Paratus

Welcome to Paratus, the broadcast ministry of Veritas International University. Paratus seeks to help Christians develop a biblical worldview, preparing believers to think scripturally and soundly about the Christian faith and our culture. To learn more about Veritas International University, visit our website at ves.edu. That's ves.edu.

Thanks for listening to Paratus, where we defend and discuss unchanging truth and changing times. I'm your host, Luke Betzner. Joining me today on the podcast is doctor Bill Dembski. Welcome, Bill.

Good to be with you.

We're excited to continue a conversation we had you on a couple of episodes ago, and we're really looking forward to the additional content. As we continue this season on Paratus, we're turning our attention again to science and the Christian faith, and we'll be using doctors Holden, Dembski, and Luskin's book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith as our text. Last episode, we explored design in nature with Doctor. Brian Miller and Doctor. Emily Reeves.

Today, we're going to be exploring the case for design. So the idea here is we're going to make a positive case for design as opposed to just a polemic against the other viewpoints. Bill, let me have you say a bit about yourself and your work for the benefit of our audience.

Right. So I'm trained originally as a mathematician. I got my degree in math from the University of Chicago in 1988. But after I got the degree, I just felt that my work was getting real specialized and wasn't gonna have an impact to really advancing the Christian faith in the way I wanted it. I was doing a postdoc at MIT, and that was my first thing out of the blocks after getting my PhD.

And I just had this sense that the scientific world had really rejected Christianity, but rejected it in a way where there was just this sense that we had lost and that there was really nothing left to do. I mean, it's been said that the opposite of love is indifference you know, and not hate, and I would have preferred to see some sort of active negative engagement to the sort of indifference that I was seeing there. And it dawned on me, I think that I had two realizations, one that really the heart of it was design, where we had to be able to see God's handiwork in nature and that so much of science was really being advanced to obscure God's glory in nature. And that the way for me to do this would be through further studies in philosophy. You can tack on the phrase philosophy of in front of just about anything.

And so I thought, well, the issue is science, agency, design. So I decided to do a second doctorate in philosophy of science. And it was in that time that I got to know Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson, the whole emerging intelligent design community, and worked on a dissertation which was called the Design Inference, and I defended it in 1995. I got my PhD in 1996 in philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and then in 1998, I got it published with Cambridge University Press. So it was a big deal.

The reason that was a big deal is that it gave a sound statistical methodology for identifying the effects of intelligence. There's a big difference in science between going qualitative and going quantitative. Qualitative is it kind of looks to me like this, Mount Rushmore, yes, it looks like it's designed. But if you didn't know anything about the artist that created it, are there any features there that with mathematical precision you could say, actually put numbers, statistics on things and say, Okay, this is beyond the reach of chance. You're going to need some other type of explanation.

And so that's where my work in the design inference focused.

Pardon my ignorance here, but it sounds like the case that you made is from an inductive perspective. So you're saying these are things we can generally observe within something that evokes the idea of design, and then you're applying that and scaling that up. Is that a correct way to sort of think about how you were looking at that?

Yeah. I think induction is involved in a sense. There's what you might call an eliminative induction. You see that things just keep not working out. And so then you say, well, maybe this way of doing things isn't working.

My dad used to have an expression, if at first you don't succeed, try something else. But I think there are three main modes of inference that philosophers talk about: induction, deduction, and abduction. Induction is you keep seeing the same sort of pattern and then you form a generalization. All the swans I've seen so far are white, therefore all swans are white. The thing is there are black swans.

So induction, always there's this problem of projecting into the future or just there can be exceptions because you never exhaust the entire space of things. Deduction is more strict mathematical premises to conclusion, and things follow in a very tight logical way. And if the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true as well. But abduction, and that's kind of it sounds kind of funny because you think abduction, you know, it's like kidnapping somebody. But it's a term that Charles Perce, philosopher, introduced.

My colleague, Steve Meyer, I think, prefers inference to the best explanation. And so the idea is you have a set of facts, and then it's what explains those facts best. And so with intelligent design, a definition that I typically give, and I think my colleagues are comfortable with, is that it's the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence. So you will not go to Southwest South Dakota, look at a rock formation that resembles four presidents and say, it's amazing what wind and erosion can do. You know?

Right.

So a different type of explanation.

Let me jump into this part of it because much of our discussion, our university discussion with Discovery Institute, has been about nesting the idea of intelligent design within the alternative or competing theories. And what I really wanna hear from you today, because I think you'll be able to speak to this so well, is aside from all the polemic applications of and implications of intelligent design, if you were just starting from scratch and saying, okay, this is the first voice. Like, if we're gonna... Let's look at it like we're the only ones that have looked at it, not in opposition to x, y, or z. But if I'm just coming straight into a intelligent design worldview, the main question here is what makes an argument for intelligent design a positive argument rather than merely a criticism of evolutionary explanations?

What is that positive argument?

Yeah, the positive argument is that intelligence identifying the effects of intelligence is already part of science. We do this and it's it's a positive or constructive thing when we identify the effects of intelligence. It helps to look at certain other special sciences because evolution is just so contentious. Think of, for instance, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I think everybody would admit that there is a science there.

So we look at signals from outer space and that there can be certain criteria or indicia or patterns that tell us that we've encountered intelligence in a signal. Typically, what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence people do is look for a techno signature, they'll call it, something that will be exemplative of technology. But the thing is, they're looking for something positive. It's not, oh, we can't figure out how signal might have arisen or it might be random radio noise, but maybe not. It's that you are looking for something positive.

And we do this in so many other special sciences, forensic science. Is this foul play or is this death by natural causes? So we draw these distinctions between intelligent causation and, I hesitate to say, non intelligent causation because in some ways, especially if you, let's say, you take a Calvinist position, everything is determined by God. God has his hands in everything. And yet for all we know, there's no clear intelligence involved.

And we draw these sorts of distinctions. Archeology, is that a burial mound or is that just a randomly formed mound? Is that a random chunk of rock or is it an arrowhead? Drawing these distinctions end up being very important to many special sciences.

So does this go back to your statement of eliminative induction where you're not saying that simply because there is a designer and there is a design that every possible thing that shows a semblance of order had direct agency involved. And so therefore, it's a qualified agency. With an eliminative induction,

would think of it more in terms of something like a second law of thermodynamics. So the patent office will no longer accept applications for perpetual motion machines. Why is that? Well, you could say that for the last one hundred and fifty years, every one of those applications has been shown to be bogus. So that would be an eliminative induction.

But the thing is, the second law of thermodynamics gives you also theoretical reasons for saying it can't be done. It's not just that we haven't been successful to this point. And I think that is the stronger position, and that's what I'm really getting at also with these design inferences. So it's not just, oh, we haven't figured out. Because then it becomes a God of the gaps type argument.

Well, there is this natural cause. We still haven't figured it out. You design people. You're just being lazy. You're just not getting down to brass tacks with the natural causes.

But can we say that the types of natural causes you're looking at are insufficient and that we can have theoretical grounds for saying that? And so that, I would say, goes beyond an eliminative induction It's going to say, here are positive reasons for thinking that this can't be done. Science is in the business of this as well, saying certain things can't be done. And second law provides a case in point. But then there are these features in the world.

If we got a long sequence of bits from outer space, we could rule out that they were generated on planet Earth. And when we broke them into eight bit chunks, Unicode, it spelled out Shakespeare's Hamlet. You couldn't at that point just say, well, it's just amazing what random radio noise can do. And even if you don't know who the ultimate source is, there was any sort of supernatural intervention at some point, you'd still know that that sequence needs to be accounted for in terms of intelligence. It doesn't matter what the underlying physical causality is, It still needs to be ascribed to intelligence.

So just just to make sure I'm hearing you correctly on this, you've you've just stated it's not just all the things that we know it isn't. There are things we can predict about what it looks like when it shows up, and that really segues into our positive argument about the ID of these types of events. So we have present day observations. You've given us a couple of examples of that already, like with the radio signals or a theoretical construct where we're able to see a clear evidence of design. But how does intelligent design itself as a science use present day observations of intelligent agents to make testable predictions about nature?

We have the the coin and also, you know, the the conversion to binary. We've talked about that before. But in a non theoretical point, can you give us a real world example of where you've seen that or where some of your colleagues had pulled that out in a particular field of science, whether you've seen it in mathematics or whether you've seen it in philosophy, and you see the merging of those two things to say, hey, this is a real world example. This is something we predicted. This is what showed up.

And they matched.

Okay. Well, let me let me go back to the SETI example search for extraterrestrial intelligence for just a moment, because I think that example puts to rest any idea that intelligent design broadly conceived is untestable. Because if you do get that signal, which has certain markers, the techno signature, you'll be convinced that you're dealing with an intelligence. To deny that there's any sort of testability going on there just seems a matter of bad faith. So then the question is, well, what if we see a signal like that in biology?

Now, it becomes much more dicey there. From a materialistic perspective, sure, there might be alien intelligences. They evolved the same way we did through natural selection, and so they got to a certain level of intelligence, and now they're trying to communicate and find other intelligences in the universe. Okay, that's all fine and well. Problem is, in biology, what would the intelligence there be?

Let's go to the origin of life. You've got this tremendous complexity that's there, the information processing, DNA, RNA, proteins. Where did something like that, how could that have arisen? Now, if you're a materialist, design is out of the picture. You can't have that.

So there has to be some sort of self organizational process that brings that about. We have no idea what that might be. All the origin of life experiments that I know either are just doing stochastic chemistry, just mixing things together and getting nothing much of interest. I think the closest may be the Miller Urey experiments where put some methane, ammonia, hydrogen, got it boiling and sparked it and you got some proteins, but they were tars, so they were totally useless for any sort of biology. If you're trying to do ribozyme engineering, you're going to need RNAs, but there's no natural route to RNA.

So the way you're going to do that is to send off to your local chemical supply company, maybe Amazon will get into that business at some point as well, and then they'll deliver the RNAs that you need. But that doesn't give you a good representation of what would have happened on the early Earth. So you have this tremendous information processing that's going on in the cell. You've got ribosomes that are themselves immensely complicated machines, probably about even the simplest 80 protein parts along with some ribosomal RNAs, which you need in order for the DNA to be transcribed to the RNA and then produce the proteins through these machines. All of that is needed.

If you're lacking any of that, you're not alive. So the very simplest cell is not simple by any stretch of the imagination. It's more complicated than any artifact, any technology we've created, including the LLMs that now are being touted as our replacement technology. And the thing is, what you see inside, even these simplest bacterial cells that presumably got things going, is a code, and a code not just a symbol convention. It's not just that you're typing characters on the keyboard.

It's a relation between two symbol conventions. So when I type, when you send me an email for this, you're typing on a keyboard, you're getting Unicode characters, but then it gets translated to something else in various packets that are sent across the internet with error correction, and then they're reconstituted on my end. That's a code. Actually, codes are going to be going on there. And with DNA to RNA to protein, you have codes.

So you're taking the DNA, turning it into smaller strands then of RNA, and then mapping that onto a protein. Protein, you've got 20 different possibilities. DNA, you've got four possibilities, but they come in triplets, so they're codons, so they're actually 64 possibilities. And there's this mapping between these simple conventions. That's a code.

Codes like this were studied carefully and the fundamental theorems about them were proven. I think I'm probably repeating myself from our last session, but this work was done by Claude Shannon in the late 1940s and then Presto Cenjo, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA as this double helix, and then within a decade, they understand that there is a code there, that there's a code from the DNA to the protein. So where do you get something like this? The codes are, in our experience, the only causal power able to do this is intelligence. We have no naturalistic account of how these codes came about, And these codes are presupposed by life.

So it's not like you could say, well, there was this earlier type of life which then evolved or may have evolved the code. Because if you don't have the code, you don't have life, period. So this is not an argument from ignorance. It's an argument for what we know about, in this case, codes, the causal powers that are behind them, and then the inference to intelligence, inference to the best explanation in this case.

I have a question about that that just sort of struck me, and maybe it's a little bit foolish, but we've talked prior about this resistance to the assignment of agency, particularly intelligent agency. And you made the statement at that point that once one has opened the door to the idea of intelligent design, one is not very far from the creator god. But I'm curious, has there been any movement in evolutionary biology or in some of these other disciplines that are willing to make the assignment of an intelligent agency to some of these micro machines that are operating inside the body that are generating codes for self regeneration or repair. We know they're machines. Have they done that on a microcosm that might be able to then be leveraged or scaled up?

Is anybody looking in that direction?

Yeah. I would say there is in that direction, but, you know, I think you need to consider it very broadly. So there are some extensions of Darwinism. Darwinism or neo Darwinism, which is basically Darwinism with Mendelian genetics, that remains textbook orthodoxy. And they do this in the textbook because they want to keep it simple, because if they tell you what's really going on and the failures of explanation, that's going to make things too muddy for students.

So this is part of the whole indoctrination business that is neo Darwinism. But there are some extensions of it. There's what's called the EES, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, which is looking at some additional mechanisms which give you more than microevolution. So for instance, it seems that there are instances of what was called symbiogenesis. Different cells or organelles can come together and then work together thereafter.

And so you get a real jump in evolution, if you will. And so there are these naturalistic mechanisms, gene doubling, horizontal gene transfer. And so they'll look at these mechanisms, but they still are not information generating mechanisms. If you get two copies of Shakespeare's Hamlet, you don't really have more information than one copy. If you're going to evolve that into James Joyce, then there's still going to be a lot of work that needs to be done.

So that becomes an issue. Then there's a more radical approach. So the EES, I think, is really trying to, it's, I would call it post Darwinian naturalism. Well, what I'm going to describe as well is post Darwinian naturalism, but I think it's trying to hew closer to the spirit of Darwinism and just say, we need these additional mechanisms in order to understand what's really going on in evolution. And then you've got something called the third way of evolution, where they'll have, I think, be still more ambitious in terms of the types of processes they'll ascribe to biological systems.

So James Shapiro, for instance, at the University of Chicago, will talk about natural genetic engineering, and so that basically cells engineer themselves and thereby propel their evolutionary progress. And there is something to that. I mean, it seems that there's an intelligence in the cell itself that will do things and that can promote certain types of changes and evolutionary processes. But the real problem still is where do you get a system that is able to do its own natural genetic engineering? Those are incredibly advanced adaptive systems if they can do that.

And I've interacted with James Shapiro. The first time was actually 1997 at Wheaton College when he was engaging Michael Behe. And so I saw him there. It was part of a chat in the early 2000s, and then I saw him when I lectured at the University of Chicago in 2014. And I always posed that same question to him, where do you get these systems?

And he always punted on it. He would never answer the question. It's like, that's not relevant to my inquiry. Well, you know, but it's certainly logically upstream to your inquiry, and if you don't answer that, you don't really have a complete naturalistic account of what you're doing. And so I think that's the challenge that gets faced.

You don't really get a you've got kind of the strict neo Darwinisms, which says we don't need design at all, or if you will, natural selection is a designer substitute. You know, it can do everything that your designer can do. Well, it can't, And I think we safely lay that to rest. But then there are these additional mechanisms, but they still don't answer that fundamental question. Where do you get systems that can exhibit these mechanisms?

And so the design question doesn't go away. They can try to push it off, take

the

can down the road, but it's still there.

So let me put a finer point on this because it definitely shows that there are some inherent hurdles to the manner in which they're trying to explain the the things that both, for lack of a better way of dividing this, both sides are seeing. The intelligent design folks, They're both looking at the same things, but they're coming to it with different presuppositions, and therefore they're drawing entirely different conclusions. In the chapter that we're looking at, which is Chapter 16, Doctor. Luskin makes a couple of different statements here that I found interesting. I'd love to hear your thought on this is if there's anything that comes to mind.

He specifically states some things happening in the area of cell biology, which we're sort of talking about right now and draws an inference to say that because of intelligence design unique perspective about these machines, as we see actually being machines that are designed, that has implications for how we go about solving health problems as well. And he specifically relates it to the idea of some of the proposed solutions for things like cancer. So it points to it's not just a matter of ideological definitions where you can just afford to land wherever you're going to land with your conclusions, but there may be some real world implications of how one chooses to look at what one is seeing. Do examples of something like that exist where it's not just an ideological fallout where we can afford to say, well, I propose this. This is the best explanation.

But when I'm proposing a scientific solution to a health problem or some other form of problem where my presuppositions really, really matter and they drive workable solutions as opposed to failed theoretical predictions.

Yeah. Oh, I think that's right. And I think that's also a big challenge because I remember years ago, over two decades ago, I was talking to a fellow, his name was Zion Barrel, I don't know if he's still around, but he was involved in an engineering problem solving approach called TRIZ, T R I Z. It emerged out of The Soviet Union patent examiners would look at technological evolution, how technologies evolved and what sorts of problems they would need to solve. And you would have kind of incremental changes, small changes, then you could have more moderate changes, and then revolutionary changes, and just also different techniques for brainstorming.

But what you found often was that you had some design that worked well, and then you just kept slight modifications of it, and then you had some fundamental new insight, and then it took the field forward. But I recall talking to him about intelligent design and him stressing, What problems are you solving? If you can say, This perspective is more fruitful, ideally get scientists to vote with their feet. Now, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that because I think many scientists who are not engaged in evolutionary storytelling but actually trying to build things, understand things, they are tacitly doing intelligent design work. They're looking for certain types of design features, and then most chemists, you know, if you think of CRISPR, this new, reasonably new technology for gene splicing, you know, it's not going to be used randomly willy nilly.

It's going to be very intentionally used given the understanding of the scientists. So I think there's a sense in which all this engineering is already going on, but there is this sense in which then if you try to give an account or a more overarching account of what you're doing, then you have to tell an evolutionary story, a Darwinian story, and so you put that sort of spin on it. And so it can actually get quite amusing if it wasn't so downright dishonest. But I remember one paper which was making an intelligent design argument, and then they added in the abstract. But this paper has nothing to do with intelligent design.

It's as though the editor just made sure that it had to go in there. I know one engineer, world class guy, who just wrote an article, in fact, I can name him because he's public about this, Stuart Burgess. He's got a wonderful book, Ultimate Engineering, which I'll plug, where he looks at the human body and says that it is just an amazing repository of design and that the sorts of things that the body does are way beyond anything that robotics has to offer at this point. But he ended up submitting a paper on human joints because they're so much more complicated than robotic joints and actually a reconceptualization of this. I think it just got published in September of this year.

But it took about fifteen months to get published because he insisted on having a paragraph in there which says, This gives credence to intelligent design, and an evolutionary explanation doesn't do it. So it was like one or two paragraphs and the editors objected to it. They would have published it much sooner, but the paper was so good he decided it was worth hunkering down and just saying, no, this has to stay there. But I was just reading a book. What is it?

Think, what is it, Garrison Lovely AI Critique. And he has to give a little evolutionary explanation of how our minds or brains are constituted and how this relates to artificial intelligence. And it's totally unfounded. There's no evidence for the sorts of claims he's making other than that's what rough some story like that would have to be true if Darwin is right. But Darwin isn't right.

You know, so we see all these stories and it's like this ritualistic obeisance to to Darwin and this naturalistic point of view. If I could just, because I do want to respond to your point about problem solving. One example of an intelligent design theorist, James Tour, is that he has taken, he looks at cancer and he has a way of, I mean, he's been working with molecules that can attach to the cancer and then spin at incredibly high rates, and then it ends up being a mechanical way rather than a chemical way of destroying cancer. So basically, it's like putting the cancer in a blender. So that is interesting.

So I'd say it's inspired by intelligent design, but I could see a naturalist coming up with that as well. Something that's, I think, a bit more straightforwardly intelligent design inspired is to say, if Darwinism or these naturalistic, gradualistic approaches to evolution are true, then evolution can only proceed at a certain rate. So if you're looking at something like a bacterium developing antibiotic resistance or a parasite developing resistance to some chemical, so for instance, plasmodium that does malaria. And then you can say, well, if we can come up with a chemical that requires two or three coordinated mutations in order to knock that chemical out, then it's going to resist the resistance because you've got too much to evolve through, too many changes that you need to get because typically with Darwinism, it's one change at a time and they have to accumulate. That's why Richard Dawkins will refer to natural selection as cumulative selection.

The problem is when you have to get these changes coordinated at the same time. So that's a perspective that Intelligent Design would give you to say, let's come up with chemical, medical approaches that will require of these systems that they must get coordinated mutations or changes at the same time, which will then make it hard for natural selection to overcome that. Natural selection, by the way, mean, it does work. Mean, resistance is something that follows natural selection, but it's this incredible creative power that's ascribed to it by the Darwinians. That's really the problem or the macroevolution.

And that's really where I want to put the finer point. It references what you were saying earlier, how that these people that are coming from an evolutionary perspective are nonetheless doing some of the legwork for what one would expect someone from an intelligent design perspective to do, which belies something that goes all the way back to on origin of species, where he's talking about how he can observe the very specific adjustments that have been made by people who are doing animal husbandry or plants and things like that. And then he says, well, if man can do this, well, nature can do it better. But I would look at this even though, you know, they say it takes more time. The very fact that nature doesn't seem to be doing any of the lifting, not even the light lifting, the heavy lifting, and that every advance in human health and every advance in all these things has always been husbanded by the organism itself.

Man, the the disappearance of species that everybody bemoans. If natural selection was a positive thing that's happening through an undirected agency, if one can say that, then why is it? I would think that even the work of scientists themselves belie the incapability of the natural environment to reach these same ends without an intelligent guide. Is that something that puts a finer point philosophically on saying, well, if evolution does all the heavy lifting, then why do we have science at all? Why do we have people who are trying to propose solutions as opposed to just saying, well, let it happen because it's gonna land on the best process.

And yet we constantly see from the example you gave from tours that we're having to go through and mitigate the things that are naturally happening through the decay of the genome, through all of these other things where diseases are multiplying or weaknesses are showing up generationally that men are proposing solutions to, not that nature is making better.

Yeah. So I think we want to be sure to distinguish evolution broadly construed, because, I mean, you could have a God guided evolution where God is actually intervening and messing with, the DNA right then and there. So it's a naturalistic form of evolution that we're talking about. And if you're a Darwinist, the natural selection is the key to everything. So then the question is, how much can it really do?

And it seems very, very limited in terms of what it can actually do. And to your point about artificial selection, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, artificial selection gives you a lot of advantages that you don't have with natural selection. You can take a huge population, focus on just those traits that you want, and kill everything else off. Usually in nature, that wouldn't happen.

To what degree because he uses artificial selection as an intuition pump for natural selection. So is that a fair comparison? I think you're right, it isn't. But I think where Darwin would go is to say, but yeah, we do artificial selection over very short time frames. Here we've got eons for natural selection to work, and so that added time can make up the difference.

But that's a question. Can it really make up the difference? This is a point that I've been discussing with some colleagues lately, is the rate of evolution, natural selection, other evolutionary mechanisms. How quickly do genetic changes accrue? How quickly can they fixate in a population?

What happens when you have a divergence of two populations and then speciation and it goes on? How much can actually happen? Is there a rate of evolution, and is the rate such that it can actually accomplish what it needs to within a given time frame? If I need to get from New York to LA, it's about 3,000 miles, and if I can run 20 miles an hour, but I need to get there in twenty four hours, I'm not going to be able to do it. I think there are these mathematical barriers that we can consider, and I think some of them, I think these are going to become more and more compelling as we see, we understand what these various evolutionary mechanisms are actually capable of.

So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like while the person who goes through a standard you know, k through 12 education may come out of that textbook Darwinism with this idea of uncapped amounts of time, when they start entering into the real world of scientific endeavor, it's not an unfair thing. It's not a polemic trick to say, hey. The prediction only allows for this much time. The time was never uncapped. There are real times that are predicated that we can't get around.

It still has to play by its own rules. And then by the way, within those time barriers, it doesn't happen. That's not a polemic trick that we're pulling. This is stuff that's coming from from their predicate.

Yeah. Well, and I think what's always in these sorts of arguments, what you want to do is make sure nobody's cheating and I'll give as much time as could possibly be allowed. So I'm not a young earth creationist, but if you're a young earth creationist, you have under ten thousand years for everything on earth to happen. So in a sense, none of this evolution that the Darwinists described could happen. But for the sake of argument, it seems it makes sense to say, Okay, let me give you six million years between the last common chimp human ancestor and then see, is it possible for the genetic changes that we see between the chimps and humans for that to have come about in six million years or nine million years?

And some of the arguments I'm looking at right now say it's just absolutely insane to think that that, you know, given the number of genetic changes there are, the fixations, makes no sense to think that that could happen by purely naturalistic processes. So some of this argumentation is giving the Darwinists every or Darwinism every chance to succeed and then still showing that it can't can't work.

And I think that's a fair argument threshold. Like, if we're really going to be intellectually honest, as you stated, we have to say, well, let's see if it collapses under its own weight. And it sounds like as of right now, there's really not a good bunch of, stanchions to prop it up or even predictions that has come down. So I wanna shift gears just a little bit here into a different area of science, really about paleontology. And if you're aware of some of the items there that has classically been described as one of the biggest obstacles that Darwin's theory has, and he admitted it himself in his book that if someone had been able to interpret the data of the fossil record sufficiently differently than him and his theories were shown to be wrong, that he allegedly stated this would be the biggest threat to his theory.

So when we look at explosions of biodiversity as, you know, as described, as well as mass extinction extinction events, how does the intelligent design perspective typically account for things like that within the paleontological records?

Yeah. Well, extinction is is never a problem. I mean, if we think of the history of life, I want to be careful, what I was going to say is a type of technological evolution, because we do have examples of technological evolution. Take the phone of Alexander Graham Bell. That was a revolution in terms of sending voices down a wire.

But then we have the cell phone now, and that takes it to a whole different level, but there's still some sort of continuity there with these technologies. So technological evolution, it happens that technologies go extinct. Mean, horses and buggies used to be very common. I guess they're not extinct, but for all practical purposes in terms of people getting around, except for maybe Amish community and nothing, I don't mean negative there. But my point is just there are these technologies that go extinct and there are nobody questions, though, that these technologies were designed.

And so organisms, if organisms are designed, it makes sense that they could also go extinct. But then the question is, where do you get things in the first place? One example I like to give is cave fish that have lost the use of their eyes. Now they've got eye nubs. Use it or lose it, that's not a big explanatory hurdle.

The question is, where did you get the eyes in the first place so that you could lose them? And so then to come to your point about these various biological explosions, the biggest one and the one that Darwin was most familiar with was the Cambrian explosion, where you have basically about 40 different types of body plans that emerge suddenly, so very different forms. A starfish compared to an insect body plan, which has the hard stuff on the outside compared to something like a vertebrate body plan, which has the hard stuff on the inside, the bones and the soft stuff on the outside, worms and so on. So all these different animal body plans, on a Darwinian common descent account, they all have to be evolutionarily related. They're all cousins at some level.

Okay, what's the connection there? Well, in the Cambrian explosion, these different body plans emerge suddenly, suddenly in the sense that boom, they're just there and there's no evident evolutionary precursors. So what are the possibilities there? Well, it's just maybe the Precambrian precursors that connected everything just got lost in some way. But it seems that fossilization is actually pretty good, that even with some Precambrian organisms, get things get fossilized.

So that's a tough one. For Darwin, was, well, another possibility was, well, we just haven't looked hard enough. Well, we've had another one hundred and fifty years and we've looked and we really haven't made much progress. Different body plans are as disconnected as they ever were.

So if I'm hearing you correctly on this, it sounds like they've created a hang up for themselves because they are postulating common ancestry and intelligent design doesn't have that hang up because it doesn't need them to all be related to one another in some strange way other than by the designer. Is that am I hearing you correctly?

That's right. But even within an intelligent design perspective, I mean, have somebody like Michael Behe who will hold to common ancestry, but then presumably, the design had to get expressed very quickly. So maybe there's it's like a computer program that is set to go off at a certain date. And so somehow there's this genetic potential and then suddenly these organisms all change. That's a possibility.

I don't hold to it. I much more hold to the idea of discrete creation events because that's what it seems to me is what the evidence, the fossil evidence points to. But I think there are ways to hold to common ancestry within a design perspective, but then you are going to have to have some sort of very rapid and then concerted change, where these different where there's some sort of biological program, I'm thinking in the computer sense, kicks in at a certain time. It's like a computer virus that 01/01/2000, you know, it's going to kick in or something.

So sort of like a functional event that has a specific, but not necessarily a directed impact upon all the organisms that change them in a particular way within their existing genetic variety? Is that... Or with

it? You know, even to... For you to say it that way, I mean, it seems seems pretty implausible. We don't have any evidence for anything like that. But I'm just saying that would at least make sense within an intelligent design perspective and could account for how you could have some form of common ancestry.

The problem is, for Darwinism, it's a gradualistic theory, so that's not an option. So if it's gradualism, basically there has to be this kind of morphing, melding of different organisms, and you're going to have to have a worm, a starfish, a human, all of these have to be connected to some last common ancestor. So what was that? And it's not enough to say that it was a single cell, a bacterium. There's got to be something closer.

These are animals, sexual reproduction, all of that. So what was the common ancestor there? And Darwinists have nothing like that. So there's incompleteness of the fossil record. There's inadequate search.

Another possibility rooted by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge is this punctuated equilibrium where somehow all the evolution takes place in these isolated pockets where some organisms separate themselves, and then that's where things evolve, where the evolution takes place. But because they are these small pockets, they don't fossilize, or very rarely will they fossilize because you're not getting a complete panorama of that organism. Just have that little pocket that's evolving. So it's very convenient. I mean, basically, the theory is saying it's giving you a reason why you should not expect to see evolutionary connectedness.

But for somebody who doesn't buy into the naturalistic picture, it's like, well, that's just too convenient, isn't it? I mean, basically you have a scientific theory that explains why it's immune to evidence, you know, if I want to be cynical about it.

Well, it sounds like it goes back to your differentiation before about the abduction that's happening there, where they're telling an evolutionary story, but there isn't necessarily any evidence by which that can be proven, sort of like having a theorem without any proofs. And so while it's a viable explanation to support their perspective, it doesn't sound like it's able to be investigated.

Yeah, I mean, and I think it's I mean, if we're talking abduction and inference to the best explanation, you know, in what sense is it even a good explanation at that point? You know, it just it seems like, to me, special pleading, it's trying to make things, trying to shore up the theory and perspective, you know, a naturalistic perspective at all costs. I mean, Stephen Jay Gould, he was I heard him speak. He was dyed in the wool naturalist, believed in the contingency of humans. Why do we have five fingers?

Well, it could have been six fingers. It's Why are humans the most intelligent being? Maybe it would run the tape of life again, and it's a giant cockroach. We're two cockroaches talking to each other instead of humans. But yeah, to me, appreciate the conversation that we're having.

If you were to have a conversation with a Darwinist, or if we had a Darwinist on this program, they would be putting up a fight and conceding no ground, pushing back on everything.

And that's... I think that's really unfortunate because it seems to me that, again, as I've mentioned in a previous episode, it's like Cyrano de Borgiaq, you know, methinks he protesteth over much. That doesn't seem like there's anything inherent in the types of things that we're discussing that should require the pushback. And the pushback seems to be a preventative for what is clearly in view down the road, not necessarily what's happening in the the scientific endeavor itself, especially if they're using similar methods and doing that. They just...

They want to stop these conclusions. And as the chapter states, they consider scientific design or intelligent design, excuse me, a science stop. And it's literally what one gentleman has has described it to be. And that just seems really unfortunate. So let me just ask a couple more questions as we're wrapping up here.

We've discussed a little bit about how intelligent design already can guide productive scientific research, and that is being used tacitly by, folks who would not consider themselves in any way, shape, or form intelligent design advocates. So when it comes to intelligent design itself, not to entirely try to differentiate it from everything else that's happening in the scientific community because I don't think that's what intelligent design is trying to do. They're just advocating for the scientific method is what it sounds like. What kinds of research programs are able to happen within that viewpoint explicitly that we can point to and say, okay. Well, maybe the evolutionists are up in Michigan doing experiments on bacteria, they're on their thirty millionth generation, etcetera, etcetera, and they still haven't found anything but bacteria.

Okay. Well, they're looking for something that they're probably not gonna find as sort of like an amplification of the fruit fly experiments. On the other hand, what are some of the major things that are being done in intelligent design that are bearing fruit because of their unique predicate and their unique predictions that are explicitly not Darwinistic?

Yeah. Well, I would say I'm hesitating. It's I would say the intelligent design community is pretty thin on the ground still, if you look at, you know, just the numbers at the Discovery Institute. So I would say there's a lot of intelligent design research that is being done outside the intelligent design community, although it's not going to be called that. So for instance, if you backtrack about twenty years, junk DNA was a big deal, Okay?

About 90% or so of human DNA was regarded as junk. It was basically just DNA, largely random stuff that was being carried along for the ride because it was just easier to keep copying it than try to rigorously edit it out. Now, I made a prediction actually as far back as 1998 that we should be looking for function because that's the default design theoretic research. So you had somebody, I mean, Richard Dawkins was going off about this around 2005, Francis Collins, theistic evolutionist but died in the wool, Darwinist nonetheless, was going on about junk DNA, and that unless we accepted evolutionary theory, we'd have to think that God basically put, if we were designed people, that God put this misleading stuff into the DNA, which was just not doing anything. Well, fast forward to about 2012, 2014, and you have this ENCODE project, E N C O D E, in which suddenly you find that about 80%, 85% of human DNA is transcribed and seems to be serving some function.

And that's been the pattern since, because there's a lot more going on than just coding for proteins. There's a lot of regulatory mechanisms going on with how the DNA gets expressed, there are epigenetics that are involved. And so suddenly, junk DNA is a dead concept. Well, we could have told you that, we predicted that. So there are, I can give you the reference, I said it explicitly in 1998.

So I think there are predictions that we can make. There are expectations that we can do on the basis of intelligent design. There are all sorts of things that we can look at. If you're a designer, you can design things from scratch. You don't have to have everything does not need to have to be a gradual sequence of modifications from what precedes.

And so what you find is there are these orphan genes where you've got genes that appear in various organisms that have no connection with anything else that's out there in other organisms. So how do you get these types of genes? That's something you would expect on a design paradigm. You would not expect it on a gradualistic evolutionary. No, I mean, it's, and so I think there are just things like this.

Digital data embedding technologies. We'll look at how you embed information with information, maybe steganography, where you've got an image, but then you get a message that's somehow encoded or watermarked in there. Well, people have now watermarked DNA, but we've got examples of DNA where you change the reading frame and suddenly you're coding for proteins. So in a sense, you're getting twice as much information in pretty much the same sequence. It's kind of like what happens with a crossword puzzle.

You can read it in two directions, and you basically get twice the information than you might by just reading it in one direction. So you've got this type of information packing that's going on in density. So if you will, the junk DNA people were saying maybe 5%, 10% of the genome does anything, so the information density would then only be about five or 10%. And code is telling us it's closer to 100, but then when you start looking and seeing these changes in reading frame where you're getting basically, you just are moving one DNA over and then you do the triplets after that, and then you have something that is being read and leads to a protein. Or you have what are called hetero palindromes.

So basically a palindrome reads the same way forward and backwards. So my son used to wear, or I think he still does, a t shirt that's Taco Cat. Well, Taco Cat read backwards is Taco Cat. Well, that's a regular palindrome, but a hetero palindrome means you're reading it forward and back, forwards and backwards, and it's meaningful in both directions. So stressed, if you read it backwards, is desserts.

Okay? And so this sort of information packing is something, there's no way you should expect that on a Darwinian or naturalistic account. There's a cleverness there that exceeds any sort of survival value or anything.

A divine pun, as it were.

Divine humor or designer's humor, whoever the designer may happen to be. Yeah.

So we've covered a lot of ground on this, Bill. I mean, we've been able to illustrate from several different scientific perspectives the the value of a positive case for design. So as we wrap this up, what are some of the big, just a couple of big takeaways, your final thoughts on the positive case for design?

Yeah, well, I think probably the biggest thing to take away is that this is a science versus science controversy, or even science versus religion, where the religion is Darwinism. Sometimes I think that they are the cult. But given that doing science, natural selection does operate, it does cause antibiotic resistance, so that it's a science versus science. But what they want to say is that as soon as you bring in the designer, you're outside the realm of science, and I would say that is absolutely false. In many special sciences that require designers, and so if there is intelligence evident in biology, then we need to deal with that.

And not just intelligence in the organisms. There's a distinction that's made these days between what's called teleonomy and teleology. Teleonomy is the goal directedness of the organism, but teleology is, is there a goal that was given to the organism and to the environment? And teleonomy is really a weasel word in this context because it tries to get away from the idea, is there some real design purpose teleology there? And so back to the point, this is a science versus science controversy, and people who try to say that intelligent design is not testable, it's not science, they are blowing smoke.

I think we can hold our own, but that is still where the debate is. So if you look me up, the very first thing is on Wikipedia is that Bill Dembski is advocating the pseudoscience of intelligent design, which is just creation. And so creationism is a dirty word because it says that in this context, because it's basically saying that it's purely a religious view. Creation is a religious perspective because it's saying that a creator God brought things about. But intelligent design is not it's saying that there's an intelligence there.

Who that or what that intelligence is, is a further point to be discussed and investigated. But that you're dealing with an intelligence can be a perfectly scientific question without then getting into the identity of that. But then the other side, they'll say, Well, you're just being coy, because we all know that you really mean God. Well, most of my colleagues are Christian, but I can turn it around. Stephen Jay Gould, he once remarked that ever since Darwin, know that we were not created in the image of a benevolent God.

So if he was in his right to draw atheistic implications from Darwinian theory, I would say I'm every bit as much in my right to draw theistic implications from intelligent design, and that neither undercuts the science of what we're doing. The science of what we're doing has to depend ultimately on the evidence, the theoretical foundations, and rigorous inquiry. And I think that's what needs to decide it.

Yeah, it seems like it would definitely be something that's solved by the application of method, not necessarily the conclusion that one draws from the rigorous application of the method, and both people could share in that. So this has been an incredible tour de force through a number of things that we've discussed, and it's been my pleasure to host you on this. But as with all of our episodes, we wanna encourage our listeners to dig deeper into the topic. I know you'd put a plug in earlier for a book, but, Bill, what books would you recommend for someone who wants to explore the positive case for design further?

Yeah, well, having the book that you've been describing, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, I think that's a great place to start. And I am going to give a plug to my book, The Design Inference, that I mentioned. There was a 1998 version of it, which I published with Cambridge University Press, but this is the second edition, which is much expanded and I think much more user friendly. And even though there is some technical work in there, there's a lot that I think the general reader will appreciate, and I think it really lays out the method of design detection. I think this is to your point about the method.

Methods really shouldn't care where they end up applying and where they're successful. So this method applies to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It could tell us whether we're dealing with an alien intelligence or not. To date, there's been no clear signal that has totally confirmed that is out there. But closer to home with biology, it seems that when this method is focused, it does tell us that we're dealing with intelligence in biology.

But I think that's precisely what I've also faced such stiff resistance from people about my work on intelligent design, because it's one thing if the method is applied to areas that are unthreatening to the naturalist, but when you start looking at biology or cosmology fine tuning, who or what could the intelligence there be? And it's going to be an unevolved intelligence, and so suddenly naturalism materialism has to go by the board. That's very threatening to people who hold to a materialistic and naturalistic worldview.

That makes perfect sense. Bill, thank you for the recommendations on this. And to our audience, if you're enjoying what you're hearing on Paratus, we encourage you to help support our outreach endeavors. Simply go to ves.edu and click the donation button on the top right side of the page. All donations are tax deductible and will help you think deeply, stand firmly, and live purposefully.

Also, do not forget to go to discovery.org and check out doctor Dembski's work. I know you'll find plenty of profitable material there as well as the work of many of his colleagues. Join us next episode as we address fine tuning with Drs. Brian Miller and Bruce Gordon. Until then, may the Lord richly bless you.

You've been listening to Paratus, the broadcast ministry of Veritas International University. To learn more about Veritas International University, visit our website at ves.edu. That's ves.edu. Or call (505) 407-4307. That's (505) 407-4307.