Michael Behe: Darwin Devolves

[Music] [Applause] this is overwhelming not be honest we've told the crime we're told the prep that wasn't spontaneous from now on just clap spontaneously but [Applause] but not but not then I am so I gotta tell you I'm so overwhelmed to be here in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and I'm so thrilled to all of you who came out this evening I know that when something is free people people tend to show up but I know that it's more than that that you are actually excited about being here and I'm so excited you're here I'm not kidding this is to my mind this is an historic event and I hope I can make that clear to you or the evening as as it unfolds you will understand how important this is this is not just another Socrates in the city event although those aren't so bad but this is particularly special now I have to tell you most of you who are here know this but those watching at home may not know this this hotel is so extraordinary it is built I didn't know this on what was the home of Count Zinzendorf when I found that out I thought is this a joke because in my research for my book on William Wilberforce and in my research for my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer both times I bumped into the Moravians and Zinzendorf Zinzendorf is like one of the heroes of heroes he like without him Bonhoeffer and as some of you will know Bonhoeffer and if you don't shame on you but if you don't know there's there's plenty books and I'll tell you later but the point is that his mother was involved in Germany with it was called the Heron hooter it was a Moravian group a we can trace Wilberforce's faith through people to Zinzendorf Zinzendorf was a hero and he lived right here it's a freaking yow I saw I saw his ghost in the laundry room and now I'm sorry in the weight room in the fitment in the fitness center I saw the ghost of the count but this is really as a Christian I guess I would call this holy ground this is a really amazing thing that in 1741 that hero was literally here so when I found that out I just said why don't we do an event there in Bethlehem because you know dr. Michael Behe lives here and teaches as some of you know at Lehigh University how cool would it be if we could go there and do an event here so I just have to say I'm so excited about this before I forget I want to thank the Discovery Institute for funding most of this tonight and making it possible for you freeloaders and you know who you are no not all of you but some of you know who you are free wine come on where do you get free wine so the Discovery Institute really has made this possible and so I'm thrilled because obviously I wanted as many people who could come to come I have not yet told you about dr. Michael Behe now this rarely happens and this is kind of a cheat if somebody does this is kind of like they're cheating because they were lazy so I'm gonna I'm gonna read the flap copy from his book earlier today while I was preparing my remarks I glanced at the flap copy to get some ideas and it struck me that unfortunately I could never ever do better than the flap copy now as an author who has read the flap copy on my books I can tell you it often doesn't do justice to what's inside the book and I hate those people who wrote the flap copy on my book and I'm going to track them down some at some point when I have more time because people read the flap copy they go yeah that's not good and they put the book down they don't buy it so whoever wrote the flap copy I'm gonna read it now and if you wrote this flap copy would you stand I'm just curious anybody No somebody should take credit because I have no idea I'd have no idea let me just read this it'll give you it'll frame things this evening better than I could it's while Stephen Colbert has called Michael Behe the father of intelligent design now most of you know Stephen Colbert is a renowned man of science and he there's nope all right there's no need to mock all right he's not the greatest scientist but he's he's the best that you get for the flap copy Stephen Colbert has called Michael Behe the father of intelligent design now if you don't know what intelligent design is we're gonna talk about that tonight bees arguments have been called close to her ethically by the New York Times Book Review you want to talk about a badge of honor and Richard Dawkins has publicly taken him to task for his maverick views because we don't like Mavericks in America right we like people who tell the wine wherever he goes be he makes ways but he has remained singularly focused on doing rigorous scientific analysis that points to controversial but incredible results that other scientists won't touch this research led be he to challenge Darwin's theory of evolution what that's crazy I had no idea this is like I'm not prepared are you crazy what are you doing let's just straight up crazy okay his research just imagine you want to talk about courage led him to challenge Darwin's theory of evolution is seminal bestseller Darwin's black box which came out in 1996 arguing that science itself has proven that an intelligent design is a better explanation for the origin of life obviously better than darwin's thesis right of natural selection now 20 years later B he shows that new scientific discoveries made possible only in the past few decades and this is where I get excited because I had dr. P on my radio show the other day this is all new science new information point to a stunning fad Darwin's mechanism works by a process of devolution not evolution we'll discuss that the mechanism works by breaking down genes which means that evolution can help make something looking act different at least on the surface but it doesn't have the ability to build or create anything at the genetic level we'll get into that critically analyzing the latest research be he gives a sweeping tour of how modern theories of evolution fall short and now the devolve nature of darwin's mechanism limits them even further if we're to get a satisfactory answer to how the most complex stunning life forms arose and by the way we are those life forms yeah congratulate yourself we need to look beyond Darwin it's time to acknowledge the conclusion that only an intelligent mind could have designed life well some of you already know dr. Michael B he's a biochemist and the author of a number of books but he is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh and I cannot believe I have him as my guest tonight please welcome dr. Michael Behe that's the guy I am so excited that you were willing to do this because as you know I'm gonna give you a hard journalistic grilling you're gonna look like Nixon in 1960 versus JFK it's gonna get ugly but uh that you know we're interested in the truth here um you and I spoke on my radio program the other day and there's so much I want to talk about but I know there are a lot of people here who literally don't even know like let's say what intelligent design is so would you do us a favor and give us a brief synopsis of what exactly is what we call intelligent design well intelligent design is simply the idea that rather than just the forces of nature some intelligent being planned or arranged something and we we can tell that's the case oftentimes when we see parts that seem not to have anything to do with each other put together to make something that can do something beyond those parts itself okay now when you say an intelligent being or whatever you don't say that it's the God of the Bible you just say it looks like there's design but you're not getting into who it was that's that's right I think from DNA from the molecular machinery of the cell you can tell that it was designed but there's no signature in the cell even though Steven Mayer said there was right and so I the the argument is limited to design itself okay so so intelligent design is different from what some people call creationism because I think that part of the reason people don't like talking about this is I've always noticed that there's a false dichotomy between you know there are some people who say uh you know the earth is eight thousand years old and if you don't believe that you got to throw the Bible away and and and that's that and we're not gonna get into you know you're not saying that you're saying I mean if somebody said to you how old do you think the earth is what would you say well I think it's billions of years old I'm happy physicists word on it so by billions like for billions yes uh-huh would you go two three four all right how old would you say the universe is Oh what whatever the current estimate is thirteen and a half I think right I think it's 13.8 but close enough yeah close enough your view is that we've been here for a long time that the universe has been here the Earth has been here and you believed that there was life on this planet whatever starting like almost a billion years ago probably soon after the earth formed as the is the best estimate these days and when so literally like yeah four billion years for billions like trilobites or something like that well no single-celled type organisms you can only see the kind of chemical traces of earlier okay okay single cells but so you're saying that life's been here for a very very very very long time your colleague and and someone I've interviewed of Socrates in the city twice Stephen Meyer talks about sort of what you talk about in your first book the cell and what fascinates me is tell us about I mean Darwin lived at a time when no one knew what was inside a cell so they just talked very cavalierly about evolution and stuff tell us what happened in science in the last hundred years that leads you to write your first book Darwin's black box and that leads Stephen Meyer to write signature in the cell what do we know that we didn't know when Darwin was hanging out well when Darwin first started the cell was thought to be a piece of jelly protoplasm some buddies of Darwin's got some mud from an exploring ship and looked at it under a microscope and thought they saw cells there and so therefore thought cells would bubble up spontaneously from the ocean depths so that's just to give you an example of how primitive science was compared to but in the hundred years or so we've discovered that there are molecules in the cell people back then didn't even know molecules were real how embarrassing okay and as as more and more of the cell was studied DNA was discovered it turned out that DNA carried information that it now we're talking about Crick and Watson yes okay so fairly recently uh-huh okay but we didn't I mean yeah it's hard to believe like we literally didn't know about DNA until very recently I mean in many people in this room who were around before we discovered DNA so it's like 10 minutes ago and obviously Darwin didn't have the beginning of a clue of any of these things that's right yeah he figured the basis of life was simple jelly protoplasm and well maybe that could shape itself or stretch itself into into pretty much anything isn't a weird like if you read science fiction from maybe the 20s or something like that they talk about protoplasm and they they talk about that stuff like it was a thing and now we know like there was no such thing but it kind of was in vogue okay so we have to ask the question Darwin was a well-meaning scientist he and Alfred Russel Wallace come up with this concept of natural selection or whatever and in many ways of course it is very plausible and in that day it was eminently plausible because they didn't know that the universe was 13.8 billion years old they thought it was infinitely old and there was an infinite amount of time so now that we know what we know what is it that you think makes it so difficult for other scientists to at least say houston we have a problem evolution has problems well as you know science and religion have a history and back in the day before Darwin every the educated person thought life was designed and it was obvious because you know birds have wings and fish have gills and so on all these things that fit them to their environment and Darwin Darwin proposed this non intelligent explanation for life and biology which was then kind of struggling to become a professional science in its own right right loved it because now we don't have to ask you know the pastors and the ministers for permission to say something about life we'll just figure it all out on our own so there's a kind of a professional jealousy people want biology to be able to be explained in the same way that physics and chemistry can be explained so it's it's a there's a history um but but I guess I mean even in my own stumbling research on a very popular level I'm amazed at how there's more and more and more information that keeps coming out I mean your book when I talk to you on my radio program this week you know the idea that you're writing about stuff that we've known for like twenty years or less and that that's what enabled you to write this book let's get to the thesis of the book when you say Darwin devolves and the subtitle is the new science of F DNA that challenges evolution the new science about DNA so what is new that even in 1995 we could not have known that you now know and put in the book well it turns out mutations which are the fodder for evolution or changes in molecules in DNA yeah when you switch something in DNA at it makes it it changes the instructions make it code for something else and we did not have the technology back then to see what the changes were most of the time people would see that there was a change in an organism and it did better they said look this mutant is doing better than it did before okay isn't Darwin's theory grand okay now before you give us the rest of that story so just to be clear I want to make sure everybody's tracking right so the end there's some pee who know tons about this but maybe some don't but so the idea is that Darwin and his the the people his champions throughout the decades said that look it makes sense that mutations happen okay now I wonder if that's a great bumper sticker I would make that biochemists would what you can use that I'll just get so mutations happen and and we know that's an appropriate laughing please know that we just know that that mutations happened so so they said okay if mutations happen given an infinite amount of time which in those days they thought we had because they didn't know about the Big Bang and so on and so forth they said it only makes sense that a good mutation will help that creature to thrive and and another good mutation will help it thrive more so the good mutations eventually will lead to better creatures and that's the process of evolution over the eons they believed that that that given enough time mutations would create effectively us that that that's correct and if you have to remember they didn't know what a mutation was and and Darwin didn't talk about mutations but rather about variation and wended mutations to come into it around the turn of the 20th century or so people started to look at that after Gregor Mendel and his P garden and in Austria talk to started genetics but they would say things like well if you were a deer and the weather turned colder and a baby deer was born with longer fur why that would be better and maybe if it got colder still and the children of that the offspring of that got even longer that would be even better so they were thinking in terms of improving improving body features I mean I never used the phrase but it's what we call survival of the fittest yes okay so the that happened to be Best Adapted survived and thrived and made it and had more of the same and this process goes on and on exactly but people never said well well that's great but you know how does that explain complex features when you have to put a few things together and Darwin kind of treaded lightly around that and waved it off and says well we'll figure that out later when we understand more about biology but that turns out to be the key critical question how does complex changes how do they come about okay so we're not gonna have time tonight but when you say complex changes in other words when yeah when you're talking about the length of hair or on the cover of your book you have Darwin's famous finches right so if you got a Finch some finches have bigger beaks some have more narrow beaks whatever not exactly complicated right it's like the hair of the deer it's like simple but you're talking about how does a whale come into being and the suggestion of course is what that some mammals eventually are wandering in the water and that you know suddenly Shazam it's a whale I mean David Berlinski brilliantly mocks this stuff in his writings because it's it is very funny when you start talking about okay so what's necessary for a land mammal to become a whale who is also a mammal what's necessary and the number of things like it's so complex that it becomes a kind of madness so if you say that to a strict Darwinian estar witnessed what what do they say they say you're a creationist so nickname Halling is the order of the day name-calling and you know condescension and at best what you'll get is a what's known in the trade as a just so story where people give kind of a semi semi plausible account of one perhaps one feature of a an organism developing and sounds you know shaky but then they say well clearly that's you know that could have happened that could have happened so therefore there's no reason you can't think that that happened and this happened and we don't get to the point where they all become integrated into one system okay but before we get to the specifics of your theory in the book I still want to ask like we have now had so much time passed between 1859 and the publication of the Origin of Species and today and we've had so many new things you know to look at right but one of the biggest ones we mentioned is time the idea that at some point in the 20th century there came the thesis of the Big Bang boil or is it Hoyle names the Big Bang and then slowly you get more and more proof for the Big Bang and then you get the consensus of scientists saying yes we believe the universe is finite there's a finite number of years that we have to work with for what we call evolution right so when when when we put forward the idea as you have in other proponents of intelligent design that we don't have enough time and we don't even have close to enough time has anybody responded have any scientists responded in anything that is not merely ad hominem well yes actually some people have published papers and official science journals addressing such questions and these days if you address a question that is relevant to intelligent design and evolution it kind of bumps your paper up a couple of notches if you are going to take try to take down evolution can like more retweets just I want to get I want to break it down for the young people that's right yeah and they're like we stopped Twitter 10 years ago we're into it right there okay but but so but so it's still like a hot topic oh absolutely yeah I mean and so okay all right and answer the previous question there was a paper in a leading journal Proceedings the National Academy of Sciences titled is there enough time for evolution specifically saying these intelligent design folks say that there's not enough time and going through a calculation to show that there was but of course calculations and models you know depend on your assumptions and the fellow writing this assumed that well once you got an improvement you could get another one either way essentially just assume darwin's theory was true and said well uh there there's no problem he didn't discuss any of the the stumbling blocks that idea folks have pointed out it was it was a cartoon model I remember literally like 30 years ago reading a cover article in the Atlantic Monthly that dealt with the issue of how did life come into being in the first place so forget about life evolving right but but just how do you get like the first cell the first anything and the article I mean you know we talk about courage and willingness to face the facts I mean the article in the Atlantic effectively said in all the time that we were looking at this we are no closer to an answer we have no idea which is very different from you know the Miller experiment where they kind of had well it happened like this right and then we'll give you the details and the decades past no details so like that's one level of that's not explained but you're now talking about a completely new level so I want to I want to get to that idea so so at some point somebody says okay evolution goes by we don't call the variations now it's mutations and now we can look at mutations so what is it in the last 20 years that makes it clear that that can't work well it's our ability to track down helpful changes helpful mutations in the DNA as I said earlier we couldn't do that before people would see some bacteria grow better in a certain environment or a bunny rabbit have a different coat color and blend into the snow better you can just say rabbit it's just that it's a scientific audience they can they can take it and but they couldn't track down what was going on now we can why because of Technology the everybody I think has heard of the human genome sequencing project where the DNA compliment of humans has been deciphered letter by letter by letter by letter a three billion or so but that was really tough sledding it took a decade or so billions and billions of dollars but it's kind of like computers back in the 50s they would cook up rooms and they were clunky and expensive now you've got computers in your hands which can access the world same thing with DNA sequencing technology it has become faster and cheaper and and easier and now people can sequence genomes of brand-new organisms you know in an afternoon and have their graduate students go into the lab and say sequence that for me and oh now we can track down these mutations okay so that so the big news that enables you to write this devastating book is that it's no longer speculation we now can look at the actual mutations and determine whether they are helping the organism and how and based on your research well it turns out that they do help them there's lots of mutations that help but the bottom line is that overwhelmingly the mutations are ones that break things that were already there they take genes that are working in some organisms and figuratively snap them and throw them away and that helps in some circumstances and people might wonder you know how how can breaking some hello well if you if you think of your car suppose your life depended on you getting better gas mileage for your car you know what's a quick and easy way to get better gas mileage well of course you can throw things away you can take off weight you can take the doors and throw them away take the hood and throw it away of course those are useful in some circumstances but if right now your life depended on your car getting better gas mileage the way to go is to is to throw those out no cell does that too I just imagine a lot of people were thinking well so what in other words if mutation for is the genetic code is broken here and that helps what why is that a problem for Darwinism well because it shows that Darwin's mechanism is actually powerfully deed Volusia nary around there then Eve illusionary it strongly tends to break things throw them away like the example I talked about and that's not going to be something that constructs sophisticated molecular machinery such as we found in the cell okay so what you're saying is if I have a wolf and I want to breed dogs of various kinds which basically has happened right you're saying that it's not a process of evolution it's a process of devolution meaning that you take the standard dog model of DNA and you break stuff off of it so to tell us about that yeah believe it or not the complete DNA genome has been sequenced not only of wolves and not only of a particular dog but dozens of breeds of dogs purebred dogs with different features so that people can track down what's what's going on what what is causing them to have smaller stature or fuzzier fur or other features and it turns out that to a very large extent it's due to breaking genes that were already there there's genes involved in fur that if you break them makes it curly and genes involved in bone growth if you break them it'll be shorter and there's developmental genes that help us now develop and if you break that you get a truncated snout like in a bulldog so we did show how Darwin's theory works by artificial selection but it's it's working by breaking genes I feel like what you're saying though is that in other words what this is leading us to conclude is there are these models that exist there's a dog there's a cat there are these different things and you're saying that we can have micro evolution and we can break the genes and so we can make this kind of a cat or this kind of a dog but we can never because we're not adding genes or or whatever you you can never breed a dog that will become a giraffe or a horse you can never break out of the dog wheel rut so to speak like it's always gonna be some kind of dog that that's correct and more than that you can think that well as this dog is selected for various things say a French poodle or so right those genes are thrown away and they're gone they're not coming back so the ability of the dog the dog that has already been selected to adapt to a different environment becomes more and more restricted so the that it becomes evolutionarily brittle what you just said though because I want to I want this to be clear for the layman and cuz scientists like us you know we understand this but that they don't know I know so here's that here's the issue you're saying I think that Darwinists will have been saying for example that there are no limits that there are no boundaries that a species is fluid and that if I were to breed dogs long enough I could get them as tiny as a house fly but in reality you're saying know the limits of dog Ness and I just coined that word are fixed and the same thing with how big dogs can get because I think to those of us who don't know science you'd sort of think like look why couldn't I breed a dog as big as this room why but you're saying I can't well Clifford Clifford accepted yes that that's correct actually I write in the book about a number of what I call luxuriantly evolving species particularly on islands such as the Galapagos Darwin's finches and it turns out there's a number of them the finches have been on the Galapagos for millions of years and they've formed about a dozen or sixteen species it's kind of uncertain and a couple of the next level up is G on or off or G genus but no new families and that's the next level of it and there are other rapidly evolving fish called cichlids in African lakes and they have been there just 15,000 years and it's known that because of the lake lake victoria evaporated 15,000 or so years ago and these species are found nowhere else in the world and there's about a thousand of them new species and a number of new general no new families though and the level of biological family is like the cat family versus the dog family okay lions and tigers and wolves and foxes and and so on and I make the case in the book that that is the limit of Darwinian unguided evolution you can have new species and new general but you can't make a new family by unguided evolution as I've talked to Steven Mayer about this he seems to suggest that in Europe not so much here there are people at the cutting edge of this world in science who are open to talking about this and that at the very highest level conferences there isn't quite the fear that you find let's say in the faculty lounge at Lafayette or Lehigh to pick something out of a you know the book yeah that's that's correct we're gonna cut that out in I apologize yeah it's surprising but true that I would estimate that at least 1/3 of professional biologists academic biologists think that Darwin's theory is inadequate that it that stop that's amazing yeah say that again about 1/3 of non intelligent design academic biologists yeah are fed up with Darwin's theory ok that's huge to me like to hear that yeah ok and yet it's only talked about in professional journals and meetings when the public media gets hold of it it's it's all Darwin all the time and it is presented as a united front that science says that Darwin's theory is known to explain everything but but professional biologists know there's there's there's problems right well even I I remember Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard beginning to be honest about this kind of stuff but obviously before he died some years ago but but um he was sort of a popular scientist and who wrote popular essays but he was he was honest about that wasn't he that we have problems sort of in ass and he got into trouble for it too I imagine the trouble you're gonna get in yeah so that's interesting to me I didn't I didn't realize that a few years ago there was a a kind of a to Dueling letters to the journal Nature nature is the most prominent science journal in the world and the letters were by two groups of son scientists one saying that Darwin's theory is great and the other one saying that we need to move beyond that there are things that it doesn't account for so you know this is in the premier science journal in the world people saying that Darwin can cover everything and was interesting in the skeptical letter the one that said that Darwin's theory doesn't really cover everything that they said we know that you know as fear of intelligent design makes a lot of people want to circle the wagons and and pretend that every daar one's theory covers everything they and they talked about that explicitly so a lot of this is due to fear fear of letting the great unwashed know the state of the of the biology and and what it what is the big fear I mean is it fear that science is pointing is pointing to something like the God of the Bible and that's just repulsive to some people I mean is that it yeah yeah what else is there this my my friend John the brilliant John's mirac was at a Stockton City event that I did with your friend Steven Mayer a couple months ago and was so inspired by the whole intelligent design discussion that we had that he wrote an article it just came out at the stream dork and I talked to him on my radio program about it earlier today he came up with a compromise he said I've got a great compromise for the atheists and the intelligent design people that we can all agree on that's gonna help everybody and he said the problem seems to be the the the the atheists don't like the concept of that it was a god that did the design but they kind of know that it looks like there was designed but they can't admit it because it points to God so his compromise is why don't we just like all agree to say that look we know there's probably a designer but let's say that that designer is just an alien on Alpha Centauri who doesn't care whom we sleep with who doesn't care about what we do or human morality and so since that designer doesn't care we can be honest about the science that's a great idea isn't it [Music] but it's it's interesting he wrote it as a parody but I don't know probably some folks in the audience know but back in the day back in the nineteen I think 70s somewhere Francis Crick of Watson and Crick Fame to Scott Co discovers of the shape of DNA co-wrote an article with a guy named Leslie Orgel entitled directed panspermia directed visions for the family show yeah alright I'll leave out the pan part yeah [Music] [Applause] any any references to pan or Bacchus or lead people astray yeah a lot of people there they already had four glasses of grape juice out there so we don't eat we don't need to go there okay so what what does that mean and this is Francis Crick the famous Francis Crick okay and essentially it was that the problems with figuring out an origin of life on Earth were so great people had no clue that maybe we should look into the idea that space aliens from a different planet shot rockets all over the universe carrying spores to seed other planets and that's how life started of course that just you know leads to you know pushes the problem to the next planet over that's what so that's what's so funny yeah right but it's kind of like he did it and okay and then let's let's question him it's like no no no you can't talk to him but for him Francis Crick said that well maybe there was some special substance on another planet that we don't have here you know maybe kryptonite or something like that that would get life started so the point is that that's this is getting funny now so you have these eminent scientists effectively because they dare not you know use the word but it's it's kind of like they're saying there could be some magic on that planet that creates life and that's our explanation like that's the scientific explanation it's probably magic from another planet which is madness I mean it's like the parallel it's like the multiverse theory exactly and then actually now that you brought that up 30 40 years on from from Crick's presentation another fellow named Eugene Koonin who is a very prominent scientist not not of the stature of Crick but very prominent he says that the problems with imagining an origin of life on Earth are so great that maybe we are the the universe in you know 10 to the 1,000 power universes and that would get life started he said yeah so you know a sent man that's lucky wave wave of the hands but it becomes funny and I purchased that from a popular level but it's always a staggering thing to see people that you're supposed to respect like scientists resorting to that kind of chicanery and and foolishness I mean it's embarrassing but they would rather in effect posit an infinity of universes then deal with the most obvious Occam's razor answer is oh there's design and and that's it's it's horrifying to me that we're at that state in the world of quote-unquote science yes you have to realize that there's only you can postulate you know 10 to the thousandth universes or or space aliens sending Rockets around but there is one strict rule about what you can't pause it guess what that might be it's that there is an intelligent being that has the power to build and plan and make life even though again ironically that seems to be even if you don't believe it you have to concede that that's probably the most logical right in other words it might be the most logical you could say why still I don't want to believe it or it's distasteful I hope there's another reason but it's not even like it's close anymore like it's getting you know Stephen Meyer is writing a book now called the god hypothesis like the evidence has become so outrageous that it's kind of embarrassing I feel sorry for for scientific materialists and and for you know scientistic scientists because it's looking bad well yeah and the only thing I really hold against such folks who posit these outrageous things is that they don't admit in public that they don't know what's going on they say they will join forces with with the greater groups of scientists to say we've got it under control don't you worry your little heads about it you know we don't need to tell you this right even though you know practically everybody in the history of the world has believed in a designer believed that life needed to be to be made to be created they won't let kids know they'll lie a to children and tell them that we got it all under control or they'll kind of say mealy-mouthed world words so that they're not actually saying that they have the answer but they say but but we will and science is a search for the truth and well it's it's a weird thing because I mean I know that people on both sides of this do that right we all know people of faith right who finds some problem in the in their hypothesis or they find some problem in the Bible or some problem in archaeology or something like that and it troubles them and they honestly feel like well I can't talk about that or I have to build some Rube Goldberg device around this problem rather than say look I just believe I only want to believe in what is true and if there's a God he's the God of truth so not to worry about the evidence or something like that you know and they kind of they they circle the wagons you know but we've heard a lot about that but we never hear about scientists who you're you know saying that this is effectively what they're doing yeah everybody has a worldview and they will oftentimes go to great lengths to protect that and as you say religions people will certainly do and but that has been looked at pretty thoroughly in the in the media the opposite though the the worldviews of scientists that they will not entertain an idea of design of something outside the universe affecting it that is you know that's that's not interesting to many reporters because they kind of share that view and it's just a modern way of thinking well I guess what I find funny I wrote a book called miracles which in the beginning of it I deal with the fine-tuned universe stuff you know when I obviously stole everything there from you know John Lennox and some of your friends but but the point is that you know even I could see like what science is science is our ability to describe the universe so using evidence using the scientific method using our five senses we can learn and learn and learn and learn but I realize that there are limits to science so science can tell me you know about the universe but science can never tell me why the universe exists or whether there is a reason like that's impossible for science so some of what you're talking about strikes me as being you know ironic that you you have scientists in a way and not in a way clearly going outside the precincts of science and making constellations based on a kind of faith in something they don't want to believe there's a god and they are they aren't really to be properly agnostic on that that that's true but scientists are very poor philosophers as a rule and they they don't realize often times that that's what they're doing they've kind of imbibed their assumptions from other places but a lot of people forget I think I myself think science can conclude that some things have a purpose like eyes eyes have a purpose you know you might think that say you don't know what a purpose of a cow is but the purpose of a cow's eye is obvious the purpose of a cow's udder is is obvious but early well I guess what I'm saying isn't and you know I'm stealing this also from John Lennox but but the point is that there are there are limits to science and I think what has happened is that if if a scientist is is uncomfortable with that he begins to saying everything that's not science is stupid you know it's like somebody who loves baked goods and has a bakery and that's anything that is not a baked good like we can't talk about it it's stupid like rather than just saying I like baked goods and that's my field they kind of act like anything outside of that field can't exist and so you have scientists declaring off-limits any reasonable speculation which is to say any philosophy as somehow not just not science but anti science yeah yeah then and you can see how from that how unreflective many scientists are because it's been known for sixty years by philosophers that that philosophy which they called logical positivism that only things that could be measured and so on are real is self-contradictory because there is no scientific experiment that can be done to show that that that nothing outside science can be known so you know there it's self refuting what's more scientists don't think that well okay only science scientific knowledge gives or scientific experiments give knowledge well how about mathematics should we throw out mathematics mathematics isn't science is obviously anti so it's helpful how about logic uh-huh how about developing theories you know when you first get a theory what experiment told you that you should make up that theory nothing but isn't it true that I mean everything you're saying it's common sense like everyone knows this except people who insist it's just wrong you know like they just don't want to go there or they subvert their own common sense because it seems it's it's just so reasonable that it's almost funny and yeah it is and we're kind of riding on the knowledge that we had over the millennia but the basic clash between that view and our lived lives is that that view at bottom wants to get rid of minds it wants to get rid of everybody's mind and say there's no such thing what you mean because I know a lot of people are gonna miss this I just happen to know this because I'm smarter than them when you say mind okay what you're saying I know what you're saying I want everybody to understand it you're saying they will say brains exist but minds do not exist in other words everything that's conscious consciousness is just a brain which is just a computer you're saying mind is something else so explain that a little bit that's that's exactly right that they will say brains exist because evolution built brains for us and that everything at bottom is matter so that when you think and you think you're thinking you're not really thinking in the traditional sense of thinking because you know it's it's natural laws that are determining what your thought processes are and ironically the people who think that are actually not thinking there's ironies everywhere you look in this topic but a man named Francis Crick wrote a book 20 years or so ago called the the amazing hypothesis I believe the title was the astounding hypothesis and essentially that it says you are nothing but a pack of neurons that how dare you my wife is in the audience take that back but I mean so that's that's the point of view it's really you know it's a dramatic thing it's it says that there is literally no such thing as good or evil that what is is there is no meaning there's no good there's no evil there's no transcendence the love that I have for my parents or my wife or my daughter that's just evolution making me feel something to perpetuate the species but there's nothing transcendent love doesn't exist mind doesn't exist none of that is real and they're insisting on this that's that's that's correct and that's where scientific materialism leads not only does not love doesn't exist you don't exist and I don't nobody exists here there are philosophers supported cheered on by scientists who say that there is no consciousness consciousness is an illusion you say wait a second an illusion and watch it's a pretty good illusion yeah don't I have to have a consciousness to have an illusion of consciousness and so it turns out that all of this stuff is is related yeah the ability to see purpose and design in life was thrown out by Darwin's theory and it ultimately leads to denying humanity denying anything exists beyond the physical level okay but what I find interesting is those scientists never really come out and that because that would consume popular you know the mobs would come for them oh they do say that well but they don't say it publicly they're not gonna say to a Time magazine reporter generic tonight there they understand that its first of all very ridiculous but it's also even if people buy it it just feels wrong like it feels mistaken and they don't seem to be pushing that idea that's right I think they're kind of screened by the media who will see how it will be perceived as you know really ridiculous we just have a few minutes left and I have to ask you how many years have you been teaching at Lehigh Oh got here in 85 so 85 uh-huh I'll bet you don't have a great beard in them days no wow are you kidding for years now 32 time flies what year did you get tenure that's a great question it was actually 88 because I came here after being faculty at Queens College in New York City so I had already had three years under my belt okay so so my question is when did you come to believe in the things you believe now was it after you got tenure hey my mama didn't raise no idiot [Music] [Applause] so I'm trying to read between the lines so are you are you implying that you had some intimations of these things before you got tenure actually I used to believe in Darwin's theory and it was only around the time I got tenure maybe a year before that I read a book called evolution and theory in crisis by a man named Michael Kenton that may it kind of shocked me pointing out problems for Darwin's theory that I had never thought of right so I was led that I was I thought that I was led to believe this rather than then it being based on the best evidence so it was around a time right around the time that I started to think about this but it was only not five years or so later that I got publicly involved in the ID movement right well and right now I mean obviously since you have tenure you're they're stuck with you and I I feel bad for them because you're just you're clearly not a scientist but look the the idea that the climate in the world of the Academy is today such that people who discover things are afraid even about being honest in other words you know you're not talking about pushing anything you're just talking about saying I've discovered these things what do we make of them let us reason together that's supposed to be the idea of of Education and of the Academy yes it is supposed to be that unfortunately there are things you can reason about and things that are assumed to be true and beyond discussion and unfortunately evolution in Darwin's theory in particular is one of those things and you entertain this idea if you don't have tenure at great risk to your career by a scientist I've known people who have lost jobs graduate students who have been kicked out laboratories all sorts of bad stuff so it's it's a very serious topic well I mean I guess when I hear this you know again I say it makes me angry that that kind of stuff goes on in America because I expect it to happen you know the former Soviet Union I expected to happen under National Socialism I expect it to happen in kim jong un's Korea until perhaps today when you saw the light we know who knows what's happening when that kind of stuff happens in America it's shocking to me and I just say this publicly it's we all have to stand against this not because you believe in a certain theory but because we're talking about truth seeking and we're talking about freedom and it's an amazing thing to me that you've been able to be so good-natured about this as you've proceeded in doing what is gigantically important work without you know being honored by the institution that that employs you because clearly the climate is such that you can't do that but I I do think that since this ballroom is not paid for by any university we can honor you by not only having you here and and and hearing from you but by thanking you for doing what you're doing so I want to say thank you for being with us and thank you for all you've done I'm just done thank you so much [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: socratesinthecity

Views: 172,531

Rating: 4.7259631 out of 5

Keywords: EricMetaxasSocrates, Eric Metaxas, Metaxas, Michael Behe, Behe, Darwin Devolves, Charles Darwin, Darwin, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Socrates in the City, DNA, Science, Watson and Crick, Genetics

Id: QNe-syuDJBg

Length: 61min 23sec (3683 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/nomenmeum]

Awesome :) I'll be watching this while I do dishes tonight.