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Speaker 1: Life.

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Speaker 2: Audio is AI in any way making this easier or

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Speaker 2: harder for people who are trying to explain the origin

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Speaker 2: of the protein, Like do we have better tools to

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Speaker 2: figure out how it could happen materially? Or is it

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Speaker 2: making people go, oh my goodness, even with AI, we

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Speaker 2: can't explain this.

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Speaker 1: You train an AI on Here's what protein structures look like,

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Speaker 1: Here's what they do. Here's their amino acid sequence. If

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Speaker 1: you give them a million of these. There's a paper

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Speaker 1: where they tried that. They didn't even get structures, but

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Speaker 1: they looked at a chemical a catalytic function, and they

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Speaker 1: got catalytic function to go up somewhat. But they acknowledge

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Speaker 1: in the paper it is nowhere near the catalytic function

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Speaker 1: that you get in actual enzymes.

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Speaker 2: How strong is the evidence for design and biology despite

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Speaker 2: claims that Darwin defeated the argument for design, Our guest today,

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Speaker 2: one of the leading proponents of intelligence design, who has

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Speaker 2: studied or done doctoral research at Caltech, Berkeley and Cambridge,

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Speaker 2: says the evidence for design is undeniable. That's right, undeniable.

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Speaker 2: He has featured in a movie set for theatrical release

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Speaker 2: called The Story of Everything. He's a colleague of mine

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Speaker 2: at Biola, and we'd invite you to join us because

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Speaker 2: this Tuesday live at four point thirty Pacific Standard time.

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Speaker 2: We're gonna take your questions. So if you have a

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Speaker 2: challenge or an objection to something shared here, write it

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Speaker 2: in as a comment or email me questions at Sean

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Speaker 2: McDow dot org and doctor Doug actuably be back in

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Speaker 2: person to address those questions. Welcome back to the show.

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Speaker 1: Great to be here.

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Speaker 2: So something I've really wanted to know about you, and

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Speaker 2: I think it's a great place to start, is how

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Speaker 2: you became a Christian? Did the design arguments play a

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Speaker 2: role at all or did you discover Him after becoming

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Speaker 2: a believer?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think they did. So I was not

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Speaker 1: raising a Christian home. I probably would have called myself

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Speaker 1: a Christian. We had a Bible at home, but we

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Speaker 1: didn't go to church. My mother started to really feel

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Speaker 1: angst about this as her four kids were in their

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Speaker 1: teen years. I was fourteen years old, so she was

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Speaker 1: praying and the Lord really answered her her prayers in

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Speaker 1: a spectacular way. Within a space of a few months,

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Speaker 1: we all started going to church. I heard the Gospel

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Speaker 1: message for the first time. My parents did as well.

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Speaker 1: I think, on two different evenings at this church, this

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Speaker 1: was up in the Bay area in Walnut Creek, California,

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Speaker 1: my parents were baptized and then we were all the

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Speaker 1: four of us kids were baptized the next the next

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Speaker 1: cycle round, so everything changed for us pretty quickly. And

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Speaker 1: then you know, later on I was at Berkeley, I

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Speaker 1: was I was thinking about worldview for the first time

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Speaker 1: because I knew I had a Christian worldview, and I

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Speaker 1: also knew that Berkeley didn't share my Christian worldview, and

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Speaker 1: I fought back, and I can't I can't say for

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Speaker 1: sure how did I think about evolution before I was

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Speaker 1: a believer. My recollection is I thought it was I

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Speaker 1: thought it was kind of fluff science. I didn't find

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Speaker 1: it to be compelling, as I said, I would have believed.

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Speaker 1: I said, I believe in God, and I did, but

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Speaker 1: I didn't have any really firm foundations, So it certainly

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Speaker 1: wouldn't have been from a scriptural foundation that I would

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Speaker 1: have rejected it when I was a twelve year old, say,

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Speaker 1: it just would have been. I gravitated towards the physical sciences.

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Speaker 1: They seemed solid, and you know, irrefutable knowledge comes out

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Speaker 1: of that, and I found, you know, the sort of

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Speaker 1: fossil argument to be patchy and not compelling. But then

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Speaker 1: this all changed when I actually devoted myself to it,

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Speaker 1: so it started to become a question that was important

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Speaker 1: for me to address.

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Speaker 2: It makes total sense when you're a college student, you've

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Speaker 2: been a believer maybe two, three, four, five years, and

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Speaker 2: all of a sudden you're a Christian in a place

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Speaker 2: like Berkeley. You got to land the plane on some

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Speaker 2: of these questions and you've come out pretty clearly as

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Speaker 2: a Darwin doubter. So I want to know your doubts

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Speaker 2: now because you said it originally wasn't really motivated by

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Speaker 2: theology or Bible. Are you not doubts now? Theological, philosophical? Scientific?

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Speaker 2: Is it about your job at Biola? If you change

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Speaker 2: your belief you lose your job? Like seriously, when you

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Speaker 2: get down to it, why are you a Darwin dowter?

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Speaker 1: Yeah? So I think it started with this. You know,

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Speaker 1: how you get your inten equiver when you see an

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Speaker 1: argument that looks like people are being way too insistent

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Speaker 1: upon something and they're not offering it looks suspicious to me,

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Speaker 1: like these people who are being so shrill at rejecting

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Speaker 1: anything but Darwinism don't seem to be able to give

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Speaker 1: a compelling reason for it. So I think it started

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Speaker 1: with me being a believer, being very open to Darwinism

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Speaker 1: being perfectly false, but not having examined it very carefully,

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Speaker 1: but then also noticing that the way people are behaving

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Speaker 1: in defensive this theory is very strange. You don't get

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Speaker 1: people defending F equals M way, you don't get other

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Speaker 1: theories that are that I considered to be rock solid,

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Speaker 1: people getting so sort of emotional in the defense of it,

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Speaker 1: And so that kind of drew me to it, like

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Speaker 1: being drawn to a controversy. And then I started reading,

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Speaker 1: and I read books like Daniel uh Not, Daniel Dnnet,

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Speaker 1: Michael b'es, Darwin's Black Box. I did read some. I

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Speaker 1: read enthusiastically Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker. There's this other Australian

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Speaker 1: guy I'm blanking on nineteen Michael Denton. Yeah. I read

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Speaker 1: Denton's book Evolutionary Theory in Crisis. And as I was

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Speaker 1: moving from undergrad to grad so I was now at

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Speaker 1: Caltech as a grad student, I started to read everything

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Speaker 1: I could about this, and I started to wonder what's

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Speaker 1: missing here? Because when I when I'd read these books

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Speaker 1: that were contra Darwin, like Dentett and and be He,

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Speaker 1: I felt like, these are strong, but there's something that

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Speaker 1: could be even stronger that they're not because they're drawing

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Speaker 1: on what we already know. And I felt like, can

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Speaker 1: we go out there and find some things that we

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Speaker 1: don't know and actually figure this out in a more

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Speaker 1: convincing way. And that really led me to embark on

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Speaker 1: a research project where I thought, Okay, if you had

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Speaker 1: the money and the opportunity, what would you do to

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Speaker 1: try to solve this thing? Resolve it one way or

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Speaker 1: the other.

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Speaker 2: That's a great way to put I think about my

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Speaker 2: life that way. Sometimes if money was not an issue,

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Speaker 2: what matters most? It sounds like this issue in your

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Speaker 2: life studying microbiology. You had to settle some of these questions.

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Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: But if I heard you correctly, you said you're happy

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Speaker 2: to reject Armanism. But did you feel like if you

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Speaker 2: embraced some kind of evolution that was threatening your Christian faith,

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Speaker 2: was that a piece of it to you or not? Really?

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Speaker 1: My faith was rock solid, so I knew I was

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Speaker 1: saved by the blood of Jesus and nothing else. I

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Speaker 1: believe scripture to be reliable, but I could also see

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Speaker 1: how Genesis is not trying to be a textbook, is

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Speaker 1: not trying to give a scientific account. So I think

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Speaker 1: I had an openness to Okay, how did God do this?

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Speaker 1: And it could have looked like different things. I rejected

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Speaker 1: just a raw materialism or the idea that just nature

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Speaker 1: can do this, but what it would have looked like,

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Speaker 1: and whether there would have been a tree of life

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Speaker 1: or not. I was opening those things and that's what

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Speaker 1: made me just plunge and say, well, if I could

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Speaker 1: get if I could get rock solid data on one thing,

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Speaker 1: what would it be that I think would really decisively

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Speaker 1: determine this. And that's what I set out to do.

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Speaker 2: So we're gonna jump in your book. But one more question.

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Speaker 2: Did it ever cost you anything like a relationship or

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Speaker 2: your career or a grade on a paper to push

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Speaker 2: back and challenge some of these ideas or was critical

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Speaker 2: thinking welcome in the academy in your experience?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. So it

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Speaker 1: cost me my job at one point. So I was

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Speaker 1: in the UK. This was back in two thousand and two.

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Speaker 1: I was working at the Medical Research Council Center in Cambridge.

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Speaker 1: The head over the center was Sir Allan First, and

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Speaker 1: I had a good relationship with him. He knew that

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Speaker 1: I was actually being funded. At one point I was

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Speaker 1: being funded by Discovery Institute. He knew that I wasn't

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Speaker 1: hiding the funding source. But I also was not coming

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Speaker 1: out and saying, you know what, I'm trying to show

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Speaker 1: convincingly one way or the other whether molecular Darwinism can work.

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Speaker 1: What I did instead was saying, I'm working on the

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Speaker 1: protein structure function problem, so I'm looking at how mutations

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Speaker 1: affect proteins. This is all legitimate work. I didn't in

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Speaker 1: other words, I didn't reveal why I was going about this,

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Speaker 1: and I had a feeling that if things got controversial

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Speaker 1: that my position could be in jeopardy. And that did

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Speaker 1: happen in the spring of two thousand and two. It

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Speaker 1: happened because there was a school in the UK teaching

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Speaker 1: intelligent design, publicly funded school teaching Darwinism and design, and

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Speaker 1: got hugely controversial, was debated in the House of Commons.

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Speaker 1: Tony Blair was Prime Minister at the time, and BBC

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Speaker 1: Radio was picking this up and doing all these things

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Speaker 1: on ID this horrible subversive idea that's trying to infiltrate education.

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Speaker 1: That's the way they were portraying it. And first came

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Speaker 1: into the lab. I was the only one in there

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Speaker 1: early in the morning one one day, and he was

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Speaker 1: twitchy and nervousy, listening to this thing on BBC radio

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Speaker 1: and he was asking me, like, do you know Bill Demski.

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Speaker 1: I say yes, and he walked out. We had this

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Speaker 1: short conversation. I could tell something's gonna happen here and

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Speaker 1: it might not be good, and it did end up.

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Speaker 1: He didn't contact me, but his assistant contacted me with

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Speaker 1: an email saying we've run out of space. We need

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Speaker 1: you to leave. And I was like, if not, Vemo

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Speaker 1: senior person there, So I knew that. I knew that

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Speaker 1: not only was I losing my position, but he wasn't

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Speaker 1: being frank with me about why. And we're on good terms.

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Speaker 1: So since this, I've had a conversation with him, so

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Speaker 1: we're on good terms. And I've even said I think

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Speaker 1: I said in my book, I might have removed me

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Speaker 1: if I had been in his position, I might have

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Speaker 1: removed me as well. But I think I would have

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Speaker 1: done it in a. I think I would have had

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Speaker 1: the honest conversation about either you need to change your

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Speaker 1: project or you need to change your location. He would

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Speaker 1: have been totally within his rights to do that. I

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Speaker 1: just didn't like the way it happened.

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Speaker 2: Well, that's understand. I'm glad about two things. Number one

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Speaker 2: that you're on good terms them, and number two that

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Speaker 2: that was part of your journey getting you here at

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Speaker 2: Biola doing a great job. So obviously not in the

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Speaker 2: route you would have picked, but we're thrilled to have you.

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Speaker 2: Let's jump In your book it's called Undeniable, which is

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Speaker 2: a bold title, which we will get to. But the

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Speaker 2: after one in your book is titled the Big Question.

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Speaker 2: So what do you think is the big question? And

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Speaker 2: what's at stake with how we answer?

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Speaker 1: I think I put it in the book to what

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Speaker 1: or to whom do we owe our existence? So that's

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Speaker 1: something around that, who are we as humans? How did

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Speaker 1: we get here? And where are we going? You can't

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Speaker 1: ask more important or deep or pressing questions in that

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Speaker 1: in philosophy, for sure, But I think those questions are

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Speaker 1: so important that you don't need to be a philosopher

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Speaker 1: to ask them. You should We should all as humans

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Speaker 1: be wrestling with how do we get? What are we?

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Speaker 1: And why are we on this planet? What is our

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Speaker 1: life for? And so those those are that's the big

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Speaker 1: question questions are around that, I think.

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Speaker 2: And the question in design directly addresses and leads into

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Speaker 2: those questions.

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Speaker 1: Because it's how did we get here? And if we

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Speaker 1: are cosmic accidents, if if we live in a universe

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Speaker 1: where physics on an earth like planet reduces life, complex life,

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Speaker 1: and then it evolves to intelligent life, that gives us

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Speaker 1: an answer to how did we get here? And what

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Speaker 1: are we? Really? We are these selected self replicators that

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Speaker 1: through a long process tried various ways, not intentionally, but

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Speaker 1: sampled different possibilities, possible arrangements, and ended up with an

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Speaker 1: arrangement that looks like us. And we're not here forever.

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Speaker 1: The sun will burn out and we will go extinct.

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Speaker 1: And that gives you a view, one view for a

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Speaker 1: depressing one girl. Why we're here, no particular reason. How

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Speaker 1: we got here is chance and nature. And where we're

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Speaker 1: going is it's going to be an in back to

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Speaker 1: the grave. Yeah, yeah, I.

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Speaker 2: Think it was biologist Will Provine who said if a

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Speaker 2: materialistic view of evolution is true, not common dissent, which

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Speaker 2: you cided earlier that you were initially oh in two,

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Speaker 2: there's no human value, there's no morality, there's no meaning,

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Speaker 2: there's no human value, there's no life after death. These

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Speaker 2: are the big questions. And at the heart of it,

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Speaker 2: is there a creator? And do we bear the mark

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Speaker 2: of design? Of course, the Bible starts there within the

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Speaker 2: beginning God created, So you hit at that in your book,

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Speaker 2: which I really appreciate you start there. Okay, So let's

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Speaker 2: talk about the prevailing worldview that you're kind of contrasting

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Speaker 2: with is materialism. Now I heard you a conference, we were

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Speaker 2: both speaking at Race together. You said, this is not

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Speaker 2: the only worldview. There might be New age world views,

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Speaker 2: there could be an Islamic worldview. But maybe just briefly,

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Speaker 2: remind us what you mean by materialism and how significant

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Speaker 2: you think it is in our culture and in the

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Speaker 2: academy today.

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Speaker 1: So by materialism, I also call it physicalism, which might

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Speaker 1: be a slightly more accurate way to put it, but

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Speaker 1: it's basically the idea that there isn't anything but physical universe.

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Speaker 1: So the stuff that physicists try to explain and study,

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Speaker 1: that's the sum total of everything. And so if you say, well,

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Speaker 1: what is God then, or what is a human? A

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Speaker 1: human has to be just by this view, just a

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Speaker 1: physical thing. So what we're doing right now is to

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Speaker 1: a physicalist, is being directed by synapses firing in our brains.

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Speaker 1: We are, you know, chemical assemblages that are doing what

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Speaker 1: we evolved to do. And it gets controversial when you ask, well,

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Speaker 1: what can we trust our thinking if we're just evolved things,

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Speaker 1: And that's a very good question that philosophers are. But

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Speaker 1: to a materialist a physical list, there isn't anything other

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Speaker 1: than physical And if you ask them, well, what is

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Speaker 1: God to you? They would say God is an invention

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Speaker 1: of evolved intelligent beings that for some reason we became

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Speaker 1: culturally complex as we emerged from the Great Apes, and

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Speaker 1: in order to make society wor we invented religion and

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Speaker 1: God so that there's an authority figure that helps us

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Speaker 1: keep things in order. I think that's that's what a

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Speaker 1: materialist would say. It's closely led to atheism because if

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Speaker 1: you're an atheist, you reject God. You really all world

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Speaker 1: views need to have an explanation for us what is

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Speaker 1: a human? And if you reject God, you almost always

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Speaker 1: accept Darwin's theory of evolution. I know one atheist who doesn't.

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Speaker 1: But you're almost always a materialist. And you say, well,

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Speaker 1: there isn't anything but the material universe. You're really putting

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Speaker 1: physics in place of God. Physics is the revelation. So

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Speaker 1: if you if you want to know what the truth is,

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Speaker 1: it's the truth of physics. And the sum total of

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Speaker 1: everything is whatever physics does. So that's materialism. And the

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Speaker 1: reason if you for most of us, we have friends

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Speaker 1: and acquaintances who are not Christians, but very a small

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Speaker 1: friend action of those would be materialist atheists. I venture

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Speaker 1: to guess it depends on what circles you you run in,

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Speaker 1: but I think a lot of people would find no.

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Speaker 1: My friends are they like you know, religiosity, they like Oprah,

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Speaker 1: they they like to think in spiritual terms. They don't

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Speaker 1: think of themselves as atheists, or maybe they're Muslim or Hindu.

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Speaker 1: So a reasonable question would be, well, why focus on

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Speaker 1: materialism and atheism if it's not like the number to

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Speaker 1: faith on the planet. And the reason I think is

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Speaker 1: really important is because Christianity and physicalism both have a

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Speaker 1: claim to science in a in a unique way. So

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Speaker 1: you'll find a lot of I've found a lot, and

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Speaker 1: I'm sure you run into them too. Physicalists atheists who

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Speaker 1: say I became an atheist by doing physics. By studying physics,

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Speaker 1: the more I learned about how the physical universe operates,

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Speaker 1: the more I realize that God is superfluous, and the

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Speaker 1: more compelling the case for atheism became. So this may

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Speaker 1: not be the most popular world of the author, but

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Speaker 1: I think is really important, particularly for people who have

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Speaker 1: an interest in science, because scientists in your textbooks will

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Speaker 1: encounter materialism or naturalism, which is a slightly nuanced version

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Speaker 1: of materialism, much more often than you encounter other religions.

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Speaker 2: Say, that's a real helpful way to look at it,

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Speaker 2: because if materialism or physicalism is real, we can see

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Speaker 2: the emphasis on science being authoritative because scientists study physical matter, Philosophers, theologians,

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Speaker 2: apologists like myself study things that are inventions and they're

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Speaker 2: not real. And I would say you're right. Probably the

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Speaker 2: vast majority of Americans are not materialists. And beyond it

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Speaker 2: was Christian smith sociologists who talked about moralistic, therapeutic deism. Sure,

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Speaker 2: there's kind of a God who's out there, but he's

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Speaker 2: not involved in my life and he just wants me

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Speaker 2: to feel good and be good. But there's a functional

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Speaker 2: kind of materialism that I are naturalism. That's also in

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Speaker 2: the church. I think there's a lot of Christians that

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Speaker 2: do we really believe in supernatural powers like angels and demons?

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Speaker 2: Do we really believe in the power of prayer? Miracles?

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Speaker 2: And so even if people aren't hardcore materialists, these kinds

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Speaker 2: of arguments seep down and have an outsized influence in

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Speaker 2: the church and in the culture. Hence, I think it's

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Speaker 2: important to push back. So here's what you're write boldly,

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Speaker 2: and I love this. In undeniable you say, for me,

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Speaker 2: there is no debate. The scientific facts are in complete

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Speaker 2: harmony with the universal design intuition. Now, specifically, what scientific

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Speaker 2: facts do you think best support design?

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Speaker 1: Well, this is what I started working on as a postdoc,

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Speaker 1: and I was like chomping at the bit as a gratitude,

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Speaker 1: thinking I was it Caltech A is a GRADI And

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Speaker 1: I was framing these ideas and thinking, what would I

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Speaker 1: do if I had a lab, if I had money

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Speaker 1: and lab at my disposal or equipment at my disposal,

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Speaker 1: what would I do? What would the one question be

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Speaker 1: that I would address to try to lay this matter

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Speaker 1: to rest, this matter being Darwinian evolution, and I landed

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Speaker 1: on looking at a single gene that encodes a single

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Speaker 1: protein in a bacterial organism, the easiest organism to work with.

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Speaker 1: You can have these genes and attest to outside of bacteria,

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Speaker 1: and you can manipulate them. You can make variants of them.

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Speaker 1: You can make what they call library, so millions of

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Speaker 1: different variants of a gene that have genetic changes to them,

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Speaker 1: stick them back in the bacteria. All this stuff is routine,

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Speaker 1: much easier than say, working with mice, much easier than

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Speaker 1: working you know, doing anything with humans is virtually impossible

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Speaker 1: for good reason. Live so you just have to sort

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Speaker 1: of infer things from what genetic mutations you find in humans.

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Speaker 1: Very hard for good reasons to do experiments on humans.

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Speaker 1: Bacteria it's easy. So I thought, I'm going to look

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Speaker 1: at a single gene that encodes so genes are it's DNA,

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Speaker 1: it's the double emits acs, g's and t's. They encode

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Speaker 1: in bacteria in a very simple way. The sequence of

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Speaker 1: amino acids that gets strung together to make a protein,

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Speaker 1: and a protein is a chain of these twenty different

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Speaker 1: amino acids. If they have the right properties, they fold

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Speaker 1: into marvelously complex shapes, three dimensional shapes, and they do

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Speaker 1: complex things like they do chemistry. They can be parts

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Speaker 1: of a motor, they can be scaffolding, so much more

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Speaker 1: complex than lagos. But like legos, you can build things

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Speaker 1: out of them that makes life cells and this is

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Speaker 1: not just bacteria, this is us too. All of the

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Speaker 1: life depends upon proteins, but unlike legos, they're using thousands

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Speaker 1: and thousands of very different forms, or as leg as,

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Speaker 1: you got your one thing and you stick it together

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Speaker 1: in different ways. These things have complex structures that enable

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Speaker 1: them to do their function, and their functions all biologists

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Speaker 1: describe them in purposeful terms, like what the role of

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Speaker 1: this enzyme is to do this in this metabolic pathway,

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Speaker 1: because there's just no other way to do it. So

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Speaker 1: my thinking was, I'm going to take a case.

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Speaker 2: Let me clarify, you're not trying to explain just the

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Speaker 2: origin of the cell itself. You're focused on a particular protein,

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Speaker 2: which is a part of many proteins that build a cell.

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Speaker 2: So you're kind of starting on what might be considered

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Speaker 2: a simpler task to accomplishes before you get to the

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Speaker 2: cell and beyond for sure.

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Speaker 1: So if you take a simple the simplest bacterial cell

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Speaker 1: would have approaching a thousand different genes that encode a

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Speaker 1: thousand different protein forms, all of which are essential for

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Speaker 1: it to do it does. Now there's debate over what's

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Speaker 1: the simplest cell. There are some cells that are obligate parasites.

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Speaker 1: They have to live inside another cell. If you talk

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Speaker 1: about free living cells, the sort of thing that could

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Speaker 1: just live in a pond or a puddle, they need

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Speaker 1: well over a thousand of these genes. So that gives

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Speaker 1: you an idea for how many genes and proteins you

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Speaker 1: have to have even have very simple life work. And

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Speaker 1: my idea was not to say I wasn't specifically saying

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Speaker 1: what makes a cell work? I was saying, how did

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Speaker 1: any one of these proteins come about? How hard is

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Speaker 1: it to get DNA arranged in a sequence that produces

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Speaker 1: one of these folded forms that actually works? And so

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Speaker 1: I thought there had been some experience where people just

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Speaker 1: threw together random DNA and try to see if it

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Speaker 1: does anything. And you can argue if you don't look

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Speaker 1: for actual structure or function that it might be doing

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Speaker 1: something very simple. But I thought a better way to

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Speaker 1: do this is look at an existing folded enzyme structure

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Speaker 1: a protein and see how delicate it is, how sensitive

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Speaker 1: it is to changes in the amuineo acid. So I'm

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Speaker 1: messed up basically an existing enzyme. Put millions of these

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Speaker 1: messed up versions in bacterial cells and let them tell

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Speaker 1: me whether it works or not. Because it's the enzyme's

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Speaker 1: function that I chose to work on. It makes bacteria

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Speaker 1: able to survive in the presence of penicillin, which is

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Speaker 1: that's the famous first antibiotic. You put penicillin on a

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Speaker 1: petri dish, put bacteria on the petri dish, they can't survive.

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Speaker 1: They get killed unless they have this special enzyme that

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Speaker 1: deactivates the penicillin. So I thought, well, I'll mess up

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Speaker 1: the enzyme and let the bacteria tell me which or

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Speaker 1: what fraction of these messed up versions still work, because those,

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Speaker 1: it would be, bacteria on a plate with penicillin form

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Speaker 1: a colony, and if they don't form a colony, it's

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Speaker 1: because it doesn't work. And that way I could actually

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Speaker 1: get a fraction of these messed up versions that work

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Speaker 1: and I could start to do math on it, like, Okay,

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Speaker 1: how hard is it for one of these things to work?

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Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense. So you're not really studying evolution itself,

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Speaker 2: like biological evolution. You're studying what might be called chemical

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Speaker 2: evolution at its very base and taking something that already exists,

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Speaker 2: breaking it down. And so in a minute, I'll need

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Speaker 2: to tell us what you found. But what would have

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Speaker 2: confirmed in your mind kind of the materialistic world view,

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Speaker 2: Like if you found this, should have said, okay, I've

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Speaker 2: got to concede that materialism can explain this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. So I had done some calculations and I thought

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Speaker 1: these protein chains, amino acid chains are typically hundreds of

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Speaker 1: amino acids in length. I looked at a chunk of

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Speaker 1: one protein that was about one hundred and fifty, so

432
00:24:51,240 --> 00:24:54,240
Speaker 1: not even a full protein. And if you do the

433
00:24:54,280 --> 00:25:01,040
Speaker 1: math of how like say half of the amino acids

434
00:25:01,080 --> 00:25:03,639
Speaker 1: are fine at every location, then you have kind of

435
00:25:03,640 --> 00:25:05,920
Speaker 1: like a binary It's almost like zeros and ones. Did

436
00:25:05,960 --> 00:25:09,120
Speaker 1: you get it right or not? If ten work at

437
00:25:09,119 --> 00:25:12,359
Speaker 1: each position, and it might differ which ten, then it's

438
00:25:12,359 --> 00:25:18,800
Speaker 1: almost like a binary chain. But even with binary if

439
00:25:18,800 --> 00:25:20,720
Speaker 1: you have a long enough string of zeros and ones,

440
00:25:20,760 --> 00:25:25,480
Speaker 1: you've got a very very improbable even a binary string.

441
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:30,960
Speaker 1: So yeah, two to the tenth power is roughly equal

442
00:25:30,960 --> 00:25:32,760
Speaker 1: to ten to the third. So there's about a thousand

443
00:25:32,800 --> 00:25:35,840
Speaker 1: ways to arrange zers and ones ten long. But if

444
00:25:35,880 --> 00:25:40,639
Speaker 1: you make it one hundred long, you've now multiplied that

445
00:25:41,240 --> 00:25:44,159
Speaker 1: by very large factors. Instead of two to the ten,

446
00:25:44,200 --> 00:25:45,840
Speaker 1: you got two to one hundred is ten to three

447
00:25:47,600 --> 00:25:49,400
Speaker 1: raised to the tenth, So that's going to be ten

448
00:25:49,440 --> 00:25:53,320
Speaker 1: to the thirty. You now have a very very rare chain.

449
00:25:53,880 --> 00:25:57,719
Speaker 1: Even if half the amino acids worked at any given location,

450
00:25:58,040 --> 00:26:00,159
Speaker 1: my suspicion one way and into this is not going

451
00:26:00,200 --> 00:26:02,399
Speaker 1: to be anywhere near half. So I was already I

452
00:26:02,400 --> 00:26:06,119
Speaker 1: had already sort of spitballed and thought, I can't see

453
00:26:06,160 --> 00:26:11,560
Speaker 1: any way that getting proteins is going to be probable

454
00:26:13,040 --> 00:26:16,560
Speaker 1: and is ten to the thirty an extraordinary and probably

455
00:26:16,600 --> 00:26:18,720
Speaker 1: one and ten to the thirty. Well, when you consider

456
00:26:18,800 --> 00:26:24,320
Speaker 1: that the total number of organisms on the planet is

457
00:26:24,520 --> 00:26:28,240
Speaker 1: maybe ten to the forty. If you're in all of history,

458
00:26:28,600 --> 00:26:33,159
Speaker 1: you're approaching numbers where there just hasn't been enough opportunity

459
00:26:33,200 --> 00:26:37,480
Speaker 1: to sample things that they could succeed at. Hitting a

460
00:26:37,520 --> 00:26:41,480
Speaker 1: target that small, so you'd in order for you asked

461
00:26:41,560 --> 00:26:44,880
Speaker 1: what could make materialism work, it would have to be

462
00:26:44,920 --> 00:26:49,640
Speaker 1: that a protein chain almost doesn't care which amino askid

463
00:26:49,760 --> 00:26:52,840
Speaker 1: goes where, and it will still fold. But that seems

464
00:26:52,880 --> 00:26:55,520
Speaker 1: so impossible to me. I didn't believe it. There were

465
00:26:55,560 --> 00:26:57,399
Speaker 1: people at the time that I did this experiment that

466
00:26:57,400 --> 00:26:59,800
Speaker 1: we're arguing that it's almost binary. You just have to

467
00:26:59,800 --> 00:27:03,360
Speaker 1: have hydrophobic amino acids in the right place in hydrophilic

468
00:27:03,440 --> 00:27:06,920
Speaker 1: so that would be binary. Just get hydrophobic and hydrophilic right,

469
00:27:07,359 --> 00:27:10,040
Speaker 1: and the thing will fold. I quickly found that was

470
00:27:10,080 --> 00:27:12,879
Speaker 1: not the case. It's much more subtle than that. So

471
00:27:12,960 --> 00:27:15,000
Speaker 1: I came up with a number that's much more scary

472
00:27:15,040 --> 00:27:20,280
Speaker 1: than if it were binary. It's not nearly that friendly

473
00:27:20,880 --> 00:27:21,480
Speaker 1: to evolution.

474
00:27:22,119 --> 00:27:24,600
Speaker 2: Okay, so tell me if this is fair enough without

475
00:27:24,640 --> 00:27:28,479
Speaker 2: making it too simplistic. We're dealing with probabilities here, and

476
00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:31,840
Speaker 2: say we want to spell out the word CAT. Well

477
00:27:32,280 --> 00:27:35,680
Speaker 2: C first there's twenty six options, and then to get

478
00:27:35,680 --> 00:27:38,879
Speaker 2: an A there's now twenty six options, so it's twenty

479
00:27:38,920 --> 00:27:43,040
Speaker 2: six times twenty six, and then the T is twenty six.

480
00:27:43,520 --> 00:27:47,320
Speaker 2: This is exponential growth. At some point you hit a

481
00:27:47,400 --> 00:27:51,439
Speaker 2: number that's so big it couldn't possibly happen by chance.

482
00:27:51,760 --> 00:27:53,800
Speaker 2: And of course, on the flip side, if we see

483
00:27:53,800 --> 00:27:58,080
Speaker 2: a complex word like hydrophilic, we for sure know that

484
00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:00,919
Speaker 2: this was the result of an intelligent mine who spelled

485
00:28:00,920 --> 00:28:03,280
Speaker 2: it out. If we see cat, we go I mean,

486
00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,200
Speaker 2: maybe there's a chance if the letters fell it could

487
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:06,880
Speaker 2: spell that out.

488
00:28:07,040 --> 00:28:08,720
Speaker 1: Maybe. Well, one of the things you'd say with cat

489
00:28:08,880 --> 00:28:11,160
Speaker 1: is well, it didn't have to be cat. It could

490
00:28:11,160 --> 00:28:12,920
Speaker 1: have been bat, it could have been C, it could

491
00:28:12,920 --> 00:28:14,679
Speaker 1: have been there's all these three letter words that it

492
00:28:14,720 --> 00:28:17,440
Speaker 1: could have been, and it just happened to be kat.

493
00:28:18,119 --> 00:28:20,640
Speaker 1: And you can get a CATALOGO how many three letter

494
00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:22,040
Speaker 1: words are there. I don't know off the top of

495
00:28:22,080 --> 00:28:23,960
Speaker 1: my head. There's a lot of them. And if you

496
00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:27,040
Speaker 1: take twenty six rages third power, take the number three

497
00:28:27,119 --> 00:28:29,800
Speaker 1: letter words, divide it by that, it gives you roughly

498
00:28:29,840 --> 00:28:31,960
Speaker 1: the size of a target that would be needed to

499
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:35,040
Speaker 1: by chance, get a three letter word, and you can

500
00:28:35,040 --> 00:28:37,399
Speaker 1: get three letter words. I use alphabet soup in my class,

501
00:28:37,440 --> 00:28:39,120
Speaker 1: and you put a picture of alphabet silk, you can

502
00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:42,080
Speaker 1: find you can find messy three letter words. You start

503
00:28:42,120 --> 00:28:45,520
Speaker 1: going to four letter of five letter, six letter, small phrases,

504
00:28:45,600 --> 00:28:51,040
Speaker 1: it becomes just astronomically more improbable, because, as you said,

505
00:28:51,120 --> 00:28:54,080
Speaker 1: you have to multiply these and probabilities along the way.

506
00:28:54,960 --> 00:28:57,560
Speaker 2: So how improbable is it to get I think you

507
00:28:57,560 --> 00:29:02,200
Speaker 2: said one hundred and fifty menal length chains, like maybe

508
00:29:02,240 --> 00:29:04,560
Speaker 2: not even quite a workable protein. But let's make the

509
00:29:04,600 --> 00:29:08,800
Speaker 2: most simple one conceivable. What's roughly the math or odds

510
00:29:08,920 --> 00:29:10,960
Speaker 2: was that one times ten to ten thirty or did

511
00:29:10,960 --> 00:29:13,360
Speaker 2: I miss hear what the number would be for that?

512
00:29:13,800 --> 00:29:16,560
Speaker 1: Forgetting for the one I examined.

513
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:16,719
Speaker 2: Forgetting the one?

514
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:19,040
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I was saying ten to the thirty would

515
00:29:19,080 --> 00:29:23,320
Speaker 1: be if it were just simple hydrophobic polar fifty to.

516
00:29:23,240 --> 00:29:24,560
Speaker 2: Fifty okay, that's right.

517
00:29:24,600 --> 00:29:27,200
Speaker 1: If at each position you had like fifty percent odds

518
00:29:27,200 --> 00:29:29,680
Speaker 1: of being okay, then you'd get something like ten to

519
00:29:29,720 --> 00:29:32,200
Speaker 1: the thirty. I got something that's much worse than that.

520
00:29:33,440 --> 00:29:36,360
Speaker 1: And I took a careful account of hydrophobic and and

521
00:29:36,440 --> 00:29:40,320
Speaker 1: polar because it's a little bit complicated. But I made

522
00:29:40,320 --> 00:29:44,920
Speaker 1: sure that all my chains were all the sequences that

523
00:29:44,960 --> 00:29:48,840
Speaker 1: I introduced to these bacteria were being hydrophobic where they

524
00:29:48,840 --> 00:29:51,600
Speaker 1: should be and hydrophilic where they should be. But I'll

525
00:29:51,640 --> 00:29:56,560
Speaker 1: let them shuffle within those constraints, and even when you

526
00:29:56,640 --> 00:30:01,640
Speaker 1: do that, you find that the very substantial majority of

527
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:04,880
Speaker 1: amino acids are not good at any given position. Or

528
00:30:04,880 --> 00:30:07,640
Speaker 1: another way to put that is, there's a pretty strict

529
00:30:07,680 --> 00:30:11,720
Speaker 1: requirement at almost every position, and at some positions it's

530
00:30:11,960 --> 00:30:14,200
Speaker 1: very strict, like it has to be this and nothing else.

531
00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:18,360
Speaker 1: So I ended up with a measurement that was one

532
00:30:19,080 --> 00:30:21,600
Speaker 1: in ten to the seventy seventh power that you would

533
00:30:21,640 --> 00:30:24,360
Speaker 1: have a string of amino acids that forms a function

534
00:30:24,440 --> 00:30:28,240
Speaker 1: that's ready to perform forms of fold, that's ready to

535
00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:32,560
Speaker 1: perform a particular function. And that's if you just say, well,

536
00:30:32,560 --> 00:30:35,440
Speaker 1: how much higher is seventy seven than thirty or we're

537
00:30:35,520 --> 00:30:37,360
Speaker 1: used to just think of numbers, well that's only double,

538
00:30:37,560 --> 00:30:40,840
Speaker 1: but no, this is the exponent. So ten to thirty

539
00:30:41,120 --> 00:30:43,840
Speaker 1: times ten to the thirty is ten to the sixty,

540
00:30:43,880 --> 00:30:48,400
Speaker 1: and that's seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than ten to

541
00:30:48,400 --> 00:30:51,480
Speaker 1: the seventy seventh is mind boggling. We're not used to

542
00:30:51,520 --> 00:30:54,840
Speaker 1: dealing with numbers this large. I use a way of

543
00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:57,840
Speaker 1: illustrating what would it be like to blindfold and throw

544
00:30:57,880 --> 00:31:01,840
Speaker 1: a dart and hope to hit a tar that's one

545
00:31:01,920 --> 00:31:04,360
Speaker 1: part in ten to the seventy seventh of the whole

546
00:31:04,880 --> 00:31:07,600
Speaker 1: say wall, or the whole thing that you could hit.

547
00:31:08,400 --> 00:31:10,960
Speaker 1: And you think, okay, that's a small bullseye on a

548
00:31:10,960 --> 00:31:13,200
Speaker 1: big wall. How small is the bullseye and how big

549
00:31:13,240 --> 00:31:15,560
Speaker 1: is the wall? Turns out for it to be one

550
00:31:15,560 --> 00:31:17,160
Speaker 1: part in ten to the seventy seventh. That would be

551
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:21,360
Speaker 1: a bullseye, the size of a hydrogen atom on a wall,

552
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:23,880
Speaker 1: the size of a sphere enclosing the visible universe.

553
00:31:23,920 --> 00:31:28,720
Speaker 2: So canalize that, right.

554
00:31:28,560 --> 00:31:30,920
Speaker 1: These are numbers that are beyond comprehension.

555
00:31:31,480 --> 00:31:34,000
Speaker 2: Isn't the number of atoms in the universe one times

556
00:31:34,000 --> 00:31:35,520
Speaker 2: ten with eighty after it?

557
00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:40,800
Speaker 1: So we're approaching like there's one marked atom in the

558
00:31:40,920 --> 00:31:45,680
Speaker 1: universe and that's the jackpot. Go pick an atom and

559
00:31:45,760 --> 00:31:47,280
Speaker 1: look at it and see if that's the marked one.

560
00:31:47,320 --> 00:31:51,160
Speaker 1: We're approaching odds like that. That's that's fantastic. I call

561
00:31:51,160 --> 00:31:54,240
Speaker 1: it fantastically improbable, is a term I coined in the

562
00:31:54,240 --> 00:31:58,520
Speaker 1: book to mean, once you have an improbability that's beyond

563
00:31:59,680 --> 00:32:04,440
Speaker 1: even then the probabilistic resources of the entire universe for

564
00:32:04,640 --> 00:32:08,880
Speaker 1: billions and billions of years, you might as well say

565
00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:12,040
Speaker 1: it's the stuff of fantasy. So it's not just improbable

566
00:32:12,120 --> 00:32:16,680
Speaker 1: or extremely improbable. It's fantastically improbable because most people don't

567
00:32:16,760 --> 00:32:19,240
Speaker 1: have You think of winning the California and Lottery as

568
00:32:19,360 --> 00:32:23,959
Speaker 1: that's improbable. It is improbable, But these are mild improbabilities

569
00:32:23,960 --> 00:32:25,040
Speaker 1: compared to what we're talking about.

570
00:32:25,040 --> 00:32:26,440
Speaker 2: It maybe like winning it. I don't even know how

571
00:32:26,480 --> 00:32:30,280
Speaker 2: many thousands or millions, maybe billions of times, who knows which.

572
00:32:30,600 --> 00:32:33,400
Speaker 2: At some point it's actually you mentioned William Densky earlier

573
00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:35,560
Speaker 2: in two thousand and eight. We wrote a book Understanding

574
00:32:35,600 --> 00:32:38,960
Speaker 2: Intelligent Design. We're updating it, and of course he's a

575
00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:45,080
Speaker 2: PhD mathematician and study the universal probability bound, meaning given

576
00:32:45,120 --> 00:32:47,920
Speaker 2: the amount of time and resource, the size of the universe,

577
00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:52,760
Speaker 2: we can actually say certain things are functionally impossible. And

578
00:32:52,840 --> 00:32:57,040
Speaker 2: you're saying just alone, this one protein itself is at

579
00:32:57,080 --> 00:33:00,880
Speaker 2: that or far beyond it. So it's logically possible. But

580
00:33:01,040 --> 00:33:04,160
Speaker 2: in terms of saying that's believable and a good explanation,

581
00:33:04,760 --> 00:33:07,560
Speaker 2: it's beyond ridiculous. Is that a fair way to frame it?

582
00:33:07,800 --> 00:33:09,480
Speaker 1: That's for sure true. Now I don't think it means

583
00:33:09,560 --> 00:33:11,719
Speaker 1: the I don't think one protein meets the dempskin one

584
00:33:11,720 --> 00:33:13,240
Speaker 1: because his is like ten to one hundred and twenty

585
00:33:13,320 --> 00:33:15,400
Speaker 1: or something like that. Can you take the plant time?

586
00:33:16,200 --> 00:33:17,720
Speaker 2: I think you pushed it back to be like as

587
00:33:17,800 --> 00:33:19,320
Speaker 2: conservative as possible.

588
00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:23,960
Speaker 1: If you take something that's biologically not insane, it would

589
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:27,920
Speaker 1: have to be under ten to the fortieth because if

590
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:32,080
Speaker 1: you're talking about evolution, evolution isn't happening in the Sun

591
00:33:32,160 --> 00:33:34,800
Speaker 1: right now in the galaxy. So the vast majority of

592
00:33:34,840 --> 00:33:37,760
Speaker 1: the of the matter that is in our visible universe

593
00:33:38,280 --> 00:33:43,000
Speaker 1: is irrelevant. There aren't there aren't organisms evolving. So if

594
00:33:43,040 --> 00:33:45,760
Speaker 1: you limit it to how many, if you limit it

595
00:33:45,800 --> 00:33:49,760
Speaker 1: to one planet and say how many organisms have ever

596
00:33:49,840 --> 00:33:53,360
Speaker 1: existed on planet Earth in the entire history of life,

597
00:33:53,640 --> 00:33:55,600
Speaker 1: you end up with a number that's not larger than

598
00:33:55,680 --> 00:33:59,040
Speaker 1: about ten to the fortieth, And those would be the

599
00:33:59,080 --> 00:34:03,360
Speaker 1: maximum opportunity unities for mutations to come up with something new.

600
00:34:03,720 --> 00:34:07,160
Speaker 1: So once you have a target that's smaller significantly smaller

601
00:34:07,200 --> 00:34:09,080
Speaker 1: than one in ten to fourth, you've really got something

602
00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:13,600
Speaker 1: that the sampling that that has happened in the entire

603
00:34:13,680 --> 00:34:17,719
Speaker 1: history of life could not have hit a target that's okay.

604
00:34:17,719 --> 00:34:19,359
Speaker 2: I want to remind you if you're listening in your

605
00:34:19,400 --> 00:34:22,359
Speaker 2: skeptic or critic and you're like, I'm not convinced. Here's

606
00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:24,880
Speaker 2: the study online or here's the fact that disproves this.

607
00:34:25,520 --> 00:34:28,480
Speaker 2: Email me questions at Sean McDow dot org. Write it

608
00:34:28,560 --> 00:34:31,200
Speaker 2: in as a comment. We have Doug coming back live

609
00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:34,120
Speaker 2: Tuesday at four point thirty and we will tackle some

610
00:34:34,160 --> 00:34:35,359
Speaker 2: of these. Now, in a minute, I'm going to come

611
00:34:35,360 --> 00:34:37,719
Speaker 2: back to some of the objections you've received in the

612
00:34:37,800 --> 00:34:41,400
Speaker 2: academic world, and you've addressed a lot of these, but

613
00:34:41,920 --> 00:34:44,440
Speaker 2: you talk about you mentioned this early on, what you

614
00:34:44,520 --> 00:34:49,920
Speaker 2: call the universal design intuition. Yeah, so we've started with

615
00:34:50,040 --> 00:34:55,160
Speaker 2: saying the beginning of this protein materialistically is functionally impossible,

616
00:34:55,200 --> 00:34:59,920
Speaker 2: it's fantastic. Well, that's critiquing materialism. Then we want to,

617
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:04,000
Speaker 2: you know, okay, is there positive evidence for design, because

618
00:35:04,080 --> 00:35:07,360
Speaker 2: the most common rebuttal is this is kind of God

619
00:35:07,520 --> 00:35:11,120
Speaker 2: of the gaps. You're saying, no, we can actually inferred

620
00:35:11,200 --> 00:35:13,560
Speaker 2: design from this. But your approach is a little different

621
00:35:13,600 --> 00:35:17,120
Speaker 2: than Dempsky's approach. Be He's approach. You lean into this

622
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:21,120
Speaker 2: universal design intuition. So tell us what it is and

623
00:35:21,280 --> 00:35:23,480
Speaker 2: why you think we can trust that when it comes

624
00:35:23,480 --> 00:35:24,040
Speaker 2: to your work.

625
00:35:24,400 --> 00:35:27,080
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, I actually I came across this when I

626
00:35:27,120 --> 00:35:29,880
Speaker 1: was doing the initial work that was like putting together

627
00:35:29,920 --> 00:35:33,000
Speaker 1: the ideas to become the book that became undeniable, and

628
00:35:33,560 --> 00:35:36,200
Speaker 1: something I came across this may be the quote I've

629
00:35:36,280 --> 00:35:42,400
Speaker 1: used more often other than scripture is. Alison Gopnik wrote

630
00:35:42,400 --> 00:35:44,799
Speaker 1: an article in the Wall Street Journal. She is or

631
00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:46,440
Speaker 1: was at the time. I don't know she still is.

632
00:35:46,480 --> 00:35:49,239
Speaker 1: She was a UC Berkeley psychology professor. She may still be.

633
00:35:50,320 --> 00:35:55,080
Speaker 1: And in this article she wrote, elementary by elementary school

634
00:35:55,120 --> 00:36:00,239
Speaker 1: age children start to invoke and ultimate godlike designer to

635
00:36:00,320 --> 00:36:03,840
Speaker 1: explain the complexity of the world around them, even children

636
00:36:04,040 --> 00:36:08,120
Speaker 1: brought up as atheists. End quote. And I took it

637
00:36:08,160 --> 00:36:09,680
Speaker 1: from the article that she was an atheist. She was

638
00:36:09,719 --> 00:36:12,080
Speaker 1: talking about the work of someone else, Deborah Kellman, who

639
00:36:12,120 --> 00:36:14,799
Speaker 1: had actually done these studies and shown mom and dad

640
00:36:14,800 --> 00:36:16,560
Speaker 1: don't have to be talking about God. They could be

641
00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:21,000
Speaker 1: atheists and raising up son and daughter as atheists. But

642
00:36:21,080 --> 00:36:24,360
Speaker 1: these kids, by say age four, when they see a

643
00:36:24,360 --> 00:36:28,680
Speaker 1: butterfly in the back garden, they just automatically they into

644
00:36:28,760 --> 00:36:31,080
Speaker 1: it that this had to have been made by a

645
00:36:31,080 --> 00:36:33,839
Speaker 1: godlike designer. And that surprises mom and dad because they

646
00:36:33,960 --> 00:36:38,120
Speaker 1: never mentioned a godlike designer. So her point Gopnik's point

647
00:36:38,280 --> 00:36:41,759
Speaker 1: was this is bad because we seem to have this

648
00:36:41,840 --> 00:36:44,239
Speaker 1: sort of by nature, we seem to get this way

649
00:36:44,239 --> 00:36:47,600
Speaker 1: of understanding things that we then have to educate out

650
00:36:47,640 --> 00:36:51,120
Speaker 1: of kids come middle school, high school, and so the

651
00:36:51,120 --> 00:36:55,080
Speaker 1: whole article was proposing that we start preschool giving you

652
00:36:55,400 --> 00:36:58,839
Speaker 1: three year olds their lesson in Darwinism. I thought, well,

653
00:36:58,840 --> 00:36:59,200
Speaker 1: that's the.

654
00:36:59,120 --> 00:37:00,799
Speaker 2: Way you're taking Its interesting.

655
00:37:00,960 --> 00:37:03,640
Speaker 1: My take on this is, well, what if they're right?

656
00:37:04,239 --> 00:37:08,319
Speaker 1: What if the four year old is right? Isn't it

657
00:37:08,360 --> 00:37:11,120
Speaker 1: interesting you go to Romans one? Here? Isn't it interesting

658
00:37:11,160 --> 00:37:15,200
Speaker 1: that we just automatically see this? And you don't have

659
00:37:15,280 --> 00:37:17,279
Speaker 1: to be in a Christian household, You don't have to

660
00:37:17,360 --> 00:37:19,960
Speaker 1: mean a theistic household. You could be being raised by

661
00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:23,280
Speaker 1: atheist parents and you see this. I thought, there's something

662
00:37:23,400 --> 00:37:28,600
Speaker 1: really startlingly beautiful about that. Now. I did not make

663
00:37:28,680 --> 00:37:34,279
Speaker 1: the argument that this intuition, that any intuition, is infallible.

664
00:37:34,280 --> 00:37:36,560
Speaker 1: What I did was I started with that intuition because

665
00:37:36,600 --> 00:37:40,160
Speaker 1: I said, isn't it interesting that we all have this?

666
00:37:40,600 --> 00:37:42,719
Speaker 1: And then I asked the question, what do you think

667
00:37:42,760 --> 00:37:45,799
Speaker 1: the kids are seeing when they Because they don't say

668
00:37:45,840 --> 00:37:49,320
Speaker 1: this when they see a piece of gravel or a puddle,

669
00:37:49,680 --> 00:37:52,200
Speaker 1: but when they see a dragonfly hovering in the in

670
00:37:52,239 --> 00:37:56,480
Speaker 1: the backyard, they just intuit this. And I the way

671
00:37:56,520 --> 00:37:58,239
Speaker 1: I put it in the book is what are they

672
00:37:58,360 --> 00:38:00,799
Speaker 1: zeroing in on? And I don't know for sure. It's

673
00:38:00,840 --> 00:38:02,719
Speaker 1: hard to go back into the mind of a four

674
00:38:02,760 --> 00:38:04,640
Speaker 1: year old, and it's hard to interrogate a four year

675
00:38:04,640 --> 00:38:07,480
Speaker 1: old about how they thought about things. But I came

676
00:38:07,800 --> 00:38:11,799
Speaker 1: up with a rigorous argument. So my approach was, Hey,

677
00:38:11,880 --> 00:38:16,600
Speaker 1: we all see this. Some people are denying it, but

678
00:38:16,760 --> 00:38:19,359
Speaker 1: can we find a way to show that what those

679
00:38:19,360 --> 00:38:23,920
Speaker 1: four year olds are intuiting is actually factually true? And

680
00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:26,799
Speaker 1: it may not be the way they're intuiting it, but

681
00:38:26,920 --> 00:38:29,520
Speaker 1: can we show that there's actually a way to demonstrate

682
00:38:29,560 --> 00:38:32,360
Speaker 1: that those four year olds are actually correct? And so

683
00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:38,560
Speaker 1: I'm less committed to a claim that I've identified what's

684
00:38:38,600 --> 00:38:39,960
Speaker 1: going on in the four year old's head because I

685
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:43,759
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. But for sure you can go

686
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:46,880
Speaker 1: and do rigorous assessment and say, I don't know how

687
00:38:46,920 --> 00:38:49,319
Speaker 1: they're thinking about but they're definitely right. And it is

688
00:38:49,400 --> 00:38:51,879
Speaker 1: interesting that you can come up with a very sort

689
00:38:51,920 --> 00:38:54,759
Speaker 1: of intuitive way of looking at things. I think we

690
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:59,360
Speaker 1: have humans have a very developed intuition about what could

691
00:38:59,360 --> 00:39:02,520
Speaker 1: be a quince's and what's beyond coincidence. So there's certain

692
00:39:02,560 --> 00:39:06,279
Speaker 1: things that if we stumble upon them, we're very like

693
00:39:06,320 --> 00:39:09,160
Speaker 1: I mentioned alphabet soup. If you you know, have to

694
00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:10,319
Speaker 1: do a little bit of work and you find a

695
00:39:10,320 --> 00:39:12,880
Speaker 1: three that are word in your alphabet soup, fine, But

696
00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:15,440
Speaker 1: if you know, lift a lid on the pan of

697
00:39:15,480 --> 00:39:19,160
Speaker 1: alphabet soup and it's telling you don't forget your car

698
00:39:19,239 --> 00:39:22,239
Speaker 1: keys or something, then you know your wife I messed

699
00:39:22,239 --> 00:39:24,360
Speaker 1: around with the alphabet. So you know that's not acquisidence

700
00:39:24,360 --> 00:39:26,319
Speaker 1: because there's a message in there. So we have and

701
00:39:26,360 --> 00:39:27,920
Speaker 1: you don't have to do the matten, you don't have

702
00:39:27,960 --> 00:39:30,520
Speaker 1: to do a calculation. You just know this couldn't have

703
00:39:30,560 --> 00:39:32,879
Speaker 1: happened by by accident. That makes sense.

704
00:39:32,920 --> 00:39:35,040
Speaker 2: Now this would take us aside. But you mentioned the

705
00:39:35,080 --> 00:39:39,759
Speaker 2: comment earlier about can Darwinism ground our reasoning faculties? And

706
00:39:39,920 --> 00:39:42,480
Speaker 2: of course that's because if our brains were cobbled together

707
00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:47,760
Speaker 2: by this blind, purposeless process, they weren't designed to understand truth.

708
00:39:48,040 --> 00:39:51,319
Speaker 2: They just resulted from survival, and we can survive with

709
00:39:51,400 --> 00:39:54,359
Speaker 2: false beliefs. So here's the case where they're saying, let's

710
00:39:54,800 --> 00:40:00,239
Speaker 2: root out these intuitions, but let's trust other intuitions. And

711
00:40:00,239 --> 00:40:01,640
Speaker 2: I want to say, wait a minute, if you're reading

712
00:40:01,600 --> 00:40:03,840
Speaker 2: it at this one because you believe in Darwinism, you

713
00:40:03,960 --> 00:40:06,480
Speaker 2: got to root all of them out to be consistent.

714
00:40:06,920 --> 00:40:11,960
Speaker 2: But of course nobody actually takes it that far for sure. Okay,

715
00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:15,640
Speaker 2: So let me ask you this question. What's been the

716
00:40:15,760 --> 00:40:18,680
Speaker 2: toughest criticism of your research. I anticipate we'll get some

717
00:40:18,760 --> 00:40:22,200
Speaker 2: questions people load we'll have to respond to. But Steelman,

718
00:40:22,400 --> 00:40:25,040
Speaker 2: one of the toughest objections maybe online, maybe you've seen

719
00:40:25,440 --> 00:40:28,319
Speaker 2: in a journal, and what your response would be.

720
00:40:31,560 --> 00:40:33,400
Speaker 1: I can give you what have been kind of the

721
00:40:33,440 --> 00:40:36,480
Speaker 1: recurring objections, none of which I consider to be tough,

722
00:40:36,480 --> 00:40:37,560
Speaker 1: but I'm biased.

723
00:40:38,280 --> 00:40:39,479
Speaker 2: Fair enough, that's what I want.

724
00:40:39,600 --> 00:40:42,000
Speaker 1: So I think you mentioned God of the gaps. That's

725
00:40:42,040 --> 00:40:44,160
Speaker 1: a very common week could go into what people mean

726
00:40:44,200 --> 00:40:46,440
Speaker 1: by that, but more specific to this work that was

727
00:40:46,480 --> 00:40:48,440
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of mac of the Biology in

728
00:40:48,440 --> 00:40:51,120
Speaker 1: two thousand and four. It's a study on one end

729
00:40:51,160 --> 00:40:54,359
Speaker 1: zyme and I come to and it was rigorously peer

730
00:40:54,400 --> 00:40:57,919
Speaker 1: reviewed by people who do not share my view, went

731
00:40:57,920 --> 00:41:00,759
Speaker 1: through peer review, top notch editor of the journal, ahead

732
00:41:00,800 --> 00:41:04,480
Speaker 1: of the European Bioinformatics Institute was the editor who handled

733
00:41:04,520 --> 00:41:09,600
Speaker 1: my manuscript published in two thousand and four. One of

734
00:41:09,640 --> 00:41:13,800
Speaker 1: the recurring objections I get not at the level of

735
00:41:13,920 --> 00:41:18,239
Speaker 1: JMB so I, to be honest, nobody has given a

736
00:41:18,280 --> 00:41:21,040
Speaker 1: critique that has gone through peer review and is at

737
00:41:21,040 --> 00:41:22,520
Speaker 1: the level of the paper itself.

738
00:41:22,600 --> 00:41:23,080
Speaker 2: Oh wow.

739
00:41:23,080 --> 00:41:26,440
Speaker 1: I've had lots of people who critique in blogs and

740
00:41:26,840 --> 00:41:28,880
Speaker 1: you know, and say ACTS is wrong because of this,

741
00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:32,920
Speaker 1: but it's never been a high level critique. But a

742
00:41:32,960 --> 00:41:36,640
Speaker 1: common recurring theme at the lower level is well, that

743
00:41:36,719 --> 00:41:42,120
Speaker 1: you just looked at one protein, and what why would

744
00:41:42,120 --> 00:41:44,920
Speaker 1: we believe that the numbers you came up with with

745
00:41:44,960 --> 00:41:51,400
Speaker 1: one with one protein would apply to all proteins. Another

746
00:41:53,360 --> 00:41:56,759
Speaker 1: recurring thing is actually, what I think happened is one

747
00:41:56,760 --> 00:41:59,319
Speaker 1: guy named Art Hunt gave a critique of this on

748
00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:03,120
Speaker 1: a blog called Panda's Thumb the year that the several

749
00:42:03,120 --> 00:42:06,400
Speaker 1: months after the paper came out. For the most part,

750
00:42:07,120 --> 00:42:10,280
Speaker 1: everyone has just gone back to that original I answered.

751
00:42:10,560 --> 00:42:13,480
Speaker 1: I answered his full ptique, and you'll still find if

752
00:42:13,480 --> 00:42:16,120
Speaker 1: people want to critique ACTS two thousand and four, they

753
00:42:16,320 --> 00:42:18,080
Speaker 1: dig around on the web. It all goes back to

754
00:42:18,200 --> 00:42:21,800
Speaker 1: Art Hunt, who had some misconceptions about the paper. He's

755
00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:24,120
Speaker 1: a plant by I was just he actually contacted me

756
00:42:24,200 --> 00:42:27,400
Speaker 1: and said, here's what I'm going to put on Panda's thumb.

757
00:42:27,840 --> 00:42:30,320
Speaker 1: Can you vet this for me? And I said, I

758
00:42:30,360 --> 00:42:32,920
Speaker 1: corrected him, I said, you haven't actually understood parts of

759
00:42:32,440 --> 00:42:36,440
Speaker 1: the paper, right, be that as it made that his

760
00:42:36,640 --> 00:42:39,920
Speaker 1: Hunt's critique is what people keep going back to. So

761
00:42:40,960 --> 00:42:46,560
Speaker 1: another critique has been that he made was as actually

762
00:42:46,600 --> 00:42:52,560
Speaker 1: looked at a He actually introduced mutations into this enzyme

763
00:42:52,680 --> 00:42:56,360
Speaker 1: to make it a weaker enzyme before he did this

764
00:42:56,520 --> 00:43:00,439
Speaker 1: study to get the library tainted it in one sense, Yeah,

765
00:43:00,840 --> 00:43:04,440
Speaker 1: now this is all carefully described in the paper, and

766
00:43:04,680 --> 00:43:07,000
Speaker 1: the peer review said, yeah, you did that the right way.

767
00:43:07,280 --> 00:43:10,200
Speaker 1: The reason I did that is I did not want

768
00:43:10,239 --> 00:43:13,920
Speaker 1: to come up with a probability for getting a highly

769
00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:17,600
Speaker 1: perfected version of this enzyme that would be far worse

770
00:43:17,640 --> 00:43:19,879
Speaker 1: than one in ten of the seventy seventh that might

771
00:43:20,440 --> 00:43:23,240
Speaker 1: be one intend to one hundred and one hundred and fifth,

772
00:43:23,320 --> 00:43:26,640
Speaker 1: it'd be far worse. I perceived that if I were

773
00:43:26,840 --> 00:43:29,400
Speaker 1: if I were measuring the information content in a highly

774
00:43:29,480 --> 00:43:33,399
Speaker 1: optimal enzyme, and I came up with a number, then

775
00:43:33,440 --> 00:43:35,200
Speaker 1: the critique would have been, you're just looking at a

776
00:43:35,280 --> 00:43:39,080
Speaker 1: highly optimal one, evolution can work on a much lower one.

777
00:43:39,120 --> 00:43:41,960
Speaker 1: So I anticipated that and I said, I'm going to

778
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:44,200
Speaker 1: make it a I'm going to make it a wounded,

779
00:43:45,920 --> 00:43:49,840
Speaker 1: functional but not at all optimized version of this enzyme,

780
00:43:49,880 --> 00:43:51,880
Speaker 1: and then I'm going to measure how hard it is

781
00:43:51,920 --> 00:43:55,720
Speaker 1: to get this low level. So the art Hunt critique

782
00:43:55,760 --> 00:43:58,799
Speaker 1: is actually not understanding that I bent over backwards to

783
00:43:58,840 --> 00:44:02,120
Speaker 1: make it straight, to make my number lower, to make

784
00:44:02,120 --> 00:44:05,919
Speaker 1: it probably less scary. By looking at what evolution would

785
00:44:05,960 --> 00:44:09,520
Speaker 1: need is something that's good enough that you can optimize it,

786
00:44:09,520 --> 00:44:13,959
Speaker 1: because mutation in selection is a reasonably good local optimizer.

787
00:44:14,080 --> 00:44:17,440
Speaker 1: If it works and you can do a few mutation

788
00:44:17,520 --> 00:44:19,560
Speaker 1: to get it to work better, then you'll get that optimize.

789
00:44:19,560 --> 00:44:22,920
Speaker 1: We've shown this with beta aactomies in the lab. But

790
00:44:23,040 --> 00:44:25,120
Speaker 1: you need that starting point, and that starting point has

791
00:44:25,160 --> 00:44:28,640
Speaker 1: to be an actual folded enzyme that's functioning as an

792
00:44:28,719 --> 00:44:31,239
Speaker 1: enzyme with an active site. And that's exactly what I

793
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:32,920
Speaker 1: started with, and that's how I got the one in

794
00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:33,799
Speaker 1: ten to the seventy seven.

795
00:44:33,800 --> 00:44:37,040
Speaker 2: That's pretty remarkable. Over two decades later, there's no peer

796
00:44:37,080 --> 00:44:43,160
Speaker 2: reviewed published sufficient defeaters of your work. I think that's

797
00:44:43,239 --> 00:44:45,719
Speaker 2: really that's significant. I love to hear that, and I

798
00:44:45,800 --> 00:44:47,239
Speaker 2: want to remind people listening to we're in part of

799
00:44:47,239 --> 00:44:50,160
Speaker 2: a three part series on the evidence for design, the

800
00:44:50,200 --> 00:44:53,400
Speaker 2: origin of the universe, and then we have fine tuning,

801
00:44:53,960 --> 00:44:56,160
Speaker 2: and we've got Steve Meyer, We've got Jay Richards as

802
00:44:56,200 --> 00:44:58,200
Speaker 2: a part of this, and you just one of the

803
00:44:58,239 --> 00:45:00,600
Speaker 2: reasons I believe in God is you start to add

804
00:45:00,719 --> 00:45:03,920
Speaker 2: these probabilities together, not just the origin of life, but

805
00:45:04,120 --> 00:45:07,320
Speaker 2: fine tuning a universe from nothing, and even some arguments

806
00:45:07,320 --> 00:45:10,839
Speaker 2: we're not looking at, the argument is really compelling when

807
00:45:10,840 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 2: taken as a whole. And again, you're in the movie

808
00:45:13,239 --> 00:45:17,640
Speaker 2: the Story of Everything that's been released theatrically soon A

809
00:45:17,640 --> 00:45:20,360
Speaker 2: couple questions for you, maybe a couple of cooklings. Is

810
00:45:21,640 --> 00:45:26,560
Speaker 2: AI in any way making this easier or harder for

811
00:45:26,680 --> 00:45:30,320
Speaker 2: people who are trying to explain the origin of the protein,

812
00:45:30,400 --> 00:45:32,239
Speaker 2: Like do we have better tools to figure out how

813
00:45:32,280 --> 00:45:35,480
Speaker 2: it could happen materially? Or is it making people go,

814
00:45:35,560 --> 00:45:38,600
Speaker 2: oh my goodness, even with AI, we can't explain this.

815
00:45:39,680 --> 00:45:41,920
Speaker 1: There's different ways you could go about this. So I

816
00:45:42,320 --> 00:45:45,000
Speaker 1: haven't read this paper, but I've heard and we'll read

817
00:45:45,040 --> 00:45:50,360
Speaker 1: it of a project where they used AI to try

818
00:45:50,360 --> 00:45:52,719
Speaker 1: to design a new protein, and I'm going to go

819
00:45:52,760 --> 00:45:54,640
Speaker 1: do the reading, so I won't I won't give a

820
00:45:54,640 --> 00:45:59,839
Speaker 1: fatail critique. But from what I can see, what they got.

821
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:03,000
Speaker 1: So what they do is you train an AI on

822
00:46:03,160 --> 00:46:06,600
Speaker 1: here's what protein structures look like. Here's what they do.

823
00:46:07,160 --> 00:46:09,600
Speaker 1: Here's their amino acid sequence. If you give them a

824
00:46:09,680 --> 00:46:12,720
Speaker 1: million of these, which you can now you can imagine

825
00:46:12,760 --> 00:46:16,919
Speaker 1: that you could train an AI to spit out sequences

826
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:20,200
Speaker 1: that might structurally look like this. Now when I look

827
00:46:20,200 --> 00:46:22,920
Speaker 1: at that, I'm thinking, I don't believe it's actually going

828
00:46:23,000 --> 00:46:25,560
Speaker 1: to be able to give you new protein structures. And

829
00:46:25,600 --> 00:46:27,440
Speaker 1: I don't believe that's happened here. But there's a paper

830
00:46:27,440 --> 00:46:31,160
Speaker 1: that where they tried that. It appears to me they

831
00:46:31,200 --> 00:46:33,640
Speaker 1: didn't even I think they didn't even get structures. But

832
00:46:33,640 --> 00:46:37,719
Speaker 1: they looked at a chemical and a catalytic function, and

833
00:46:37,719 --> 00:46:40,640
Speaker 1: they got catalytic function to go up somewhat, but they

834
00:46:40,920 --> 00:46:44,480
Speaker 1: acknowledge in the paper that it's nowhere near the catalytic

835
00:46:44,560 --> 00:46:47,800
Speaker 1: function that you get in actual enzymes. I've published papers

836
00:46:47,800 --> 00:46:50,880
Speaker 1: where I've shown you don't have to have a folded

837
00:46:50,920 --> 00:46:57,520
Speaker 1: protein to do some simple catalysis, and you can have

838
00:46:57,640 --> 00:47:03,960
Speaker 1: simple like lemon ju use can destroy penicillin, vinegar can

839
00:47:04,000 --> 00:47:08,640
Speaker 1: destroy penicillin. Is through a simple acid base catalysis, you

840
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:13,799
Speaker 1: can you can hydrolyze penicillin. Well, a beta actomase does

841
00:47:13,880 --> 00:47:17,719
Speaker 1: that much much like many orders of magnitude more efficiently

842
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:22,880
Speaker 1: by having an enzyme. And and that's a key distinction.

843
00:47:23,440 --> 00:47:27,440
Speaker 1: So I think this AI approach, I think I'll reserve

844
00:47:27,560 --> 00:47:28,319
Speaker 1: judgment for sure.

845
00:47:28,960 --> 00:47:30,960
Speaker 2: Maybe by Tuesday, I'll give you homework for.

846
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:34,879
Speaker 1: The more about it. From what I can tell, they

847
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:38,959
Speaker 1: didn't actually nail it, and that would help to show

848
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:41,520
Speaker 1: that even you know, even when you throw millions of

849
00:47:41,520 --> 00:47:44,280
Speaker 1: structures at something and train it, it's not a slam

850
00:47:44,360 --> 00:47:49,080
Speaker 1: dunk that you can reconfigure a protein. But even if

851
00:47:49,120 --> 00:47:53,000
Speaker 1: you could, that's not giving any credence to the idea

852
00:47:53,040 --> 00:47:56,759
Speaker 1: that natural process has just stumbled upon these things. You're

853
00:47:56,800 --> 00:48:01,799
Speaker 1: you're clearly chat GPT is putting out if I ask

854
00:48:01,840 --> 00:48:05,160
Speaker 1: it a question, it's putting out sequences of letters and

855
00:48:05,160 --> 00:48:09,319
Speaker 1: words that are extremely improbable in the space of all probabilities.

856
00:48:09,320 --> 00:48:12,319
Speaker 1: But it's been trained to put out ones that are

857
00:48:12,400 --> 00:48:14,960
Speaker 1: highly improbable, but they conform to the patterns that human

858
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:18,000
Speaker 1: righting do to some extent. It has its flaws for sure.

859
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:24,600
Speaker 1: But there's another interesting angle on AI and that here. Here,

860
00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:29,120
Speaker 1: I think materialism does get a boost from AI, and

861
00:48:29,160 --> 00:48:33,399
Speaker 1: it's the illusion. I think it's an illusory boost, the

862
00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:38,759
Speaker 1: illusion that a machine can think, the illusion if we

863
00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:44,520
Speaker 1: go back to physicalism and AI, they have these huge

864
00:48:44,520 --> 00:48:47,680
Speaker 1: clusters of computers that are doing the training of large,

865
00:48:48,160 --> 00:48:51,120
Speaker 1: large language models and other AIS, and then they have

866
00:48:51,160 --> 00:48:53,719
Speaker 1: powerful computers up in the clouds. So every time you're

867
00:48:53,760 --> 00:48:57,759
Speaker 1: asking a question of Claude or Gemini ORBT, it's there's

868
00:48:57,800 --> 00:48:59,440
Speaker 1: nobody at the other end saying, oh, we got a

869
00:48:59,520 --> 00:49:02,759
Speaker 1: question from Sean. It's a machine that goes in.

870
00:49:02,680 --> 00:49:04,400
Speaker 2: And it spits out the scene.

871
00:49:04,560 --> 00:49:08,000
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there is the appearance that you can have

872
00:49:08,080 --> 00:49:11,800
Speaker 1: a conversation with a machine, and that means there's the

873
00:49:11,880 --> 00:49:15,560
Speaker 1: appearance that a machine can think. Now there, these are

874
00:49:15,560 --> 00:49:18,160
Speaker 1: both false, at least with the richest understanding what a

875
00:49:18,200 --> 00:49:22,120
Speaker 1: conversation is. If he's a part the meaning of that word,

876
00:49:22,160 --> 00:49:25,759
Speaker 1: you're not actually having conversation at all, And certainly the

877
00:49:25,800 --> 00:49:29,120
Speaker 1: machine that's spitting back these words is not thinking at all.

878
00:49:29,960 --> 00:49:34,080
Speaker 1: But there's a powerful illusion, and I think that powerful

879
00:49:34,080 --> 00:49:37,399
Speaker 1: illusion is probably causing a lot of confusion, even among

880
00:49:37,400 --> 00:49:40,879
Speaker 1: peopleho are not material so Christians, you read of these

881
00:49:40,880 --> 00:49:44,480
Speaker 1: people who are like having a relationship with a virtual

882
00:49:45,680 --> 00:49:50,439
Speaker 1: entity that's that's an AI, and it's a sad thing,

883
00:49:50,520 --> 00:49:52,719
Speaker 1: I think, but it's also a very confusing thing. Do

884
00:49:52,800 --> 00:49:55,400
Speaker 1: these people actually believe there's someone on the other end

885
00:49:55,480 --> 00:50:00,680
Speaker 1: of this? It's that we have never had conversation with

886
00:50:01,680 --> 00:50:04,880
Speaker 1: a mere thing. Conversation has always meant there's someone receiving

887
00:50:04,880 --> 00:50:09,000
Speaker 1: my ideas and giving me their ideas, and now it

888
00:50:09,000 --> 00:50:13,080
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that anymore necessarily because when chat gipt is

889
00:50:13,080 --> 00:50:16,960
Speaker 1: spitting back a response, there's no idea, It has no ideas.

890
00:50:17,600 --> 00:50:20,920
Speaker 1: I can interpret what it spit back as ideas, but

891
00:50:21,040 --> 00:50:23,759
Speaker 1: chattept didn't actually have them. So that's something that I

892
00:50:23,800 --> 00:50:26,279
Speaker 1: think needs to be addressed. I'm hoping to address. It's

893
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:29,920
Speaker 1: kind of a philosophical question. What is fundamentally the distinction

894
00:50:30,000 --> 00:50:34,319
Speaker 1: between a machine and a mind? And will once you

895
00:50:34,360 --> 00:50:37,239
Speaker 1: get that distinction right, will AI ever become like us?

896
00:50:37,280 --> 00:50:39,760
Speaker 1: And I say it won't, but it's an interesting question.

897
00:50:39,880 --> 00:50:42,040
Speaker 2: I agree with that. That's a fascinating question. Of course,

898
00:50:42,040 --> 00:50:44,439
Speaker 2: that would point out what Stephen Meyer often points out

899
00:50:44,480 --> 00:50:48,080
Speaker 2: that if you have systems of AI spitting out these

900
00:50:48,360 --> 00:50:53,720
Speaker 2: protein type simulations. There's information already put into that system

901
00:50:53,800 --> 00:50:56,799
Speaker 2: for sure, and of course life from non life. On

902
00:50:56,840 --> 00:51:01,160
Speaker 2: a materialistic system, there can't be any in information input

903
00:51:01,360 --> 00:51:04,880
Speaker 2: at all. So the deck is stacked, is stacked, so

904
00:51:04,960 --> 00:51:08,680
Speaker 2: to speak, and doesn't quite stimulate what needs to be explained.

905
00:51:09,080 --> 00:51:11,520
Speaker 2: All right, So we're gonna wrap up here. Obviously, at

906
00:51:11,520 --> 00:51:14,200
Speaker 2: the beginning we asked the question about the big question,

907
00:51:15,200 --> 00:51:18,319
Speaker 2: what's at stake with this? You've argued that materialism is

908
00:51:18,360 --> 00:51:21,799
Speaker 2: not even close to explaining even a simple protein. We

909
00:51:21,880 --> 00:51:26,239
Speaker 2: have design intuition that points towards this being designed in

910
00:51:26,280 --> 00:51:29,319
Speaker 2: your mind? What follows for the big question? From this

911
00:51:29,680 --> 00:51:31,240
Speaker 2: argument alone?

912
00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:34,400
Speaker 1: If we go back to what or to whom do

913
00:51:34,440 --> 00:51:39,399
Speaker 1: we owe our existence? From this design argument, I think

914
00:51:39,480 --> 00:51:43,839
Speaker 1: you can. It's a robust argument with lots and lots

915
00:51:43,880 --> 00:51:46,080
Speaker 1: of layers. I've contributed a small piece to it, but

916
00:51:46,080 --> 00:51:48,759
Speaker 1: if you get everything that's been done, it's huge. We

917
00:51:48,840 --> 00:51:53,000
Speaker 1: have a staggering case to be made against the idea

918
00:51:53,440 --> 00:51:59,839
Speaker 1: that we are alone in a impersonal cosmos that maybe

919
00:52:00,080 --> 00:52:08,520
Speaker 1: some you know, some quantum foam universe generator belched out

920
00:52:08,880 --> 00:52:11,040
Speaker 1: our universe and it happened to have the right properties

921
00:52:11,080 --> 00:52:15,640
Speaker 1: that life could survive in. And planet Earth is a

922
00:52:15,760 --> 00:52:18,440
Speaker 1: rare planet, but it happened to have properties that allow

923
00:52:18,960 --> 00:52:23,040
Speaker 1: life to exist, and something caused a first cell, and

924
00:52:23,160 --> 00:52:26,480
Speaker 1: all of that, by accident, evolved into us. This can

925
00:52:26,560 --> 00:52:33,600
Speaker 1: now be robustly, rigorously rejected, and that means we're not

926
00:52:33,880 --> 00:52:37,680
Speaker 1: cosmic accidents. That and I think if you just go

927
00:52:37,760 --> 00:52:41,359
Speaker 1: the step of saying intelligent design, okay, some intelligence has

928
00:52:41,440 --> 00:52:43,640
Speaker 1: to be responsible for us being here, that takes you

929
00:52:43,680 --> 00:52:46,759
Speaker 1: a big step toward the truth. But I think you

930
00:52:46,920 --> 00:52:50,160
Speaker 1: also see in what kind of beings are we? Well,

931
00:52:50,200 --> 00:52:54,040
Speaker 1: we're persons, So now I think it's not just some

932
00:52:54,200 --> 00:52:58,799
Speaker 1: like AI type intelligence pseudo intelligence. There has to be

933
00:52:58,920 --> 00:53:03,880
Speaker 1: a personal intelligence behind us because we embody personhood and

934
00:53:04,320 --> 00:53:07,560
Speaker 1: something that doesn't have any conception of personhood would not

935
00:53:07,600 --> 00:53:11,120
Speaker 1: be able to make us. So it takes you, in

936
00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:15,239
Speaker 1: that kind of reasoning, very close to the God that

937
00:53:15,280 --> 00:53:17,320
Speaker 1: we know to be true, the God of Abraham, Isaac

938
00:53:17,360 --> 00:53:20,280
Speaker 1: and Jacob, a personal creator God who had us in mind,

939
00:53:20,640 --> 00:53:25,280
Speaker 1: created us in his image and not just for entertainment.

940
00:53:25,440 --> 00:53:27,840
Speaker 1: But there's a purpose for this. There's a reason that

941
00:53:27,880 --> 00:53:32,400
Speaker 1: we're here, and that gives life a whole lot of meaning,

942
00:53:32,560 --> 00:53:35,320
Speaker 1: even if we go through struggles, and that's when people

943
00:53:35,320 --> 00:53:38,560
Speaker 1: go through hard things, and those are the times, the

944
00:53:38,640 --> 00:53:40,400
Speaker 1: hardest times are the times when we most need to

945
00:53:40,400 --> 00:53:42,000
Speaker 1: be reminded of the truth of who we are and

946
00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:42,640
Speaker 1: where we're going.

947
00:53:42,719 --> 00:53:44,719
Speaker 2: Amen, love it, Love your work. Now you're part of

948
00:53:44,719 --> 00:53:48,160
Speaker 2: this movie coming up called The Story of Everything. I

949
00:53:48,160 --> 00:53:51,040
Speaker 2: saw an early clip of this. You're interviewed, Jay richards

950
00:53:51,080 --> 00:53:54,480
Speaker 2: Is interviewed, John lemox Is interviewed, Stephen Meyers interviewed. It

951
00:53:54,560 --> 00:53:59,000
Speaker 2: is just a first class, top quality case of what

952
00:53:59,040 --> 00:54:02,320
Speaker 2: you demonstrated here, with a lot of visuals beyond it,

953
00:54:02,400 --> 00:54:05,280
Speaker 2: like the not just origin of life, but the fine

954
00:54:05,280 --> 00:54:09,000
Speaker 2: tuning origin of the universe, Like you said, a sophisticated,

955
00:54:09,040 --> 00:54:12,880
Speaker 2: compelling case against materialism. This suggests there might be a

956
00:54:12,920 --> 00:54:15,360
Speaker 2: god and a mind who plays this year for purpose.

957
00:54:15,880 --> 00:54:18,680
Speaker 2: So I want both believers, I want skeptics to go

958
00:54:18,719 --> 00:54:20,880
Speaker 2: watch it and check it out. Doug's been great to

959
00:54:20,880 --> 00:54:24,160
Speaker 2: have you on your book. Undeniable is excellent. It's thoughtful.

960
00:54:24,440 --> 00:54:26,440
Speaker 2: You need to write an update now about ten to

961
00:54:26,560 --> 00:54:29,719
Speaker 2: twelve years removed from it, not that the book needs it,

962
00:54:29,800 --> 00:54:31,680
Speaker 2: but there's been enough time that I'd love to see

963
00:54:31,719 --> 00:54:34,640
Speaker 2: a follow up volume from it. Folks, make sure you

964
00:54:34,719 --> 00:54:37,520
Speaker 2: check out the film in theater support. It's called The

965
00:54:37,560 --> 00:54:40,879
Speaker 2: Story of Everything. It is compelling, it is interesting, bring

966
00:54:40,920 --> 00:54:43,480
Speaker 2: your friends talk about it, go to a meal before

967
00:54:43,640 --> 00:54:46,920
Speaker 2: or even afterwards you can dissect it and make sure

968
00:54:46,960 --> 00:54:50,080
Speaker 2: his subscribe here. We've got a lot more interviews like

969
00:54:50,120 --> 00:54:52,640
Speaker 2: this coming up on the evidence for God, evidence the Bible,

970
00:54:52,719 --> 00:54:56,440
Speaker 2: evidence for the afterlife. And don't forget skeptical or believer

971
00:54:56,600 --> 00:54:59,879
Speaker 2: right in your tough questions, your objections, and I will

972
00:55:00,080 --> 00:55:02,520
Speaker 2: send the best ones to our guests today, Doug Ax

973
00:55:02,560 --> 00:55:06,520
Speaker 2: and we'll be live here Tuesday, four thirty Pacific Standard

974
00:55:06,600 --> 00:55:10,919
Speaker 2: time to take your questions. Mark your calendars. We'll see

975
00:55:10,920 --> 00:55:13,880
Speaker 2: you then. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please

976
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:16,799
Speaker 2: hit that fall button on your podcast app. Most of

977
00:55:16,840 --> 00:55:19,239
Speaker 2: you tuning in haven't done this yet, and it makes

978
00:55:19,280 --> 00:55:22,040
Speaker 2: a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more

979
00:55:22,080 --> 00:55:26,280
Speaker 2: people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review.

980
00:55:26,600 --> 00:55:30,239
Speaker 2: Every review helps. Thanks for listening to The Sean McDowell Show,

981
00:55:30,360 --> 00:55:34,200
Speaker 2: brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University,

982
00:55:34,239 --> 00:55:37,600
Speaker 2: where we have on campus and online programs and apologetic,

983
00:55:37,600 --> 00:55:40,879
Speaker 2: spiritual information, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more.

984
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:43,960
Speaker 2: We would love to train you to more effectively, live, teach,

985
00:55:44,080 --> 00:55:46,879
Speaker 2: and defend the Christian faith today, and we will see

986
00:55:46,920 --> 00:55:48,760
Speaker 2: you when the next episode drops