view of their three-dimensional shapes, so they form The Parts of molecular machines work like enzymes to catalyze reactions at super-fast speeds.

They help process information, but if you were to build a system like the flagellar motor, you need 30 proteins that fit together in an integrated way, but that requires a genetic code for each one. of those proteins requires a lot of genetic information to build the protein and so what you're talking about is not just a bent hammer or something that's sitting around doing nothing, you're talking about a need for genetic information that It's enough. To overcome these long odds against building the protein in the first place, it would be like changing the metaphor slightly, a gigantic haystack the size of the North American continent and you can only look for 110 37 of the continent maybe a small square of Southern California when, if That is the case, you are more or less likely to define the need to find the needle and the answer is that it is overwhelmingly more likely not to find the needle than to find it. find it, that is, the mutation selection mechanism lacks the creative power to generate new biological information exactly below and that is for one protein of the 13 proteins necessary to make the little wavy tail, which is just a machine that in some sense is before you. said something about the fact that information acquired as linguistic and linguistic language is not produced by random processes, right, and this is a very important thing, it is linguistic in the way that the human genome exactly, yes, the human genome is the longest word we have ever discovered. and we can call it a word because it's written in a four-letter chemical language and all those letters chained together like a computer program have to be in the right order, otherwise it breaks, I mean, most programs, if you change one letter, that's the end of the show, so we're dealing with something absolutely gigantic in terms of probabilities before we even think about the additional complexity that arises through protein folding and all the epigenetic information that has been discovered in recent years and that information Beyond in its complexity and therefore becomes a great stress and my own simplistic view is to say that I prefer an explanation that makes sense to one that does not make sense, if I could add something more, we are talking about this ultra-complex machine. the bacterial flagellum and say that Darwinian processes are ridiculously inadequate to explain it, but I want to point out that they cannot explain things much simpler than a bacterial flagellum, we talk about how many amino acids these things have and there are 30 proteins and 400 amino acids, that is, approximately twelve thousand, but to develop resistance to the anti-malarial drug chloroquine, billions and billions of Plasmodium falciparum malaria cells were needed to obtain two horrible mutations, two and we are talking about twelve thousand for the scourge now billions and for each additional mutation it increases exponentially, you know Steve was talking in exponential language, but that's another factor of a billion for another and another factor of a billion for the next two, so this is actually true, you know, there are even much simpler things than that we have been talking about.

Beyond Darwinian processes. I just want to add a nice little thing is that, these days, scientists can do evolution in the laboratory, grow bacterial cultures and to A lot of time went by and saw what happens and a man named Richard Lemsley, a biologist from Michigan, did this to a bacteria called E coli and one of the first mutations that he saw that really helped the bacteria grow faster was when he deleted the genes that he got rid of. bacteria genes are exactly being removed and that's something we haven't touched on yet, but it's often much quicker and easier to get rid of things and improve the chances of a species surviving and thriving, then you can't get a new. species by losing information by becoming stupider, that's right, adding new capabilities requires new proteins, which requires solving this combinatorial problem, the search for those extremely rare sequences among the large number of gibberish sequences that don't do it again, you agree turning the needle in The Haystack Problem This is the layman struggling to understand this again Copernicus says that the Earth revolves around the Sun if he had had access to telescopes that would be developed not many decades later, much less to the instruments what we have today to search in the heavens, I would have understood. immediately that that suggestion was ridiculous, right, and then what we're talking about here is, do you think you mean excuse me?

I have it backwards I have it backwards Copernicus is Copernicus is the one who corrects the old Ptolemaic system, okay, so the Ptolemaic system persists until the fourth moment. I don't want Galileo to get mixed up, but we put him in the 16th century telescope, yes, that Copernicus. Copernicus discovers that this is partly due to technology. he can see what they couldn't see before, okay, so Darwin is a bit 170 a few years ago and it was plausible that the tiny little cell was a blob of jelly in the old days, but now, thanks to bihi, here We can investigate that. cell and we have the same experience in going to smaller and smaller Dimensions that telescopes had in going to the larger and larger Dimension, which is every time we look, it becomes more complicated, deeper, richer, more amazing, it is more or less correct, more or less correct and so it begins. important, correctly, yes, it starts in the 1950s, you know, with Watson and Crick and what historians of science now call the molecular biological revolution, of course, they elucidated their double helix structure, discovered language exactly, they discovered, they discovered the structure. of the molecule in 1953, but it is Crick who makes the important advance in 1958, he was a code breaker in World War II and formulates something called the sequence hypothesis and proposes that the four chemical subunits that run through the interior of the molecule of DNA are called nucleotide bases or simply bases and proposes that they are functioning as alphabetic characters in a written text or as for example zeros and ones in a section of software today that is, they perform a function as a group not by virtue of any of its physical properties, but by virtue of its sequential arrangement according to an independent symbol convention discovered later and now known as the genetic code and then, over the next seven or eight years, the rapid sequence hypothesis was confirmed by a series of experiments on both sides of the Atlantic and that gave us this new understanding of information, the information revolution came to biology because we realized that inside the cell we have a complex system of processing and transmitting information storage information and to explain the origin of life you have to Explain that and to explain any new form of life you have to explain how you can take a section of code, change it randomly and hope to create another section of code without destroying the function of the code you started, so all three.

I want to get to the quote the way that capital S science responds to people like you three, but you three are not some kind of throwbacks that say you are attacking everything that civilizations stood for by what you are saying. iswait, we know more than they did looking at the latest information, you are, you are, you are, your champions of the latest science, not some kind of backwards world view, that's fair, I think that's fair, I think that's okay worth saying. You accused me of pushing Darwin away. I don't put them aside. He was, he observed something very interesting and useful.

He was also a good writer, but he was, but he was limited by his time and we also have something additional. We have not discussed that at all and the fact is that ideas that perhaps were crystallized by Darwin had existed long before where there was nothing of what is called science Lucretius had them in fact if you read de rerum Natura Lucrecia spoke in the on about the nature of life, he understands almost everything that Darwin does, except the transmutation of species, and he deduces it from materialist philosophy because one of the things, yes, I can, what century is Lucretius, no, it is in the back of the first century, but I was drawing on things even earlier, going back to the early Greeks of Democritus and the point of that is important, there is a worldview dimension to all of this, you'll see if I put on my atheist hat, which I do with some difficulty, but I try to do it and If you tell me, write me a story about the origin of life.

I will propose an evolutionary theory right away because that is the only possibility allowed by the naturalistic worldview, so we are competing with that too and of course. Darwinism has greatly attracted atheists and increasingly so, as we know through Richard Dawkins. , so you have to remember that once you start asking the kind of question that these two gentlemen have been asking and that is that there is information, there is code and the looming Specter of the possibility of a coder raising crucial problems, that's right like bouncing, that's not science, yeah, yeah, and that means we have to broaden the discussion about how science is defined and of course, well, I just want to get to that because I promised John. that we would come to this and that this is the origin of life itself, as I understand it from your work Stephen, life arises quite quickly after the conditions for the emergence of life itself emerge, it is there from the beginning in the 3.85 billion geologically speaking. years is the accepted time, okay, the cessation of meteorite bombardment of the Earth occurred at most 50 million years before, in the blink of an eye, geologically we went from simple chemicals to functionally integrated complexes of cells with information processing systems and miniature machines.

Okay So this is what they taught me when I was in school: the famous Yuri experiment in 1952. I looked it up where if you put in a chamber all the chemicals that were supposed to be present when the Earth was at the time it arose life and I seem to remember from textbooks the idea that there was a terrible storm, so it mixed everything with electricity and a couple of scientists, Yuri, from the University of Chicago, tried this and, lo and behold, one way or another they managed to form a few amino acids. The acids didn't form life, but that's because you have to do the experiment many times, and as I understand it now, to the extent that we understand that it couldn't be done, the more we try to do the better experiments that Yuri was able to do. in 1952, the further we are from creating something that can be recognized as life, more or less that's right, yes, so once again we have this realization that it is moving away from us instead of finding ourselves moving towards it, what does that mean? ?

Well, what does that mean? By better understanding the complexity that they didn't realize at the time, they thought I guess it was enough to get a few amino acids and, well, voila, it would turn out that they didn't know anything about the linguistic structure, so what happened subsequently is that has regressed. as you say, because we've discovered more and more about the sheer sophistication of what life is, and by the way, no one really knows what life is. A great irony is that in 1953 you have Miller's Yuri experiment, Big Flash, in the media, but you also have Watson's discovery and the right one and the two things I have faced since Miller and Yuri produced two or maybe three amino acids protein builders from The Ensemble of 20 that you would need to build a complete protein, but most importantly it did not show how you can correctly sequence amino acids so that they fold into proteins, for this you need instructions and those instructions were found in the DNA molecule and it is the origin of the code that has presented the most acute problem for the origin. of life because chemistry just doesn't move in the direction of information complexity, it moves in other directions, another origin that can't be moved from chemistry to code, if I could just come in for a second, yeah, just I add that the process you described, people had hope in the early 50s and the harder they worked, the harder they saw the problem, that means you are barking up the wrong tree, that is the signature of a wrong idea, because if you have the correct idea, I hope that future results will rush to back it up again like Einstein exactly, but on the other hand Darwin thought the cell was a small lump of jelly, but the more we find, the increasingly sophisticated genetic code of the molecular machinery of the DNA and and so on, that's for an advocate of intelligent

design

that sounds like you're barking up the right tree.

Well, there's another irony in all of this because much more recently, I think, it was Jeremy England who dug up the test tubes that were used in the Middle Yuri experiment. When examined, it was discovered that there were more amino acids than Miller and Yuri had originally discovered, and Dan Brown, the novelist on that team, collected this in a book he called Origin and used it to develop his theory of the origin of life. for which the scientist Jeremy England, who did this work with great exception, and I think Stephen B, the historian, has probably explained well exactly what happened.

I mean, again, the big problem is not making amino acids, but sequencing them correctly, it's like getting a bag of Scrabble. letters and thinking you have a triple word score, you have to arrange the letters in the right way and place them on the board in the right place so that they actually convey information, one more sudden appearance from anthropologist John Hawks. someone I don't remember whose work I read this and maybe yours maybe yours anyway it's probably not mine John Hawks is an anthropologist and he maintains that about 2 million years ago our genus homo simply appears citing Hawks, there is no gradual series of changes in previous australopithecine populations. clearly leads to the new species and no Australopithecus species is obviously transient. quotes well, it doesn't seem like we descended from apes or at least if we did it's not in the fossil record, what does that tell us?

It's one thing to say Wow, where did the dinosaurs come from? But we have this notion in school textbooks about humanity emerging from the work of art also in the work of art, so what does this tell us? It is another example of an abrupt appearance of a morphological innovation in the history of life. There are two great verses of innovation in the history of humanity: the first is the sudden emergence of the homo gender. The second is what is sometimes called the cultural Big Bang, evidence of higher cognitive abilities that occurred in the last approximately 40,000 years. homo was two million years ago, right, you get Homo erectus, but last time I would include Neanderthal and sure, okay, yeah, but in the last 40,000 years you get the first agriculture, you get the first cities, you get the first language written. the first representational art and then there is another great explosion of innovation suddenly this cultural revolution also happens very suddenly, okay?

Is it a problem for Darwin that Bach lived? What series of adaptive advantages could all those cantatas have produced? um or language, the origin of language is completely inexplicable in Darwinian terms, Chomsky, the great Linguistician, so now we're starting, we're getting closer, we're getting to this topic that I've been trying to put off because now we're getting closer. this notion of intelligent

design

I want to show you two images a serious question which image is more scientific which image contains more information which image contains more reality here is image one and there is image two serious question that contains more information I will try Yes, of course, I think we've been mainly offering critiques of Darwinism in this interview so far, but we're all sympathetic to the idea that there is evidence in the natural world for the activity of a mind.

John puts it in a way that he speaks. an infusion of top-down information about the biosphere Mike and I talked about the concept of intelligent design, but I think there is a powerful scientific argument for intelligent design and this was the question that gripped me when I went to do my doctorate. uh we've seen that this problem of the origin of information, but could you look at it carefully because it's complicated stuff. I know it's go ahead, go ahead, what could this mystery of the origin of the information actually be a positive indicator? of a completely different kind of cause at play, um, and the person who helped me think about this the most was actually Darwin himself because Darwin pioneered a method of historical scientific reasoning in which he realized that if you wanted explain an event in the remote past, You should try to explain it by causes that are now seen at work and you got this principle from the great geologist Charles Lyell, so in eastern Washington, where I live, there are still little specks of white dust on the ground due to an event that occurred in May. 1980.

And if you don't know what caused that white dust, you would use a standard historical method of reasoning known as the method of multiple competing hypotheses and then you would formulate some hypotheses, maybe it was a flood, maybe it was an earthquake, maybe it was a volcanic eruption which of those explanations is better according to the principle of Darwin and Lyelles well, it is the volcanic eruption because we have seen volcanoes produce white dust and floods and earthquakes do not do that, so if you apply this principle of reasoning if you are looking for a cause now in operation and you ask yourself what is the cause now in operation that produces digital information, you come to only one type of cause and that is a mind.

Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we have created. What is needed to produce software. A programmer is needed. So what we think we are seeing with the digital information that is in DNA is not just a problem for a Darwinian evolution, it is a problem. positive indicator of the activity of a mind or an intelligent agent acting in the history and origin of life. I'm going to tell you: set this up with a quote, listen to this, and then the question comes to you. Bill Clinton, if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there on its own, all of creation, this whole complex world that we see around us is a turtle on a fence post.

B, looks at the complicated subcellular biology and says this could not have happened by chance. Meyer looks at the fossil record and says there's just too many things showing up and John Lennox does the math and says if there's a Code maybe there's a coder now, it's one thing to look at certain limits to what Darwin and others could have been. able to explain the explanation stops here that's as far as we can go and it's a very different thing to cross that line and say oh I think I see what's on the other side are you in for intelligent design?

I'm willing to answer your question about the two images first, ah, you asked me how much information those two images contain. Yes, I do. I suspect it's about the same. I think the question you should have asked is how much truth those two images contain. Now let's get back to your precise question the first image shows what people commonly call the rise of man yes from the lower animals yes now this is where Darwin helped me enormously by expressing in a letter a deep doubt he said: you know and I'm just paraphrasing because I haven't got the quilt in my head said: you know, I'm concerned about the fact that if my explanation is correct, then how do we explain the human capacity for rational thought? he said, after all, if we start with lower animals and the mind of a monkey.

I said well, is there any thought in the mind of a monkey? Now, hold that for a moment because I have a lot of fun with my scientist friends. Sometimes I ask them what you do science with, and of course they named some expensive machine. I say no, no, oh. They say you mean you are and they're about to say mind when they realize that's not politically correct and they say your brain. I said okay. I think the brain and the mind are separate, but we are very afraid. Give me the gimme. I ask them about the brief history of the brain and have done so many times.

It's fascinating and they say well, in the end the brain is the final product of aunguided and meaningless process. He would smile at them and say, "You trust." I'm saying, no, tell me honestly, that computer you use every day, if you knew it was the end product of an unguided, meaningless process, would you trust it? Here's what I've talked about with dozens of leading scientists and pushed them on this and everything. Only one has said no, I said you have a problem because you are giving me an argument that goes against rationality and they turn to me and tell me where you got that argument from I said well first about Charles Darwin they say I don't believe you and then I quote the diets of Darwin, that's his other diet, yes, Darwin's doubt about the reliability of human emotionality.

Now, in my opinion, this goes to the heart of the implications of the whole thing and is why I believe there is an intelligence behind the universe. I am a mathematician, all mathematicians and scientists are people of faith, not necessarily in God, but they believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe, yes exactly, and therefore, what do they base that on if you base it on a meaningless evolutionary process and unguided you are destroying? rationality C.S Lewis saw that in the 1940s he said that any theory that undermines rationality cannot be true because you are using your rationality to arrive at it.

Alvin Planting has worked on it, but the most interesting person who brings it into the woods now, Thomas Nagel, the philosopher in New York, and he says there's something wrong here because if you follow evolutionary naturalism it undermines the very rationality that you need to believe not only in evolutionary naturalism but in any theory, so my main problem, eh, Peter, and all this is not the mathematics, that's just an interesting piece of evidence, is that here I am involved in a rational discipline of mathematics that everything dissolves if the evolutionary naturalistic explanation is true; In other words, I often tell people that shooting yourself in the foot is painful, but shooting yourself in the foot is painful.

By the way, the brain is fatal, actually Darwin, although this discussion tends to discountTo a large extent, if not to dismiss his theories, Darwin is emerging as an excellent writer, a wise man and in every sense, an honest man, he had a doubt, recognized the problem with the Cambrian record and then recognized this big question of where is the mind? agree, Michael, I'm quoting you intelligent design coagulants can happily coexist with a high degree of natural selection resistance to antibiotics and pesticides antifreeze proteins and fish and plants and more can in fact be explained by the Darwinian mechanism the criticism The claim of intelligent design is not that natural selection explains nothing but that it does not explain everything it explains, that is exactly right because, if you postulate that natural selection produced all life, then it must have produced not only trivialities but also profound ones. molecular machines that are in the cell, the genetic code, the wings of a bird and much more, and we don't see that, and yet it can work on DNA, for example, it can break genes, a random mutation can break. a gene and let's say make a brown bear lose its coloration and become a white polar bear and eventually a new species and it can be separated from baby things compared to the original targets, that's exactly right, just like if you were driving along the way, you know there may be Knicks.

The Stones can crash and Nick your car and you can scratch it, etc., you can recognize the car is designed. You know there are random Nicks and hits etc. so random things can. This happens, but can they explain this elegant machinery that has been discovered by science as the basis of life? And, of course, the answer is: now I'm going to quote you one more time. Listen carefully because this refers to the two of you, Michael. B continue breathing deeply here this is great an open root could be cited for a subtle God to design life without overriding natural law if quantum events such as radioactive decay are not governed by causal laws then no law of nature is violated influence Even more so in such events, although we may not be able to detect quantum manipulations, we can confidently conclude that the final structure was designed, so here we start the three of us, there are very serious problems with Darwin, then we go to step two, which is that if there is a code, maybe there is a coder.

I see that everyone recognizes that we are in complicated territory, but you three are still there and now, he here goes to step three. In fact, I think I see a mechanism by which the coder may have operated. In this material world, am I being fair to you? uh yeah that's true okay guys go for it. I don't, no, no. I believe that when we invoke the action of a mind, we are invoking a non-material Cause and we do not need to follow the rules of scientific materialism to invent a mechanism that explains the origin of information because we know from our uniform and repeated experience that information always arises. of a mind that we do not understand the interface The Mind-Body interface and, in the case of human intelligence, we know that we can affect the material world through the decisions we make and the thoughts we have.

I am going to choose to move this glass of water right now, but I do not know how my volitional act of my mind to initiate that act affected the material world; That interface is unknown to us at this time, but we can infer from certain types of effects that go back to the activity of a mind, we know that a distinctive effective intelligent artifact or activity is the production of information every time we see information and track it. to its source, whether we're talking about a computer code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph from a book or information embedded in a radio signal, we always get back to it for a second.

I think we are talking about different purposes. I wasn't saying that radioactive decay is responsible because it is a random event. The quote that Peter Red said could an intelligent God or an intelligent mind use something that was undetectable. to scientific instrumentation to affect the results he wanted, so it is not a mechanism, it is rather a tool and it is a tool managed by him. I'm not so much disagreeing, I mean disagreeing with the requirement that many of our evolutionary colleagues want to impose on intelligent design theory that it formulates its alternative explanation as a mechanistic cause, we are proposing a different kind of cause, a mental cause that It is something we recognize from our ordinary experience, but somehow when we enter the science laboratory we want to say it all. has to be explained materialistically, isn't it even information that we know does not arise through an undirected material process?

It is not like this? I'm going to turn to John Lennox as referee here. Isn't that the nature of science? among perhaps even especially among believers Newton was a I think it's fair to say he was a Christian, he certainly was, he was a Christian, of course, all the prosthetic pioneers and the mutants understand themselves as exploring the mind of God, yes, and at some basic level. Newton level faithful Christian is saying how he did it yes, how he did this, how he did that, he is not saying well, it is the mind of God, therefore there are no more questions to follow, it is a search for specific mechanisms and that is good and noble. something that gives us nine-tenths of what we know about physics in some basic way, so here is the question presented to me, a layman, and I see it represent people bewildered all over the world about science, question in science, how does it work? happen Charles Darwin says this is how it happened well and if you want to say well Charles Darwin was wrong then I say well if it didn't happen that way how did it happen and the answer can't just be God or can it?

Not only are we designers, there's a kind of human impulse in us to say well, how, what's the mechanism and that's a fair question and B, he's trying to do it and Stephen is trying to say no, no, I'll get back to you when Newton he discovered his law of gravitation he didn't say now I have a scientific explanation I don't need God what he did was write principia Mathematica the most famous book in the history of science and he expressed in it the hope that his research would guide thought people believed in God, in other words, he believed that his science was showing evidence of intelligent entry into the universe.

Predictability of beauty design, but the important thing here is that great confusion arises when Richard Dawkins suggests that God's explanation is the same as God's. scientific explanation that's like saying that Henry Ford's explanation for a car is the same as the explanation in terms of physics and automotive engineering there are different types of explanation and we need both to fully expire and there are different types of questions Peter Yes, The question of how the internal combustion engine works can be answered using principles of mechanical and electrical engineering, but the question of the origin of the automobile cannot be answered apart from Henry Ford's activity of an intelligence on the principles that Newton developed and described.

The ongoing regular process of gravity and he used a mathematical law to describe that process, but he also believed that the fine tuning of the solar system gave direct evidence of the activity of a designing intelligence. He said that this is the most beautiful system of solar planets and comets. It could only be the product of an intelligent and powerful being, so it actually presented a direct design argument when we talk about the origin of life or the origin of the universe or the origin of Cambrian animals, there is another way to formulate the ask. It's what kind of cause best explains the origin of these things, an undirected material process or an intelligent cause and science, yes, but what do you do?

Why are you opposed to Michael at that time? Let me in, yes, Michael, let Michael in, yes, absolutely, that's how I feel. I've set things up so that you two could have beaten him head and shoulders when Isaac Newton developed his wonderful law of gravity. They asked him what the hell gravity is and he said hypothesis, I'm not pretending, yes. he hasn't faked any hypothesis no mechanism he didn't he didn't have a mechanism what is the mechanism of the Big Bang what is the mechanism of radioactive decay I don't know, so a lot of things happen, people don't know what the mechanism is that we see patterns and can deduce explanations for the patterns.

Okay, I'll quote you and start by quoting someone you quote. This is more: be here, biochemist Franklin Herald and his 2001 book, The Way of the cell. We should reject as a matter of principle the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue between chance and necessity, but we must concede that there are currently no detailed accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of illusory explanations. Close date and Michael says okay. That's a pretty impressive concession to begin with and congratulations, science has advanced enough to recognize Darwin's limits and then Michael moves on. Harold never explains his reasoning, i.e. why we should reject intelligent design and principles, but I think the principle probably boils over.

Even this design seems to point strongly to Beyond Nature the three of us agree with everyone because it has philosophical and theological implications because some think that science should avoid a theory that points so strongly to Beyond Nature that they want to rule out the intelligent design of the beginning of the closed quote this is the question of drawing lines and I pose the question to Michael, what the hell is wrong with us just saying that science goes as far as it goes with our five senses and from what can we reason there and when? reaches a dead end says dead end well we don't have it radioactive decay gravity I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know keep going so what's wrong with drawing these sharp lines?

Because you want? including intelligent design in the scientific enterprise, well, first for a couple of reasons, if some scientists claimed that they didn't know how life developed, that would be good for me, that would be a step in the right direction because, unfortunately, people does not know. pretend they do, on the other hand, uh, we can say that we conclude the design, we infer the design from physical evidence, it's not from some vision that you know or anything that people have, if you look at a mousetrap, yeah you look at a mousetrap, you can tell. It was designed and you can tell because you see how the parts are arranged what is the relationship of the parts to each other to perform a function when you look at an outboard motor on a boat you see the same thing you see a purpose arrangement of the parts now we see that in the Cell machinery we see outboard engines in the cell we see trucks in the cell, etc., but your life would be a lot easier if at the end of your article you said it's funny. you said that if you would like to continue with this go to the Department of Philosophy go to the Department of Theology listen that science ends I say that after concluding the design I do not infer toGod uh and as I write some people have approached me and said: yes, I am with you.

I think it's smart, but I think it's you. Aliens have visited Fred Boyle's explanation. I think he's moving on, John. I think the basic question here is that there are several and they are very important. is what is an explanation, that is a crucial question and Michael quoted Newton hepatizing a finger he his gravity when I was taught in school I thought the law of gravity explained gravity and I was an adult before I discovered that it does not explain such thing, so that even a scientific explanation within its own terms is rarely complete, almost never complete, that's the first thing, secondly, we admit at all kinds of levels explanations in agent terms, as if we want a full description of the car.

Now, your previous question to Michael, could God have done it? That being done, in a sense God can do things however he wants, but the question is how God does it and, secondly, whether his activity is scientifically detectable. Now I'm putting those words together very carefully, his involvement is not detectable, but detectable. in terms of science, in other words, if you set your definition of science as restricted to the five senses, so that it is not and here comes the principle, the often violated Socratic principle, that the late Anthony saw that when They concluded that there was an intelligent designer behind the Universe based on DNA and they said: Oh, but you can't do that.

He said I followed the evidence as far as it leads and this is the clash that arises. You can say, well, science has arrived. until the end, you cannot answer this question, there are very few people who want to say that or you say that science is limited, we must open the field to other types of questions like why, questions of purpose like teleology and all these kinds of things and the underlying issues. The error that we are forced to think is that science and rationality are coextensive when they are not and also that they are, that is, science does not do, science does not do, science does not cover the entire field of rationality. . history is a rational discipline those philosophical types of science and this is what my PhD was about there is historical science historical scientific reasoning historical that has to do with abduction abduction inferring the cause to explain causal origins imagine that you walk into the British Museum and look in the Rosetta Stone and you and someone says, well, how did that come about?

How did those inscriptions come about? If the archaeologist is governed by the principle you indirectly alluded to, it is called methodological naturalism, we can only infer materialistic causes, whatever that may be. The evidence that scientists would overlook the obvious explanation: this was produced by scribes and by intelligent agents. There are distinctive indicators of the activity of intelligence and, therefore, this allows us to infer that language was one of the first pioneers in the information sciences. named Henry Kwasler said that the creation of new information is usually associated with conscious activity in other words our uniform and repeated experience states that there is only one type of cause that produces information but uniform and repeated experience is the basis of all historical scientific reasoning. so there is a basis in historical scientific reasoning to infer intelligent design there is no need or reason to limit the conclusions we can consider in that branch of science because unless and here is the end result of all this, unless that you presume a naturalistic worldview and imprison yourself, that's not fair if the evidence leads Beyond a naturalistic view, you should pursue it properly, why shouldn't you, but why not, that's exactly what I'm saying, Otherwise, you will be locking yourself in a prison.

Three of you also seem to me, of course, would prefer to argue, but you three seem to me to be rational men, and yet look at the lives you lead. Steve Meyer wrote a paper on the Cambrian explosion for the proceedings of the Biological Society. at the Smithsonian Institution and his editor was harassed and eventually left the institution. Michael Behe ​​has evoked from his colleagues at Lehigh University, which is a large university and especially strong in the sciences, a statement on his website that Dr. Bihi has the right to express his views, but we, his colleagues in the Department of Biology, we do not see them as science.

He has been denied. It has been denied. Why academics embrace all kinds of crazy ideas. Why should these ideas? Why should they? The challenge to Darwin and the suggestion that if there is a Code there is a coder the suggestion. of intelligent design evokes such unique hostility. What's happening. I'll start with John because I didn't tell you what's happening like the dominance of naturalism and materialism in academia, which is so ironic. I'm from Oxford University. His motto. and it's been there for a long time, the people who founded the great universities of the world had no problem with the idea of ​​an intelligent designer of the universe, but now, somehow, in academia, anyone who embraces the idea that it was the basis of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries possibly as a historical thesis that hits and that idea that idea is that the founding idea is the founding idea, well, let me quote C.S Lewis.

Men became scientists why because they expected law in nature and they expected an inferior nature. because they believed in the legislator there, it's summed up, that's Whitehead's thesis, if you will, North Whitehead, and the point is that these gentlemen here have tragically been subject to an anti-intellectualism that has lost the spirit that lies behind modern science. that these universities I intend to teach two quotes and then I will ask each of you to comment here is quote number one from the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins with whom you are sometimes debating your opponent Richard Dawkins quotes that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if it existed at least below without design without purpose or evil or good nothing but mindless indifference here is the second quote from a man who at the time he wrote this was known as Cardinal Ratzinger and would later become Pope Benedict XVI quotes Let's go directly to the question of evolution and its mechanisms, microbiology and biochemistry have contributed revolutionary ideas.

Here we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of living creation are not the product of chance and error, we They show creative intelligence and do so today more luminously and radiantly than ever. before, who is the best scientist who has better understanding? The first statement is not a scientific statement at all. Dawkins is giving his own atheistic belief and putting a spin on morality that contradicts it in his own life, so it's of no consequence, I think. I'd like you to know that I never anger you, John. Sometimes I quote the same Dawkins quote you just read above and then you say it must be so funny at parties because it has such a bleak critique, but he doesn't support anything and Cardinal Ratziger later Pope Benedict is talking about science, he wasn't talking about what it's really like, he's not going too far, no, yes, that's what he was talking about, I should say he's talking about the latest science, he's talking about what's been discovered by molecular biology and biochemistry and biology. cell phone that he's not talking about, you know, squirrels are so cute or things like that, he's saying: holy moly, these are machines, holy moly, these are technical terms, it was very important, I was in German school very interesting. philosophers led by a man called spaman and one of the best deconstructions of Dawkins was written by one of spaman's students, a man called Reinhardt Loof unfortunately it is only in German, not in English, but it is absolutely brilliant, but Ratzinger really before becoming Pope he wrote a lot on this kind of things and influenced the current Cardinal in Vienna Shonborn yes a lot.

Can I say something in favor of Dawkins' quote? I like the framing. It says that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should observe if at bottom there is no purpose without design Nothing but blind pity loose indifference I love the way you frame the issue the question is whether you are right is the support the things that we make the verifiable ones he makes a verifiable claim about his materialist philosophy but then last summer, interestingly, he confessed to having been beaten. Sideways, next to the cell's digital information processing system, was a new animation that was presented by an Australian group and He said he was, you know, surprised by the intricate complexity, there's something extremely surprising that the universe doesn't have. look as it should from a strictly materialist point of view we should not expect the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics we should not expect a beginning for the universe and we should from a materialist point of view we certainly should not I have expected to find the intricate nanotechnology and information technology that is evident in the living cell; you're concluding from the physical evidence whether you believe there is a purpose or not to the universe and you have your opinion, but that means that's a legitimate thing one can ask.

Is there physical evidence of the purpose of life in the universe? He actually implies that it is legitimate to consider the design question, yes, but it is worse than denying the existence of good and evil and that destroys morality, and he believes in the problem of evil because he criticizes that, so there is a disconnect total on a moral level gentlemen last question last question I'm going to set it up once again with two quotes quote one Michael bihe the strength of intelligence design derives primarily from the progress of the daily work of science the cell is not getting simpler, it is becoming much more complex Progress in the 20th century The sciences led us to the design hypothesis I hope that progress in the 21st century confirms and expands it close quote Here is quote number two from a colleague of many of you, mathematician David Berlinski , the theory of evolution is unique among scientific instruments and is appreciated not for what it contains but for what it lacks.

In Darwin's scheme there is no special creation, no divine guidance, and no transcendental forces. Darwin, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, has commented with evident gratitude that Berlinski continues to make it possible to be an intellectually accomplished atheist without a doubt. David Berlinski concludes that the theory of evolution will continue to play in the life of our secular culture the unique role it always has. has played close to quote it is not a question of science what you are facing is a world view and Michael very cheerfully says that science is science, they will recover in this century, the design hypothesis will be expanded and confirmed and berlinski says Oh, silly boy, what do you think?

Tell me who you are. who is who is most likely to be right The optimist or David berlinski I'm not a prophet, ah, but I will tell you what Dawkins has done for me, he has made it possible for him to be an intellectually realized Christian Stephen. I love what Mike said about how The Intelligent Design Hypothesis is being confirmed and expanded by 21st century science. We are seeing that in many, with many important experimental results and new discoveries, for example, a few years ago, the discovery that only a certain portion of DNA was the cause of proteins and the rest does not allow many neo-Darwinists to develop the concept of junk DNA, yes, the 97 that doesn't code for proteins, they said, is just the rest of the failure and jepsum of the random trial and error process of natural selection and chance.

Several of our leading ID advocates in the 1990s and early 2000s said, well, we agree that there should be some evidence that those random mutations accumulate, but not 97, so we're going to predict , based on our theory, that those non-coding regions of DNA are not junk DNA, but are importantly functional and that prediction has now been confirmed by the encode project and a number of other interesting developments in bioinformatics and we now know that the regions non-coding DNA are functioning approximately. Like an operating system on a computer, they are controlling the timing and expression of encoding files, so this is actually a prediction made by proponents of intelligent design that has been confirmed by new discoveries.

I did not answer. Your question: Am I an optimist? I'm not actually a biologist, but reading the material from the so-called third wave of biology actually makes me quite optimistic that there will be an intellectual breakthrough. There was a meeting at the Royal Household under the weight of scientifically accumulating the weight of evidence, yes it is a very heavy ship but I think it is starting to turn and there was evidence that the Royal Society meeting only John refers to a meeting in 2016 that was convened by members of the Royal Society and evolutionary biologists. those who doubt the standard neo-Darwinian model and those who say that we need a new theory of evolution andThey called the meeting to explore new evolutionary mechanisms that could replace or complement natural selection due to its lack of creative power.

I said that was the last question but here is the very funny last question here are you three charming cheerful Splendid Men and you say that if there is a Code there is an encoder and you say that there are mechanisms by which one could imagine a mind participating or intervening or participating Say that in the material world, here is the objection. Have you never heard of the Inquisition? Have you never heard of religious wars? Don't you understand the importance of the American agreement whereby we had the Puritans in New England and the Episcopalians in the South and the Catholics in Maryland and the agreement was to each his own, but here there will be a public space in which we can work together.

This is what the modern American university gives us. of modern research, let's put it that way, the modern research institution and it's the way you three go, maybe you three don't intend to do it, but the people who come immediately after you will come right back to put you in the stocks old fashioned morality religion religion is a very deceptive and very often painful influence on human history and you three are kicking in the door on this dragon that we had very carefully locked away Michael well, opinions differ on that, I think, uh , but you I know that they are undoing, you are undermining enlightenment, this is science and science does not care about your particular view of the world that we have throughout history, scientific discoveries like the microbial world and relativity and other things that have disrupted our notion of what reality is and now it is the turn of molecular biology and biochemistry to make us sit up and take notice I can't stop science from discovering complexity and elegance in the cell it is there what people do with it it is a different question I am saving the last word for John because he is also the most senior man at this table, he should have a friendly debate partner called Michael Roose, British professor of philosophy, biology, Florida State, we have done several debates and Michael has written an important book. in which he explains that Darwinism has functioned as a kind of secular religion for many people in the Sciences and therefore, people with different worldviews can at any time start inquisitions and cancellations of people they disagree with .

I think we all need to be careful. I don't want to allow myself that, but this is not the case, the cancellations have not only come from one side or another in the debates of the history of humanity, on the other hand, and that is why I believe that one of the reasons why the design intelligent has been silenced is that Michael has been denied and Richard Sternberg was persecuted at the Smithsonian too close to you, I myself have come to think that yes, absolutely it is that when you challenge Darwinism you are challenging not only a scientific theory but a vision of the deep-rooted world or something that functions as a kind of secular religion and people on that side of the aisle have been guilty of indulging in cancel culture and I think we all need to deny that and let go and follow the evidence wherever it takes us. and a final thought and that is that in the history of science the belief in a designer, a Creator, inspired innovation and scientific development, even look at Newton, for example, he developed calculus, binomial theory, he developed the theory of gravitation , the laws of motion, its principles.

It was simply intended to reveal the principles of creation that had come from the mind of God, so belief in a

creator

does not stifle scientific innovation, it can inspire it, and we believe that our modern theory of intelligent design will also lead to new discoveries such as the one I mentioned a minute ago junk DNA is not junk John Lennox emeritus professor of mathematics a noble and pure expression of the mind of man in one of the greatest universities that has ever existed Oxford University professor Lennox, you are complicit to push back the Enlightenment. I'm delighted to do it because the Enlightenment discovered that the best way to deal with powerlessness was to cut off their heads and historians, particularly Joan Gray, who is an atheist and actually one of the leading historians. of architecture yes, and in Europe he points out that there is a direct line between the Enlightenment and Stalin's persecutions and the horrible destruction of life in the 20th century, so you will get nowhere with the second point of the Enlightenment from of Northern Ireland.

Very aware of the reputation of religions, particularly Christianity, for causing wars and that has led me to do a lot of research and I have come to the conclusion that I have written about, so I am not going to go into too much detail, but what has happened? What happened there is that people have not been able to get to the heart of the matter. Now some religions can cause wars so I don't deny that and they will have to speak for themselves but one of the most interesting things about Christianity is that Christ was tested and it is a On the public record that he was trained to be a terrorist , we rarely express it in modern terms.

He was exonerated by the Roman procurator and why, because when asked if he was a political opponent of Rome, he said that my kingdom is not of this world, otherwise my servants would do it. They have been fighting and he would stop them from fighting but now my kingdom is not from here you are king yes he said for this purpose I was born and for this purpose I came into the world to bear witness to the truth and Pilate said what is true and went out, he declared to Christ Innocent, but then he made the point to the crowd that that is enormously important historically.

I used to wonder why there is so much in the New Testament gospels about the judgment of Christ and I suddenly realized that it is because This precise question Christ repudiated violence, so the people in my own country who followed him used bombs on both sides, yes, they were not Christians at all because they repudiated Christ. The obvious thing in all this is the one thing that cannot be done with pure power. It's imposing the truth on people and I think Pilate saw that John Lennox Michael before Stephen Meyer thank you thank you for his unusual knowledge of the Hoover institution I'm Peter Robinson thank you