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

who's dead God or Charles Darwin Michael behe a biochemist John Lennox a mathematician Stephen Meyer a geophysicist filming today in fies only Italy uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University Michael B he holds an undergraduate degree from Drexel and a doctorate in Biochemistry from Penn he's the author of a number of books including Darwin's Black Box Emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford John Lennox grew up in Northern Ireland earned his undergraduate degree from Emanuel College Cambridge and then went on to earn not one and not two but three doctorates in an academic career of astounding distinction Dr Lennox is the author of many books including the 2019 volume can science explain everything a former professor of geophysics at Whitworth College Stephen Meyer is now a fellow at The Discovery Institute he holds a doctorate of the philosophy of science from Cambridge Dr Meyer has published again many books including his 2013 volume on the fossil record Darwin's doubt Michael John and Steve welcome first question Darwin versus Einstein Einstein publishes the special theory of relativity in 1905 and in the 12-ish decades since that publication one observation after another has tended to confirm his work just a decade ago scientists found clocks on satellites in elliptical orbits kept time just about as Einstein would have predicted over time to put it crudely Einstein has become easier and easier to believe Darwin publishes on the origin of the species in 1859 briefly as was true of Einstein also of Darwin has he become easier and easier to believe Michael no the opposite the opposite John the exact time listen Stephen theory has been progressively disconfirmed by multiple observations in multiple sub-disciplines of biology all right all three of you come out swinging uh gentlemen you're about to take a Layman through three problems with Darwin that the last few decades have turned up problem one Stephen this is for you feel free to join in but this one for Stephen particularly the fossil record the Cambridge Cambrian how's it pronounced either way all right the Cambrian or the Cambrian explosion what was it and why is it a problem for Darwin it was a problem that Darwin himself knew about in 1859 the Cambrian explosion is the uh refers to an event the history of life in which the major groups of animal forms the new body plans that are exemplified by the largest categories of different types of animals appear very abruptly in the fossil record with no discernible connection to ancestral precursors or intermediates in the lower Precambrian strata and this pattern of abrupt appearance of the major groups of organisms of biological or morphological Innovation as it's called recurs up and down the sedimentary rock column the first ins winged insects the first dinosaurs the first Birds the first mammals the first flowering plants there are multiple instances of this type of abrupt appearance and so the fossil record looks very different than Darwin anticipated that it would look he depicted the history of Life as a great branching tree where the the forms of life we see today emerged gradually from one or very few simple forms at the base of the tree at the trunk of the tree but instead what we see it looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees where the major groups of organisms appear abruptly without connections to those ancestral precursor forms so the Cambrian explosion was the first that got noticed as you say Darwin himself noticed that this was a problem but this is from my reading add to it or correct me as I've got it the record shows one abrupt of corrupt meaning a few million years but in the geologic time that's the blink of an eye one abrupt event after another photosynthesis just all of a sudden it's there the Avalon explosion the great ordovician biodiversification event whatever that may have been the silurian devonian terrestrial explosion fish appear Birds appear dinosaurs appear mammals appear okay so the obvious objection to this is well we've only really been digging since about Darwin's time the Earth is Big geologic time is essentially endless there are fossils there we just haven't found the intermediate forms right that's an objection to the claims about fossil discontinuity that's known as the artifact hypothesis this idea is that the the missing ancestral forms are an artifact either of incomplete sampling yes or incomplete preservation right the Cambrian explosion itself poses a presents a very nice test of that artifact hypothesis the claim with respect to sampling is that the uh we haven't looked long enough or 160 years on now from the Cambrian or from from the publication of the Origin of Species and the the the Cambrian explosion from our point of view has become even more explosive there are more new forms of life no more new animal forms known now in that Cambrian explosion event than there were In Darwin's time and yet with that passage of time we've found no more of the the intermediate so there are more new forms still all of which are still lacking intermediate forms instead of our findings regressing to some sort of darwinian mean they're departing from Darwin more and more and more right quickly uh one last notion here one last question on this um before I turn to my big problem in life maths with with John Lennox um punctuated equilibrium Stephen J Gould the late and by all accounts great he seems to have been a dynamic teacher he was certainly prolific the great biologist Stephen J Gould who held well you tell me what punctuated equivalent equilibrium held and why it doesn't answer the problem well it was it was a wonderful uh new idea Gould and another paleontologist uh Niles Eldridge formulated this theory in the late 1970s and what they were trying to do is describe the fossil record more accurately and what they saw and what paleontologists saw then and see now even more distinctly is this pattern of abrupt appearance and what they called stasis that the basic form of an animal the basic body plan will remain constant through long periods of time either going extinct or continuing to the present day there would be variation within the constraints of a body plan but limited variation the crocodile appears appears and remains and remains all right and um and so what what they suggested was that there's the there are these punctuation events where you have this sudden appearance and then this long period of equilibrium of stasis um and uh but they wanted to maintain that Evolution takes fifth place and fits and starts exactly Evolution takes place and fits and starts and so it was a wonderful uh improvement in our description of the fossil record but the problem was that golden Eldridge never came up with a mechanism that convinced their colleagues in evolutionary biology that that uh that Evolution could occur so quickly there was no it was a good description of the fossil record without a mechanism to explain how that amount of change could occur in those short numbers meteor smacks the Earth wipes out the dinosaurs and creates an ecological niche yes it creates space for new species to emerge and so suddenly they do well extend I don't persuade these two are chuckling the problem is you have to build the animal and this is the second part of the in when I wrote the book of Darwin Stout I talked about two big Mysteries one is the mystery of the missing fossils but the second is the mystery of how the evolutionary process generates the new biological form because what we know now as in our computer world if you want to generate a new form of life you have to have a lot of new information in the computer World want to get a new program got to have new code same thing is true in life where's the code come from just opening up the niche doesn't explain the origin of the information necessary to build a new animal form to fill it all right now we come to mass the mathematical problem maths was always my weakest subject and I am extremely conscious that I'm speaking to the Emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University all right so let me just put in layman's terms as best I can and I have worked on it what I take to be the mathematical problem that has emerged in recent decades with Darwin we know now something about when life seems to have emerged something between four and five billion years ago we now know quite a lot about the rate at which random genetic mutations take place Darwin's theory suggests that Evolution arises because random genetic mutations take place in natural selection acts on them we also know quite a lot about how complicated it is to create proteins that function proteins chains of amino acids a couple of hundred and longer and the math simply doesn't work from the beginning of time to the present there is some number of mutations that had to have taken place to create the life that we see around us and it just doesn't add up is that right roughly it's much worse than that because I think one of the very important things and I'm not a biologist but I do study the biologists as carefully as I can is that Darwin's theory whatever it does or doesn't do says zero about the origin of life he didn't claim to speak about the origin he always presumes that the pre-existence of a form from which other things involved but unfortunately for many years Richard Dawkins obscured everything obfuscated the whole situation this is the Oxford biology that's that's right because he said that natural selection which Darwin discovered and he describes this as a blind automatic process yes is responsible for the Existence and variation of all of life now he later admitted took far too long to do it that evolution in the darwinian sense cannot be responsible for the origin of life for the simple reason is that Evolution whatever it does or doesn't do presupposes the existence of life right so you have two separate problems here one is the origin of Life which will come to that one I promise back to the origin of information as Stephen has mentioned but the second is just the sheer calculation now you mentioned things in your questioning that have to do with the origin of Life proteins and so on and I one of my examiners at Cambridge was Sir Fred Hoyle and he came to Cardiff where I was a lecturer many years ago and he shocked Everybody by he just stood up and said to an absolutely packed crowd because he was famous he said life cannot have originated on Earth and there was a a collective gasp and he said I've done the calculations and mathematically it is something impossible there isn't enough time and I actually have a copy of those calculations at home and he just said that it's quite obvious if you do the calculations and he puts it very simply and pregnantly you know rabbits produce rabbits and very little else and what is mathematics I think showed him was that the innocent aspect of evolution which we can all accept that is you get minor variations on a theme which Michael here has dealt with so successfully in his book The Edge Of Evolution that's non-controversial but once you go beyond that and think of new animals new body plans all of that kind of thing darling's book is the Origin of Species yes that's the Origin of Species but I think you know what cuts all this for me now is not what the mathematicians are saying but what they're mathematically conscious biologists are saying now one of my friends in Oxford is a very distinguished biologist Professor Dennis Noble and he has just been absolutely clear he said neo-darwinism that is the modern synthesis that the standard textbook theory that we all learn natural selection and mutation doesn't need to be improved it needs to be replaced and he almost was quoting someone like Lynn margulis another very distinguished person who said it's dead so these are people who know about the calculations who know about the complexity I'm saying from that perspective it's dead all right so I Fred Hoyle we should add was a very famous mid-century mid-last century astronomer yes that's right all right Michael problem three for this little Layman cellular biology can you just tell us about irreducible this is your your sort of thing signal concept irreducible complexity and the story of the mouse trap sure uh well I might start might be good to start by saying that Darwin and folks in his day didn't know much about the cell right they had crummy microscopes it looked like a little piece of jelly and they knew nothing about molecules and we now know that tiny and Elementary also meant simple to them so yes biologically that's correct so like jello or a jelly they thought it might just Bubble Up from the sea but modern science in the past 70 or so years has shown that this the cell is run by molecular machines real machines made of molecules and really sophisticated ones where there are machines that act as propellers machines that act as trucks to bring supplies from one side of the cell to the other side of the cell so when you when you magnify these days we don't know enough about cells to know that they're not little Blobs of jello that's right you get inside a cell and you're looking at a city uh yeah pretty much yeah that's right it's got electrical apparatus it's got Vehicles it's got information it's got all sorts of things and the problem with irreducible complexity is if you think about it Machines are made of different parts say a lawn mower it's got a you know blade it's got a motor Wheels stuff like that but Darwin always insisted that his theory had to work by numerous successive slight modifications had had to be very very gradual but if you try to build a machine like a lawnmower or a mouse trap uh I like The Mousetrap because that's so simple even I can get it in mind yeah yeah just think of a mechanical mouse trap it's got a number of different pieces now if you wanted to build something like that slowly and have each per each each part or each intermediate work you've got a big problem because it needs all of the parts to work it needs a spring a wooden base a couple other metal parts and I and just to capture that concept I invented the phrase irreducible complexity because it's complex can't reduce it or take away one piece and it just doesn't and the mouse trap doesn't work therefore it could not the mouse trap take away one piece from one of these fantastically complicated machines in a Cell all right it doesn't function and therefore could not have conferred an Adaptive Advantage right and it could not be built gradually and improving each step of the way intermediate stages confer no functional Advantage therefore there's nothing for natural selection to select on the way from the simple to the complex Michael does that what interests me greatly about that is the granule building up is a stepwise Ascent whereas am I right and saying that contemporary biologists like Dennis Noble whom I've mentioned are saying but look you have to take the wholesale into consideration that this is top down causation and that would frustrate any concept of building things up anyway by numerous slight accretion is that fair to say that if you go that way then you have left Darwin far behind yes you've left Randomness far behind but they are doing that they're leaving it far behind but top down is actually a metaphor for the action of an agent in arranging things with a plan in mind yes right you see John Lennox just SWAT starwin aside for the two of you it's a much more agonizing process you try very hard to be fair to the man it's two quotations Michael two quotations Charles Darwin in the origin if Darwin himself writes this if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications lie Theory would absolutely break down close quote that's Darwin he puts the test right there in 1859 here's Michael behe the question then becomes are there irreducibly complex systems in the cell yes there are many absolutely as I said it's the cell is chock full of machines machines need in many parts they can't be built by numerous successive slight modifications but let me draw attention to one little sneaky trick that Darwin put into that quotation he says if it could be demonstrated that something couldn't possibly happen so he's putting a burden on his opponents to prove a negative which science cannot do and never has no theory has ruled out all rival theories to be accepted but we have great evidence and that it can't and we have absolutely no evidence that uh natural selection acting on random mutation could build much of anything so so here's here's the objection the objection I say this is if I know enough to be authoritative here's an objection and the objection runs all right it's very hard to see how you evolve a mouse trap beginning with a little wooden platform and true it can't work until all the pieces are in place on the other hand suppose you do evolve it in two or three pieces and they sit around for centuries they don't confer any advantage on the organism but they don't harm it either so they're just they're these strange accretions on which natural selection is neutral it doesn't select for them but it doesn't select against them and then after eons and eons we worry about the maths later after eons and eons the final piece drops into place and suddenly it functions plausible uh no that's ridiculous uh I mean realistically he's being very careful in Durham would be swatting me aside no if if you think you know suppose you didn't have a mouse trap so you say well let me what can I do I'll just go into my garage and pick out a few pieces that would function uh as a mouse trap when you say well I need spring well here's one in this grandfather clock I have you know you wind up I'll just use that and I need a I need a hammer to squash the mouse I'll use this crowbar over here but the pieces don't aren't adjusted to each other you can't just take random pieces and put them together and natural selection which as Darwin said is is constantly scrutinizing life would not be expected to make things in the shape that they would need to be for some future use they would only they would hone them for what they were doing right now all right can I weigh in I'm sure because there's a connection between what Mike's talking about in the mathematical problems that John was alluding to and that is that in these actual systems these Nano machines that Mike has made famous through his work for example the bacterial flagellar motor or the ATP synthase one's a one's a rotary has made the flagellar motor a rock star well she kind of has because yeah but it's you know it's a 30-part rotary engine the ATP synthase is a turbine with multiple Parts but the parts are made of proteins and proteins are the in in essence the toolbox of the cell that they're they they perform specific functions in view of their three-dimensional shapes so they make the parts of molecular machines they function as enzymes to catalyze reactions at Superfast rates they help process information but if you were to to build a a a system like the flagellar motor you need 30 proteins that fit together in an integrated fashion but that requires genetic code each one of those proteins requires a long stretch of genetic information to build the protein and so what you're talking about is not just you know some bent hammer or something sitting around doing nothing you're talking about a need for genetic information that's that is sufficient to overcome these long odds against against building the protein in the first place so it'd be like to change the metaphor slightly a gigantic uh Haystack the size of the North American continent and you're only allowed to search 110 37th of the of the continent maybe a tiny little square of Southern California when if that's the case are you more likely or less likely to define the need to find the needle and you're and the answer is you're overwhelmingly more likely not to find the needle than to find it which is to say the mutation selection mechanism lacks the creative power to generate new biological information below exactly and that's for one protein proteins out of 13 proteins necessary to make the waving little tail which is only one machine that in a sense is before you said anything about the fact that the information acquired as linguistic and linguistic language is not produced by random processes right and this is a hugely important thing it's linguistic in the way the human genome exactly yes the human genome is the longest word we've ever discovered and we can call it a word because it's written in a chemical language of four letters and all those letters strung out like a computer program have got to be in the right order otherwise it breaks down I mean most programs if you change a letter that's the end of the program so we're dealing with something absolutely gigantic in terms of probabilities before we even think of the extra complexity that arises through the folding of the proteins and all the epigenetic information that's been discovered in recent years that the information Beyond in its complexity and therefore it becomes a huge stress and my own simplistic view is to say I prefer an explanation that makes sense to one that doesn't make sense all right if I could add just a little something we're talking about this Ultra complex machine the bacterial flagellum and and saying that what darwinian processes are laughably inadequate to explain it but I want to point out that it can't explain things a whole lot more simple than a bacterial flagellum we talked about how many amino acids these things have and there are 30 proteins and 400 amino acids and so twelve thousand ish or so but in order to develop resistance to the anti-malarial drug chloroquine it took trillions and trillions of uh malarial cells plasmodium falciparum to get two crummy mutations two and we're talking about twelve thousand for the flagellum now trillions and and for each extra extra mutation it goes up exponentially that you know Steve was talking in exponential language but that's another factor of a trillion for another one and another factor of a trillion for uh the next one two so this is truly truly you know uh even much much simpler things than we've been talking about are Beyond darwinian processes I I just want to add one little cute thing is that uh these days scientists can do uh evolution in the laboratory grow bacterial cultures and for a long time and see what happens and a man named Richard lemsley a biologist at Michigan did this for a bacterium called E coli and one of the first mutations that he saw that really helped the bacteria grow faster was when it deleted the genes got rid of the genes for the bacteria it's dropping it exactly and that's something we haven't touched on yet but it's oftentimes a whole lot faster and easier to get rid of stuff and improve a species chance to survive and prosper then you can't get a new species by dropping out information by becoming stupider that's correct adding new capabilities requires new proteins which requires solving this combinatorial problem the search for those exceedingly rare sequences among the vast number of gibberish sequences that don't again you're back to the needle in the haystack problem this is the Layman struggling to understand this again Copernicus says the Earth revolves around the Sun had he had access to telescopes that would be developed not that many decades later let alone to the instruments we have for searching the heavens today he would have understood immediately that that suggestion was ridiculous right and so what we're talking about here is do you think you mean excuse me I've got it the other way around I've got it the other way around Copernicus is the Copernicus is the one who correct the old ptolemaic system right okay so the ptolemaic system which persists until what fourth we I don't want to get Galileo mixed but we get this get this into the 16th century yeah telescope which Copernicus Copernicus figures out that that's partly because of the technology he can see what they couldn't see before all right so Darwin's a little 170 some years ago and they it was plausible that the little tiny cell was a blob of jello in the old days but now thanks to bihi here we can look into that cell and we have the same experience going into smaller and smaller Dimensions the telescopes had going into the larger and larger Dimension which is every time we look it becomes more complicated deeper richer more mind-boggling is that roughly correct that's roughly right and it's it starts back importantly correctly yeah it starts back in the 1950s you know with Watson and Crick and what uh historians of Science Now call the molecular biological Revolution uh they of course elucidated the double helix structure of them they discovered the language exactly they discovered they discovered the structure of the molecule in 1953 but it's Crick who makes the important breakthrough in 1958 he was a code breaker in World War II and he formulates something called the sequence hypothesis and he proposes that the four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the DNA molecule are they're called nucleotide bases or just bases the he proposes that they are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like for example the zeros and ones in a section of software today that is to say they perform a function as a group not in virtue of any of their physical properties but in virtue of their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code and then over the ensuing seven or eight years quick sequence hypothesis was confirmed by a series of experiments on both sides of the Atlantic and that gave us this new informational understanding the information revolution came to biology because what we realized is in inside the cell we have a complex information storage transmission and processing system and to explain the origin of Life you've got to explain that and to explain any new form of life you've got to explain how you can take a section of code randomly change it and hope to come up with another section of code without destroying the function of the code you started so the three of you I want to get to the quote to the way science capital S is responding to people such as the three of you but the three of you are not some sort of Throwbacks saying you're attacking all that civilizations stood for what you're saying is wait we know more than they did look at the newest information you you're you're at the your your champions for the latest science not for some sort of retrograde worldview is that that's fair I think it is fair I think it's worth saying you accused me of swiping Darwin aside I don't swipe them aside he was he was he observed some very interesting and useful thing he was a good writer too but he was but he he was limited by his time and we also have an addition something that we haven't discussed at all and that is that ideas that were perhaps crystallized by Darwin had existed a long time before where there was nothing of what is called science lucretius had them in fact if you read de rerum Natura Lucretia spoke on the on the on the nature of life he gets almost everything Darwin does except for the transmutation of species and he deduces it from materialistic philosophy because one of the things yes I can what century is lucretius no he's he's in the back of the first century but he was building on stuff even earlier going back to the early Greeks of Democritus and the point of that is important there's a worldview dimension to all of this you see if I put on my atheist hat which I do with some difficulty but I try to do it and you say to me write me an account of the origin of life I will come up with an evolutionary theory immediately because that is the only possibility Allowed by the naturalistic worldview so we're competing with that as well and of course Darwinism has such appealed massively to the atheists and increasingly so as we know through Richard Dawkins so you have to remember that once you start raising the kind of question these two gentlemen have been raising and that is that there's information there's code and the looming Specter of the possibility of a coder that raises a crucial problems that's that's how to bounce that's not science yes yes and that means that we have to broaden the discussion as to how science is defined and of course well I just want to get to because I promised John that we would come to this and that is the origin of life itself as I understand it from your work Stephen life emerges pretty quickly after the conditions for the emergence of Life themselves right emerge it's there from the get-go in the geologically speaking 3.85 billion years is the accepted time okay the the cessation of a meteorite bombardment of the earth occurred at most 50 million years before that a blink of the eye geologically we get from simple chemicals to a complex functionally integrated of cell with information processing systems and miniature machines Okay so here's what I was taught when I was going through school there was the famous Yuri experiment 1952 I looked it up where if you put in a chamber all the chemicals that were supposed to have been present when Earth was at the moment when life arose and introduced I seem to remember from textbooks the idea that there was some terrible thunderstorm so you mix it all up with electricity and a couple of scientists Yuri at the University of Chicago tried this and lo and behold somehow or other they managed to form a few amino acids they didn't form life but that's because you have to run the experiment a lot of times and as I understand it now again to the extent that we understand you couldn't the more we try to run better experiments than Yuri was able to in 1952 the farther we are from actually creating anything that could be recognized as life is that roughly correct yes so once again we have this understanding which is receding from us rather than finding ourselves approaching it what does that mean well it means with that we're understanding more the complexity that was not realized at the time they thought I think that it was just enough to get a few amino acids and hey Presto it would happen they knew nothing of the linguistic structure and so what has happened subsequently is it has receded as you say because we've discovered more and more about the sheer sophistication about what life is and by the way nobody really knows what life is a huge irony is that 1953 you have the Miller Yuri experiment Big Flash in the media but you also have the Watson and correct discovery and the two things I've run counter to each other ever since Miller and Yuri produced two or maybe three protein forming amino acids out of The Ensemble of 20 that you would need to build a whole protein but more importantly they didn't show how you could sequence the amino acids properly to get them to fold into proteins to do that you need instructions and those instructions were found on the DNA molecule and it's the origin of the code that has presented the most acute problem for origin of Life research because chemistry simply doesn't move in the direction of informational complexity it moves in other directions one other origin you can't get from chemistry to code if I could just hop in just for a second yeah I just add that the the process you described that people were hopeful in the early 50s and the more they worked the more difficult they saw the problem to be that means you're barking up the wrong tree that's the signature of a wrong idea because if you have the right idea you expect future results to haste to support it again like Einstein exactly but on the other hand Darwin thought the cell was a little glob of jello but the more and more we find the more and more and more sophisticated uh genetic code splicing of DNA molecular machinery and and so on that's for an intelligent design proponent that looks like you're barking up the right tree all right there's another irony about all this because much more recently I think it's Jeremy England dug out the test tubes that were used in the middle Yuri experiment undiscovered on examination that there were more amino acids in them than Miller and Yuri had originally discovered and Dan Brown the novelist of that team pick this up in a book that he entitles origin and he used this to develop his theory of the origin of life to which the scientist Jeremy England who done this work to Great exception and I think Stephen B the historian you're probably explained exactly what happened well I mean again the big problem is not making amino acids it's sequencing them properly it's like getting a bag of Scrabble letters and thinking you've got a triple word score you've got to arrange the the letters in the right way and put them on the board in the right place for them to actually convey information one more sudden emergence man the Anthropologist John Hawks like somebody I can't remember whose work I read this and maybe yours maybe yours anyway probably not mine John Hawks is an anthropologist and he argues that about 2 million years ago our genus homo just appears quoting Hawks no gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species and no australopithecine species is obviously transitional close quote well we don't seem to have descended from apes or at least if we did it ain't in the fossil record what does that tell us it's one thing to say wow where did the dinosaurs come from but we have this notion from textbooks in school on humankind arising from the artwork also in the artwork so what does this tell us well it's another example of an Abrupt appearance of a morphological innovation in in the history of Life there and there are two such big verses of innovation in the history of mankind the first is the sudden emergence of the genus homo the second is what's sometimes called the cultural Big Bang the evidence of higher cognitive capabilities that occurred within the last roughly 40 000 years homo is two million years ago right you get Homo erectus but uh in the last time it would include Neanderthal and sure okay yeah but within the last 40 000 years you get the first agriculture you get the first cities you get the first written language you get the first representational art and so there is this is another big bang of innovation suddenly this uh the cultural revolution is uh also occurs very suddenly okay is it a problem for Darwin that Bach lived what series of adaptative advantages could possibly have produced all those cantatas well um or language the origin of language is completely unexplained on darwinian grounds Chomsky the great Linguistics so now we now we begin we approach we're getting getting to this subject which I've been trying to hold off because we're now getting close to this notion of intelligent design I want to show you two images serious question which image is more scientific which image contains more information which image contains more reality here's image one and there's image two serious question which contains more information I'll take a stab at that yeah sure I think we've been mainly offering criticism of Darwinism so far in this interview but all of us are sympathetic to the idea that there is evidence in the natural world of the activity of a mind um John puts it one way he talks about a top-down infusion of information that the biosphere Mike and I talk about the concept of intelligent design but there there is I think uh a powerful scientific case for intelligent design and this was the question that seized me when I went off to do my PhD uh we've seen that this problem of the origin of information but could that you watch him carefully because this is tricky material I know it is go ahead go ahead what could the could this this mystery of the origin of information actually be a a positive indicator of a different type of cause at work altogether um and the person who helped me most think this through was actually Darwin himself because Darwin pioneered a method of historical scientific reasoning where he realized that if you were wanting to explain an event in the remote past you should try to explain it by causes that you see now in operation and he got this principle from the great geologist Charles Lyell so in Eastern Washington where I live there are little patches of white powdery stuff still on the ground from an event that happened in May of 1980. and if you don't know what caused that white powdery stuff you'd use a standard Historical Method of reasoning known as the method of multiple competing hypotheses and you so you'd formulate some hypotheses maybe it was a flood maybe it was an earthquake maybe it was a volcanic eruption which of those explanations is best according to Darwin and lyelles principle well it's the volcanic eruption because we have seen volcanoes produce white powdery stuff and floods and earthquakes don't do that so if you apply this principle of reasoning if you look for a cause now in operation and ask yourself what is the cause now in operation that produces digital information you come to one and only one type of cause and that's a mind Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program but much more complex than any we've ever created what it what does it take to produce software it takes a programmer so what we think we're seeing with the digital information that's in DNA is not just a problem for a darwinian Evolution but it's a positive indicator of the activity of a mind or an intelligent agent acting in the history and the origin of life I'm coming to you with I'm going to say set this up with a quotation listen to this and then the question goes to you Bill Clinton if you see a turtle on a fence post you know it didn't get there by itself all of creation all this complex world we see around us is a turtle on a fence post B he looks at complicated subcellular biology and says this couldn't have happened randomly Meyer looks at the fossil record and says too many things just appear and John Lennox runs the maths and says if there's a Code maybe there's a coder now it's one thing to observe certain limits to what Darwin and others may have been able to explain the explanation stops here that's as far as we can get and it's something quite different to cross that line and say oh I think I see what's on the other side are you in for intelligent design I'm in for answering your question about the two pictures first of all ah you asked me how much information is contained in those two pictures yes I did I suspect it's almost equal I think the question you should have asked is how much truth is contained in those two pictures now to come back to your precise question the first picture shows what people commonly call the ascent of man yes from lower animals yes now here's where Darwin helped me massively by expressing in a letter a profound doubt he said you know and I'm only paraphrasing because I haven't got the quilt in my head he said you know I'm troubled by the fact that if my explanation is correct then how do we account for the human capacity for rational thought he said after all if we started with lower animals and a monkey's mind he said well is there any thinking in a monkey's mind now hold that just for a moment because I have lots of fun with my scientific friends I sometimes ask them what do you do science with and of course they named some expensive machine I say no no oh they say you mean you're and they're about to say mind when they realize that's not politically correct and they say your brain I said okay I believe the brain the mind are separate but we're really afraid um give me the give me the brief history of the brain I ask them and I've done this many times it's fascinating and they say well the brain in the end is the end product of a Mindless unguided process and I'd smile at them and I say and you trust it I say no tell me honesty that computer you use every day if you knew that it was the end product of a Mindless unguided process would you trust it now here's the thing I have spoken with dozens of leading scientists and pushed them in this and every single one has said no I said you have a problem because you are giving me an argument that undermines rationality and they turn to me and they say where did you get that argument I said well firstly from Charles Darwin they say I don't believe you and then I quote Darwin Darwin's diets that's his other diet yeah Darwin's doubt about the reliability of human emotionality now this to my mind goes to the heart of the implication of the whole business and it's why I believe that there is an intelligence behind the universe I'm a mathematician all mathematicians and scientists are people of faith not necessarily in God but they believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe yes exactly and therefore what do they base that on if you base that on a Mindless unguided evolutionary process you're destroying rationality C.S Lewis saw that in the 1940s he said any theory that undermines rationality cannot be true because you're using your rationality to get to it Alvin planting has worked on it but the most interesting person who brings it now to the forest Thomas Nagel the philosopher in New York and he says there's something wrong here because if you follow evolutionary naturalism it undermines the very rationality you need to believe not only in evolutionary naturalism but in any Theory at all so my major problem uh Peter and all of this is not the mathematics that's just an interesting bit of evidence it's that here I am engaged in a rational discipline of mathematics that all dissolves if the evolutionary naturalistic account is true in other words I often say to people shooting yourself in the foot is painful but shooting herself in the brain is fatal by the way Darwin actually even though this discussion is tending to Discount heavily if not to dismiss his theories Darwin is emerging as a fine writer a wise man and in all kinds of ways an honest man hit one doubt what he recognized the problem with the Cambrian record and then he recognized this huge question of where does the mind come from all right Michael I'm quoting you to yourself intelligent design coags can happily co-exist coexist with a large degree of natural selection antibiotic and pesticide resistance antifreeze proteins and fish and plants and more may indeed be explained by the darwinian mechanism the critical claim of intelligent design is not that natural selection doesn't explain anything but that it doesn't explain everything that explains that's exactly right because uh if you posit that natural selection produced all of life then it has to have produced not only trivia but the profound molecular machines that are found in the cell the genetic code the uh the wings of a bird and and much more uh and we don't see that uh and yet it can work on DNA for example it can break genes a random mutation can break a gene and say cause a brown bear to lose its coloration and and become a white polar bear right and eventually a new species and it can break up with baby stuff by comparison with the original aims that that's exactly right so just like you driving down the road you know there can be Knicks Stones can bump up and Nick your car and you can get a scratch on it and so on you can recognize that the car is designed you know there are random Nicks and and bumps and so on so random things can happen but can they explain explain this elegant Machinery that has been discovered by science at the foundation of life and of course the answer is now I'm going to quote you one more time listen carefully because this one comes back to the two of you Michael B he continues take a deep breath here this is big there could be quote a root open for a subtle God to design life without overriding natural law if quantum events such as radioactive decay are not governed by causal laws then it breaks no law of nature to influence such events further although we may not be able to detect Quantum manipulations we may nevertheless be able to conclude confidently that the final structure was designed so here we start all three of you there are very serious problems with Darwin then we go to step two which is if there's a code maybe there's a coder I see that everybody recognizes we're on tricky territory but you all three are still there and now be he here goes to step three actually I think I see a mechanism by which the coder may have operated in this material world am I being fair to you uh yes that's true okay boys do you go for that I don't you don't don't I think that when we invoke the action of a mind we're invoking a non-material Cause and we don't need to play by the rules of scientific materialism to invent a mechanism to explain the origin of information because we know from our uniform and repeated experience that information always arises from a mind we don't understand the interface the Mind Body interface and the in the case of human intelligence we know we we know that we can affect the material world by the choices we make and by the thoughts that we have I'm going to choose to move this water glass right now so but I don't know how my volitional Act of my mind to initiate that act affected the material world that interface is unknowable to us at this point but we can infer from certain sorts of effects back to the activity of a mind we know that a distinctive artifact or effective intelligent activity is the production of information whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source whether we're talking about computer code or hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio set signal we always come back to a mind a second I I think we're talking across purposes here I wasn't saying that radioactive decay is responsible for because it's a random event the quotation that Peter red was saying could a clever God or clever mind use something that was undetectable to Scientific instrumentation to affect the results that he wanted so it's not a mechanism it's a tool rather and it's a tool wielded by him I'm not so much disagreement I mean disagreeing with the requirement that many of our evolutionary colleagues want to place on the theory of intelligent design that it formulate its alternative explanation as a mechanistic cause we're proposing a different kind of cause a mental cause which is something we recognize from our ordinary experience but somehow when we get into the science lab we want to say well everything has to be explained materialistically isn't it even information which we know doesn't come about by undirected material process isn't it I'm going to go to John Lennox as the referee here is it isn't it nature of science even among perhaps even especially among Believers Newton was a I think it's fair to say he was a Christian he was certainly he was a Christian of course all the pioneers of the Prosthetics and mutants understands himself to be exploring the mind of God yes and at some basic level Newton faithful Christian is saying how did he do it yeah how did he do this how did he do that he's not saying well it's the mind of God therefore no no more questions to follow he's a search of specific mechanisms and that's a good and Noble thing which endows US with nine tenths of what we know about physics in some basic way right so so here's the question that presents itself to me Layman that I see her stand in from for baffled people the world over science the question in science how does it happen Charles Darwin says here's how it happened okay and if you guys want to say well Charles Darwin was wrong then I say okay if it didn't happen that way how did it happen and the answer can't just be God or it can't just be designer there's some sort of human impulse in us to say well how how what's the mechanism and that's a fair question and B he's taking a shot at it and Stephen's trying to say no no I will come back at you when Newton discovered his law of gravitation he didn't say now I've got a scientific explanation I don't need God what he did was to write principia Mathematica most famous book in The History of Science and expressed in it the hope that his research would lead thinking people to believe in God in other words he believed His science was showing evidence of an intelligent input into the universe Beauty design predictability but the important thing here is that a huge confusion comes up through Richard Dawkins suggesting that the god explanation is the same as the scientific explanation that's like saying that the Henry Ford explanation for a motor car is the same as the explanation in terms of physics and automobile engineering there are different kinds of explanation and we need both to give a full expiration and there are different kinds of questions Peter yes the question of how the internal combustion engine operates can be answered using principles of mechanical and electrical engineering but the question of the origin of the car can't be answered apart from Henry Ford activity of an intelligence in the principia Newton developed he described the the ongoing regular process of gravity and used a law mathematical law to describe that process but he also believed that the fine-tuning of the solar system gave direct evidence of the activity of a designing intelligence he said this most beautiful system of sun planet and comets could only be the product of an intelligent and Powerful being so he actually made a direct design argument when when we're talking about the origin of life or the origin of the universe or the origin of the Cambrian animals there's another way of framing the question is what type of cause best explains the origin of these things an undirected material process or an intelligent cause and science yeah but what do you why do you object to Michael's at the time let me just yes Michael let Michael come in yes absolutely I feel so I've set things up so that the two of you have been able to beat him about the head and shoulders when Isaac Newton developed his wonderful law of gravity uh he was asked what the heck is gravity and he said hypothesis non-fingo yes I have feigned no hypothesis no mechanism he didn't he didn't have a mechanism what's the mechanism for the Big Bang what's the mechanism for radioactive decay I don't know um so there's lots of things that happen people don't know what the mechanism is but we see patterns and we uh can deduce uh explanations from the patterns okay I'm going to quote you and begin by quoting someone you quote this is more be here biochemist Franklin Herald and his 2001 book The Way of the cell quote we should reject as a matter of principle the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity but we must concede that there are presently no detailed accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system only a variety of Wishful explanations close quote and Michael says well to begin with that's quite a breathtaking concession and congratulations the science has moved along enough to recognize the limits to Darwin and then Michael continues Harold never spells out his reasoning that is to say why we should reject intelligent design and principle but I think the principle probably boils down to this design appears to point strongly Beyond nature all three of us are down for everybody's down for that it has philosophical and Theological implications because some think that science should avoid a theory that points so strongly Beyond nature they want to rule out intelligent design from the start close quote this is the question of drawing lines and I pose the question to Michael behe what the heck is wrong with that we just say science goes as far as it goes with our five senses and what we can reason there from and when it hits a dead end it says dead end well we haven't got it radioactive decay gravity don't know don't know don't know don't know go ahead so what's wrong with drawing these very sharp lines Why do you want to include intelligent design in the scientific Enterprise well uh for a couple reasons first if if some have scientists claimed that they did not know how life developed that would be good with me that would be a step in the right direction because they don't unfortunately people pretend that they do on the other hand uh we can tell we conclude design we we infer design from physical evidence it's not from some you know Vision or anything that people have if you look at a mouse trap if you look at a mousetrap you can tell it was designed and you can tell because you see how the parts are arranged what the relationship of the parts with respect to each other to perform a function when you look at a an outboard motor on a boat you see the same thing you see a purposeful arrangement of parts now we see that in the Machinery of the cell we see outboard motors in the cell we see trucks in the cell right and so on so but your life would be so much easier if at the end of your article you said that's fun you said if you would like to pursue this further go to the Department of philosophy go to the go to the Department of theology hear the science ends I say that after we conclude design I do not infer to God uh and as as I write some people have approached me and said yeah I'm with you I think it's intelligent but I think it's you know space aliens have visited the Fred Boyle's explanation I think go ahead John I I think the basic question here is there are several and they're very important is what is an explanation that's a crucial question and Michael cited Newton hepatizing on finger he his gravity when I was taught in school I thought the law of gravity explained gravity and I was an adult before I discovered it explains no such thing so that even a scientific explanation within its own terms is rarely full it's almost never full that's the first thing secondly we admit at all kinds of levels explanations in terms of agent like if we want a complete description of the motor car now your earlier question to Michael could God have done this there is a sense in which God can do things anyway he likes but the issue is how does God do it and secondly is his activity detectable scientifically now I'm putting those words together very carefully not is his involvement detectable but is it detectable in terms of science in other words if you set up your definition of science as restricted to the five senses so that you're not and here comes the principle the socratic principle that is often violated that the late Anthony flew saw that when he came to conclude that there was an intelligent designer behind the Universe on the basis of DNA and they said Oh but you can't do that he said I followed the evidence where it leads and this is The Clash that arises you can either say well science has come to an end it cannot answer this question there are very few people want to say that or you say science is limited we must open the field to other kinds of questions like the why questions of purpose like teleology and all this kind of thing and the underlying mistake that we're forced to think is that science and rationality are co-extensive when they're not and also that they're that is to say science doesn't science doesn't do science does not cover the full field of rationality history is a rational discipline those philosophical kinds of Sciences and this is what my PhD was about there's historical science historical historical scientific reasoning which is all about abduction abduction inferring back to cause to explain causal Origins imagine that you walk into the British Museum and you look at the Rosetta Stone and you and someone says well how did that how did those inscriptions come about if the archaeologist is governed by the the principle that you alluded to indirectly it's called methodological naturalism we may only infer materialistic causes whatever the evidence the the scientists would miss the obvious explanation this was produced by scribes right by intelligent agents there are distinctive indicators of the activity of intelligence and therefore that allows us to to infer language there was one one of the early uh Pioneers in the information Sciences named Henry kwasler said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity in other words our uniform and repeated experience affirms that there's only one type of cause that produces information but uniform and repeated experience is the basis of all historical scientific reasoning so there is a basis in historical scientific reasoning to infer intelligent design there's no need or Reason to limit the conclusions that we can consider in that in that that branch of science Because unless and here's the bottom line for all of this unless you presume a naturalistic worldview and imprison yourself that's not fair if the evidence leads Beyond a naturalistic view you must pursue it correct why shouldn't you all right but why shouldn't you that's exactly what I'm saying okay otherwise you're closing yourself within a prison okay um all three of you strike me as well of course you'd rather argumentative but you all three of you strike me as as rational men and yet look at the lives you lead Steve Meyer wrote an article on the Cambrian explosion for the proceedings of the biological Society at the Smithsonian institution and his editor was harassed and finally left the institution Michael behe has evoked from his colleagues at Lehigh University which is a great University and especially strong in The Sciences a statement on their website that Dr bihi is entitled to express his views but we his colleagues in the biology Department do not view them as science he's been disclaimed he's been disclaimed why academics espouse all kinds of crazy ideas why should these ideas why should the challenge to Darwin and the suggestion that if there's a Code there's a coder the suggestion of an intelligent design evokes such singular hostility what is going on I'll start with John because I didn't give you what's going on as the domination of naturalism and materialism in the academy which is so ironical I'm from Oxford University it's motto and it's been there for a long time the people that founded the great universities of the world had no problem with the idea of an intelligent designer of the universe but now somehow in the academy anybody who espouses the idea that was the foundation of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries arguably as a historical thesis is out that strikes and that idea that idea is that the founding idea is the founding idea is well let me quote C.S Lewis men became scientific why because they expected law in nature and they expected lower nature because they believed in the legislator there it is encapsulated that's Whitehead's thesis if you want it North Whitehead and and the point is these gentlemen here tragically have been subject to an anti-intellectualism that has lost the spirit that lies behind the modern science that these universities claim to teach two quotations and then I'm going to ask each of you to comment here's quotation number one Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins you're sometimes debating opponent Richard Dawkins quote the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good nothing but pointless indifference here's the second quotation from a man who at the time he wrote this was known as Cardinal ratzinger he would later become Pope Benedict XVI quote let us go directly to the question of evolution and its mechanisms microbiology and biochemistry have brought revolutionary insights here we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of living creation are not the products of chance and error they show us a creating intelligence and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before who's the better scientist who has a better grasp well the first statement is not a statement of science at all Dawkins is giving his own atheistic belief and doing a spin on morality which he contradicts in his own life so it's it's of no consequence I think I I'd like you know I only never to cross you John I sometimes quote the same quote from Dawkins that you just read previously and followed up by saying he must be a lot of fun at parties because he has this such a gloomy review but he supports nothing and and Cardinal ratziger later Pope Benedict is talking science he wasn't talking about how he really is he's not overshooting no yeah that's he was talking he was I should say he's talking the latest science he's talking about what has been discovered by molecular biology and biochemistry and cell biology he's not talking about you know how squirrels are so cute or or things like that he's saying holy moly these are machines holy moly is a technical terms it was very important he he was in the school of very interesting German philosophers led by a man called spaman and one of the best deconstructions of Dawkins was written by one of spaman's pupils a man called Reinhardt Loof unfortunately it's only in German not in English but it is absolutely brilliant but ratzinger really before he became Pope he wrote a lot on this kind of stuff and influenced the present Cardinal in Vienna shonborn yes a great deal can I say something in favor of the Dawkins quote I like the framing he says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should observe if at bottom there's no purpose no design Nothing But Blind pity loose indifference I love the way frames the issue question is is he right does are the prop the things we make the testable he makes a testable assertion about his materialistic philosophy but then last summer interestingly he confessed to being knocked sideways by the uh the digital information processing system of the cell there was a new animation that was put up about it by an Australian group and he said he was he was you know shocked by the intricate complexity there's something extremely surprising the universe doesn't look as it should from a strictly materialistic point of view we should not expect the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics we shouldn't expect a beginning to the universe and we should from a materialistic point of view we certainly shouldn't have expected to find the intricate nanotechnology and information technology that is evident in the living cell he's concluding from physical evidence whether he thinks there's purpose or not in the universe and he's got his opinion but that means that that's a legitimate thing that one can ask does is there physical evidence for purpose uh in life in the universe it actually implies that it's legitimate to consider the question of design yes but it's worse than that he's denying the existence of Good and Evil and that destroys morality and he does believe in the problem of evil because he rails against it so there's a total disconnect at the moral level gentlemen last question last question I'm going to set it up one more time with two quotations quotation one Michael bihe strength of intelligence design derives mainly from the work a day progress of science the cell is not getting any simpler it is getting much more complex progress in 20th century Sciences led us to the design hypothesis I expect progress in the 21st century to confirm and extend it close quote here's quotation number two from a colleague of of many of you mathematician David berlinski the theory of evolution is unique among scientific instruments and being cherished not for what it contains but for what it lacks there are in Darwin scheme no special creation no Divine guidance or transcendental forces Darwin the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude berlinski continues made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist no doubt David berlinski concludes the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played close quote it's not a question of the science what you're up against is a world view and Michael very cheerfully says science is science they'll come around in this Century the the hypothesis of design will be extended and confirmed and berlinski says oh you silly boy what do you think tell uh who's who's who's who's more likely right The Optimist or David berlinski I'm not a prophet ah but I'll tell you what Dawkins has done for me he's made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian Stephen I love what Mike said about the way the hypothesis of intelligent design is being confirmed and extended by 21st century science we're seeing that in many uh with many important experimental results and new discoveries for example a few years ago the discovery that only a certain portion of the DNA caused for proteins and the rest doesn't let many neo-darwinists to develop the concept of junk DNA yes the 97 that doesn't code for proteins they said is just the leftover the flopsum and jepsum of the of the random trial and error process of natural selection and random mutation several of our leading ID proponents in the 1990s and early 2000s said well we agree that there should be some evidence of those random mutations accumulating but not 97 so we're going to predict based on our theory that that those non-coding regions of the DNA aren't junk DNA but rather they are importantly functional and that prediction has now been confirmed by the encode project and a number of other interesting developments in bioinformatics and we now know that the the non-coding regions of the DNA are functioning roughly like an operating in an operating system in a computer they're controlling the timing and expression of the coding files and so we actually this is a prediction that was made by proponents of intelligent design that's been confirmed by new new discoveries I didn't answer your question am I an optimist actually I am not a biologist but reading the stuff from the so-called third wave of biology really does make me quite an optimist that there will be an intellectual breakthrough there was a meeting at the Royals under the weight of accumulating scientifically the weight of evidence yes they it's it's a very heavy ship but it's beginning to turn I think and there was evidence that the Royal Society meeting just John's referring to a meeting in 2016 that was convened by members of the Royal Society and evolutionary biologists who doubt the the standard neo-darwinian model and who are saying we need a new theory of evolution and they called the meeting to explore new evolutionary mechanisms that could either replace or supplement natural selection because of its lack of creative power I said that was the last question but here's the last question too much fun here's here's you three of you lovely cheerful Splendid men and you say if there's a Code there's a coder and you say well there are mechanisms by which one could imagine a a mind participating or intervening or participating let's say that in the material world all right here's the objection haven't you ever heard of the Inquisition haven't you ever heard of the religious wars don't you understand the importance of the American settlement whereby we had the Puritans in New England and the episcopalians in the South and the Catholics in Maryland and the settlement was to each his own but there's going to be a public space here in which we can work together this is this is what gives us the the the the the American modern American the University of the modern research let's put it that way the modern research Institution and it's the way you three are going maybe the three of you don't intend it but the people who come right after you are going to be right back to put them in stocks old-fashioned morality the religion religion is a very tricky and quite often in human history painful influence and the three of you are kicking open the door to this dragon that we had very carefully locked up Michael well opinions differ on that I think uh but you know the thing is they're undoing you're undermining the enlightenment this is science and science doesn't care about your particular worldview we have throughout history uh scientific discoveries such as the microbial world and relativity and other uh other things have upset our very notion of what reality is and now it's the turn of molecular biology and biochemistry to make us sit up and take notice I can't stop science from discovering complexity and elegance in the cell it's there what people do with it is is a different question I'm saving the last word for John because he's the senior man at this table as well you should I have a friendly debating partner named Michael Roose British professor of philosophy biology Florida State we've done a number of debates and Michael's written an important book in which he explains that Darwinism has functioned as a kind of secular religion for many people in The Sciences and so there uh people from different World Views can at any time initiate inquisitions and cancellations of people they disagree with I think we all have to be careful not to indulge in that but this isn't uh the the cancellations have not just come from one side or the other in the debates in human history on the other hand and so I think one of the reasons that intelligent design has been silenced that Michael's been disclaimed and Richard Sternberg was persecuted at the Smithsonian a little too close to you myself come to think yeah yeah absolutely is is that when you challenge Darwinism you are challenging not just a scientific theory but a deeply held worldview or something that's functioning as a kind of secular religion and people on that side of the aisle have been guilty of of uh indulging in cancel culture and I think we just all need to disclaim that and let and follow the evidence where it leads and one final thought and that is that in the history of science a belief in a designer a Creator inspired scientific innovation and development even look at Newton for example he developed the calculus the binomial theory the developed the theory of gravitation the laws of motion his principia was meant to just to reveal the the principles of creation that had come from the mind of God so a belief in a creator doesn't stifle um scientific innovation it can Inspire it and we think our modern theory of intelligent design is also going to lead to new discoveries such as the one I mentioned a minute ago the junk DNA isn't junk John Lennox professor emeritus of mathematics a noble and pure expression of the mind of man at one of the greatest universities that has ever existed the University of Oxford Professor Lennox you are complicit in rolling back the enlightenment absolutely I'm delighted to do it because the enlightenment discovered that the best way to deal with impotence was to cut their heads off and the historians particularly Joan gray who's an atheist actually one of the top historians of the architecture yes and in Europe points out that there's a direct line from the enlightenment to the persecutions of Stalin and the horrific destruction of life in the 20th century so you'll get nowhere with the enlightenment second point coming from Northern Ireland I'm acutely aware of the reputation of religions particularly Christianity for causing War and that has led me to do a lot of investigating and I've come to the conclusion about which I've written so I'm not going to in much detail but what has happened there is that people have failed to go to the heart of the issue now some religions May generate War so not denying that and they will have to speak for themselves but one of the most interesting things about Christianity is that Christ was tried and it's a public record that he was trained for being a terrorist we rarely put it into modern terms he was exonerated by the Roman procurator and why because when challenged whether he was a political opponent of Rome he said my kingdom is not from this world otherwise my servants would have been fighting and he'd stop them fighting but now my kingdom isn't from here you're a king yes he said to this end I was born and to this end I came into the world to Bear witness to the truth and pilate said what is truth and went out declared Christ Innocent but then gave into the crowd the point of that is hugely important historically I used to wonder why is there so much in the New Testament gospels about the trial of Christ and suddenly I realized it's because of this precise question Christ repudiated violence so that people in my own country who followed him using bombs on both sides yes they weren't Christian at all because they repudiated Christ the obvious thing in all of this is the one thing you cannot do with sheer power is to impose truth on people and I think pilate saw that John Lennox Michael behe Stephen Meyer thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge on the Hoover institution I'm Peter Robinson [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 1,621,761

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Peter Robinson, Michael Behe, John Lennox, Steven Meyer, Hoover Institution, Hoover Institute, Darwin, science, academia

Id: rXexaVsvhCM

Length: 84min 29sec (5069 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023