Genesis Conf 2019 - Michael Behe

[Music] okay super then I'd like to talk to you tonight about intelligent design and the title of the talk is fearfully and wonderfully made the argument for intelligent design from biochemistry now before I start I'd like to put up this disclaimer because you may know that intelligent design is an exceedingly controversial topic in some quarters of this society so you're going to be hearing something dangerous so if you want to leave now I would understand so like I said the the subtitle of my talk is the argument for intelligent design from biochemistry what's that about well it turns out that throughout written history everybody especially the most intelligent folks in society knew that life was purposely made that life was designed for example a thousand or more years ago three thousand years ago King David wrote in the Psalms I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous are thy works and that my soul knoweth right well David was talking about physical characteristics he said hey I am fearfully and wonderfully made look at these hands they can grasp things they can move needles and and so on look at these eyeballs I can scout out things look for places to live and and these ears I can hear my muscles I can I can lift things so he said he was fearfully and wonderfully made he wasn't some glob of jelly just kind of sitting around on a playing so he realized that but of course the ancient Hebrews did not have advanced science but with time science kind of slowly and gradually got underway and another stop along the route is this guy this is Galen he was a Greek physician living in Rome and he was arguably the best naturalist or scientist of the classical world he was a medical doctor and he did dissections on many different kinds of animals and and organisms so he could see how muscles were connected he could trace he could trace veins and arteries he could look at nerves and dissect the eyeball and one of his writings says exactly this that the human body is the result of a supremely intelligent and powerful divine craftsman that is it's the result of intelligent design but that wasn't the end of it science advanced even more and continuously it's kind of a a building up of knowledge about the world and in another fifteen hundred or so years perhaps the most famous argument for the intelligent design of life was made by an English clergyman named William Paley around the Year 1800 and he made the famous watchmaker argument and the watchmaker argument says heck if you were walking in a field and you kind of stumbled across a watch or some boat across a stone and somebody asked how long it had been there you might I don't know it might have been there forever but if you stumbled across a watch you would know it hadn't been there forever because you know it would require design some but he would have had to make it and you could tell that by the way the parts are fitted for each other and he went on to say that we that living things are more wonderfully made than a watch we are more intricately made than a watch and so so much greater wood art be our confidence that we had a maker than for this watch but the argument for design of life was derailed in the middle of the 19th century by this fellow Charles Darwin and as you know Darwin in his early days signed up as the naturalist aboard a an exploring ship called the HMS Beagle and they took a round-the-world trip going down around South America and over to Australia and back again and he collected a lot of specimens along the way and he made a lot of observations and he saw things that no European had ever seen before or had ever noticed before for example he saw that on the Galapagos Islands which is about 500 miles west of Ecuador there were a bunch of birds and he collected specimens of them and when he brought them back to England and an anatomist dissected them the anatomist told Darwin that these guys are all finches there are separate species of finches what's more they don't occur anywhere else in the world except the Galapagos Islands and Darwin was surprised by that and he started to kind of conjugate on that and other observations for about 30 years or so and then he the book on the origin of species by natural selection where he presented a theory by which organisms could develop and vary over time and the theory goes like this that if you look around you see that individuals of a species vary some are bigger some are faster some are brighter in color and if one of those variations helps it survive maybe the faster one can escape predators better then it will tend to out survive others of its species that don't have that variation and leave more offspring and if the offspring inherited that characteristic too then they could out-compete everybody else and the next generation in the next generation and pretty much the trait will have spread throughout the entire species and then maybe another variation comes along that is helpful so that if traits are inherited then over generations the species will change ok it was a very interesting idea very impressive and at the time and of course a lot of science has been done on the basis of Darwin's theory but what we have to get straight from the start so as not to become confused is that Darwin's theory is actually an amalgam of a couple different ideas and you have to separate the ideas and evaluate them separately some of his ideas might be true some not true but they all have to work for his overall theory to be correct and the three most important components of Darwin's theory for our purposes here tonight our first the idea of common descent that is that organisms in the misty past gave rise to over time to the organisms that are living today and that's interesting as I write here but if you think about it it's trivial okay it might be an interesting idea about natural history but it doesn't say where those ancestors came from they're just there at the beginning doesn't say how they gave rise to sometimes very very different animals today it just says it happened over time so that's interesting it's interesting to think that things today are descended from things in the past but well okay it doesn't say anything really striking by itself the next idea is natural selection that is the idea that those organisms that are more fit for their environment will survive better and leave more offspring than than those that don't have or aren't as fit and again it's interesting but once more it's trivial because who's going to deny that an organism that's better fit to its environment you know it doesn't have a better chance of living okay the most important part of Darwin's theory into which 99% of the philosophical and scientific interest is poured is in this third topic that of random mutation that random accidents random genetic changes random changes and organisms can even with selection over repeated repeated times add up to phenomenally coherent functional biological systems like say the eyeball that as I said that's the most important part of Darwin's theory by comparison the others are just fluff and that is what we're going to be concentrating on tonight so the critical claim of Darwin is that the random changes are sufficient to fuel natural selection to build the build the phenomena of life well now most people most people are a little don't get their biology you know from the latest literature so I want to start with a an idea that was first presented by an English writer GK Chesterton in the early 20th century in his book orthodoxy Chesterton wrote that nursery tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the Forgotten moment when we found that they were green they make rivers run with wine only to remake us remember for one wild moment that they run with water and the point is that when you are surrounded by startling amazing things you sometimes take them for granted yeah yeah yeah illnesses water sure you know water is this land stuff after all well in order to kind of jog you folks into seeing life in a different way I'm going to take Chesterton's advice and and point to a modern fairy tale or nursery tale whatever and let's look at a TV program that some of you might have have heard of called Star Trek didn't anybody ever watch that show there's one there yeah okay a couple couple folks have seen this so a Star Trek and the bore again in one of the one of the episodes or one of the years of Star Trek the Borg were introduced as a race of half machine half humanoid type beings who would relentlessly attack and try to assimilate our our noble crew here into the into their race and they were famously powered by nanotechnology and you can see it here it's from the memory alpha free stark reference on the internet so you know it's reliable and they write that nanotechnology is a word used to describe devices so small that the naked eye cannot see them the Borg collective is infamous for their use of nanotechnology to advance their goals specifically assimilating new members and technologies assimilating new members and technologies okay and and here's a nice graphic of it here's a poorer Captain Picard being assimilated and over here we see what's going on in his bloodstream it's the nanotechnology these red disks or red blood cells and these evil-looking metallic things are the nanotechnology which is somehow wreaking havoc well the interesting thing is that as science has advanced we've come to realize that we are the Borg at least in that respect not necessarily in one who to assimilate and conquer other races but we are the Borg in the sense that we are run by exquisite nanotechnology for example here's the cover of a science journal called cell from the late 90s and you might see that it is a special issue on macro molecular machines and if you look down in the lower left-hand corner there's a drawing that looks something like Paley's watch and if you turn the page and look at the table of contents you'll see articles like the cell as a collection of protein machines polymer aces and the replisome machines within machines mechanical devices of the spliceosome motors clocks Springs and things you are the Borg you are run by nanotechnology here's a computer a drawing of one molecular machine which we won't describe or or get into but if you look all of these little dots are separate complex protein machines by themselves and they all aggregate into this larger complex machine called a cilium now I don't want to talk about it but I just want to show you where it was published the journal where it was published is called nano technology nanotechnology that's what science has discovered we are run by more sophisticated machines than are found at Star Trek so the point that I want to make as a biochemist somebody who studies the molecules of life is to point out that this is the way that most people think of evolution kind of wrongly but understandably well you know here's a fish crawling out on land and here's his dad saying don't walk away when I'm talking to you so that's how you know walking started land land vertebrates here's a here's a dinosaur with feathers well that's great what you saved yourself maybe that's interesting but how did this fish grow legs what went on how did this animal grow feathers exactly what's going on there and instead of thinking about evolution like this this is how you should think of evolution science has discovered that the basis of life is cellular and molecular machinery so life the information for life is coded into DNA and this is pretty cheesy but this is a molecular machine which can actually walk up and down things called microtubules highways made out of molecules into to its destination this is where this is the bottom level of life so it is there that we have to look to see what's going on what's going on during evolution so the rest of the talk is to say why we should think that life was purposely designed why it's erroneous to think it was not and that it is a compelling conclusion and the structure of my talk is going to be similar to a an op Eady site wrote about what 15 years ago now for the New York Times see there's my name if you want a copy of it after the talk well anyway well it was it really on the front page but you know who is Photoshop you can do wonders and I don't put this up I put this up just to point out that if you can explain these ideas in an op-ed page then they're not that hard to understand anybody can understand them and the structure of my argument has five points let's go through them the first point as the design perceiving design is not some mystical conclusion you don't have to you know raise your hands and close your eyes to decide that something was designed rather it's deduced from the physical structure of a system the second point is that everyone agrees everyone agrees that aspects of biology appear to have been designed and when I say everyone I mean even those folks who most strongly deny that the apparent design is real and those folks think that something other than a real intelligence is responsible for life and they have other ideas how that might have happened the chief one of them is Darwin's theory of evolution so the third point is to show you that there are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution there are physical reasons for thinking that it cannot do what its proponents claim for it but you might say that well you know whenever I see a science show on TV or read a article about evolution in a magazine people say that you know science has already shown that Darwin's theory accounts for all of life it's it's not up for discussion anymore so the next point is to say that those grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination now imagination is can be helpful in science just like it can be helpful in most other areas of life but if it's undisciplined imagination if not grounded in facts and tests and so on then it becomes a double-edged sword and it can lead you on a merry chase and the final point is kind of a summary point for the for the talk tonight and that is that the bottom line is that right now in the year 2019 there is strong evidence for design overwhelming evidence for design and little to no evidence for Darwinism all right not every crowd I talk to is as agreeable as yourself so I appreciate that okay so let's we're going to get into those points one by one and we'll start with the first one that design is not some mystical conclusion it's deduced from the physical structure of a system pretty ordinary observations and but first before we go into that we have to ask ourselves what is intelligent design and if you look up in the dictionary the word design you'll see a number of different definitions but the pertinent one is that design is the purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details in other words design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts in other words we infer design we conclude that design has occurred whenever parts appear to have been arranged for a purpose okay well that's that's a bunch of words but you might say to yourself well how what do you mean by that show me an example and and a good example or my favorite example is shown on the next slide here and this is a far side cartoon I love the far side and here we've got a troop of jungle explorers and the lead Explorer has been strung up and skewered and this guy here turns to this guy here and says that's why I never walk in front words to live by all right I can tell you okay now everybody in this church looks at this cartoon and you immediately realize that this was designed this was no accident his death was intended as a matter of fact the humor of the cartoon depends upon you recognizing that it was designed it wouldn't be all that funny if he just fell over a cliff or something so everybody realizes that this was designed how do you know that is it is it a religious conclusion probably not unless you're one of those weird you know no it's not a religious conclusion we know it's designed because we see a number of parts that have been arranged for a purpose we see the purposeful arrangement of parts whoops went the wrong way and a purposeful arrangement of parts is the way it is the only way that we recognized the work of a mind and the reason is that minds can have purposes to the extent they can affect other things they can then place them in relationship so that it accomplishes their purposes we are physical beings so we have to get all of our information through our senses which perceive physical things but we also know that there are minds there are such things as minds and so we perceive the work of a mind through physical arrangements that have a purpose only minds have purposes and mind and purpose is something that is found nowhere in darwin's theory okay there are two other points that we have to consider before we move on a next one is that the strength of the design inference is quantitative and that just means that the more and more parts we have and the more and more closely they are arranged to fit the purpose the more and more and more and more certain we can be that this was designed and let's let's look at an example here suppose you and a buddy were hiking out in nature and you walked by these mountains called the sawtooth mountain was found in Idaho and your buddy asked you well where do you think those mountains came from and you said I don't know I never took that geology class plate tectonics or volcanic activity maybe yeah maybe most people would accept that but suppose your friend said yeah yeah yeah but if you look at this you find that this peak here is exactly 300 19 feet higher than that peak and what's more if you draw a line from this peak to that it makes a an angle of 18 degrees from the horizontal and you would say so so excellent point excellent point but suppose you and your buddy who are very formidable outdoorsmen kept on hiking and you went to New Hampshire and you saw this part of a mountain this is called the old man of the mountain and it's kind of a was a historic structure in New Hampshire and these guys here are state workers trying to shore it up but it fell down a few years ago which I guess shows you something about government workers but suppose your buddy said well where do you think this mountain came from and you said huh that kind of looks like a chin there and that's like a mouth on a nose forehead gee do you think that some prehistoric tribe might have Nana it's just a lucky arrangement of rocks you know if you look at it from the other side doesn't look like a face at all or anything and but suppose you and your friend kept on hiking and you came to this arrangement in South Dakota now if he asked that same question where do you think this mountain came from nobody would think that it was due to plate tectonics or volcanic activity or unintelligent processes of any kind even if you never heard of Mount Rushmore before even if you brought a friend from a foreign country they would immediately recognize that these structures were purposely designed and they would do it because they can see that parts the parts of the rocks that have been chiseled away and so on have been arranged to portray images and we Americans know the images of presidents of the United States and now questions like you know how come this is only 18 feet from here and why does it make an angle of about 85 degrees with the horizontal how they have answers because there's a purpose why does that happen because it's that's necessary to portray the image of George Washington okay so the conclusion of design is quantitative you can have ambiguous cuase ambiguous cases like the old man of the mountain you can have that aren't ambiguous like these saw to thousands there's no reason to think they were designed and you can have clear examples where there's no question that something was in fact designed one more point so as not to confuse ourselves that is that design can be found at multiple independent levels if design occurs at one level a separate design can occur at another using the design from the lower level an easy example is this this here is a a collection of the World Book Encyclopedia and if you look you see that the all the articles are arranged alphabetically and so on they have a certain style so you could tell that the alphabetical arrangement was purposeful it was done on purpose it wasn't a printers mistake when it went to the when it went to the printer but you also know that each of the words was designed and that they were put together into phrases and clauses and sentences and paragraphs at each of those levels is a separate design you can use the same word in different sentences you can use the same sentence in different paragraphs and so on a physical example is Mount Rushmore we look at Mount Rushmore and we see that the presidents of the United States but suppose we just saw George Washington's nose carved there well would probably be suspicious that it was designed but it's not enough not enough parts to reach a conclusion but if we saw the eyes and the mouth and so on we would conclude that in fact yes it was George Washington but suppose instead that George Washington's nose was followed by say Woody Allen's nose or Cyrano de Bergerac nose now we say hey the purpose is a collection of noses that's a separate design from the individual individual sculptures suppose we had this wonderful image of George Washington but next to him was not Thomas Jefferson it was Martha Washington and maybe a neighbor of theirs from Virginia well that would have a whole different vibe than what we see here so the point is that there are multiple levels and they are independent you have to keep that in mind to avoid confusion okay so that was my explanation that design is not mystical it is deduced from the physical structure of a system so let's go on to that everyone agrees that aspects of biology appear to be designed and since we don't have time to see what everyone has said we will settle with a fellow named Richard Dawkins who has a very strong advocate for Darwin's theory and in 1986 he wrote a book called the blind watchmaker defending Darwin's theory very strongly saying after Paley Paley thought that a watchmaker was needed to make complicated things but Dawkins says no the blind watchmaker of natural selection would suffice nonetheless on the very first page of the very first chapter of his book defending Darwin he writes that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose well that's counterintuitive isn't it now I have problems here so that's the very definition of biology according to himself that it's the study of things that look like they were designed but of course he doesn't think they were really designed he thinks darwin's theory accounts for them so why do they even look designed why does he think that they even look designed he doesn't think they were is it you know maybe for some aesthetic reason is it because you know flowers are so pretty and baby seals are so cute then it just looks like somebody had to have set them up that way no according to Richard Dawkins it is not for aesthetic reasons it is for engineering reasons that they look designed he writes a little further in the book that we may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer might have built into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose such as flying swimming seeing any engineer can recognize an object that has been designed even poorly designed for a purpose and he can usually work out that what that purpose is just by looking at the structure of the object so what is he saying he's saying that is purposeful arrangement of parts is exactly how we perceive design he doesn't think it's correct but he says that is how we perceive design well is this kind of like you know look you know looking at finding figures in the clouds you know like oh this looks like a duck and this looks like a camel and so on is it like say the old man of the mountain in New Hampshire you know it's interesting but you know it's just ephemeral well no according to Richard Dawkins himself it is overpowering an overpowering appear of design he writes selection is the blind watchmaker blind because it does not see ahead nonetheless the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watch maker okay so we're not talking the old man of the mountain we're talking we're talking Mount Rushmore to the nth power okay so that has to do for that everyone agrees that aspects of biology appear to be designed the next point is that those folks like Dawkins think that it looks like it but it wasn't really designed there was Darwinian evolution random changes and natural selection so let's spend a few moments to see that there are problems with that that there are structural obstacles physical reasons to think it cannot do what it's boosters claim for it and the I talked about this was the major theme of my book from 23 years ago and you guys 23 years ago it was it was a while back and it kind of played on a problem that Darwin himself noticed in the Origin of Species he wrote after in a section entitled organs of extreme perfection and complication he wrote at the end of that section he said if it could be demonstrated than any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down adding but I can find out no such case notice here first of all is a rhetorical trick that Darwin used which is oftentimes used even today in these discussions he is saying that he's placing the burden of proof on his opponents to prove a negative to prove that some organ couldn't possibly have been formed this way and it is impossible for science to to logically disprove anything only math and philosophy logic can do that science just works with the facts it gets beyond its ability so let's let's modify Darwin a little bit and say well what sort of system sure looks like it doesn't can't be put together by numerous successive slight modifications and I should add that Darwin always had existed on this numerous successive slight modifications that evolution had to be gradual things had to change in tiny steps over long periods of time because if he knew things changed rapidly in big leaps then it would look suspiciously as if something other than random processes were involved so he always insisted on gradualism well okay so what kind of a system would be a problem for Darwin's theory well I argued in Darwin's black box that one would be a system that would give problems to Darwin's theory is one that is irreducibly complex and it's a fancy phrase but it stands for something simple it just means that you've got a system that does something really neat and it needs a number of components working with each other in order to to do its function and a good example of that from our everyday world is this guy right here a mousetrap a mechanical mouse trap that you can buy in a store we may you know as the mousetrap has a wooden platform and this tightly wound spring with an extended end here and extended in here to push on this other thing called the holding bar and there's a there's a sorry the hammer there's the holding bar which keeps the hammer in place until the mouse comes along and a couple other parts as well now if you took away the spring we were you took away the holding bar you would not have a mousetrap that worked half as well as it used to or a quarter as well as he used to it you would have a broken mousetrap it wouldn't work at all so explaining how something like this could be produced by numerous successive slight modifications by random changes plus selection for working breader is a big problem and so I don't have time to go into it but the question is then you know are there anything like irreducibly complex machinery at the foundational level of life now that science knows that the cell and molecular machines are at the foundation of life are any of them irreducibly complex and pretty much every one of them is irreducibly complex and here's my favorite example what's called the bacterial flagellum which literally is an outboard motor that bacteria used to swim and just like our everyday outboard motors that we use to to boat it has a number of different parts this long part here acts as the propeller when it's spun around and around and around it pushes on the water in which a bacterium finds itself and propels the bacterium along this is called a universal joint which changes rotation in this plane from the from the drive shaft to rotation in this plane from the propeller the drive shaft is attached to a motor which uses a flow of acid from the outside of the cell to the inside to power the turning just like water flowing over a dam can turn a turbine the the driveshaft has to poke up through the membrane and there are several several layers of proteins that act as bushing material to allow this to happen and many many many other complications so like the mousetrap the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex and like it it's extremely difficult to envision how Darwinian mechanism in slow gradual tiny steps could put something like this together I wrote about this in 1996 you might have seen that year in your history books time flies and people just hated it including many really prominent scientists the president of the National Academy of Science sciences sent a letter to all of the members essentially denouncing me for for advancing this argument so ok so I'm a jerk ok tell me how it was put together by Darwin's mechanism well 10 years later in 2006 a couple of people who were in the vanguard of denouncing intelligent design sent a paper to a professional journal called Nature Reviews microbiology very prominent journal and in it they write in use in new year's flagyl ER biologists have made astonishing progress in understanding the structure for hunt function and regulation of bacterial flagella that is how they work however the flagler research community has scarcely begun to even consider how these systems have evolved 10 years after this provocation you know this this frontal challenge which was no and denounced and strongly strongly opposed by all the right people no progress zero progress was made in explaining how this came to be it is now 2019 twenty three years after I pointed out this problem and there are still zero papers that even try to explain how the flagellum could have been put together as a matter of fact when Darwin's black box first came out there was kind of a veritable cottage industry on the internet trying to explain how a mousetrap could be built in small steps and they couldn't do that and and yet they adhere to this well I'm um I'm gonna skip over a couple of things except I want to point this out and that is that irreducible complexity is a twofer it's two for the price of one it is not only an obstacle to Darwinian evolution but it's also evidence of purposeful design because you have a number of parts put together for a purpose and the purpose is plain to see you can't look at a biochemistry textbook and you know not see purpose on every page well here's another example of the same thing and here's another one too and another one too but I don't have time to get into those so just take it from me that in those 23 years the number of astonishing examples has only grown exponentially let's go to that fourth point that grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination and I will let this be exemplified by one person's writing a man named Franklin Herold who was a professor biochemistry I had Colorado State University and in the year 2001 he wrote a book called the way of the cell which was published by Oxford University Press a very prestigious academic publishing house and in a explain how he thought life might originate and eventually he considered the idea of intelligent design and he wrote this about it he said we should reject as a matter of principle the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity and he cited my book but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system only a variety of wishful speculations whoa huh okay well in this you know he makes two points and let's take those two points in reverse order he says that there are no accounts Darwinian accounts for any biochemical system only a variety of wishful speculations speculations you know kind of like those just so stories that were written by Rudyard Kipling in the early 20th century I'm sure you know them how the how the zebra got it stripes how the rhinoceros got its horn the bacterium got its flagellum now it's funny but if you think about it longer it's astonishing that a large number of scientists believe this and and and cling to it you think that it since it's been utterly sterile at explaining the very foundation of life that another idea might be in order the second point is that Franklin Herald says that we should reject intelligent design not as a matter of evidence but as a matter of principle what principle what principle is that I mean you look at drawing the flagellum and and other things design just you know is screaming at you but apparently we're not allowed to consider it and and why is that well it turns out that he Franklin Herald does not say he just writes that and goes on to other topics in his book nonetheless I think I have a good idea what he had in mind and it's shown here on the next slide and that is that many people think intelligent design has strong extra scientific implications that it might have strong philosophical even theological implications and that makes some people uneasy and they think science should stay far away from such stuff well I understand what they're saying but I disagree with them when I was being trained I always was told that science follows the evidence wherever it leads let you know philosophers and theologians worry about any extra scientific implications we stick to the facts I thought that was good advice back then and I continue to think it is so the final point is that right now we have got astonishing evidence for intelligent design and the evidence for Darwinism is at best extremely weak and if you read my new book you'll see that it's actually very negative not not just weak so you might say well okay we just saw that Darwin Oh some can't explain those things but can you you know where can you explain again what that strong evidence for design is just explain that one more time and it is exactly what Richard Dawkins wrote in the blind watchmaker that in life there is the overwhelming overwhelmingly impresses us with an appearance of design as if by a master watch maker that is the evidence that is the physical evidence for design the way we perceive design is through a purposeful arrangement parts we got minds and we can tell that there is a purpose in things so that is the evidence of design and I want to give you this one this is a relatively new result some microscopy in Britain looked at a ordinary insect that's found pretty much everywhere in the backyard it's called a plant hopper or this is the species of it it had been known since 1950 and while the plant hopper can jump further than any other animal in relation to its body size hundreds of times its its body length it have been known since the 50s that in its legs there were kind of bumpy things here but people said bumpy things you know there's bumps on my nose and you know on my head as I am what big deal but techniques have been developed that can look much more closely in much better detail whoops I keep bumping this and they saw that the bumps were dears physical actual mechanical gears it turns out that the plant hopper has to jump with both its legs starting at the exact same time if one leg started a little bit before the other it would kind of tumble and it would probably not survive very long but with the gears as one starts the other one is pushed by the gears - and it goes all at once after this pop paper was published the internet or the corners of it that are interested in this was alive with theological discussions and then after two weeks or so kinda died down and people forgot about it okay so what kind of an argument is this that you know in our everyday lives we make design decisions every day we can tell that you know anything's designed say a flower bed versus a patch of weeds and so on because we see the purpose in the arrangement of parts well it turns out that it's a pretty straightforward method of reasoning and the colloquial and a colloquial example of this is is shown here okay you right there what is that it's a doc good for you and how do you know that well I know what you're trying to say and you're trying to say well if it looks like a knock and if it walks like a duck and if it quacks like a duck then we are intellectually intellectually justified in saying that this is a duck hmm yeah okay well it turns out you know this is the colloquial version but philosophers know that this type of reasoning is just one of the two major kinds of reasoning that we employ all the time and as a matter of fact they have a they have a technical special technical term for it they call it an inductive argument you see see that's what they call it you know and you might say to yourself well philosophers inductive arguments you know is this have we talked about her we talking about philosophy or what well no we aren't if you look at a reference a reference book for example the Encyclopedia Britannica and you looked up inductive reasoning you'll see descriptions like this when a person uses a number of established facts to draw a general conclusion he uses inductive reasoning this is the kind of logic normally used in the sciences a conclusion of intelligent design is a scientific conclusion it is based on physical evidence empirical evidence that is the structures of the machinery we have found even at the basis of life and before then it was based for example David you know thousand BC and Galen you know around the 200 AD and so on they could see the purposeful arrangement of parts at the normal everyday level but they were kind of defeated by Darwin because he said well yeah but maybe something's going on underneath here that can explain it and so that's sidetracked the argument for a hundred and fifty years but now that we know more and more and more about life we can see that design extends very very far into life and you can say to the psalmist that I am fearfully wonder and wonderfully made that he didn't know the half of it that we live in a privileged time and we can see that we are really fearfully and wonderfully designed so that's my argument and I think that if you think about it for a long time and if you wrap your mind around it you can see that a conclusion of intelligent design is rationally compelling okay I've gone well beyond my limit but let me just point out that this is just the basics of intelligent design and there's lots of discussion in this area I've written a couple of other books as well one in 2007 called the edge of evolution which says that well evolution can explain some things you know little things but it can't explain everything like eyeballs so where is it rational to draw a rough edge between what can be explained by natural processes and what it required intelligence to account for and just recently a few months ago I had another book published called Darwin devolves and that helps to that helps to answer that question which was raised by the edge of evolution and the main argument of that is that sure evolution occurs that random changes can happen and sometimes they can be beneficial but now in just the past 20 years or so science has developed the ability the tools and technology to look at the DNA level the molecular level that shows you what mutations happen and what helped it improve and you know it's clear that evolution happens that random mutations can help a person or help an species but overwhelmingly those mutations break genes that were already there so it's sometimes helpful to get rid of something for example you know when you're dating you know if you get rid of extra weight you get rid of a sarcastic attitude but wait a second that's it that's a different talk suppose you your life depended on your car getting a little bit better gas mileage how could you quickly arrange that well you could take the hood off and throw it away spare trunk and throw it away break off the mirrors and throw them away of course they're useful in some circumstances but if your life right now depended on you getting better gas mileage that's the way to go it's quick and easy and Darwinian evolution works exactly like that sometimes if a part is causing you trouble get rid of it and that's good but it's not building anything certainly nothing resembling the elegant machinery that has been discovered in life ok last slide is that you might have thought well does everybody agree with with Professor be he and no not everybody a few people have have criticized these ideas and I have responded to them at a couple of places one is at my Lehigh University faculty website and they're mostly academic type articles and also at the website of the Discovery Institute and especially with the publication of last book it has its own website I've collected articles from members and National Academy of Sciences you know luminaries who have just you know blown their tops over this and i respawned and show why they're completely mistaken so if you're why here the nitty-gritty then this is the place to go now these are these are my responses this will take you to my responses if you want to read the original critical articles themselves they're easy to find to just you know go to an internet browser type in my name plus any common swear word you'll get thousands of hits thousands of well thank you very much for your attention

Channel: Living Word Bible Church

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Id: M8nPfrZMieQ

Length: 65min 27sec (3927 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019