Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, PhD talks about the Case for Intelligent Design

my name is Liz Kato for those of you that are at a Trinity Trinity event for the first time my husband Wally and I founded Trinity 15 years ago and I'm the privileged to be the head of school for our Academy this year we celebrates having five hundred and fifty students at our school we started in 2001 with 28 little people in kindergarten first and second grade and this year we welcomed 550 students into our school and we'll be celebrating our fifth graduating class in the spring and we continue to be encouraged and grateful for what the Lord is doing here and the mission of our school has remained unchanged since its founding and that is to offer a challenging education grounded in the Christian faith and the classical tradition to produce young men and women of virtue wisdom purpose and courage and tonight is an example of what we're trying to do with our students inside the classroom by having a dr. Meyer come and speak to our community and begin to dig in to the reasons why we believe what we believe we spend a great deal of time doing that with our students especially as they rise up through our school and the grammar logic and rhetoric stages of our school and do they know what they believe and why they believe it can they communicate it in a fashion that people would care to hear what they have to say and asking hard questions and digging deep into information and material and having a reason for that is a huge part of what we do and today we were blessed to have our entire faculty and staff sit and learn and get a chance to do that with dr. Meyer and tonight our community is blessed to do that as well to pray for our time and sort of give lay out for how the evening will work and of course and introduce our distinguished speaker is dr. Phillips Trinity's theology and science chair please welcome dr. Phil [Applause] so greetings if you've never heard of a department of theology and science that's because Trinity is the first school to be doing that and we do that as a deliberate statement first of all that science was birthed out of the queen of the disciplines theology without theology without Christian thought we would not have science as we know it today and so we make a very deliberate and cogent effort to blend these two disciplines so that someone who's graduating from Trinity they're not going to be blindsided when they get out into the university world if they happen to go to the University which is hostile to the Christian worldview which is very likely it's probably over 90 percent of the university now and so the theology and science department makes it makes a great effort to integrate the two and to show the presence of God in natural systems so the presence of God in life systems a lot of the material that has come from the ministry and the work of dr. Stephen Meyer in the Discovery Institute where he is now a lot of that material inspires much of what goes on in theology and science departments so I feel very very indebted to dr. Meyer for that dr. Meyer is a graduate of a Cambridge University he has both an MPhil and a PhD there in the history and philosophy of science and right out of the gates he was already a bumping up against the status quo of neo-darwinism with this thesis which was really the idea of looking at the the methods of investigating life origins and dr. Maier got his undergraduate degree in physics and earth science from Whitworth from there he went to work at Atlantic Richfield company as a geologist for a while he helped to develop some of the computer graphic and digital mapping work but he always had this bull on him to study philosophy and he always had this pool that we tried to achieve here and that is to integrate theology and science integrate philosophy and science and so he was awarded a rotary scholarship to go to Cambridge where he earned his his two degrees from there he returned to Whitworth and actually became a tenured professor there but one of the things I feel we owe debt to men like him is there are people like that walking away from tenured professor ships to do things like what he's doing now by heading up the the science the the science portion of Discovery Institute in Seattle and they're doing a tremendous work there I mean good solid science and he may have time to talk about some of his peer-reviewed articles which have brought somewhat less than friendly responses to the naturalistic materialists out there but nonetheless is good science and so I appreciate that he's done that also he's written a couple of very important books he's written many things his CV is about the length of the Septuagint you theologians out there but signature in the cell is is it's a great read it's really about the information systems of the cell how this points to intelligent design he actually won the the Book of the Year award from the literary Times of London supplement in 2009 also Darwin's doubt about the Cambrian explosion how it points really really to a need for a special creator and I believe that's what he'll be talking about tonight another book these are both for sale after the evening tonight another one a companion to this that has come out that is a very good book I've really been enjoying it is debating Darwin's doubt and it's it's basically the expected onslaught against Darwin's doubt but also Steve's response to that and so if you have read debating if you've read Darwin's doubt and enjoyed it I really encourage you to get debating Darwin's down because it's very very honest to see the criticisms that are out there and there is a very solid and cogent answer for all of them so I encourage you to get those books I encourage every educator at the very least every science educator these are books you really need to have as as part of your library so let's pray and get our evening started Lord we're grateful for a place like Trinity where we can worship you with our minds where we understand your command to renew our minds daily includes this aspect of living and we're grateful that we are able to have someone like like dr. Mayer here tonight we pray that his words are your words I'm grateful not only his brilliance as a scholar but his humility as a Christian brother and we trust you will speak through him tonight we brush you will speak to every single person who's here tonight we know that no one is here by accident but it's something you've ordained and we thank you for that and so we pray your blessings on our time together we pray that what dr. Maier brings to us tonight will be encouraging will strengthen our faith and increase our ability to be prepared to give a reason to anyone who should ask for the hope that we have within us we're grateful to you Lord and we're grateful for this evening we pray this in Jesus name Amen ladies and gentlemen please welcome dr. Stephen Meyer Thank You mark how we do it on the sound not too loud not too soft okay I've been incredibly well welcomed here today I am so impressed with your founders and with your administrators and your teachers and the students that I met and it's just been kind of a rush I'm on a little bit of a high today so it's it's nice to be able to come back this evening and share with a wider group of people I'll be talking about my book tonight I'm gonna try to keep the talk it's it's a it's a big subject and I typically go about a full hour but we're gonna leave some time after that for Q&A and and so I just want to let you kind of in on this structure because I really want to have the conversation afterwards and field questions and points of deliberate about some of the different issues that are raised in the talk just one word about the Q&A when I was in grad school my first year I come from a little colleges mark had mentioned Whitworth which is in Spokane Washington and when I when I got to England and everyone spoke so beautifully and they sounded at least 20 points higher in IQ than any of us Americans because of that lovely British accent and it was all a little bit intimidating and all the other people in my department were from very impressive places so and then one day there was a an expert scholar come who came in who was an expert on the philosopher Kant and he gave a really amazing lecture about the works of Immanuel Kant the German philosopher and even though I had studied physics and some more science things I had taken one philosophy class on Kant's work but the things he were talking that the scholar was talking about I had never heard about they were his philosophy of beauty and and I studied his more of his philosophy of science so I at a certain point in the lecture I raised my hand and and said you know I've never read in any of those the sources you were mentioning of cons on aesthetics would would you mind recommending a good place for me to start and there was this kind of uncomfortable shuffling in the room and and the this visiting scholar gave me a recommendation and I had this vague sense I might have done something not quite not the done thing as the English said and so anyway after afterwards my supervisor took me aside he was a dawn of the old school and he said Maya he said in the States you've learned that the only quested question is the one you didn't ask he said it's different here and he went on to say if if you in in the future if you have a question that reveals ignorant he said please come ask me privately he said everyone is bluffing here and if you're to succeed you must learn to Bluff - so anyway we will have some time for Q&A afterwards and I just wanted to assure you it will be American rules ok no no stupid questions I'm ok so I want to talk tonight about my book called Darwin's doubt and it tells a story it also makes an argument and the book begins with a line and I'll quote it that's always kind of vain to quote yourself but it's a oh wait what am i oh am i oh my gosh I took the jacket off and now I'm almost up oh oh my my wife's gonna be scandalized okay she said she'll say I sent you out the door looking properly and now look what happened okay so anyway so the book Darwin's doubt tells the story and it tells the story of a doubt that Darwin had about his own theory and how that doubt has grown up to create a major crisis in evolutionary biology today that's what the book is about and I start the book with a line and I'm gonna quote myself it's a little bit self-aggrandizing but forgive me when Charles Darwin finished his great masterpiece the Origin of Species he thought he had explained every clue but one and the one clue he knew he hadn't explained and now I'm gonna see if this system we have for advancing the slides we did okay the one clue he knew he hadn't explained was an event in the history of life known as the Cambrian explosion and the Cambrian explosion refers to the geologically sudden appearance of most of the major animal groups or body plants and in the way that biologists classify animals they have a hierarchy of classification and the biggest group the phyla correspond to animal many different types of animals that exemplify the same body plan where a body plan is kind of an architecture it's a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues so some familiar examples might be Corday's which have an internal spinal column or notochord and the body logic is built around an internal structure another common another distinct body plan would be things like arthropods and we've got lots of them running around insects crabs and in ancient times we had these things that fascinated me called trilobite and they have a hard exoskeleton so it's a completely different architecture and logic built around an hard external skeleton and many of the major body plans the that have ever existed on earth emerged very suddenly and abruptly in the fossil record in this same period known as the Cambrian period and Darwin was aware of this in 1859 and it troubled him because it didn't the pattern of appearance didn't really match what he had described in his book or he had he had depicted the history of life as a great branching tree and yet the fossil evidence seemed to suggest that the first animals arose very abruptly with no discernible ancestors in the lower strata that would allow the scientists to connect the dots and form a tree like picture of the history of life so this is a diagram Oh how far have I gotten I'm pressing buttons up here and not sorry we have an interesting system my computer isn't hooked up to what's actually going on back there so sorry about this here's a nice picture by the way that depicts the the challenge of the Cambrian explosion you see all these different animals behind me on one side you see the sedimentary rock column and on the other side you see the standard geological dating scheme in millions of years and you see that at a particular point in the history of life boom you have these new these new forms of animal life that arise very suddenly and as I mentioned this contradicts the Darwinian picture of the history of life this was part of his theory was the idea of universal common ancestry and he depicted that idea with a branching tree where the the the forms at the bottom of the tree represented the first very simple probably one celled organisms the branches at the top represented all the complex forms of plants and animals we see today and then the intermediate that the connecting branches represented what are called transitional intermediates or ancestral precursor forms now the challenge of the Cambrian is represented by this part of the branching tree which shows the first animals arising they're represented by the the gold dots at the top but the blue dots represent the expected precursors that the geologists and paleontologists and evolutionary biologists attempted or is rather expected to see in the lower strata and you can see the problem is that these discernible these ancestors these discernible ancestors have just not turned up the blue dots represent things that should be there and aren't there the gold dots represent was actually there and so what we see in the history of life is something that looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees not one big branching tree that connects up at the base with that first primordial form of life okay and so there's a contrast attention between the theory and the data the theory and the evidence okay sorry to keep turning around I just want to make sure that what I'm showing you is what I think I'm telling you about okay so that's the challenge and that's the that's the and that was the problem the doubt that Darwin had not about whether his theory was true he was pretty convinced he'd gotten it right but he he had a doubt about whether his theory could explain all the relevant evidence and he was worried about it and this was so this this this problem this tension between the data and the theory and the absence of those ancestral precursor form leading up to the first complex animals I called a mystery of the missing fossils and this is the first third of my book is devoted to discussing this mystery and here's what Darwin said about it he said to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system that crane barren strata I can give no satisfactory answer this is Ryan the Origin of Species now it's really interesting I really appreciate Darwin because unlike many of his modern defenders he was he was rhetorically honest he was rhetorically modest he didn't try to say he'd solved all the problems when he had he didn't pound his fist and say anyone who disagreed with him was was stupid or ignorant or insane but some of his modern proponents do say things like that a few years ago I had the chance to testify before the Texas State Board of Education and they were looking at enacting a policy provision that would encourage teachers to teach the strengths and the weaknesses of competing scientific theories and one that the Darwin only science Lobby turned out and forced to argue against this seemingly common-sense provision and their argument was and I quote there are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution again up there we go and this is Eugenie Scott who was then the the president of the National Center for Science education a small Darwin only science lobbying group out of Oakland California and when I saw this I thought this was a you know an incredibly unfortunate statement I was about to present into evidence 100 peer-reviewed a binder of a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles questioning various aspects of contemporary evolutionary theory what's known as neo-darwinism the standard textbook theory that we all learned in the in our high school and college biology text so at the very least there are scientific problems with the theory scientific weaknesses of the theory that need to be explored Darwin was aware of some in his time and talked about them openly but on four in our modern discussion and of biological origins too many people defending the Orthodox view think that it's they can't acknowledge the actual state of the science that is is in play one of the worst offenders in this regard is the well known evolutionary biologists and new atheist named Richard Dawkins from Oxford University he's actually said if it's absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant stupid or insane and then he said in parentheses or wicked but I'd rather not consider that and I thought that was really sporting of him not to consider that maybe the people who disagreed with him or wicked that's not rhetorical modesty that's rhetorical excess and there's an awful lot of it in this debate and so I do appreciate that Darwin was so honest about the things that he could and the things that he couldn't explain so his statement here the case the Cambrian acam Brean explosion at present must remain inexplicable and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained so that's that what I call the mystery of the missing fossils in it it haunted Darwin to his death but he did have he was a smart guy and he had an idea about how this could be resolved he thought that let's see I'm coordinating my forces here okay mystery of the missing fossils tada he thought that the absence of these ancestral intermediate forms could be exploit be eventually explained away by future fossil discoveries which is to say that the missing forms would actually turn up if we kept looking hard enough in the in the Precambrian strata around the world so he had this charming analogy to a book that the that the fossil record was like a he said he said I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and on this view the difficulties discussed above about the Cambrian explosion are greatly diminished so he said imagine that the fossil record is kind of like a book and it's it's recording some of the chaps some of the layers are there they're like a chapter but then other chapters here and they are missing and some chapters we may only have one and eventually if we find the other pages and the other chapters then we'll then it will show this seamless gradual continuous changing progression described by his history of life depiction of the origin of all the new forms of life on earth so that was what that was his hope and this idea became known later as the artifact hypothesis and that the idea there is that the absence of those fossils in the lower Precambrian layers are an artifact or a byproduct of our incomplete sampling of the fossil record we just haven't looked hard enough and another version of that same idea well a slightly different version but the same kind of concept was that the the the missing ancestors are an artifact of incomplete preservation maybe there was something in those lower in the sedimentary the sediments that were in the Precambrian that were just not capable of preserving those ancestors maybe they were too small maybe they were too soft to have been fossilized so that was another idea that said so either it was an artifact of incomplete sampling inadequate sampling or incomplete preservation and that idea became kind of the go-to explanation as to why these fossils were missing now unfortunately for the defenders of Darwin's theory additional fossil finds have not actually resolved the mystery of the missing fossils they've actually made the mystery more acute in Darwin's time there were a lot of there were a couple main forms of several main forms of animals that were known there were these trilobite switch fascinated me as a kid they look kind of like potato bugs if you've watched those guys but it's they oh oh I forgot I have a really nice sample of one that has a compound you can see the structure of the compound I and the in the fossil that I have and it's just you you realize that it was a very sophisticated visual apparatus from from the very present from the very beginning from the dawn of animal life it's extraordinary how complex these animals were but in Darwin knew about these guys he also knew about other other animals called brachiopods and and several others there were several main groups but in 1909 there was a mate there was a huge fossil find do I have a picture of Canada behind me okay thank you I don't want to keep turning around how interesting can the back of my head be right and right near the border between British Columbia and Alberta in a place near field BC when these fossils were discovered by a paleontologist named Charles Wolcott and Wolcott was prospecting for fossils it was near the end of the 1909 prospecting season the weather was getting bad his horse may have been a mule slipped on this on the on the path his wife was on it she wanted to get the heck home to Washington DC and the legs of the horse went into this talus slope of loose hunks of shale and as they pulled the horse out he flipped one over and it revealed an amazing delicate lace crab an animal that had been previously unknown and unknown to this period of time and you can imagine the winter that Wolcott had waiting to go back to see what other treasures lay in these hunks of shale later which later became known as the Burgess Shale and he did in fact go back and the Burgess Shale reveal this is an artist's depiction of the of that of that lace crab and he went back and it was a trove of new animal forms here's another guy called dia you see the beautifully segmented articulated exoskeleton there looks like a lid like a shrimp with a hardhead shield here's a picture of another fossil of this guy from another locale with a beautiful artist's rendition but you can you can see that well there were just all kinds of interesting just good this guy is called an OPA binya he has five eyes a long proboscis and a and I think it's about 30 segmented body segments Stephen Jay Gould the famous Harvard paleontologist wrote a book called wonderful life all about these extraordinary animals that were discovered in the burgess shale so whereas before we had a few basic forms of animal life that we knew had arisen or that the paleontologists in Darwin's time knew had arisen you know in a really discrete and abrupt way now as a result of the burgess shale there was and I'm showing a bunch of this is this guy this is guy called Wewak SIA all these are animals this guy kind of scooted around the bottom now as the results of the burgess shale discoveries there are loads more animal forms whose first appearance is documented in the Cambrian period and each of whom lack ancestral precursors in the lower Precambrian strata so now from our vantage point we've discovered the Cambrian explosion was much more explosive than it was understood to be in Darwin's time the mystery of the missing fossils wasn't attenuated or mitigated by fossil finds it was accentuated it was made more acute so that own and then oh these guys these are the Marella's they're this is what they some of the paleontologists think that they might have how they might have this little lace crab is called Marella splendens so beautiful so I've got this animation it goes on you can see more of this on my web site so anyway that was one big fossil find and did we did we skip on to it we're still we're still animating here let's see if I can get to there that's back to oh okay now this is the next big fossil find 1984 in the southern China there's another huge Cambrian discovery and it was very exciting and by in the 1990s they ended up doing a cover story on it in Time magazine with the title evolutions big bang and one of the paleontologists who who was commenting on this find it was extraordinary for a number of reasons the preservation was even more exquisite than the fossils at the Burgess Shale there were more new animals discovered than then had been known even from the Burgess fine so the explosion again looked more explosive more new forms of animal life again each lacking those ancestral intermediates and the time period in which geologists estimated these events to have occurred shrunk quite dramatically and so one of the paleontologists quoted in this article said well what I like to ask my evolutionary biologist friends is this how much faster does this event have to get before we stop calling it evolution it's really abrupt ok so this was this accentuated the mystery and in in the year 2000 we had a chance to host one of these Chinese paleontologists who made these discoveries at the discovery in stood him to give a lecture at the University of Washington and the University Washington in Seattle big research university and word got out that jy Chen was coming the Chinese Stephen Jay Gould the Chinese Simon Conway Morris a big player in this field worldwide and the word got out he was bringing fossil samples from the Chang Jiang locale and this was pretty exciting so there was a good a good turnout and Chen walked us through many of the the amazing creatures that had been discovered this is a guy called animalic Harris he is the he was the the top of the food chain predator in the Cambrian seas about a meter long extraordinary and the preservation of the the body parts and tissues that was another arthropod extraordinary creature another animal that was discovered if representing the phylum hiawatha this high Olaf was a an animal that lived inside a conical shell that had an attached lid that opened and shot another interesting body plan different kinds of worms a foreign itíd worm that had a feeding oregon and a thing called a loaf of for a worm inside a tube the worm lived inside the tube within another kind of worm an annelid worms that was segmented and had lateral bristles for locomotion so lots of distinct body plans and architectures exemplified by these different animals this guy I really like it looks kind of like a plant but the more they studied it the more convinced they were the paleontologists that was an animal but the the organization of this animal called Dyna miss 'kiss was so unusual they didn't quite know how to classify it so they just called it a problem Attica you can see ladies and gentlemen how science works okay so that's very that was kind of neat so we were getting a really good fossil show oh and this this guy is my favorite cuz we have these in the Puget Sound where I live near Seattle and this is extraordinary this is a comb jelly and that you can see the let's see the picture on the left is a photograph of a modern translucent comb jelly and the picture on the right is the artist's depiction of what's being shown by that Cambrian era fossil so on the standard geological timescale this guy's been around for five hundred and twenty to thirty million years and he hasn't he hasn't evolved at all this is a phenomenon that paleontologists now call stasis which is a lack of directional evolutionary change things just stay the same for a long period of time kind of mysterious on a Darwinian point of view in any case professor Chen talked about all these different forms and then at a certain point in his lecture this came later he this was discovered in 2009 that we learned that the first fishes actually arose in the Cambrian as well which made the explosion again even more explosive but in this talk in 2000 professor Chen I was talking about these different forms of life and at a certain point in his talk he said you know what's extraordinary about these fossil forms and he held up his hand like this and he said as they turn Darwin's tree of life upside down so now in the Darwinian tree of life the little changes accumulate over long periods of time eventually resulting in big disparities in form a chordate is really different than an arthropod that's a completely different body organization theoretically from the Darwinian point of view those two forms of animal life would have had a common ancestor way way way back so it takes a long time to develop those big differences and they only arise at the end of a long process of gradual evolutionary change in the Darwinian theoretical perspective but professor Chen pointed out those big differences in form were present right from the very beginning echinoderms are different than arthropods are different than chordates they're different than comb jellies okay really all and they're all very different and those differences are present from the beginning so he says it turns Darwin's Tree of Life upside down so that was a really interesting comment he made and then there was a Q&A afterwards and one of the University of Washington professors certain point raised his hand he sits that was fascinating lecture thank you for coming to our country thank you for coming to our University the fossils were wonderful but he said I do have one question for you aren't you a little uneasy about expressing skepticism about Darwinism coming as you do from such an authoritarian country it got very quiet in the room and you know this was a really an insult to China and and professor Chen didn't miss a beat he smiled he said oh no he said he said in China we can question Darwinism just not the government in the United States he said you can question the government but you can't question Darwinism and he had heard about our political correctness in our universities and had a kind of a message for us which is who's country is more free really we're able to discuss these things in my country he said so that was kind of interesting in any oh yeah I love this guy this is this one of the earliest fishes ever discovered in the Cambrian right from the very beginning now even as ardent an advocate of evolutionary orthodoxy as Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that the Cambrian explosion represents a bit of a puzzle he says it's as though they the animal phyla the new animal forms were just planted there without any evolutionary history that's what it looks like from the fossil record of course he says we know when that's not true then there must have been these forms in the in the earlier record but it says though they were just planted there now he has he you know is expressing a commitment to this artifact high pop hypothesis idea that there they must be missing because there's by now by the time in 1984 in the 1990s and right up to the present there are very few paleontologists who any longer think we haven't looked hard enough for the ancestors in the Precambrian but up until relatively recently there were still a lot of people who thought well maybe we're missing the ancestors simply because they weren't preserved and the most popular version of the artifact hypothesis was that they weren't preserved because the the the ancestors were too small or too soft but the Chinese fossils revealed something relevant to that claim as well and that was a really interesting find in a layer of rock just beneath the layers that document the Cambrian explosion this is a layer called the douche onto shale and in this shale it's a very late Precambrian sedimentary layer the chinese paleontologists have discovered little tiny microscopic fossils going through the first few cell divisions their embryos probably of sponges a very simple animal form one of the few animal forms that originated in the late Precambrian now this discovery raises a huge problem it produces for the for the artifact hypothesis and it's this if the late Precambrian sediments are capable of preserving small microscopic fossils why didn't they preserve the ancestors to all the other animals that first arise in the Cambrian the fish is the the trilobite s' the animala corrodes all these other guys especially since most of them would have had to have some at least hard parts because they're animals with hard EXO or internal skeletons where where's if you can preserve an embryo a soft tissue dem Brio at that why can't you preserve all the other the other ancestors so now the I you I would say the dominant view in Cambrian paleontology especially among the leading experts on the explosion is that the explosion is real it's not an artifact of incomplete or in an incomplete fossil record there was a very important book on the Cambrian explosion that came out in 2 3 2013 the same year as mine by James Valentine and Doug Irwin and they basically that there's certain no friend of my preferred perspective which I'll explain later but they very much think that the Cambrian event was real and what whatever we make of it they argue we've got to reckon on the explosion as being something that that really happened it's not just an artifact of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation now that so that's the first the first mystery of that I dress in the book the second one has to do with what you really can think of as first of all it's a deeper problem and it's an engineering problem it's the question of how would the evolutionary process build all this new form and structure especially in such a short period of time geologically speaking and biologically speaking the natural selection random mutation mechanism needs a long time to work and scientists can actually there's a branch of evolutionary biology that allows scientists to actually calculate what are called waiting times if you know the size of a population the mutation rate the time from one generation to the next factors like that you can calculate for any given set a series of mutations how long you should have to expect for such an event to take place and if those calculations are being made if you get beyond two or three coordinated mutations the waiting times just balloon well beyond the time available for the entire history of life on Earth accepting the the great ages that most geologists talk about so give them three and a half billion years it's not enough time to generate the kind of changes that we see in the history of life using the mutation natural selection mechanism so that's a big problem now in my book I discussed this problem in light of another discovery that makes the problem even more acute and that is the the discovery of the information bearing properties of the DNA molecule this discovery was came in the 1950s Watson and Crick I'm not pressing the right buttons up here Thank You Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of DNA in 1953 the structure they realized right from the beginning makes suggests that the DNA molecule may have the capacity to store information in a digital form in 1957 Francis Crick proposes something called the sequence hypothesis in which he suggests that the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in a section of machine code that they're the zeros and ones in a section of software which is to say it's not the chemical properties of the these chemical subunits in DNA that matter it's not the shape of those subunits it's their arrangement in accord with a symbol convention or code that allow them to convey instructions for building all the important proteins and protein parts that cells have that keep them alive I'm competing with myself here ok so I've got a little piece of animation that I'll just run in the background as I'm describing this but this has been one of the great discoveries of modern biology it's a stop press moment in the history of life the biologists discovered that code is literally literally running the show inside living systems let me give you an analogy and as you can see some of the animation running the background it's explaining how and you can watch this on my website if you're really interested tonight you but it the the animation is explaining how the digital information in the DNA molecule directs the construction of the protein parts that are so important to keep ourselves alive proteins are and perform all the important jobs they catalyze reactions they form the structural parts of molecular machines we have inside cells extraordinary little tiny machine anno machines rotary engines sliding clamps turbines it's just extraordinary they're made of and they're typically made of proteins and the proteins also process information so you've got this extraordinary process going on inside the cell and it's in here's the analogy engine any engineers here in the audience okay some engineers familiar with CAD cam computer assisted design and engineering I'm from Seattle we've got two really famous companies up there Microsoft where they write code Boeing where they use code to direct the construction of mechanical systems called airplanes so you got it you've got a engineer sitting at a console he writes code to specs to for producing a particular part that code is sent down a wire it's translated into a a machine language that can be read at the manufacturing center and then that manufacturing center will take that information and use it to say place rivets on exactly the right place in the airplane wing so you build the airplane wing according to specs information directing the construction of mechanical systems that's what's going on inside cells molecular machines made of proteins the proteins are built according to the specs the instructions stored in the DNA molecule it's a mind-blowing discovery now I call this discovery the the DNA enigma and the the enigma here is not it's not sorry let's go yeah there we go it's not what the DNA does it's not even the structure of the DNA molecule Watson and Crick solve that for us the the information is the the the enigma is where did the information come from okay and I found in talking to students nobody talks about that in biology classes they here's what DNA is here's the structure here's what it does but no one raises this deeper question where did it come from now I also used to ask my students the question if you want to give your computer a new function what you have to give it software I heard instructions over here any any other answers code okay check check check all right answers so the same thing turns out to be true in life if you want to build a trilobite from whatever simpler form of life was around before you've gotta generate a whole new group of specialized cells every snoo cell type needs dedicated proteins if you're a gut cell for example if you have a gut in an animal those cells need enzymes for digestive enzymes for to do their job and those proteins are constructed in accord with the instructions stored on that DNA molecule so what's this all got to do the Cambrian explosion well when we see all these new forms of animal life we're not just looking at an explosion of new form of biological form we're looking at a new explosion we're looking at an explosion of new information and that's the big question the big question that my book addresses where does that information come from now there's a couple of there are many reasons that the neo-darwinian mechanism the idea of natural selection acting on random mutations does not explain the origin of that information let me run one by you just it's just a little bit intuitive if you software programmers engineers here if you've got a section of software and it's functional maybe some whole program and you start changing the zeros and ones in that software randomly question are you more likely to degrade the information that's present there already or to generate a whole new software program or operating system the laughter shows that everyone gets the point right when I was when my daughter was in middle school she was on a soccer team called the polar bears and she had a real gruff coach with a shaved head and he kind of intimidated me he turned out though he was a really smart guy he was an architect level programmer at Microsoft and I didn't I didn't I didn't know he knew anything about what I did and one day we're watching the girls play and he saunters over on the sidelines and leans over to me like this and he says so what do these Darwinists think the code just wrote itself and then he paused for dramatic effect and said not at Microsoft does work that way okay and so people who are aware of these systems of for conveying information digitally or alphabetically have long been aware that there's a kind of a there's a big mathematical problem with the idea that random changes can generate new information the problem is there's a reason that that the random changes tend to degrade information and that is that there's a lot more ways to arrange characters in any system of any combinatorial system for conveying information there's a lot more ways a lot more arrangements that will produce gibberish then there are that will produce meaningful text or functional sequences just quick illustration turns out this is a bizarre thing but if you take just a 12 Y letter word in the English language for every 12 letter word in English that is meaningful there are a hundred trillion combinations of letters that are that are not meaningful that you won't find in the dictionary okay and this turns out to be a common feature of what are called combinatorial systems where in a combinatorial system is just a system where there's a lot of different ways to arrange things okay now in the 1960s there were there were a group of mathematicians and engineers and computer scientists at MIT who found that at a company picnic one day at a university picnic with some of their biology colleagues in the conversation they discovered that they were as a group really skeptical about the story the evolutionary biologists were telling about how random mutation and natural selection produced all this new genetic information it's the mid-sixties people are just starting to appreciate the information bearing properties of DNA and what it does inside living systems and how important it is to life and these physics math guys are saying I don't think this works and one of them was Marie Eden a famous guy now he ended up convening a conference called mathematical challenges to neo-darwinism and this is one of the things he said expressing his skepticism he says no currently existing formal language system can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences or meaning meaning is almost invariably destroyed now there as mentioned there's a mathematical reason for this and I have a way of illustrating this that gets across the problem of the origin of information why it's such a big problem for the neo-darwinian theory of evolution here's a familiar combinatorial system it's called a bike lock okay it's got four dials and each style has ten digits on it so how many different ways are there to arrange the characters on the lock 40 right 10 plus 10 plus 10 what trick question right okay it's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 is there's 10,000 possibilities which is why a bike lock works okay if you'll imagine we've got a thief out there outside the school sees a nice new bicycle that he'd very much like to have but he encounters an impediment to his avarice the lock okay question if he encounters a lock with four dials like this is it more likely that he'll succeed in opening the lock or that he will fail to open the lock another trick question okay our intuition is yeah fail because we're thinking he probably isn't gonna stay out this very long right but it does depend can you see it does depend on how much time he has I've made some stupid calculations that show it that if you get if you if every 10 seconds you get one new combination it will take you about 15 hours to search more than five thousand once you get to five thousand and one it becomes more likely than not that you'll succeed than it is that you will fail so if we grant that our thief has 15 hours then the answer to the question is well yeah it is more likely that a random search will eventually generate the combination and he'll be able to open the lock all right but what if our thief this is our thief out there randomly randomly searching searching searching but what if instead of a for dialog he encounters one like this okay oh oh thank you that's the random search and here's now the other locking comes okay now what what's the situation now is it more likely that the thief will generate the information he needs to open the lock in the time available to him well let's give him his whole life now I've made calculations on this as well and it turns out that that that if he lives a hundred years and does nothing but sample combinations he's only gonna sample about 3% of the total okay so this is a first of all my bad way to spend a life and secondly it becomes can you see that in this case with all the time available it's gonna be overwhelmingly more likely that he will fail than it is that he will succeed which means if you're a betting person and you form a hypothesis about what's the likely outcome of such a random search it's the hypothesis that he will succeed is overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true can you see that it's a connection to the truth or falsity of the chance hypothesis now the question that I posed in the book is this if we think of a gene or a protein as a combinatorial system remember that picture of the DNA molecule that I had up there and had all the a C's GS and T's well you can see that there be a whole bunch of different ways of combining those ACC's and T's and those are gonna correspond to a whole bunch of different ways of combining what are called amino acids which make up the the subunits of the proteins that the DNA codes for so what you're dealing with in biology are actually combinatorial systems there's lots of different ways to arrange the the characters in the DNA only a very few of which are gonna yield a functional protein and the question is in the case of life is it more like the the the first case where with enough time the the thief could conceivably open the lock there he'd get to a better than 50/50 chance of doing so or is it more like the second case for the ten dialogue and I simplify here and there's a lot about this in my book but here's the situation mathematically that's the search search search of our if we're looking at just one gene with information for building one new protein the ratio of the sequences that will produce a functional protein to all the gibberish sequences is about 1 over 10 to the 77th power this has been experimentally determined for a very short protein and protein sequence okay now that's there's only 10 to the sixty-fifth atoms in the entire galaxy all right so this is a big space to search a big haystack looking for a one little needle okay but it turns out that there's only 10 to the 40th organisms in the entire this's we're searching our 10 to the 77 possibilities it turns out that three and a half billion years is not nearly enough time to search this effectively because there's only been 10 to the 40th organisms in the whole history of life on Earth which means that if every organism in the entire history of life every time it replicated itself was generating a new sequence of DNA you'd only still only search one 10 trillion trillion trillionth of the possibilities okay 110 yeah that's right which means it's overwhelmingly more likely that a search for a new gene that's a new stretch of genetic information randomly like that is it's overwhelmingly more likely that such a search it will fail than it will succeed which means that the hypothesis that such a search did succeed is overwhelmingly more likely to be false and true which means that the neo-darwinian mechanism is not a plausible means of generating new genetic information and people following roughly okay I'm gonna liken this to the two by clock kinases this is like the ten dialog and and we're giving the evolutionary process essentially its whole life to look the whole history of life on Earth and it's not enough time to search the spaces and so it's gonna be more likely than not now anyone seen this film I think it was called Dumb and Dumber it had a it had a comment a comic called Jim Carrey he's kind of a goofy guy and he he sees across the room a lady that he he fancies and so he goes up to her and he he kind of goes and he has a pickup line and he says what are the what are the odds that a girl like me and a guy like you could get together and he Boches his pickup line right from the beginning cuz he's actually the guy you know and and she says not good and he says you mean not good give me like one in a one in a hundred and she says no like one in a million buddy you remember how he reacts if you saw this stupid film he's there jumping up and down he says oh so there's a chance there's a chance okay and I sometimes think this is how our Darwinist friends reason okay just because there's a finite probability of something having happened doesn't mean it happen that way you what you need to know is how many opportunities were there for that thing to happen so you can make an assessment of the kind I just made to determine whether the hypothesis hypothesis is more likely to have been false and true well I've just shown is that the chance hypothesis for the origin of information is more likely to be false and true which means it's a bad hypothesis and in science we want to look for we want to infer to the best explanation and if something is overwhelmingly the more likely to be false and true we're gonna be most likely wanting to reject that okay and move on and that's essentially what's happening in evolutionary biology today and I tell this story in the book the there are many evolution leading evolutionary evolutionary biologists today who are now saying neo-darwinism the standard textbook theory of evolution is it does it does a good job of explaining small-scale variation it doesn't do a good job of explaining the big changes in the history of life the origin of new information the origin of the new body plans that arise in events like the history of life and so in a fuller talk I would explain all that we're gonna skip ahead to what for me is the punchline yeah many new many new theories of evolution are now being proposed because of the problem that I've described tonight with about the origin of information and other similar problems having to do with the origin of the whole of the big body plans as well let's see it turns out that's even a bigger bigger problem and I discuss those in the book so there's a kind of an odd thing going on in the Christian right now you have a big push to get Christians to accept our winni and evolution it's an idea called evolutionary creation or theistic evolution and I find it really odd because you have all these leading secular evolutionary biologists in the mainstream of the discipline saying we need a new theory and to attest to that in my book I described six or seven of the new theories and some of these theories have advantages over old-fashioned neo-darwinism but I also found in describing these new theories that that they too failed to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce say these big Cambrian animals one theory for example I really like is called natural genetic engineering it's been proposed by a biologist at the University of Chicago named Jim Jim Shapiro Shapiro shows that a lot of the mutations that evolutionary biologists describe are not random at all they're being directed towards certain outcomes he says they're under algorithmic control there's a kind of pre-programmed adaptive capacity so that when organisms respond to certain kind of stresses they are capable of responding and generating the production of new genes or proteins as needed but there's a pre-programmed capacity there and Shapiro describes these non-random evolutionary processes but he doesn't attempt to explain where the pre-programming came from and that's what really interests us those of us who are proponents of intelligent design now I first got interested in this idea of intelligent design back in the mid 1980s as Mark mentioned I was a I worked for an oil company I was doing digital signal processing it was an early form of information technology and I had the chance to meet a scientist named Charles Saxton who was one of the first pioneers in proposing this idea of intelligent design he'd written a book called the mystery of life's origin and he had become fascinated with this same question I've been talking about tonight where does the information come from necessary to produce the first cell where does it come from to produce the first animals and he suggested in an epilogue to this very important book that maybe when we're talking about the problem of the origin of information we're not talking about something that's going to be solved by materialistic evolutionary processes because what we know from experience is that information comes from a mind and for him there was this kind of intuitive connection between mind and information and he said maybe what we're looking at is evidence of an intelligent cause well in 1985 I had a chance to get to know thanks and he mentored me for about a year before I went off to grad school and when I went off I was pretty intrigued with his ideas but not totally convinced yet and I had a burning question in my mind and that was could this idea that information is pointing to intelligence could that be formalized as a rigorous scientific hypothesis now ironically I ended up reading a lot of the works of Charles Darwin to get to the bottom of this question in part this is my my mentor Charles Saxton and another Charles Charles Darwin had and I was interested in his biological arguments and so forth but I was also interested in his method of reasoning because he had pioneered a particular kind of scientific reasoning that was more forensic and style he was reasoning from effects all the clues we have in front of us back to their causes in the ancient past and it became clear from reading Darwin that there was a special method of scientific reasoning you couldn't make trilobite to reappear in the laboratory they originated only once so if you were trying to figure out what caused an event in the remote past to happen you had to use this more historical style of reasoning that Darwin had pioneered and and scientists and philosophers now call that method the method of multiple competing hypotheses or sometimes the method of inference to the best explanation but that raised a really interesting question what does it mean to be a best explanation well Darwin had a principle and he got it from his mentor and other Charles Charles Lyell one of the great geologists of the 19th century and Charles Lyell's idea was that if you're trying to reconstruct what happened in the remote past you want to choose that hypothesis the best hypothesis or explanation is the one that cites a cause that is now in operation that is precaution afore man repeated experience is producing the effect in question and when I came across those words on the title page of his book causes by reference to causes now in operation a light went on for me and I began to think about the problem of the origin of info Meishan I asked myself a question what is the cause now in operation that produces digital code what do we know from our uniform and repeated experience about the origin of digital code soon after I encountered another author who was writing about the the he was applying the information Sciences to analyzing the information in DNA and he made an offhand comment the creation of new information is habitually associated he said in our uniform and repeated experience with conscious and rational activity what do we know from our experience that produces digital information well mines intelligent agents and Bill Gates has sort of intimated something like this he's when he says that DNA is like a computer program only much more complex than any we've ever devised I think that's a very interesting statement because if you think about the implications they're kind of profound what do we know generates the software the Microsoft Corporation programmers write intelligent agents that's what we know from experience that's the one cause of which we know that generates information and I thought that's very significant because as I thought about it it's not just the code in software it's it's any place we encounter information in a digital or alphabetic form whether it's in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a section of code in a radio signal or embedded information in a radio signal whenever we find information and we trace it back to its source we always come to a mind not a material process and so I've argued in my two books Darwin's doubt which concerns the origin of animals and let's go back here and signature in the cell that the origin of information that we see arising in the history of life is best explained by a designing intelligence and the ironic somewhat mischievous approach I take is to use Darwin's own method of reasoning to make that case I come to a different conclusion Darwin wanted to deny that there was actual evidence of design in nature but I'm arguing that based on what we now know in particular what we know about the digital information stored in DNA and I've really only given you just a little bit of the story because it turns out in addition to digital code in DNA we have networks of genes that function like integrated circuits they're called developmental gene regulatory networks and you can read about them and what they do it in my book we also know that that the information in DNA is only part of the information that's necessary to build a whole animal form that there's a hierarchically organized information processing system that's kind of like say the information that we we've got information that is necessary to build a circuit board more information necessary to build the computer the computer can be linked into a hierarchy of networks we organize information in hierarchies and biological systems are hierarchically organized information processing systems suggesting again by the same logic only one known cause of that kind of thing and that kind of and that again is intelligence so I think the case for intelligent design can be made very powerfully at many levels now in close some of you may wonder how the argument I've made about intelligent design is the best explanation for the origin of the information needed to build these new animal forms in the Cambrian period how that argument has been received in the scientific community the book came out in 2013 it was reviewed initially quite frivolously in a number of sources but then in the fall of 2013 there was a very serious review in the journal science written by the distinguished paleontologist and evolutionary biologists at Berkeley named Charles Marshall and Berkeley rotary Marshall wrote a respectful review he said some nice things about the book but on the crucial argument he said he begged to differ and his claim was this he says that Mayer argues that you a paraphrase but he says Mayer argues you need all this new information to build the Cambrian animals he says that's not our current understanding our current understanding is that all the weight you would need to have is you these gene regulatory networks his net is that the the evolutionary process would need to rewire these networks of genes that control the expression of other genes for building the different parts of the animals and when I saw that passage in his review I was actually reading it on my iPhone driving home from a haircut it wasn't a good thing to do but you know what I was kind of curious what he was going to I just about you know drove off the road because this was the best possible critique I thought that I could receive not because it was correct but rather because it revealed the weakness in the position of the other side a network of genes contains what genetic information and lots of it okay and the networks of genes that act on other genes for building the parts of the animals can what do those other genes contain more information rewiring a network of genes requires multiple coordinated changes in code more information so to explain the origin of the information necessary to build the Cambrian animals this leading evolutionary biologist begged the question he simply pushed the question back and said well it's in the information that was there prior to the building of the animals or something okay but he didn't explain the origin of information in the first place how you saw for example that combinatorial problem that I was explaining earlier with the bike locks okay so I actually think that we're at a place of real impasse in evolutionary theory the crucial questions are either not being addressed like the natural genetic engineering really good description of some really real processes but it doesn't address the deeper question of where the programming comes from and Marshalls responses of the same kind he just pushes the question back so I think it's a very interesting time and this is my case for intelligent design and I thank you for listening very much thank you and I'm happy to take questions on American rules yes so if you have a question what we would like to do is rather than me running around like like an ATV foo which I do everyday in class just kind of come on up here and you can line up and take questions that way and also I do want to welcome those of you who are visiting science teachers and visiting professors as well especially my friend dr. Joe Francis chairman of Balaji masters College great to have you here Joe so we'll open up for questions now I'd like to say that if you have one just come get in line and we'll make it happen questions comments objections all fair game okay I'm a I'm a theist I believe the the intelligent designer is God and I'm also I I'm also a Christian yes right right yeah creation would would it would it surprise you to hear that this is the first question that I get at almost every lecture okay I'm gonna well let me let me say a couple things about this all right the the case for intelligent design actually go back to your first question about the identity of the designer all right I've just given you one little piece of evidence for intelligent design and if you look at the cosmic timeline with the teachers this morning I talked about some of the evidence from cosmology and physics that we see not only evidence of a we see three things I think that help us get a clearer picture of the identity of the designer did anyone see the movie expelled with Richard Dawkins and Ben Stein in the final sequence and Ben Stein got Richard Dawkins to acknowledge that he had no idea where the first life came from and there might actually in the DNA be a signature of intelligence which kind of got my attention because at that point I was finishing up writing signature in the cell and but then Dawkins said but whatever that intelligence is it must have evolved someplace else in the cosmos by purely undirected processes and so essentially he was proposing a space alien did well not Watson but Crick has proposed at one point a panspermia idea that life was seated here in outer space from some sort of intelligent agent he got so much flack from that he then he then forced swore proposing any more theories about the origin of life after that but anyway so so anyway if all we had was the evidence from biology it would be logically possible to consider to design different design hypotheses one an imminent intelligence some sort of agent within the cosmos and one a transcendent intelligence that would have the attributes of God beyond the cosmos but in addition to the biological evidence we also have evidence from physics where the physicists have been telling us for fifty years that the basic laws and constants of physics are exquisitely finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life which is to say the very fabric of the universe the laws that apply to all entities within the universe are finely tuned suggesting that you have designed built into the fabric of the universe itself and I think that such design cannot be explained by any entity within the cosmos thus I think on scientific grounds alone there's a good reason to exclude Dawkins as space alien hypotheses on the other hand if you only had the physics evidence you might say well maybe it was a kind of deistic designer who wound the clock up the beginning and then let things run but not but from biology we see that there's evidence of the designer acting in time and space in history which is the the which is what's characteristic of a theistic God okay the kind of God revealed in the Bible so I think when you add up all the evidence the evidence for definite beginning in the material universe is revealed by cosmology and evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe from the beginning as revealed by physics and the evidence of the a master programmer for the code of life revealed by biology I think that all adds up to a very frankly theistic picture which is the kind of thing you'd expect on the basis of Romans 1 okay all right that's one thing now on this question of age we have an official position at Discovery Institute which is we're neutral okay now and one of the reasons there's a couple reasons for that one is that the debate has become very toxic in the Christian world okay there's older people and younger people and it's not toxic for everyone who has a view on this but there are groups that are really at each other about this okay and I believe this is not a primary question either of doctrine or of science and worldview okay the most important thing I think the most important question is whether or not there is a creator and secondly whether or not the scientific evidence reveals that such a being exists okay so and that's what Romans 1 is about right so the question of and so I would argue that surely the question of how long ago the creation took place is of secondary or tertiary importance to these other issues the metaphysical claim that there is a creator maybe is the first important thing the epistemological claim about whether or not we can know the Creator from the things that have been made is the second most important claim and then how long ago its its third most okay now as many people think that well but it is super important because it's a question of biblical interpretation and there I will share my view okay not the view of the intelligent design movement which includes both younger and older scientists I personally have never thought that the Bible teaches a young earth and the reason for that has to do with the action what the actual text says about the days of Genesis when you get to day four in the Genesis account you have the the text tells us that God either created or caused to appear depending on the rendering of Hebrew verb asau which can mean either created out of nothing or simply caused to appear either way we're told that the Sun and the moon are caused to appear or created and that they are given as markers of the days and the seasons their time markers but already by this point in the Genesis account we've had three days of creation complete with evening and morning but with no time markers available to mark time the way we mark time today so I think a really careful indeed yeah verily literal reading of the text suggests that the days of Genesis are of indeterminate length from a human point of view and there is a great Bible scholar at covenant college named Jack Collins he's the Hebrew philologists or Hebrew scholar and when he's asked are the days of Genesis long Hugh Ross days or short Ken Ham days he always answers and says neither there are days of indeterminate length from a human point of view what's that there's a big argument to be had here and I'm not going to have it tonight okay no no no yeah yeah yeah and and this is this is actually one of the reasons that we tend not to answer the question because you get into this a little bit and then people want to make this the main issue you know yeah yeah well but I mean scientifically there's a big there's a big metaphysical issue about what does the science reveal does it reveal a naturalistic worldview or dissapoint of naturalistic worldview or theistic one and yes obviously the main issue is Jesus do okay yeah but anyway thank you for asking that's yeah you may not clap if you don't like that answer it's fine I don't care yeah I would tell you that that my personal view when I look at the evidence is that I tend to view the universe and the and the earth is very old and I think humans are relatively recent we have been on earth and I believe in a recent creation of human beings so I've kind of a hybrid view my closest colleague in the ID movement is a guy named Paul Nelson and he's a young earth guy and we tried to argue about this one time and found that we couldn't actually sustain the energy we got kind of bored because we're more focused on refuting the materialistic Darwinian thing and arguing for design and trying to figure out the age question but I understand some people are really into it and it's fine yeah another way I often put this I think a lot turns on whether there is an actual historical Adam theologically I don't think a lot turns on the age of rocks yeah thanks yeah your involvement with them you know when the lack of traditional forms was acknowledged they come up with punctuated equilibrium right when they find animals with similar traits even if the genetic level that are not related they say convergent evolution right so my question is every time there is a discovery that should falsify evolution they changed the definition of what evolution is so the way they've set up this theory it's by definition not falsifiable so is it a scientific theory I'm gonna be a little contrary in here as well but I get the the the spirit I agree with the spirit of the question there's a fine point in the philosophy of science about how do you define a scientific theory and it turns out it's super hard to do that it's something called the demarcation question in a lot of my work was showing that however you define science that intelligent design is every bit as much a scientific theory as Darwinian theory is you can apply different yardsticks and people choose different yardsticks and this one you're talking about falsification was came out of the philosophy of science of a guy named Karl Popper and there are problems with it because it doesn't it doesn't capture the comparative nature of scientific testing it says you can just make predictions in the prediction if the predictions don't come true and you don't and you don't if the predictions don't come true well then you you're obligated to to to reject your theory and say it's it's false okay but scientists all the time have lots of reasons why they think a prediction might have failed other than their theory being wrong and sometimes it's an okay thing to think well maybe maybe there was a disruption in the in the conditions under which the experiment was performed or so and they call those so they'll come up with auxilary hypotheses well the theory was right but this other thing was the problem and it's really it's a judgment call ultimately as to when you've added too many of those in an implausible way to save a theory all right I think a better idea about what constitutes scientific description of the way science works is this method I call inference to the best explanation where we're really testing things by comparing explanatory power and predictive power there's a comparative aspect to this and so I would be happy to grant the Darwinism as a scientific theory I just think that we've got a better one and because it explains the key evidence is more consistent in a way that's more consistent with our knowledge of cause and effect so I tend not to want to say disqualify things with a definition I want to show that our theory provides a better explanation in relation to the evidence but but there is this kind of weasel enos about neo-darwinism it's constantly reinventing itself to avoid you know refutation so yeah thanks reducible complexity there's a certain number of processes that need to be present in the cell for this cell to continue like one of those processes but if one of those processes eliminate that cell will die it doesn't make a difference how many more exists so given that how do you secular biologists argue that all of these were present at one time and now we have life rather than slowly accumulating all these processes at one time and still not being able to have like until you get to a hundred yeah really did a nice job explaining this okay this idea of introducing complexity was first proposed by a biochemist named Michael Behe I was with him last week in Pennsylvania where he's from and B he highlighted the these little tiny miniature machines and circuits that are being discovered inside even the simplest cells I wish I had the pictures I shared some of this with the faculty this morning but one of those little machines is called a bacterial flagellum motor he made it very famous it's literally a rotary engine it has a rotor a stator a u-joint bushings bearings a driveshaft and a little hook like tail that functions like a propeller it turns it a hundred thousand rpm it's hardwired into a signal transduction circuit and can reverse directions on a quarter of a turn it allows the bug to chase down the sugar it needs to eat it's amazing okay high tech and low life B he argues that systems like this they're many things the mutation selection mechanism can explain he said but things like this it can't explain because the whole idea of mutation is selection is that natural selection preserves things that confer a functional advantage but these machines that have all the this one particular machine has about 30 protein parts and if any one of those parts is missing the machine doesn't work and this is what you're alluding to and this applies at higher levels as well but when you break it down to these machines and circuits it's really becomes a very tractable tractable engineering problem and B he shows that the 29 28 27 26 part version of this motor simply has no function so the intermediate stages on the way from whatever simple thing it started with to the fully functional motor are simply non-viable which means they won't be selected which means that the evolutionary process will terminate in encountering those non-functional combinations of parts so that means that you can't build the the the motor or the these motors gradually in a step-by-step Darwinian fashion but that's the mechanism that is allegedly gets read rid of the need for the design hypothesis that unguided undirected mechanism of mutation and selection explains the appearance but not the actuality of design says says say the Darwin us so B he says look if it if designer substitute mechanism that explains the appearance of design we have a striking appearance of design in these little nano machines maybe they really were designed hey there's a concept yeah so that's what yeah and what you asked how they explain this what they have what has been proposed is there are some immediate structure intermediate structures that might be show that the complexity is not irreducible and there is something that's been discovered called a little type 3 secretory system it's a little syringe that has 10 parts and it's actually in a fully built flagellum it's on the inside and then all the other parts get built around it and in some bacteria you find these little syringes operating in isolation but what you're what the people who want to invoke those as the intermediates on the way to the full system don't tell you is first of all that only gets you to 1012 parts and all the intermediate stages are still non-viable but secondly when you do an analysis on what are called mutation density studies they've revealed that the syringes are not older than the fully formed flagellar motors but they're younger or the same age suggesting that they are devolution Airi breakdown products they're not ancestral so is it and so be he's argument I think has resisted refutation pretty dramatically but you don't hear that everywhere so yeah we've got a section on that in a book called explore evolution and you'll be glad it's not taught in a dogmatic way complexity is talked here and then the students are told that you look and you see throughout the year if you find things in the cell if you find systems that you think irreducibly complex and be able to tell me you can these kinds of things are actually there's all kinds of systems that have this property in biological systems engineers might think of it as something like functional integration of parts complexity it is because it comes down my understanding to an issue of presupposition because the evolutionary biologist is presupposing like you said earlier no deela Tereus mutations only good mutations resulting with enough time and some machine that can build sequentially which is really a presupposition suppose first of all it's not gonna get destroyed along the way second of all is enough time to do it so my question then is you think about presupposition z' and the need for information and you're looking for a better model that has information given that is a designer what about including in your apologetic and maybe you do other arguments of that nature of presupposition the question of not only where do we get information from what's a better explanation information but also what's a better explanation for certain laws of logic certain laws of science this is a transcendental argument that Bahnson talks about and you know so do you incorporate this argument for a need for the giver of moral law giver of logic the very things that the philosophy bakes for but then also yeah information that sort of relates to that I I'm a big fan of both the moral argument and the epistemological argument for God's existence the argument from epistemological necessity it was the first thing that it probably had the biggest effect on me intellectually in my in my conversion to to theism and it was I first encountered in in one of Francis Schaeffer's little books called he is there and not silent I had a professor who's a Content specialist who used to soup up Schafer's arguments and give them a bit more analytical philosophical rigor but they're pretty good arguments I will probably rive written one essay about that I'll probably incorporate that into some future work I think there's there's an evidential case for God from cosmology from physics from biology I also think these presuppositional arguments have a lot of force so I'm at both and not an either/or guy on the approach to to the theistic argumentation I also think oddly there's a common logical structure this inference to the best uh deaiing Darwin the structure of Darwin's our argument in the Origin of Species I thought I've seen this before someplace it was and I realized oh it's it was in the it was in Schaeffer's presuppositional argument for theism it's the same structure it's just it was different is what the starting point you either can infer from the evidence to the best explanation which is the scientific approach or the presuppositional apologetics approach is to posit something as a possible explanation and then compare the competing explanations to show that your explanation provides the most coherent account of reality and so it's really the only it's the same logical structure neither of them are deductive strictly speaking but it just it's iterative it depends on whether you start with the evidence or start with the explanatory supposition so I think the the dichotomy between evidential and presuppositional apologetics is ultimately a false one and thats been another one of these fights in the christian world that's been completely unnecessary well it's a huge there's a huge question is about the reliability of human reasoning the human mind itself this is what planning is work is is about his great books warrant and proper function and and this has been the main thread in philosophy of science and and epistemology since the Enlightenment on what basis do we justify the reliability of the human mind the question never occurred to the early founders of modern science because they believed that nature was intelligible because it had been made by a rational God the very same rational God who had made our minds so our minds were attuned to the reason that was built into the world we could perceive it and understand it and and but since the Enlightenment that confident when she got rid of God it became a lot more difficult to justify science to justify the reliability of the mind and our ability to make sense of the order and design that's built into the world so it's a big question but I'm very sympathetic to the concern maybe we should take I'm tracking with you all the way to the very end I'm real reluctant to impose ok about sin and rebellion and that sort of stuff but what I think we can say is that it does derive from a philosophical previous opposition that we must explain everything by reference to purely materialistic causes ok and there's even a there's a principle of reasoning that people say is definitional in science the judge in the Dover case affirmed it and it's the idea of methodological naturalism ok that if we're going to be scientists we've got to explain everything by reference to naturalistic or materialistic causes but the problem is information is not that kind of a beast if you walk into the the a British Museum and you look at the rosetta stone you don't say gee isn't it wonderful what wind and erosion did you know from experience that a mind is involved right there's more in other words there's more to reality than is acknowledged by the the thing about Horatio and Shay you know if there's more to reality than is acknowledged by the materialistic philosophy and what so part of what we're doing in the IT movement is not only challenging the scientific interpretation of the evidence but we're saying we're challenging the rules that limit people from considering an interpretation that goes beyond a purely materialistic worldview so I think you're I think you're exactly right on that that is the key hidden persuader yeah thank you great question no there's a lot of movement there's a lot of movement I got I had a very encouraging email today from a really high-powered professor at an amazing place and it's not everyone who's friendly to this can be open about being friendly to it but people ah'd I mean just is there a lot of people in in the field of evolutionary biology who know that the textbook theory is in trouble there are a lot of people in other disciplines that are sympathetic to what we're doing an intelligent design and we're starting to feel the cracks and you know sometimes you push on a wall and you push and you push and you push and you think nothing's ever going to change and then suddenly it just it just goes and the young scientists that are being attracted to this some of the older people who are in established positions who are friendly it's it's some some days it's kind of encouraging so I think we should be very encouraged people that the truth will win out it just does something sometimes take time thank you great question [Applause] is these two books are for sale there's a sale table back there and I highly encourage you to read them they will encourage you in your faith they will strengthen your ability to be prepared to give a reason to anyone who should ask for the hope that is within you and I thank you all for coming out tonight and hope you were as blessed as I was god bless let me close this in prayer Lord we're grateful for this evening and we're grateful for dr. Meyer for the work that he's doing the work at Discovery Institute the work at the Science Division that he heads up we pray you will continue god speed in his efforts to reveal your glory and just as the psalmist wrote the heavens do indeed declare the glory of God and Lord we thank you that you have made us in your image and given us keen minds where we can't investigate this intelligible universe and Lord may we feel your pleasure every time we do we pray this in Jesus name Amen thank you have a great evening

Channel: Trinity Classical Academy

Views: 144,961

Rating: 4.5027571 out of 5

Keywords: Intelligent Design (Field Of Study), Dr. Stephen Meyer, Darwinism (Literature Subject)

Id: vl802lHAk5Y

Length: 95min 1sec (5701 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2015