The Origin of Life: Evolution vs. Design [Full Debate]

[lively music] >> Good evening and welcome to The Great God Debate Two on The Origin of Life. Let me also take a moment to welcome all of those who are tuning in tonight via our live stream at biola.edu. I'd like to offer a special thanks to Biola University for not only providing tonight's live stream, but also for being one of this event's primary sponsors. Other sponsors of this event include The Well Christian Club here at the University of California, Riverside, Come Reason Ministries and Reasons to Believe Ministries. My name is Daniel Hooper and I'm an alum of this wonderful institution, the University of California at Riverside, and I wanna thank UCR for their willingness to accommodate tonight's debate. Issues of origin, existence and meaning are not trivial issues and this is why we have brought in two experts in their respective fields to address these issues. It's our hope that the information that's shared tonight will stimulate ongoing discussions about these all important topics among the student body at UCR, and also among the community in Riverside. At this time, I would like to introduce our evening's moderator, who will explain to you the format of the debate as well as introduce to you both of our speakers. Dr. Craig Hazen is a Professor of Comparative Religion at Biola University and Director of the graduate program in Science and Religion. He is the editor of the philosophy journal, Philosophia Christi, and author of a monograph on the interaction of science and religion in America. He also wrote a breakout novel called Five Sacred Crossings, which is available tonight. Hazen holds a PhD in Religious Studies, a degree in Biological Sciences, and has managed a research lab in comparative animal physiology. He has lectured multiple times on Capitol Hill, and in the White House, and is a former co-host of a national radio talk program. Would you please put your hands together tonight and help me welcome to the stage Dr. Craig Hazen. [applause] >> This will be fun. Isn't this the greatest desk ever? I'm lovin' this. Thank you, Daniel. That was a great introduction. Thank you all for coming. This is gonna be fun. In fact, I think there was some sort of great debate here last year. Raise your hand if you came to the great debate last year. Oh, we've grown a little bit, yeah. Well, thanks for returning, those of you who came. And if we do it again next year I hope you all come back again. I am curious, though, but we're streaming this live on the internet. Welcome to all of you who are watching from Indonesia to Arkansas on the internet. We're just delighted to have you here with us. In fact, I wanna ask you the same question, some of you may have watched last year, would you please, if you're at home watching this on the internet, raise your hand. [laughter] Hold it. Hold it. We're done. The web cam on your computer just scanned the room and we were counting the number of hands raised. I wonder if they believe that really happened. There's probably some poor guy in his underwear on a couch eating potato chips who thinks we just took control of his computer. That didn't really happen to everybody out there. I mean this is a great technological center, but I don't think we have that capability, although somebody in here probably does. Delighted to have you here tonight. Now the debaters tonight know each other. They, in fact, they, we all had dinner last night, it was a very cordial affair, and I heard them discussing how they're going to approach the debate. And they're really big believers in having these, the educational affairs with a great deal of respect. And as an experienced moderator of debates, I said, no, good heavens, no. No, we want, we want a gladiator fest. We want the person with the wrong view to be crushed into a powder and taken over to that construction site mixed with the dirt. That's what we want here. Okay, it's probably not gonna happen that way. These two guys are wonderful. And I think you're gonna grow to love them and their ideas as they present tonight. We'll see how it goes. Special thanks to our sponsors, The Well, the college ministry at Harvest Christian Fellowship, [applause] Yes, indeed. Come Reason Ministries, which is a wonderful operation that is involved in apologetics, giving reasons for faith, Lenny Esposito helped put this on, and we should give him a round of applause because he really did a lot of work. Lenny. [applause] And Biola University, my home institution, is also a sponsor. We have a master's degree program in Christian Apologetics and a master's degree program in Science and Religion. If you like these kinds of topics I think you would like these master's degrees. And I know the freeways are tough to get into La Mirada, which isn't far from Disneyland, from here in Riverside, but we have a wonderful distance learning program. So if you wanna do a first rank distance degree in Christian Apologetics or Science and Religion check that out. And that goes for you, if you're watching in Arkansas as well, all right. Let me talk to you a little bit about the format tonight. It's a little bit of an unusual mix up in terms of the way the formal debate format is so I wanna give you a clue on this. First of all, we're gonna have 20-minute opening statements. That's pretty standard with these kinds of things. But then we're gonna have the, what they call, we're calling it the first cross examination. And so one of the debaters will actually interrogate the other one for six minutes, mercilessly, right? And then the second debater will have his chance, six minutes in the other direction. Then we'll take a moment to have 10-minute rebuttals, formal rebuttals from the podium. Then we'll engage in the second round of cross examination. Whatever ideas that are popping after 10 minutes they're gonna take 'em on during the six-minute interrogatories during the cross examination. Then we'll have a five-minute each closing statement from the podium and then it's your turn. We're gonna be taking questions via text and Twitter from around the world and from this room, and you in this room are gonna get a chance to stand up with mic on this side and on this side to ask your questions directly. 40 minutes will go by fast so not everybody in this room is gonna get a chance to ask their question but we'd love to hear from you. And by the way, I know many of you may have grown up in schools where they tell you that there is no such thing as a stupid question. That's not true. [laughter] Okay? So here, let's engage in some peer review. You come up with a, what you think is a brilliant question. What I want you to do is run it by your neighbor, especially if that neighbor has a PhD or a master's degree in that subject, okay? And they'll help you formulate it just right before you get up to the microphone. There are such thing, such things as stupid questions. At least you'll walk away with that bit of knowledge tonight. All right, let me introduce our debaters tonight. The first one in from Florida is Dr. Michael Ruse. He'll be answering in the affirmative. What is it he's answering in the affirmative? This particular and specific debate question, which is the question of the night. Natural processes are sufficient to explain the origin and the complexity of the cell. He'll be arguing that tonight. Michael Ruse is a philosopher and a historian of science, who was awarded an MA in Philosophy from McMaster University in 1964. He then did doctoral at the University of Bristol and was awarded a PhD in 1970 for his dissertation The Nature of Biology. He taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada for several decades. And since 2000, Prof. Ruse has served as the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. Dr. Ruse has contributed to and scores of books and articles including The Darwinian Revolution and Darwinism Defended, and the forthcoming Atheism: What Everyone Should Know. Dr. Ruse, please come up and join us. [applause] >> I feel I should do something like this. [laughter] >> We forgot the Rocky music. >> I'm gonna use this side. >> Is this the right one? >> On this side. >> Over here. You're on this side. >> Okay, fine. >> On my right hand. The arm of power. The person who will be answering the question in the negative, that is, he'll be saying, natural processes are not sufficient to explain the origin and the complexity of the cell, is Dr. Fuz Rana. He was a presidential scholar at West Virginia University where he earned an undergraduate degree in Chemistry with highest honors. He completed a PhD in Chemistry with an emphasis in Biochemistry at Ohio University and twice won the Donald Clippinger Research Award. Post-doctoral studies took him to the universities of Virginia and Georgia before he landed at Proctor and Gamble as a senior scientist in product development for several years. Dr. Rana has authored, co-authored books such as Origins of Life, Who was Adam, and most recently The Cell's Design, and has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He's now vice president of apologetics at Reasons to Believe Ministry, and we can't wait to hear from him. Dr. Rana, please join us on stage. [applause] You gentlemen ready for action? >> Very! >> All right. Give a warm round of applause to Dr. Michael Ruse as he leads off in an opening statement of 20 minutes from the podium. [applause] The black one right there. Do you mind going to that one? >> Which one am I looking? >> Craig: The black podium right there. >> Oh, I see, okay. >> Craig: You got your notes? >> You mean I make all the mistakes and then he knows, and he does it really smoothly after me. That's right, okay. >> Craig: Here's your clicker. >> Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me and particularly to Lenny Esposito, who was standing there and who was the person, as it were, the éminence grise behind this, and I want to say what a very great pleasure it is to be invited here. I'm particularly pleased if I can embarrass one of my own students, who still hasn't finished his PhD yet, but, Dan, stand up, would you? Dan is teaching here in California and [applause] he's gonna be working very hard on Science and Religion all summer. It's a great deal, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to come here and to talk to you tonight. I must confess, I don't normally have, I won't say the collywobbles, but I don't normally have moments of self-doubt. I'm not much given to those. But I did rather wonder why me for this particular debate. It's not so much that I'm not a scientist. I'm not a scientist. I don't want to be one. I never have been and I never will be. I'm a historian and philosopher of science, but my specialty or my, what shall I say, my expertise is particularly in the area of Darwinism and evolution generally. And so it did cross my mind, both did cross my mind, why on Earth then would somebody like me get right into the whole much more technical discussion about the whole question of the origin of life and the complexity of the cell, and am I qualified to talk about this? And I thought about it and I realized that perhaps it's not a bad thing that I'm not an expert on this, because I very much suspect that most of you aren't either. And in a way then we're coming at it together. And the question is what about people like us, people of goodwill, people who, I'd like to say, have got a certain intelligence who are prepared to read things, if not necessarily the technical material but Scientific American or the New York Times or LA Times that sort of thing. And I've got to judge these things and how can we do this? And can we, as it were, come to some sort of decision or do we just, as it were, let the experts do the talking and then we vote without really thinking about it? And so I think we can. And what I want to do with you tonight is very much share with you that kind of exploration, that kind of journey so that we can, at some level, come to some decisions. Now, I seem, I got a beautiful picture of myself, but I, oh, there we are. [laughter] So as I see it, what we're talking about tonight then is the origin, but then also the nature, the complexity of the cell. So this is the issue that we're talking about. And I think that we're lucky in the sense that we have two very clear cut explanatory models which are being put forward tonight in order to come to some sort of answer about that. On the one hand, we've got the position that I'm endorsing tonight, the naturalistic position. This is one which ultimately basically starts with evolution and says, yes, in order to understand the origin and the complexity, the nature of the cell, then the secret must be natural laws and natural laws of a particular kind, evolutionary laws. In particular, I'm going to, myself, endorse the position that all organisms are descended from common ancestor or a group of common ancestors that, at least very early on, the main mechanism of change is going to be natural selection. Certainly after the cell is up and running and as the cell develops its complexity, natural selection is going to be the name of the game combined with random changes known as mutations. Though, they're not random in the sense of uncaused but they're random in the sense that they don't have some immediate intent. They're not, as it were, consciously designed. Now I see that, I see my fellow debater, I see his position is that at some level what we're dealing with is what he calls in one of his books an intelligent agency. Now, that in some sense a thinking being is directly responsible for the making of the cell, the designing of the cell, the creating of the cell, and if I say the development of the cell I don't mean to put evolutionary words into my fellow debater's mouth, but at least the subsequent history of the cell that an intelligent designer is, they're doing his or her work all of the time. Now notice that there are some questions here, which I'm certainly going to be raising before the evening is over, because if you speak of an intelligent designer one of the questions one wants to ask is, is this a natural intelligent designer, is this a natural being, or is this a supernatural being? Is this a God? You might say, well surely it has to be a God. Well, not necessarily so quickly. Maybe we're all an experiment by a graduate student on Andromeda who is writing his dissertation on the development of life and we're his lab. Now I don't believe that. I don't think that Dr. Rana believes that either. But I think at least until we're told why we shouldn't believe it, it's an option on the table. Are we talking designers when we talk in terms of designers? If you think of a motor car, an automobile, for instance, it's very rare, if not, virtually impossible that one would ever have just one designer. There's always a team working at this. So are we talking in terms of one designer or are we talking in terms of a team of designers? How powerful is this being? Is this being something which can change the laws of nature as he or she will? Or is this being something which has to take the laws of nature for granted and works within the context of those? And of course questions like, particularly how does this being do its work? Now as I say, I think these are all questions which are raised by the alternative position. I'm not saying that ante the answers, but I think that that's something that one must keep in mind. Now if we look at the cell, and I mean I just got like you would, I went to Wikipedia to get this. If we look at the cell, I don't know about you folks, but when I look at the cell, I say, oh my goodness, that sure as hell looks designed to me. I mean that doesn't seem to me to be something which is just randomly put together. It doesn't seem to me like just a pile of old junk which, as it were, was dumped out. That looks to me like something that somebody worked very, very hard to produce. So I don't want to deny, I don't want to deny that we're dealing with design-like phenomena. Now that's not part of what I'm saying tonight. I'm not saying that the design question is irrelevant or even false. And one of the facts, things I want to say in fact is I think that we've got a little bit of a false dichotomy that we're working with here. And this of course is something that Charles Darwin himself thought. I'm not sure that we necessarily have, tonight, have to make a decision between evolution or design. But certainly I don't necessarily want to have designed by miracles but I'm not sure that anything I'm going to say tonight will rule out talking in terms of design. And Charles Darwin said, " see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I'm inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws with the details whether good or bad left to the working out of what we may call chance. So at least within the context of this evening, I want you to know that I'm not arguing against design. Now I think there are arguments you might bring against design so please, I'm not pretending to be a Christian or anything like that, but I'm saying in the context of tonight, I'm not sure that that's the dichotomy that we need to face. Now the way I come at this this whole problem is I think we've got to be awfully careful not to commit what I'm gonna call the fallacy of selective attention or illicit focus. What you're looking at is the well-known Indian rope trick. Somebody climbs up a rope and, if they're really good, vanishes at the top. And you look at this and you say, oh my God, oh my God, Newton was wrong. Gravity doesn't work. And then you say, now, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. Of course gravity works, of course gravity works. We don't just look at the Indian rope trick in isolation. We take it in context. We ask ourselves, why would we say that the Indian rope trick must be a trick and not magic? Why don't we think Newton's laws, why do we think Newton's laws don't hold or do hold in a case like this? Why do we think that there's something fishy going on here? And the answer of course is we're not just judging the Indian rope trick taken on its own, but against the background of our knowledge that magic simply doesn't work and that Newton's laws do. And I do want to say, going back to something like the cell, I think we got to be awfully careful not to say, now, Prof. Ruse, we're talking about the cell, just talk about the cell, I don't want to hear about anything else, we're talking about the cell. And I want to say, that would be the same as somebody is saying, okay, Prof. Ruse, we're talking about the Indian rope trick, tell me why Newton's laws aren't false. And I'm gonna say, I'm not going to be boxed in like that and neither should we and I don't think we should be tonight. So my argument very much and it's going to be the argument all through this evening is we don't just look at the cell on its own and say, oh my goodness, it's so complex, works so well, it might have been designed in a hands-on way. When I say designed miraculously, we judge the cell against all of our background knowledge, that includes our knowledge of evolution through natural selection at the macro level. So in other words, what I'm gonna stress this evening is that this debate must be put in the context of everything that we know. All right, what would be my position? I don't want to, having, as it were, laid out some sort of philosophical background, I don't want to be fuzzy on what I believe or what I think is the case. I want to say something along the following lines. The Earth is about four and a half billion years old, life began somewhere less than four billion years ago, more than three and a half billion years ago that the first cells were primitive cells, prokaryotes. And then about two billion years ago, the more complex cells of which we're made up, eukaryotes, came along and then, and of course we're not talking about this tonight, the sorts of organisms that we're acquainted with came round about the Cambrian explosion about half a billion years ago. So this is the background against which I think we're arguing tonight. I think that the origin of the cell, I would want to say we don't, we know less than we know on the origin of the cell. But I would say that we're starting slowly and painfully to block out a picture of how the cell came into being. It started off with organic compounds being formed, naturally what is known as the prebiotic soup, then we get the early macro molecules, chain-like molecules. After that, at some point, we get the, we get probably ribonucleic acid which is something which can replicate itself. At some later point, we get the DNA molecule and the making of proteins. And somewhere along the line, everything gets enclosed in some sort of lipid bubble or something of this nature. So this I think is the basic picture that we've got. And then as I say, somewhere about two billion years ago, we get this massive change from the prokaryotes to the eukaryotes. And I wanna talk just a little bit about this because this in fact was work which was done by a very good friend of mine who died a year or two ago. We got two kinds of cells, as I've already explained to you. The prokaryotes, these are simple cells with no nucleus; and the eukaryotes, which are complex cells with a nucleus and they've also got cell parts known as organelles, chloroplasts which make chlorophyll, mitochondria which are the power pack of the cells and other organelles. And the interesting thing about these cell parts is that they exist in their own right with their own DNA. and the theory that we hold today is due to this woman, Lynn Margulis. And in the 1960s, Lynn, who incidentally at that time was known as Lynn Sagan 'cause she was married to Sagan, Carl Sagan, the astronomer, Lynn had an insight. She said, I think the way that the cells, the complex cell, the eukaryote was formed, is not miraculously. It's formed out of prokaryotes. So these prokaryotes you can see on the left, these are the simple cells. Eukaryotes, these are the ones on the right, the complex cells. And you can see they have their, not only the nucleus, but they also have different cell parts, the organelles. And Lynn's theory which is known as endosymbiosis is quite simple that some prokaryotes swallowed other prokaryotes. But that those that were swallowed didn't necessarily get digested and into non-being that what happened was they kept their integrity and went on working within the outer cell. So you've got the symbiosis and that this was the way that the eukaryote cell was formed. Now when she published this in 1965, it took her 17 attempts to publish it. Everybody said it's nonsense and nobody believed it. 15 years later, they sufficiently sophisticated that they could map the DNA and check the DNA. And what they found was that organelles, these particular organelles that Lynn had focused on, in fact have exactly the same DNA as some free-flowing or free-living prokaryotes. Rather disgusting ones. I think yellow fever I think is one. And of course then what one had got was proved positive that what Lynn had done was, what Lynn had proposed was absolutely right. Now what you've got here is a naturalistic evolution of something going on. Because as soon as this happens, natural selection picks it up and works with it and develops it and now of course we can work out the history of things that we know, for instance, that clearly the first organelles taken in with the mitochondria, the power plants, and then later on, because we don't convert sunlight into energy, the plants did it again and got chloroplasts and the plants have these other cells which came in. What I want to say is that this is perfectly natural. It is a developmental sequence. But as I've said, I don't, in any sense, see some, this is something which necessarily goes against design. I think if one was a believer, one could say, God works in a miraculous way, his wonders to perform, but his miracles are done through unbroken law. What about some of the more complex things like the bacterial flagellum, the sort of whip-like tail which pushes things along, which pushes thing along. You take one part out and it doesn't function. People like my fellow debater will say, these must've been done miraculously because, otherwise, it wouldn't work if they are put together. Well, you run into problems if you take a miraculous position because there isn't just one flagellum, there are many, there are literally hundreds of thousands of flagellin, as they're called in the plural, and they're quite different some of them. Some circulate this way, others circulate that way. Some wiggle, some don't. Some do one thing, some do another. Which ones do we think they are? Much more likely that in fact these evolved. That's what you get with evolution. You get variation. Much more likely because in some cells you get flagella which don't work. They're vestigial organisms or characteristics which is what you expect in evolution. And what's interesting is the cell parts. Again and again the parts of the flagella come from other things. This is known as exaptation, where one feature is picked up and used for something else. Feathers which are used for warming are then used for flying. Characteristics which are used for injecting poisons from one organism into another very similar to the flagellum are then adapted to be able to move things along. And so here again, I think we get a case where a naturalistic evolutionary explanation gives us the kind of solution that we want. And I'm going to end on this point, how do we explain cases of bad design? What about T cells which are needed for the immune system? What about T cells? Why were they not immune against the HIV virus? And if it's a designer, hands-on designer, then as Charles Darwin said, I don't think much of that. Much better to have it all happen through unbroken law. Thank you. [applause] >> We'll now hear from Dr. Fuz Rana his opening statement. 20 minutes. [applause] >> Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here tonight. Thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the organizers for all the hard work in putting on this event. You could say, I think, safely that this was intelligently designed. Anyway, what I'm going to do tonight is basically argue that natural processes are not sufficient to explain the origin of life in the complexity of the cell. In fact, I'm gonna go one step further and actually argue that when we look at the scientific evidence at hand it actually indicates that life's origin, and again the structure of the cell, reflects the work of an intelligent agent. And in order to make my point tonight, I'm gonna develop four lines of argumentation. The first is that all avenues taken to explain the origin of life through chemical evolution have led to dead ends. The second point I'm going to make is that work in prebiotic chemistry which is designed to give insight and to validate chemical evolution actually ironically demonstrate the necessity of intelligent agency in bringing about the origin of life. Work in synthetic biology where scientists are trying to explain, sorry, check that, are trying to create artificial cells in the laboratory affirm the conclusion of the work in prebiotic chemistry. And then finally, the structure and the function of biochemical systems allows us to revitalize the watchmaker argument for God's existence, and in doing so make a case again for intelligent design. Let me go ahead and make my first point. Now, Dr. Ruse described in very general terms a textbook description for how scientists think the origin of life happened. But when you actually survey the scientific literature over the last 60 years, or you discover a myriad ideas that had been proposed by origin of life researchers it's an incredibly complex landscape of ideas. And this diagram is taken from a book that I wrote with Dr. Hugh Ross, an astronomer, called Origins of Life where we attempted to try to give some organization to these ideas and show how they interrelate. And it's interesting to note that regardless of the specific model at hand when you look at the origin of life question from an evolutionary perspective, there are key features that every model has to have in place. Source of prebiotic materials, a way to concentrate these prebiotic materials in some location on the early Earth, a way to generate life's building blocks, a process to assemble those building blocks into complex molecules, you have to account for the origin of self-replication, you have to account for the origin of metabolism, you have to account for the emergence of protocells and then finally explain how that protocellular entity evolves into the last universal common ancestor. What I'm gonna do in my opening statement, with regard to the first point, is focus on these three ideas. Namely, the development of self-replication, the emergence of metabolism, and the aggregation of the systems to protocells. Now these are very important steps in the origin of life because they essentially are looking to explain certain central features that all living organisms possess, namely, that they operate on the basis or the outworkings of information-rich molecules. For example, proteins carry out virtually every activity inside the cell. The information needed to drive the production of those proteins and coordinate the operation of the cellular systems are information-rich molecules in the form of nucleic acids. And self-replication involves the duplication of information-rich molecules. Intermediary metabolism refers to a network of interacting chemical reactions in which small molecules interconvert, if you again elaborate series of chemical pathways. And these small molecules generate the life's, generate life's building blocks and also are the byproducts of breakdown that generate energy for the cell to use. And of course cell membranes are the boundary that separate the interior of the cell from the exterior environment. And these central features for life as well as the requirements of all origin of life explanations have led to three different approaches to the origin of life known as replicator-first, metabolism-first and membrane-first scenarios. And what you see is that when you evaluate these scenarios there are fundamental intractable problems that essentially invalidate each approach. For example, with regard to replicator-first scenarios, in order for a molecule to be a self-replicator it has to be a homopolymer. A homopolymer is a large molecule comprised of smaller subunit molecules. And the backbone of that homopolymer has to have a regular repetitive unit that comprises it that has to be a homopolymer. The backbone has to be again identical. This is a chemical requirement for self-replication. And as the late chemist Robert Shapiro demonstrated, when you take into account the complexity of a chemical environment on the early Earth there are so many different interfering chemical reactions that exist that the generation of a homopolymer is virtually impossible. And this problem is fundamental regardless of what you think the first self-replicating entity might be. In fact, the problem is so severe along, not only the homopolymer problem but other problems associate with self-replication or replicator-first scenarios that the late Leslie Orgel said, it would be a miracle if a strand of RNA ever appeared on the primitive Earth. With respect to metabolism-first scenarios, again you're looking at these networks of chemical reactions involving small molecules. And these catalytic, sorry, these chemical networks have to have some form of catalysis in order to drive the reaction of one, of reactant into a product. And the problem here is that mineral surfaces which had been proposed as the catalytic materials for these protometabolic systems have limited catalytic range meaning that the products are gonna have to migrate to other mineral sites in order for that pathway to be sustained. And this again is virtually an impossible scenario. Leslie Orgel also said, with respect to metabolism-first scenarios, that these would require an appeal to magic, a series of remarkable conditions. A near miracle. With regard to membrane-first scenarios, this is where I've actually contributed to the origin of life problem. A chemist, Jackie Thomas and I wrote an article a few years ago where we evaluated membrane-first scenarios. And what we showed is that in membrane-first scenarios each step in the process requires exacting environmental and chemical conditions in order for again that step in the membrane-first scenario to transpire. And it turns out that each step requires a different set of exacting conditions, meaning that the pathway is essentially self-stultifying. The bottom line is that you cannot explain the origin of life through the outworkings of chemistry and physics. Now my second point is that work in prebiotic chemistry ironically demonstrates the necessity of an intelligent agent. Now when you look at the scientific literature you see a lot of experiments that had been done over the last 60 years that seem, on the surface, to support the notion of chemical evolution where scientists go in the laboratory and they can generate life's building blocks, can assemble them into polymeric materials, they can generate RNA molecules with a wide range of catalytic properties, they can generate self-replicating systems and generate protocellular entities. The problem with these experiments, however, is that they represent false success, not genuine success. At best, they simply demonstrate proof of principle, but as soon as you try to take the chemistry that's done in the laboratory environment and translate it to the conditions of the early Earth the chemistry breaks down, it's not productive. That is the chemistry discovered in the laboratory is not geochemically relevant. And in order to demonstrate geochemical relevance you have to be able to, in the laboratory, design again realistic experiments that take into account the concentrations of materials on the early Earth, the energy sources that would be available. You have to take into account chemical interference. You have to take into account chemical stability. And another very important factor that has to be considered is researcher intervention. Because these prebiotic simulation experiments are done with the oversight of organic chemists, and organic chemists of course would not have been present on the early Earth and so you have a real problem with researcher intervention. And in fact the researcher intervention, in my opinion, is unwarranted in virtually every prebiotic simulation experiment. Let me just illustrate with one example. This has to do with the RNA world scenario. This is one of the leading ideas in origin of life research that basically says the very first biochemical systems were exclusively RNA-based, and that this RNA world later invented the DNA protein world through an evolutionary process. Now there's a lot of lines of evidence that people cite in favor of the RNA world model, one of which are experiments done in a laboratory showing that you can start with RNA building blocks and assemble fairly long RNA polymers using clay as a catalytic surface. But when you examine these experiments in detail what you discover is that these are again highly unrealistic experiments where you, the researchers have been careful to exclude chemical interference that would prevent the RNA chains from growing or exclude chemical interference that would cause the RNA chains to breakdown once they formed. The researchers thought the experiment at the just right time to prevent the RNA molecules from becoming too long because if they become too long they become irreversibly absorbed on to the clay surface. And the clays that are used have to come from a particular source, they have to be processed by the supplier in a particular way, the have to then be treated in the laboratory in a particular way to prepare them to function as catalysts. And oh by the way, the building block materials are chemically activated to ensure that they would react. Paul Davies put it this way. As far as biochemists can see, it is a long and difficult road to produce the efficient RNA replicators from scratch. The conclusion has to be that without a trained organic chemist on-hand to supervise, nature would be struggling to make RNA from a dilute soup under any plausible prebiotic conditions. Simon Conway Morris generalizes this problem to say many of the experiments designed to explain one or other step in the origin of life are either of tenuous relevance to any believable prebiotic setting or involved in experimental rig in which the hand of the researcher becomes, for all intents and purposes, the hand of God. The bottom line here is prebiotic simulation experiments are actually empirically demonstrating the central importance of an intelligent agent in order to bring life into existence. And this conclusion is affirmed by work in synthetic biology where the goal of scientists is to create artificial cells in the laboratory. And one approach is a bottom up approach where scientists start with simple chemicals and then try to assemble them into these chemical super systems that again assume many of the properties of life. And when you examine this work, what you note is that this work is only successful because you have some of the best minds in the world employing rather sophisticated and elaborate strategies to carry out these experiments. These strategies spawn very sophisticated protocols that require highly skilled chemists and biochemists to go into the laboratory utilizing sophisticated chemical instrumentation to carry out the production of protocells, that is intelligent agency is necessary. Let me illustrate with one example. This is work that was published in 2008 in Science in which a team of researchers designed an enzyme from scratch that could carry out what's known as an aldol condensation. This is a chemical reaction that does not occur in biological systems. And in order to create this enzyme from scratch, these researchers employed an elaborate strategy that involved modeling the transition state, determining how to stabilize that transition state by surrounding it with chemical groups. By taking that understanding and then designing an enzyme active site and then building a protein that would fold to produce that enzyme active site. And then once this was done, they then went into the laboratory and produced the enzymes and then vary the enzyme structure, fine-tuning it to produce an enzyme that would function. This work required a team of computer scientists, sorry, a team of quantum chemists, a team of computational chemists, protein engineers, biochemists and molecular biologists. And it took hundreds of hours of super computer time, the use of massive databases of protein structures derived from studying proteins found in nature, again highly skilled chemists and sophisticated laboratory equipment to carry out this work. And the product of this work was an enzyme that quite frankly was laughable in terms of its performance compared to the enzymes that are found in biochemical systems. The authors conclude their paper this way. Although our results demonstrate that novel enzyme activities can be designed from scratch and indicate the catalytic strategies that are most accessible to nascent enzymes, there's still a significant gap between the activities of our designed catalysts and those of naturally occurring enzymes. My final point is this, that when we look at the structure and function of biochemical systems they help us to revitalize the watchmaker argument, an argument advanced by William Paley in the late 1700s that basically said, as a watch requires a watchmaker, life requires a creator. And Paley's deya watch was the pinnacle of engineering achievement. And what William Paley noted is that a watch has certain properties that distinguish it from materials that are currently produced in natural processes. And Paley argued that as a watch requires a watchmaker and living systems, biological systems, share many of the same properties as a watch. Therefore, one could rightly conclude that life requires a creator. And what's interesting to me as a biochemist is that when we have, what we've learned about biochemical systems is that their defining features are identical to the same features that we would recognize as evidence for the work of a human designer. In other words, when human beings design and create and invent we produce systems that have certain characteristics. And when we look at the structure of biochemical systems and how they function, they again have those same characteristics. And so we can revitalize the watchmaker argument. And I'm just gonna give you one example of again the similarity between biochemical designs and man-made designs by turning to the information-rich molecules that are found in biochemical systems, namely, nucleic acids and proteins. Now what's interesting is that these systems are remarkable in their similarity to again man-made information systems. For example, Leonard Adleman, who is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, recognized that the enzymes that operate on DNA are literally functioning as Turing machines. And a Turing machine is an abstract machine invented by the British mathematician Alan Turing that essentially performs the theoretical foundation for how computer systems operate. And Leonard Adleman realized that these enzymes that are manipulating DNA are functioning as actual Turing machines and employed that insight to found an area of nanotechnology called DNA computing where scientists are using the information in DNA in the same way that a computer scientist would treat a string of data and then are manipulating that data using the enzymes in cells stringing again these, stringing together these Turing machines to perform incredibly complex computations. Again the similarity between man-made designs and biochemical designs is absolutely startling. Now in addition to that, Donald MacDonald at Trinity University in Dublin, Ireland has actually discovered that built within the structure of DNA itself is something known as an even bit parity code. And this is a coding device that computer scientists use to detect error in data transmission. And again what's remarkable to me is the similarity between these biochemical systems and man-made constructs, which again helps us to revitalize the watchmaker argument. The information systems inside the cell are ultimately defined by something known as the genetic code, which is a set of rules that relates the information and DNA and RNA into the information found in proteins. And it turns out that in recent years researchers have discovered that the genetic code found in nature is exquisitely optimized for error minimization. In fact, the genetic code in nature exists as a statistical outlier compared to any conceivable random genetic code that could've been generated through chemical evolution. This has led Simon Conway Morris to say that the genetic code in nature displays eerie perfection and startling evidence of optimization. And again optimization is a characteristic of man-made systems. And so the point here is that again biochemical designs are eerie in their similarity to man-made designs. This allows us to develop a revitalized watchmaker argument and in turn use that to buttress the conclusions of other lines of argumentation I made tonight that, namely, life requires the work of an intelligent agent. What I've demonstrated by looking at replicator-first scenarios, metabolism-first scenarios and membrane-first scenarios is that they're fundamental intractable problems with the details associated with chemical evolution that work in prebiotic chemistry ironically demonstrates the central importance of an intelligent agent that synthetic biology and the attempts to create artificial life in the lab affirm that conclusion. And that finally, again the structure and function of biochemical systems allows us to revitalize a formal argument for design, namely, the watchmaker argument. Thank you. [applause] >> Well, I'm impressed with the UCR student body all seem to be tracking well. We can tell when you're noddin' off and you people are in this. Well, we've come to a little bit more exciting part. But before we get to the cross examination, I wanna remind you that you can text in your questions. You do it from the internet if you'd like or if you can do it from the room. And here's the numbers, it's right on your program that they handed you at the door. 951-398-1197. I'll repeat that for the internet watchers. 951-398-1197. All right. We're moving into the first session of cross examination and we are going to have Dr. Michael Ruse to be the interrogator towards Dr. Fuz Rana. In other words, he's gonna ask the hard questions and he's gonna try to answer them. You with us? All right, six minutes to do this and then we will switch roles. Ready, go. >> Craig, are we going to sit here and speak to each other? I think it would make more sense if we did it that way. I was listening to what you were saying with, obviously with great interest, but we're here talking about two models, we're here talking about two positions. Mine, the naturalistic position, and yours, the intelligent designer position or the intelligent agent position. And I want to know a little bit more about your position You didn't actually give us the hypothesis that I find, for instance, in your book that you wrote with Dr. Ross, The Origins of Life, and I want to quote you on this, and your model says, life appeared early in Earth's history while the planet was still in a primordial state, the backdrop for the origin of life in Genesis 1:2 was an early Earth enveloped entirely on water and yet untransformed by tectonic and volcanic activity. This tenet anticipates the discovery of life's remains in the part of the geological column that corresponds to early Earth. So in other words, it's clear, I mean you're quite explicit about this, that your position is one which is based on Genesis or the reading of Genesis in particular, the second verse of Genesis. Now I wanna know where the hell was sun is at this point. I mean what's going on here? We've got an Earth, we've got an Earth here, and yet, as I read it, and I'm staying in a hotel so I've borrowed the Gideon bible for the evening [laughs]. >> We carry them on our iPhones now. >> Yeah [laughs]. You carry them on your, you work at Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, I don't. And then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And that was on the fourth day. So I want to know what your position is. I mean are you saying that we've got this Earth which is sort of suspended like that and then the sun comes along, what exactly? >> Okay, well our view is that the Genesis 1 creation account is a natural history of life, sorry, of the Earth and life on Earth. And that we would argue that if this text is inspired by a creator that it should be essentially a text that corresponds to the scientific record. And so we would argue that the appropriate frame of reference when you're looking at the Genesis 1 account, we take day as a long period of time so I'm an old Earth creationist, I think the Earth is four and a half billion years old, life's been present on Earth 3.8 billion years or so. So we take day as a long period of time, but the frame of reference for the Genesis 1 account is not a hypothetical observer looking from outer space down on the planet, but a hypothetical observer on the surface of the planet looking upward, because Genesis 1:2 tells us that the spirit of God is hovering over the waters. And so the text is telling us that initially there's darkness everywhere and so it means that the sun is not visible, it doesn't mean it's not there, just simply not visible in the Genesis 1:2 passage. On the first day of creation, there's a transformation of the atmosphere that now allows light to penetrate to the surface of the planet. On day four, what you're looking at is the further transformation of the atmosphere so the heavenly bodies are now visible to that hypothetical observer. And the text in the original Hebrew doesn't say that the sun, moon and stars were created, it says, let them appear. And so it's not describing the creation, but rather the appearance. And in fact there's a parenthetical statement that reminds the reader that the sun, moon and stars were created by God but their first appearance was on day four, but that doesn't mean that that's when they were created. >> Then what you're saying is, as most of us read Genesis then, it's profoundly misleading? >> No, I don't think-- >> Well, it is. I mean, look, it says, then God made two great lights. The greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. I mean God made those, God made the sun and the Earth and the moon on the fourth day. He made the light earlier. >> No. I mean the text isn't saying that, because that's essentially making a statement about a past activity that God engaged in. And so the text in the original Hebrew is giving the impression that the sun, moon and stars appeared, but not that they were created. So I don't think that Genesis 1 is misleading at all. But you keep in mind it's written in biblical Hebrew and then translated into English. And the message of Genesis 1 is very, very clear I think. >> But then, just to go back to Genesis 1, Genesis 1:2, I mean I don't mean to just spend our evening cutting this, but this is your position in your book, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. I don't see anything about organisms there. Is that in the original Hebrew? >> No. >> Oh. >> Okay. And that's a, we got just a few seconds. That's a good point. And we actually explained how we arrived at that position in the book Origins of Life, that basically it's not a direct statement but it's an inference that we're drawing from the text given the language in how Genesis 1:2 relates to another passage Scripture called the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 where Moses had the Genesis 1:2 account in mind when he described essentially Israel's delivery from Egypt. But when you take that imagery and transpose it to Genesis 1:2, you can make a reasonable inference that there was something on the surface of the Earth that was of tremendous value and importance to the creator. And so in the book, we simply draw the inference that that was perhaps something akin to the origin of life. But arguably that's essentially an interpretation that based on that we then developed a model. >> All right, we're now switching roles. >> Yeah. >> Dr. Rana is going to be the interrogator and Dr. Ruse is going to answer questions, Bible questions. Go. >> Okay. How much do you feel that philosophy plays in this discussion? And what I mean by that is, to take a statement from Paul Davies' book The Fifth Miracle, which is a book that he's written on the origin of life, where he says that although biogenesis strikes many as virtually miraculous, the starting point of any scientific investigation must be the assumption that life emerged naturally. And so it seems to me that what you've already done by making a statement like that is essentially eliminated any possibility that if the scientific data really is driving you to the point that it looks as if intelligent agency is involved in the origin of life that the scientific apparatus has rendered itself impotent to explore that question because of the way in which it's constrained by methodological naturalism. >> Yeah. Let me say, I think that's a very good point. I think it's a very interesting point. And I certainly, for one, would not deny they're all the philosophy in this discussion. I mean, what the hell, I'm a professional philosopher so I'm not about to do that. Having said that, Dr. Rana, I don't think it's just a question of gut commitments and, what shall I say, just, okay, I'm just gonna take a naturalistic position and I'm damned if I'm going to allow anything else. In other words, I'm ruling your position out a priori before I begin. I mean, first of all, notice that I have, at least in the context of this debate, already agreed that nothing I have said goes against the notion of a designer. I mean, as I say, out of the context of this debate I've got other things to say. But in the context of this debate, I don't see this, for me anyhow, as a matter of designer or not designer. I would want to say the following, is that there's a pragmatic reason for being a naturalist. It's not just a gut thing. Naturalism works. That when you get a problem, as Thomas Kuhn told us in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the way that you deal with problems is not by throwing up your hands and saying, in that Sidney Harris cartoon, oh, it's a miracle. What did the warden say in the Shawshank Redemption when Andy isn't there? He said, "It's a miracle! "He's vanished like a fart in the wind." Well, I mean the point is people don't vanish like farts in the wind. I mean the simple fact of the matter is, he poked it and Andy had spent his time digging his way out. And what I want to say is again and again and again in the history of Western civilization, and I talk Western, and I'm not saying it isn't the case for others too, in Chinese or whatever. I want to say again and again and again when we've had major problems come up, things that we can't solve, the way you deal with it is not by throwing up your hands and saying, it's a miracle. You say, as with the crossword puzzle, what am I missing? What am I missing? What don't I know? Let's go at it again, let's try another way of doing it. And low and behold, not necessarily in our generation, but in the next generation, answers come up. Now I'm inclined to agree that there probably are some problems we can't solve. I'm not at all convinced that we'll ever solve the body-mind problem. I don't think it's miraculous, I just don't, I'm not sure we're going to solve it. But I would say that naturalism has a pragmatic justification. So I'm quite prepared to say that this is a philosophical position. Of course it's a philosophical position. But I want to say there's a good reason for this philosophical position and that is it works. >> But it hasn't worked with the origin of life. And, I mean are you not appealing to the future in order to essentially defend the commitment that someday we'll have an explanation for the origin of life? And we have plenty of data at hand over the last 60 years that nothing seems to work. And some of the ideas are rather inventive and creative. Origin of life researchers are remarkable scientists in terms of their inventiveness and creativity. >> You know, but the point is it is, it's an incredibly complex problem. I'm not denying that. And 60 years, but I don't think 60 years, I mean 60 years, you take something like sexual orientation. I think by and large these days if you ask sex researchers, they say, we've got a pretty good handle on sexual orientation that the way that the hormones and these sorts of things are involved in this, prenatal androgen levels and those sort of thing. But it took a lot more than 60 years to start to get some sort of handle on that sort of issue. So, I mean, with a complex problem like this, I don't think 60 years is bad at all. >> All right. Now, if we can go ahead and move to the next thing. >> Moving to the next segment. What we have next is 10-minute rebuttals. And Dr. Michael Ruse will be the first one at the podium. [applause] >> I rather like quoting from the Bible. Maybe I'll use the first five minutes to read some of my favorite passages. Rebuttal, how does one rebut something like this? I mean I think, in fact in our interaction just now, we were in fact getting to some of the sorts of things which are important. And basically where I stand and why I'm, it takes such a different position from Dr. Rana on this. I said in my first, in my opening statement, I was worried about this whole business of taking a problem out of context. I looked to find whether, I'm sure that there's an official term for this. I called it misplaced focus, the fallacy of misplaced focus or the fallacy of taking out of context. And I just worry that when Dr. Rana gave his very sophisticated and, at one level, very convincing analysis that I was, all the time I was saying yes, but isn't there something very peculiar about this? What you're doing is taking the results of a group of researchers, you're accepting their results, time and again you're showing us all of these highly sophisticated results, you're accepting these results and yet somehow you're going absolutely flatly against the kind of overall interpretation that each and every one of these people would've put upon it. In other words, there's something not right here. You're taking every result of these people find about polymers and about DNA, RNA world all of these sorts of things. You're saying, yes, you're right about this. But all of these people think that at some level they're on the way to some sort of solution and what you're saying is, no, you're not. So there's, as I say, what worries me is I think we're taking this out of focus. And I just want to talk then 'cause I didn't talk very much about the origin of life, and I'm going to obviously retract at a certain level what Dr. Rana said. But I'm gonna tell you why I see it from a different point of view, and we were getting to this in our interaction and I'm glad we did. Because basically I want to say we don't come to this as virgins, we don't come to this with no experience, never having done it before or anything like this. We come in as researchers, if we're origin of life researchers, we come in from a background of chemistry, probably some physics, a background of biology where laws rule the world, where H2SO4 is H2SO4, and that's all there is to it. We come in without miracles. We come in and we face this problem, a problem which we have learned, and you're absolutely right, Dr. Rana, it's horrendously more difficult than people thought in the halcyon days in the 1950s. And we've had 60 years of slug at this. And I don't think that there's any origin of life researcher who would want to say, okay, folks, we're skiing down the other side now. I don't think there's anyone of them who would want to say that. On the other hand, I think that each and every one of them would say, for all the difficulties, we're starting slowly to get some sort of view of what's going on. I've been looking, for instance, at the work of Jeff Barda, who works at Scripps Institute just down the road who's a big one for doing overall synthesis. And basically he wants to say, and it takes a very different interpretation from Dr. Rana on this, that yes, we do have some ideas now. We do now know, for instance, as we said, and we've agreed on this, that life started about three and a, 3.7, eight billion years ago. Dr. Rana says, yes, but it happened so quickly, it couldn't possibly have been natural. Well, we're talking a hundred million years or something like that. Not necessarily that quick. And of course we now know that evolution can take place very, very quickly indeed so I think we've got plenty of time to do this. We do now know that, indeed, that we can artificially, or through mechanical means, make the so-called building blocks of life, the amino acids and the building blocks of the nucleic acids. Now, Dr. Rana is quite right to point out that early optimism about the atmosphere, and I think it was going to be sympathetic or welcoming to this sort of prebiotic soup, is now long gone. But if you look at the researchers, they're far from convinced that it's gone completely and utterly. For instance, people like Barda say, yes, overall the atmosphere probably wasn't that friendly, but if you look at what was going on around volcanic, volcanoes and then the water around there it's quite possible, quite possible, quite probable that the building blocks of life were being formed or were being and could be formed there. So in other words, if you look at somebody like Barda, he says, there's no question that the prebiotic soup hypothesis is still very much alive and well. Now, Dr. Rana is quite right to say, but where do we go from here? But again already there is experimental work showing that you can make these long polymers, these long chain-like molecules. Again there are problems. The best way to do these, perform these is on minerals. You need it fairly cool because if it's too hot they're going to break up. But if it's fairly cool, trouble is these damn polymers stick to the minerals and you can't get them off. But then again experimenters have shown, ah, yes, normally that's the case. But if you keep it in salt water or something like this it's surprising how easily you can get the molecules, these polymers, to break up. So in other words, again nobody's saying absolutely that this is right. But we got a sense of what's going on. And all the time, this goes back to our discussion. All the time, at the back, these people are saying, it's not that we're against miracles a priori but we just don't see the need, the methodology for using miracles. We can keep going. Again, of course the big breakthrough was the work which was done on, with, thanks to the work of people like Tom Cech, the Nobel Prize winner, showing that the, that RNA can self-replicate. A real, big breakthrough. Now again Dr. Rana's right to say, ah, yes, but RNA is not very stable. Is it possible that this could've happened that RNA could've been put together? Isn't it too unstable? But of course Dr. Rana himself mentioned this that there are suggestions that there may have been pre-RNA molecules like peptide nucleic acid PNA, which is a great deal, more stable, and that could then have gone on to do this. And again big gaps, big gaps, and nobody's denying this, between RNA and DNA and DNA and proteins, although there are reasons why DNA may well have been preferred over RNA, namely, that DNA is a lot of more stable than RNA. So one can see reasons why natural selection would've wanted that. At the same time, and Dr. Rana also mentioned the membranes, but again we've got evidence that fatty acids can make these sort of little vesicles. And people like, well Parin of course, the Russian researcher was the one who worked on this but the late Sidney Fox was somebody who worked on it. None of this, none of this is giving you a cast iron analysis or proof of this is the way that life evolved. None of this is doing that. Nobody pretending that. But it's equally foolish, even more foolish to say, we've made no progress, and it's really silly, and I'm using this in a philosophical sense so it's nothing personal, it's really silly to say, oh, well, throw up your hands and bring in miracles. Now if you wanna bring in miracles because you've got a Bible position, I'm not gonna stop you. If you say, I've read my Bible, I've read Genesis, I'm committed to miracles and that is my position, I'm not gonna stop you. What I am gonna say is, fair enough, but you're not doing science now. And my understanding is that somebody like Dr. Rana wants to say, my position is a scientific assurance, and that's what I want to differ from him. It's not because I'm against miracles a priori, I just think that they haven't proven themselves necessary in the past. And I'm very, very, very far from convinced that they're needed at this point of time on the origin of life work. There's Nobel Prizes out there, folks. There's Nobel Prizes out there. And appealing to Genesis 1:2 is not gonna get you one. Thank you. [applause] >> 10-minute rebuttal, Dr. Fuz Rana. >> Okay, let me go ahead and first comment on this whole idea of a creation model. And I didn't bring that up in my opening statement because I was focusing on addressing the question at hand, which again was are natural processes sufficient to explain the origin of life. But one of the things that we are working on is developing a creation model, and that is derived from Scripture but is recast in the form of a scientific model where we make predictions about science should discover. And these predictions form essentially a guiding framework in order to do research into the origin of life question. And I would actually defend that approach by noting that science, very rarely proceeds from observation to theory, more often than not the inspiration for scientific models comes from a variety of different places, and sometimes some rather unusual places. For example, the German chemist Kekulé who discovered aromaticity, which is a very important property that molecules have, was working on trying to solve the structure of benzene which was C6H6. And there was no way that anybody could figure out how to get that particular chemical composition to form any kind of molecule that people would have reasonably thought at the time could exist. And Kekulé, as the story goes, was having a dream, and dreamed of a snake biting its tail and from that the story goes how the inspiration to actually, to think that maybe benzene was actually arraigned molecule, and in doing so, literally discovered, a very important chemical property known as aromaticity And so the point here is that Kekulé had a dream and that dream served as an inspiration for a scientific hypothesis that he then went in to the laboratory and put to the test. And that's essentially what we're doing, reasons to believe with regard to our creation model is we're looking at the Genesis 1 creation account, we're treating it as if it was again a real natural history about what transpired on Earth, a natural history coordinated and orchestrated by a creator. And then what we're doing is we're taking that idea, or the ideas from Scripture and we're recasting it in the form of a scientific model where we make predictions that can then be used to evaluate the model. And so I would argue that that is every much science as any kind of model or whatsoever. And again it's a model that is predicated on relaxing the restrictions of methodological naturalism where you allow intelligent agency to play a role. Now if you start from a different perspective, however, I still think you'd wind up with a situation where again the idea that life stems from an intelligent agent is a reasonable position based simply on observations and experiments that had been done over the last 60 years. Because if you start, as I did in my opening statement, with chemical evolutionary scenarios for the origin of life and you look at how those scenarios perform in light of again all the evidence at hand, what you see again is one intractable problem after the other. You brought up the idea of the source of prebiotic materials. The fact of the matter is there's not an established source of prebiotic materials on the early Earth. The Miller-Urey experiment that was designed to argue that atmospheric chemistry was a source of prebiotic materials turns out to be irrelevant to the conditions that we think now exist on the early Earth. And if you actually take the atmospheric conditions that we think now existed on the early Earth and tried a Miller-Urey type experiment, you get nothing, nothing forms in those experiments. Most researchers have abandoned atmospheric chemistry. Hydrothermal vent chemistry is very popular as a source again of prebiotic materials. And again you can go in the lab and do some kind of simulation study that seem to indicate maybe this chemistry is promising. But as Stanley Miller himself pointed out in a famous paper that the extreme conditions of hydrothermal vents are really wonderful in terms of generating prebiotic compounds but they also will actually destroy those compounds as soon as they form. The half life of organic materials and hydrothermal vent environment is extremely short. In some instances, it's on the order of seconds. And so again you have environments where you have chemistry that can happen but those environments are so harsh chemically and physically that destruction ensues almost immediately afterwards. Some people have argued that maybe prebiotic materials were delivered to the early Earth through asteroid and comet delivery or even just the infalling of dust particles. And again those scenarios have problems. Those are not only mechanisms that again allow for delivery to the Earth but they also are highly destructive mechanisms as well. Flying through the atmosphere, these particles ignite because of frictional heating. When asteroids and comets strikes the Earth there's tremendous amount of energy that's liberated that is highly destructive. Though it can also be a source of energy for some synthesis, it's extremely destructive. And if we simply look at the isotopic distribution of the organic deposits in the oldest rocks on Earth, they don't match the isotopic distributions that we see in organic materials from meteorites, for example. Again arguing against that, that possible scenario. And no matter what scenario you bring to the table, I can show you legitimate scientific problems. And so you're in a position where no matter what you try it doesn't seem to work. But I'm not simply stopping at that point and saying, okay, we can't explain it, therefore, it must be God. I'm not arguing God of the gaps. I'm going one step further and I'm saying, let's look at the history of work done in prebiotic chemistry. What is the common denominator? The common denominator is that scientists have demonstrated proof of principle that the chemistry and the physics is possible. But in doing so, they have failed to show that that chemistry is robust enough to translate to the conditions of the early Earth or any conceivable environment in the solar system and beyond where life could originate. And in fact, the only reason those experiments work is because you have intelligent agents doing that. That is the second piece of evidence. I think that counts as evidence. This is an empirical observation that's being made time and time again. And labs all over the world with independent research groups being involved that intelligent agency seems to be the missing ingredient. You go to synthetic biology and again the creation of artificial cells, the missing ingredient in the prebiotic experiments is fully acknowledged in synthetic biology. And again life is not gonna come from simple chemical materials in a laboratory unless intelligent agents are intervening. And so these, I think, are positive pieces of evidence that suggest that maybe indeed a creator is necessary and that bottom-up approach matches the top-down approach that we propose in the book Origins of Life. And again you can develop predictions that can be scientifically tested along those lines. And then you add to that mix the fact that biochemical systems have at least minimally the appearance of design, and again ironically they seem to be systems that are remarkable in their similarity to man-made design. You've got another piece of evidence that again argues for the work of an intelligent agent. So I hardly think it's a God-of-the-gaps approach, I hardly think our approach is illegitimate or it's not scientific. I think the reason why people would say it's not scientific goes back to the question I asked you. I think it's a philosophical position more so than anything else where what becomes defining of science is the methodological naturalism as oppose to what really I think defines science which is the methodology of science. And you can easily employ that methodology of science to evaluate any model or any hypothesis regardless of where that hypothesis or model comes from. So I think we are practicing science in every sense of the word. [applause] >> We have a couple more segments before we get to your questions. Don't forget to text number 951-398-1197 if you wanna text in a question. Of course we'll have microphones set up during the Q&A time so you can ask in person. Jot those down now and be prepared to ask them in just a few minutes. The next segment is another cross examination. And on this one, Dr. Rana is going to start the interrogation. Here we go. Six minutes. By the way, a round of applause for our great time keeper. [applause] Thank you. Dr. Rana. >> I would like to get your reaction to some ideas that the science journalist John Horgan wrote with regard to the origin of life in his book The End of Science, which is somewhat of a controversial book. But John Horgan, with respect to the origin of life question, refers to it as ironic science in which he argues that origin of life research is, has more in common with literary criticism than actually a genuine scientific program where it's characterized by points of view, opinions, speculations, where different exotic ideas come in and out of favor that at the end of the day none of the ideas are ever genuinely fully established, fully confirmed or fully rejected. And it seems to me that this is actually a fairly reasonable assessment, though, a rather dark assessment of origin of life research, and I think the problem there is that again you're locked into this naturalistic paradigm and you're not looking at what the data is suggesting to you. So how would you react to this idea that origin of life research is more in common with literary criticism than really science? >> You're asking some very good questions and I wish I was as good as you at this. First of all, let's not knock literary criticism quite that much. You know, there is something to be said for literary criticism and I think it can be very revealing, for instance, if you're looking at Melville or looking at Dickens or something like that. I don't think it is purely post-modern stuff. I think you can make some progress there. And I think that that's the way that I would go at the whole origin of life issue. I mean there's no question that at some level origin of life has, not so much of metaphysical and not so much of philosophical but almost a metaphysical buzz about it. If you like, a spiritual buzz about it. I mean origin of life, this is, this really is something which is exciting, which obviously attracts adventurers, cowboys, if you like, people like that. I mean, clearly there's something about origin of life studies which does attract a certain personality. And I don't think anybody would deny that over the last, well not just the last 50 years, but the last 500 years there's been a hell of a lot of BS or shall we call literary criticism done about the origin of life studies. And of course it's not the only area of science where that happens. I mean an area I've been very concerned about over the last 30 years has been human social behavior, sociobiology. And of course people like Dick Lewontin and Steve Gould, I think rightly criticize what they call just-so stories. But I've seen that particular science. I mean, I'm not saying that it's firmly established in every way now, but I've seen that science take very seriously a lot of the criticisms and made big efforts to clean up its act. My sense is that this is also true on origin of life studies. There's no question that in the 1950s and 1960s people were gung-ho. The Miller experiments, these things were on the way, it's just around the corner, folks. And then by the '70s, and you're quite right to point this out, it all started to fall apart that, the whole question of the early atmosphere, you're quite right, was nothing like as sympathetico as people thought. And you're quite right that even as they got the macromolecules, it became a lot more difficult to, you're right to point out, there were all sorts of criticisms. And for a while it looked like deep-sea vents were going to be the solution, and now people are pulling back from that somewhat because they're too damn hot [chuckles]. So I'm not denying that that's the case. Nevertheless, I want to say that if you look at the overall history of the last 60 years, I think that through the mist, outlines are starting to emerge of the way that it worked. I think, I personally think that the RNA and RNA able to self-replicate, nobody's questioning that. I think that was a major breakthrough. Now even if it's not exactly that way at least it shows that the sorts of things that origin of life researchers are looking for are there. There's gold in them thar hills. It's just a lot more difficult than we thought. So at one level, I want to roll with your criticism and agree with it. At another level, I want to say, but I don't think it's the end of the story. And of course, Horgan's writing, he's writing a book that he wants to sell, and I've done that. And I'm sure you haven't because you're a good man, but I've done that. And if you, balance means boring, so. >> Time for a quick-- >> Oh, I'm good, I'm good. Thank you. >> I wanna ask you a question now. >> We gotta, it's gotta rundown-- >> It's gotta rundown, oh my God. No, it doesn't have to. Six minutes, come on. [laughter] Come on, we've all praised you and clapped you. Now earn that clap [laughs]. >> All that applause ruined her. >> Yeah. I wanna ask you a question. And, Dr. Rana, I'm not asking, I mean at one level, I'm not asking this to catch you, because I don't think you've tried to catch me in your questions and I appreciate the spirit in which you've asked them. What about when things go wrong? What about cancer? How is somebody like you going to answer this? You see, for somebody like me, who takes the Darwinian position, I want to say it's all a question of the laws. And things are going to go wrong because that's the way that laws work. And the trouble is if you praise God for doing the hands-on good things then when something goes wrong, why didn't God get in there and save that little girl from cancer? Now my position is it's unbroken law, even if, including design, because this is the way it works. Now I've got theological issues to deal with obviously, but at least I can explain cancer. How do you explain cancer? >> Yeah, okay. Well, let me respond to that question by looking at it in the context of biochemical design and then we can extrapolate, because you're bringing up the idea that there appear to be bad designs in nature. Now I don't think that that in and of itself is incompatible with a model that employs intelligent agency because it could be a design or that isn't necessarily all that competent, let's say. But I believe that the designer is God of the Bible so to me it becomes a problem because I think that we would expect to see good designs in nature, elegant designs in nature, if indeed it's the God of the Bible. So this is I think a legitimate criticism of a design position. However, one thing that I'll note is that oftentimes systems that appear to be bad designs turn out to be actually good designs upon further understanding of those systems. And I talk about this problem in my book The Cell's Design where I give many examples where that turns out to be the case. But also we would expect to see some bad designs in nature that are genuinely bad designs. Why would I say that? Because once a creator puts in place or an intelligent designer like the God of the Bible puts in place these elegant designs, they are now subjected to the laws of nature and they will undergo degradation and decay so you do expect some designs that are essentially breakdowns of optimal designs. Now there are also other designs that maybe are not bad designs but actually are suboptimal designs. And this actually reflects an engineering principle that when you have complex systems that are, in which you're attempting to perform many different things with those systems, they have, they're a multi-objective system, you can never optimize each element of that system, you have to suboptimize the systems in order to perform overall, to have overall optimal performance. And we give many examples of that in The Cell's Design. So when it comes to something like cancer, I would basically argue that cancer is essentially a reflection of a creation that operates according to laws of physics where things that are optimal wind up undergoing decay. So I probably would explain cancer very much in the same way that you would, but I don't think it renders a design position untenable. >> You see, what I want to say, to point like this is, then why do you, why do you wanna get God involved in the miracle business in the first place? Because you're now saying that the God, your creator God, at some level, is going to be constrained by these laws that presumably this God is not able, I take it, is not able to do other than what happens. Because surely a loving God is going to try to prevent those small children from dying of cancer. So already it seems to me, and you've said that yourself, you're going down, I don't know whether it's a slippery slope, but you're going down the path towards my position. And what I'm, I can't quite see is why you feel then it's necessary to stop going down that path? Why you can't just simply go the whole way and simply say, yeah, I believe in God, I believe in the God of Genesis, I believe in the God who made us in the image of God, I mean all of those things. I believe that we're sinful, all of those crucial things in Genesis. So I'm not here sneering at Genesis, but I don't understand why you're not prepared to say, God did it through unbroken law, and these things like cancer happen. >> Well, and our position is not either or, it's both and. In other words, we're not saying that God is running around performing interventions continuously, but God is intervening but also is creating and working through process. And so again it's not either or. And part of the idea that God works through process relates to this concept of providence, that God is providentially providing for his creation through putting in place his processes that help the creation to remain self-sustained, but it doesn't mean that God can't intervene in those processes, your work through those processes but it also means God can work outside. So to me it's not either or, it's both and. And so our project is, is to try to identify where its process and where its intervention. When it comes to the origin of life, I think that's a place where we see intervention but I'm not saying that process isn't part of how God creates or how God providentially provides for his creation. >> I think that's pretty good. >> That wraps it up? Well, closing arguments. This is your last shot from the podium. Formal address this audience to persuade them before they get the chance to ask their questions. And we're gonna start with Michael Ruse. [applause] >> Well, I'm obviously not going to say anything new at this point. So I just want to pull together what I've said before. Because in a way I'm saying, you might say, why am I debating with somebody that I disagree so completely and utterly with? I mean, what's the point of doing this? I'm saying that there is a great deal of point to doing this, because I think it's bringing out some really important issues about the nature of science, about the way that we think. I agree with Dr. Rana that the problem of, that the origin of life is one hell of a difficult problem. I don't think anybody wants to deny that. I agree with Dr. Rana that scientists today do not have a full or even an adequate solution. I agree with Dr. Rana that there have been a lot of, shall we call them cowboys in this business who have done a lot of speculating, as I say, Stephen Jay Gould used to call just-so stories. They talk about it in sociobiology. You certainly see it here. So I don't wanna disagree with any of those sorts of things. However, what I want to say is it's so instructive, isn't it? You've got what is a horrendously difficult problem, we've now got, don't forget, but at the same time we've now, since the Watson-Crick model, we've now started to get some tools that we can explore this. At first, it looked as though it was gonna be easy peasy, but then within 10, 15, 20 years it became clear that it was a lot more difficult than anybody thought, a lot more difficult. And even today, I don't think anybody would want to deny that. So the question then is where do you go from here? What's to be done? Do you throw up your hands? Do you take a biblical position? Now as I say, if you're gonna take a biblical position at a biblical position, I can't stop you, but you're not doing science anymore. The question is, do you, at some level, have this, if I call it a hybrid, Dr. Rana will probably give me another word for it, but do you say, no, the science points me to miracles. And I want to say no, I want to say no because we are not coming to this problem as it were blank without any experience. Anymore than coming to the Indian rope trick is blank without any experience. If I see the Indian rope trick or a boomerang, I don't immediately say, oh, Newton's laws don't work. I start to say, okay, what's going on here, why does it look as though Newton's laws don't work, 'cause I know damn well they do. And I want to say exactly the same about the origin of life. It's a difficult problem. We've got some tools now. I think we are making some progress. We're not there yet. Probably we won't be there in my lifetime. I hope it will be there in the lifetimes of some of you here but perhaps not even then. But that's no reason to give up, that's no reason to give up the naturalistic approach, that's not reason to turn to miracles, not for religious reasons but for scientific reasons. I want to say this is a paradigmatic example of a really tough problem where we've got some tools and exciting, interesting tough problem and it's a paradigmatic example of why science doesn't give up, why science says, we're not there yet, but let's keep trying because it's, the answers are there, the problem is not with the, the problem is not with the problems, it's with our abilities to solve those problems. That if you like, in Thomas Kuhn's language, these are puzzles, not problems. I don't think anybody is ever going to solve, what shall I say, the Palestinian question. I mean, I give, I don't think anybody's gonna solve the American Senate problem. I think that that is a problem which is insoluble. I don't think there's any solution to that. It's not a puzzle, there's no solution. But I do think that the origin of life is a puzzle, I do think that there's a solution and I want to say let's get at it, and isn't that exciting. And to quote Genesis, isn't that what being made in the image of God is all about, trying to explore that wonderful world God has given us with the abilities that he's given us? Thank you. [applause] >> Dr. Fuz Rana, final comment. Five minutes. >> Well, I think what you've heard tonight are two presentations: one you might say is a Ruse, and one you might say was based on Fuzzy logic. [laughter] I wish I could be as clever as you, Dr. Ruse [laughs]. Anyway, that's my feeble attempt. What I basically try to do tonight is to argue that again the origin of life and the complexity of the cell require the work of intelligent agency in order to account for again the emergence of life on Earth. And I've demonstrated or I attempted to demonstrate that every explanation for the origin of life through chemical evolution encounters significant problems, encounters dead-ends, many of these problems appear to be intractable. I've shown that when you look at the work in prebiotic chemistry the role of intelligent agency cannot be ignored in making laboratory experiments successful that appear to validate different stages in the origin of life process. And it's because of the central importance of intelligent agency in these experiments that I've argued that again the origin of life appears to be the work of a mind. Again the work in synthetic biology, attempting to create life in a lab, leads us to a similar type of conclusion. I've also talked about the design in biochemical systems that again I think points us to the work of a mind. So you have four separate lines of argumentation that lead us to essentially the same conclusion. Now as I have been critical of work in the origin of life, I wanna be clear that I do have tremendous amount of respect and admiration for the scientists that are engaged in this work. They are a breed of unto themselves who are people that are consumed with I believe to be one of the most difficult problems in science. So I have nothing but admiration and respect for them. And the more that I study the work in origin of life research the more I appreciate again the ingenuity and the insight that these researchers had brought to this problem. But again time and time again the ideas that had been proffered turn out to not withstand the rigors of scientific testing. I believe it is possible to develop a scientific model that employs the work of an intelligent agent, a creator. And one of the things we're doing at Reasons to Believe is developing a scientifically testable creation model where we attempt to take these ideas from the realm of reading through the creation accounts in Genesis into the scientific arena where we're willing to put our ideas to the test. We're putting our ideas in harm's way. And I think our model actually performs rather well in the face of those types of challenges. At the end of the day, this is really very much a discussion about the nature of science itself. Is science about methodological naturalism where only a certain category of explanations are allowed? Or is science, first and foremost, about a methodology that takes hypothesis, ideas, theories, models and the predictions that emanates from them and applies scientific testing to those ideas and allowing the best models to persist and discarding those models that are failed models? And so again I think it's very much a question of the philosophy of science to some degree. And I, as a scientist, would like to think that science has the capacity to discover truth as oppose to science being a game that is played where we only are looking for natural process explanations. I think methodological naturalism actually makes science impotent to answer some of the most important questions, not only in science, but most of the important questions to humanity at large. One of the critiques of our position of course are the bad designs found in nature or presumably bad designs found in nature. And I believe it's possible to develop a robust response to that very, very much that legitimate criticism. So again at the end of the day, I believe that I have demonstrated and made my case that indeed intelligent agency is required for the origin of life. And as much as I respect Dr. Ruse, I'm not sure that he's convinced me that natural processes are sufficient. What I see him doing and I see origin of life researchers do this as well is that essentially appeal for the future. And this is essentially a logical fallacy because we need to evaluate this question with the data that we have at hand today. And that data that we have at hand today suggest intelligent agency is required to account for the origin of life. [applause] >> Boy, I especially thank our presenters tonight for hitting the mark on their time. Every moment, every segment we did it right on time and here we are. Now it's your turn. Let's see if you can do it on time. Here's how it's gonna work. We have a microphone on this side of the room. You can see it just behind the light stand. If you have a question for Dr. Michael Ruse, that is the place to stand. If you have a question for Dr. Fuz Rana, this is the microphone. And people are already lining up so there you go. Form some lines. We'll try to get to as many questions as we can. I'm certain we won't get to all of them. And we also have some questions that have come in via text. I'm gonna start with one of those. Here's a question from the internet, Dr. Ruse. For you. >> Wait, no, this is wrong. >> Where does information-- Where does information, as an information seen within the cell, typically come from? >> Where does information typically come from? You know, in a way, that's a little bit like when did you stop beating your wife, because it rather implies that information is something that comes from somewhere. And I'm not sure that information is something, is a thing quite of that nature. Obviously what I would want to say is that information is something which is formed, thanks to natural selection. I think that what we have is we get random trials, we get a struggle through existence, some work, some don't, and those that work have something, if you lke to call it information, that those that don't work don't have and I think that that's how it happens. It's slowly, it's a question of slowly accumulating. So if you like to think of it in this way, one side has AMD, the other has DA, DAM, no, I don't mean that, but the other one is garbage. And so you get and and then you start to get a longer sentence and a longer sentence and it builds up gradually in that sort of way. So that's how I think information comes into being. But I don't think, I'm uncomfortable about thinking of information as a thing which is coming. >> All right, let's go to this side of the room. Brief question for Dr. Fuz Rana. >> Dr. Rana, Dr. Ruse has attacked miracles as not being scientific and that you rely on it too much. However, I'd like to know how you would respond to the Big Bang Theory, which is evolution's miracle. In the beginning was nothing, then it exploded. >> Well, yeah, I'm a biochemist, I'm not an astronomer so please keep that in mind as I answer this question. But I think the Big Bang, the idea of the Big Bang is an idea that fits Christian Theism very nicely, because you have astronomers discovering that matter, energy, space and time seem to have a singularity beginning. And it looks as what has caused the universe exist outside the universe itself. It's a transcendent cause to the universe. And so I look at that as being fully compatible with the notion that there's a creator that brought the universe into existence. So I like the idea of the Big Bang very much. >> Thank you. Question for Dr. Ruse. >> Okay, Dr. Ruse, you mentioned the problem of the origin of life, I would like to ask about another origin. Where does instinct or the program response to different situations found from the amoeba to the elephant and can be compared to a sophisticated software program come from? And can it function in a piecemeal way as evolution would teach? >> Well, I think this is really quite an interesting question. It's absolutely fundamental to Darwinian theory that behavior is just as much a feature or a characteristic as any physical characteristic is concerned. So I obviously am quite committed to, let's say, the idea that the hand or the eye or these things came about through natural selection. So I don't find it, in any sense, surprising or, what shall I say, anomalous that behavior would also fall into this category. That, for instance, let's say, let's say a deer which does not have a great deal of weaponry, I don't find it, in any sense, surprising that natural selection should've designed, let's use that word, should've designed the deer to be very skittish, to be very much aware, always on the lookout for predators, and when it sees a predator, to have the genes, if you like, to, for let's get the hell out of here as quickly as we can. So I personally see behavior, and I think that's the question you're asking about, is just as much of a package of being an organism as physical characteristics. >> Internet question for Dr. Rana before we get to the in-house mics. Give us an example of a scientifically testable prediction made by intelligent design about the origin of life that has been found to be correct and it's not explainable like chemical evolution. >> Okay. In the book Origins of Life, one of the predictions that we make is that if life is the work of a creator, then it would be, they would have an intrinsic amenable complexity that one could say is irreducible. And when you look at the work done in comparative genomics of microbial genomes, what we've learned is that it looks as if the minimum complexity for life is approximately in the neighborhood of about four to 500 gene products. And once you go below that level, you cannot have an organism that would exist that would have again the properties of life. This seems to be the bare minimum requirements for life. And I'm not sure that through any kind of chemical evolutionary scenario you can account for the fact that you have to have the simultaneous concurrence of that type of complexity. So life appears to be in its minimal form irreducibly complex. So that would be one example. >> All right, let's hit you up another question from your line over here. >> Dr. Fuz Rana, how does your position differ, if it does, from Dr. Francis Collins, a Christian who believes in evolutionary theory? Do you believe in evolutionary theory? And then, sorry, sorry, sorry. Last, also, Dr. Ruse, how, from an epistemological standpoint, should we factor in our feelings, personal experiences into our understanding of the way things are? >> Okay, I actually know Francis Collins. I wouldn't say he's a friend but I know him. I've interacted with him personally on a number of different occasions and very much respect Dr. Collins, though, I don't agree with his position. Dr. Collins would be an evolutionary creationist, or a theistic evolutionist, who would argue that God uses evolution exclusively as a means to create. Now I'm a skeptic of aspects of the evolutionary paradigm, but not skeptical entirely the evolutionary processes. I think there's ample evidence that microorganism evolved. I think you've got evidence for adaptation, microevolution for speciation. I'm skeptical about the ability of evolution to create. So when it comes to the origin of life or large scale transformations where one group transforms in another group that's where I'm skeptical where I believe that there's got to be a creator intervening in those situations. Dr. Collins would take a different perspective. I'm an old Earth creationist, he's a theistic evolutionist or an evolutionary creationist. Also, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with that position because that view argues that human beings are ultimately the product of evolutionary processes. And from a theological standpoint, it creates a number of uncomfortable problems with regard to again how do you square that with the biblical text and with very important theological ideas that are central to core doctrines of Christianity. >> Question for Dr. Ruse. This side of the room. >> Dr. Ruse, I'm really enjoying the debate tonight and I have a question about-- >> Craig: Speak right into the mic nicely and loudly so we can hear you. >> Sure, thank you. I have a question about illicitly focusing. Dr. Ruse, you warned us about how illicit focus can lead us to an incorrect or at least unlikely conclusion. And you also said that if I was to read Genesis and include God into my conclusion, I wouldn't be doing science. However, my question is aren't you, isn't it being illicitly focused when you use philosophical naturalism coupled with methodological naturalism the view that we can only know things and have to measure things from the physical universe only? Dr. Rana seems to use science intuition and observation. He seems to be trying not to be focused on one philosophical world view and includes others. >> Well, I noticed that when I was talking about focus I wasn't quite using it in that sense. What I was saying was I think that if you just try to isolate a problem from the overall context, then already you've, as it were, tilted the discussion in what I was thinking were illicit sorts of ways. But you're quite right to point out that obviously, at some level, I'm not including the Bible as a work of even, what shall I say, even potential science. I mean, 'cause obviously, clearly it is true, I don't read the Bible in that sort of way at all, I read the Bible as a document about God, about humans and about our relationship to God. And so I'm not even going into the Bible, if you like, to find answers to scientific questions. Now it doesn't mean to say that I'm not doing this out of prejudice, because once again I'm coming in to that position with a great deal of background knowledge and people who who went before me. It was St. Augustine, for goodness sakes, who said, don't look at the Bible in that sort of way. The Bible is written, it was written for preliterate folk, it was not written for sophisticated scientists and philosophers like ourselves. Don't read it that way. You're only going to make a mistake. So I feel that I can very comfortably separate out the two. But as I say, I think that I was talking about focus, I wasn't quite using it in the sense that you were implying I was. >> All right. You folks on the internet are gonna have to raise your game. We need some good questions out there. All right, text them in right now. We'll hit over here, Dr. Rana, you're up. >> Thank you very much for being available, both of you, for this excellent debate. And also the entertaining moderator especially at the beginning of the session. It's always good to have something like that going on. It makes us grow. I have a specific question with regards to the first cross examination. And that is in regards to the reading of the Book of Genesis on which your model is based. And this regards also my personal understanding, if I understood you right, and maybe further explanation of it. Did I understand you right that you don't read the entire text in its literary sense but you take some things literally and some other things in a mythological sense? For example, there's evening and there's morning, the first evening, morning, the second and so on. Is that literally to be understood according to your model or is it rather a mythological sense? And if that is mythological why is the other part not mythological and a viable base for a model? >> Yeah, well the way that, to be clear, there are a number of different ways that Christians have approached reading Genesis 1. I think I've seen maybe 10 to 15 different approaches that people have taken in terms of how interpret Genesis 1. The particular approach I take is that it's a historical description of God's creative work. And I take it as a literal historical description. I look at the days again as a period of time, but I view that as actually a literal reading because the word in Hebrew that's translated is day, is yom, which one literal meaning is a period of time, and so that is a literal reading. I don't look at it as an exhaustive description of everything that God did, but highlights of what God did throughout Earth's history and throughout life's history. So that's how I would approach it. With regard to the expression there was evening and there was morning, there's an Old Testament scholar named Walt Kaiser who argued that when you look at the first day of creation, on the first day of creation a day was created. Therefore, evening and morning cannot be in reference to a calendar day or a solar day, but rather must be referring to something else. Thomas Oden, another scholar, has actually pointed out that if in the original Hebrew it was referring to a solar day, it should say it was evening and it was evening. But the fact that it says it was evening and it's morning is a clue that this is something other than a solar day. And of course on the seventh day of creation, there is no evening and morning and the biblical text tells us elsewhere that we still are in the seventh day. And so by, that then indicates or implies that these are also long periods of time. So it's a literal reading taking into account the literary genre that we believe is appropriate for Genesis 1. >> No follow-up over here. >> Yes, yeah, good. >> Question for Dr. Ruse. >> Dr. Ruse, thank you so much for doing this. This has been wonderful. You made the statement that invoking a, invoking intelligent intervention by a creator is not doing science, yet archeology and forensics among other sciences or well-established sciences that include possible intelligent intervention. Doesn't that invalidate your statement? >> Oh, but notice that I was very careful at the beginning of the evening to allow that an intelligent designer or intelligent intervener could be a natural being. So I'm quite prepared to take it as a potential science or potentially scientific claim that we are in fact an experiment being run by a grad student on Andromeda to see what happens. So that would be a natural intervention. Now, my understanding is that in archeology and anthropology, and I'm neither an archeologist or an anthropologist but I've had a couple of kids who were, and when they're doing, what shall I say, studying the native people of British Columbia, God doesn't come into this. I mean, God, at least God is a causal force, God may be discussed as something they believe in. But when they're trying to understand why these things occur, sure, they're going to take intelligence and intervention, but these are natural phenomena. So I'm not ruling out natural intelligent design, what I'm ruling out is supernatural or non-natural intelligent designer. I'm claiming that that is not science. >> All right, internet question. Dr. Rana, here you go. If there is an intelligent designer, who then created them, he, she or it? >> Yeah, that's a common question that's asked and a couple of comments towards that end. Number one is whether you are looking at things from a theistic perspective or an atheistic perspective you still, you ultimately have the problem of appealing to an uncaused cause, because I would argue that the definition of God is that God is an uncaused cause. And if you take, let's say, a strictly naturalistic perspective and you say, we know that the universe has a beginning, something must have caused that universe, and let's say, if you appeal to some kind of multiverse, eventually something has got to cause that multiverse or else you wind up in an infinite regression. Ultimately, you're, at some day, at some point in time having to appeal to an uncaused cause whether it's person or impersonal. So I think it's a problem, not just simply unique, to somebody who appeals to an intelligent designer, it's a problem everybody faces. Now, the second point is to essentially appeal to work that my colleague, Dr. Hugh Ross has done where he has shown that if you recognize that God operates outside of a single dimension of time moving in a unidirectional manner that you no longer have to have again a cause for that type of being. We are biased by our sense of time where we think again of time being again along a single dimension in a unidirectional manner. And in that framework, anything that exist has to have a beginning, but as soon as you relax that requirement and have a more complex view of time, then again a being that operates, let's say, in two dimensions of time, doesn't require a beginning, and of course we would argue that God exist outside of time as Christians. And so again I think it's reasonable to think of God as an uncaused cause. There's nothing problematic with that. >> You probably love to comment on that, but we're gonna have to go to her and see what she has to say. Yes, ma'am. >> Thank you both very much. Dr. Ruse, my question's to you. If system optimization is the, in this case the cell, is given as the goal of life, leaving microevolution as fact, wouldn't macroevolution be negated due to the time span needed, thus, lending credence to intelligent design? >> Well, this whole macroevolution, microevolution division is a popular thing which comes up at this time. I personally don't want to draw distinctions between microevolution and macroevolution. I mean, the example I gave you this evening, for instance, endosymbiosis, is this microevolution or is this macroevolution? I mean it's micro at one level. One can see it as being a one-step sort of phenomenon. And yet it's so macro, it's just about the most macro event in the history of life in the sense that once you've got the eukaryotic cell, obviously humans are the possibility. So my own personal feeling is that I don't want to draw a distinction between the one or the other. And so any questions about shouldn't you be doing this rather than that or something like that, I want to say I just don't accept that dichotomy. >> All right, you've been very patient. You're up. >> My question is with the answer you gave, oh, sorry, thank you guys for coming. And this question is for Dr. Rana. My question is with the answer you gave about the cancer scenario. It sounded like you were saying that God is governed by laws. If that is true, how then can he create those laws that govern himself? Can you please clarify your answer? >> Yeah, thank you. No, I don't think that God is confined to the laws that has created. I think the universe and the laws of the universe were put in place by the creator, and the creator lets the universe run according to these laws but can, at points, intervene and work directly through those laws and through those processes or can intervene and operate outside of them. So again it's not an either/or situation, it's a both/and situation. But we have to keep in mind that from a Christian perspective the universe that we live in is not the final product. That there's, this is in effect the training ground that is preparing us for another universe that God will create that Christians would refer to as the new creation. And so when you have things like cancer or other difficulties, pain, suffering that people experience these are part of the process by which one could view training happening. Philosophers would call this soul-making theodicy, for example. And so that's how I would view something like cancer from a theological perspective that this is part of a process in which we are being equipped to enter into the new creation. >> Thank you for that. This side of the room. Question for Dr. Ruse. >> Yes, well, I'd first like to start by saying I'm a young Earth creationist so when I hear 3.7 billion-- >> Michael: Well then why don't you criticize him? Why me? >> Well, I often ask myself, do they know how large a billion really is? And then I say, Congress has no idea so why should they? But the question, the original question tonight is are natural processes sufficient enough to explain the origin of life? I would actually like to take a little bit further, a little bit more detail, is, are the natural processes of this world sufficient enough to explain the complexity of life? And I don't wanna be vague by the word complexity. What I mean is, is it sufficient enough to explain the relationships within a cell? And I believe relationships are complex, I have a girlfriend that drives me crazy, but what I'm saying is that why does the ribosome compel itself to make a protein in a certain manner for a function that it has almost no relevance for ribosomes? Why does the Golgi apparatus act in a way in tandem with other systems within the cell? And if the Fuz could also offer the creationist reason for the relationships, that would be helpful as well. Thank you. >> Well, I'm not quite sure how to answer that, honestly. You say, why does the ribosome bother to do this? I don't think the ribosome's a sentient being. I don't think the ribosome is in the business of bothering to do anything. I look upon the ribosome as a complex molecule which is doing something in the context of the overall cell. And that why is the ribosome doing what it's doing? Because, frankly, because if it didn't the cell wouldn't be around and natural selection would've wiped it out. So my position, obviously, is that there were, if you like, proto-ribosomes that were doing a little bit better than nothing in the land of the blind, the man with one eye, as king. And so basically that's the way that I see it being put together. But I don't, I mean I'm very uncomfortable about the phraseology that you used which rather implied that the ribosome was a really rather good chap and was helping out and I just don't see it from that context. >> Thank you. This side of the room for Dr. Rana. >> Yes. Dr. Rana, based on the technological limitations of the time and large portion of the Earth have been unexplored and undiscovered, couldn't you say that there could be catalysts that could complete the RNA completion? And you speak in certainties but aren't certain that there are these different things such as the clay that could complete it. For example, the double helix DNA wasn't accepted due to the technological limitations of the time for quite a few years. So couldn't you say that within the next few years we could discover something besides the clay that could complete the RNA strand without the intervention of the hand of God, basically? >> Yeah, that's an interesting question. And, I mean logically speaking, the answer to that question is of course that is a possibility. But when you begin to think about things from the standpoint of just chemical principles, I would be highly suspicious if something like that would be necessarily found. Because again there's just chemical principles that come into play in terms of how minerals are catalyzing the transformation of organic materials. And again the idea that catalysts of that nature are highly restricted in terms of their catalytic range is a pretty sound idea that's based again on chemical principles. But I mean it's always possible that something would be discovered that displays properties that are exactly what you need to account for the origin of life. But given, again to appeal to something that has not yet been discovered as a way to resolve a problem is a fallacy, a logical fallacy. We've got to operate based on what we know now, what we have available to us now and draw conclusions based on that, recognizing that those conclusions are provisional of course in light of what may be discovered in the future. But you can't just simply appeal to some kind of hypothetical material that basically solves your problem. I mean in a sense, that's the naturalistic equivalent of a God-of-the-gaps explanation where we don't have an explanation but evolution has done it and we're confident that we're gonna discover how evolution is done in the future. That's equivalent to a God-of-the-gaps thinking where we can't explain something, therefore, it must be God. Both are, I think, in proper ways to reason. >> Dr. Ruse, internet question for you. What kind of evidence would you need to see to be able to affirm that there is an intelligent designer? >> Well, of course I don't want to put this just in the context of science. For me, and you made that comment about something which was, what is the cause for itself or have no need of a cause. So obviously, for me, the whole question of the intelligent designer is going to be put very much in a broader theological, philosophical question. And I mean if you were to ask me why I don't believe in an intelligent designer, it got nothing to do with science. It's, what shall I say, it's when Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen. As far as I'm concerned, God died there. So for me, I can't accept an intelligent designer because I don't think that there's a solution to the problem of evil. I mean obviously one could have an intelligent designer who is not a nice human being or not a nice God, but I take it we're in the context of the Judeo-Christian God. So give me a plausible solution to the problem of evil and then let's pick the question up there. I mean I'm not being flip about this 'cause I think it's a tremendously important question. So please understand that this is, I'm not trying to evade the question, I mean for me this is a very fundamental question. >> Let's give you another one. This side of the room, pull down that mic and speak right into it so we can hear you. >> First off, thank you for presenting on what you did tonight, Dr. Ruse. And my question, and just based upon what you said earlier in the debate, you said you wouldn't go against the necessity to say that there's a creator in this particular debate. However, not pertaining to this debate, you'd argue otherwise. And I just want to know how was it consistent for you to suggest there's a designer in this particular debate but not others, and to explain further. >> Oh, thank you. Well, thank you for asking that question 'cause it does help me to clarify what I think was an important point. And I wasn't just making this as a debating point incidentally. This is something I really do believe. What I wanted to say was I don't see science, at least at level, as something which challenges religion. And if you like, what is known as an accommodationist which brings down the scorned people like Richard Dawkins and others upon my head that I'm very happy to tolerate. No, I, what I wanted to say was were I a Christian I would look at the cell and the sorts of things that Dr. Rana has been talking about tonight and I would be just absolutely amazed at what a wonderful thing this is and what a testament this is to the abilities and glories of my God. So I'm quite sincere about that. So as I said, I don't, for me, tonight's debate was not about whether there's a designer or not. Tonight's debate was about how that designer works. And like what I wanted to say very strongly yet I do disagree with Dr. Rana is I want to say that designer, in the context of this debate, works through unbroken law rather than through miracle. Now to follow-up on the last question which was asked, you say, okay, but now we, the debate will be over in eight minutes and eight seconds, what are you gonna be then? And the answer I'm not going to conceal is that I'm a non-believer. I'm an agnostic rather than an atheist. But as I say, I'm a non-believer because of other reasons. And particularly overwhelmingly I'm a non-believer because I cannot reconcile the problem of evil with the existence or the nature of the Judeo-Christian God. For me, this really is a flat contradiction. I know others can and I know that Christians, I wanna be quite open about this, I know that Christians including Dr. Rana take the problem of evil very seriously so I'm not one who says that you folks belittle it, I mean any religion which has its God dying in agony on the cross takes the problem of evil seriously. I just don't think you or anybody else can solve it. >> Before we take the last couple of questions, a quick commercial. There's some resource tables out there for Reasons to Believe and Biola University and some student groups. There's a lot of books on the tables and CDs and DVDs so you can keep the education going. Things like a DVD debate with William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens. Just a fun time for everybody. A book I wrote called Five Sacred Crossings, check that out. In fact, you should buy lots of these. [laughter] Yeah, all the proceeds will go to needy children. [laughter] Mine. [laughter] And a book by Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana Origins of Life, all that and a lot more. Go check it all out. Last couple of questions. Dr. Rana, here we go. >> Dr. Rana, I am a young Earth creationist, therefore, I believe in young Earth. I realized that the Bible has answers to questions you cannot answer because of your view on the age of the Earth. For example, cancer, pain, suffering and all that, Genesis tells us that that's a result of the curse. After the land was cursed, after all that we see pain, suffering, thorns and all that and then Genesis talks about it coming to the Earth. You can't, you don't have an answer to that because you believe in old Earth. Therefore, you believe those pain and suffering before sin. We believe pain and suffering as a result of sin. Why do you find it necessary to interpret Genesis with the views of secular science to the views of an old Earth that came about to explain everything we have without a God? For example, how do you explain life without God? Will you need a long time? Will you need naturalist processes to make better sense of it? Why do you find it necessary? In Romans 3:4, it says, let God be true, but every man a liar, and I just wanna say I'm not happy with what you're doing. >> Thank you for those encouraging words. [laughter] You know, I have been studying Genesis 1, well the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in the context of other creation accounts found throughout Scripture for at least, I've been studying it in a serious way for at least 20 years. Working at Reasons to Believe, I have the benefit of working with some very good biblical scholars and theologians and scholars in other areas who have likewise spent many, many, many years studying this. I've had the privilege of interacting with some of the best theologians in the world who are conservative Christians and I'm convinced through that exercise and again that intensive study that there are some very serious exegetical problems with a young Earth interpretation. I do not think it is the obvious interpretation or obvious reading of Scripture. I think it's got real problems associated with it. Likewise, I think looking at the Scripture with day as being a long period of time, looking at Genesis 1 with days a long period of time, is actually an interpretation that integrates very, very nicely with other passages in the Scripture that speak about again the creation. And we don't have enough time to go into a long discussion of that. There's a great book written by Hugh Ross called A Matter of Days that I would refer you to that gives a very good argument along those lines. There's also a book called the Genesis Debate that Hugh Ross was an author in as well as young Earth proponents and framework model proponents where they actually debate the different perspectives that they hold, again having a back and forth exchange. And I think you'll see when you look at that debate how rigorous an old Earth position or a day-age creation position actually is in light of other positions that are out there. >> Mic's gone, my friend. Guess who's gonna be it. You have the last question and it had better be good. >> [chuckles] Thank you so much. And thank you Dr. Ruse for listening to my question. Just to borrow from your example, we can't simply push aside Newton's law, which we know works damn well, just because we see a perpendicular Indian rope and call it, throw our hands in the air and call it magic or throw our hands in the air and cop out and say it's a miracle. In that case, how can one push aside Pasteur's law of biogenesis or push aside cell theory? And basically law of biogenesis being that life only comes from life and cell theory being that cells can only come from other cells. And then push those laws aside just for the sake of spontaneous combustion. And at this point, wouldn't saying we simply don't know yet be just as much of a cop out as it's a miracle when a miracle can be explained with scientific laws? >> No, I mean, first of all, it's spontaneous generation we're talking about, not spontaneous combustion. No, I mean, the whole point is of course life comes from life, one cell comes from another cell. But the question is as we take it back and take it back, where does it, where does it all begin? And what I'm, the whole debate that we've got tonight is where did it start, and I don't see any reason whatsoever why one shouldn't be thinking in terms of something which is a naturalistic process from non-physical, from non-living things. I mean, to take the analogy, you build an automobile, admittedly, you're using an intelligence to do it but you're building an automobile from non-automobile pieces and you end up with an automobile even though you didn't start with an automobile. And so I take tonight's debate to be a question of can we start with inorganic materials and build up gradually until we get life, until we get cells which are self-generating? And remember, at least part of the discussion by both of us tonight was about that whole crucial moment whether or not could self-generation start. I don't think either of us wanted to say, the way that you're putting it, that somehow it's impossible because of the very nature of the problem. I think we both think it's possible, it's just that I think it's plausible, and he doesn't. >> All right, let me bring up Daniel from Harvest Christian Fellowship to close this off. [applause] >> Well, hey, thank you guys so much for your contribution tonight. Let's give them one more round of applause. [applause] >> Presenter: Biola University offers a variety of biblically-centered degree programs ranging from business to ministry to the arts and sciences. Visit Biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life.

Channel: Biola University

Views: 170,464

Rating: 4.5972223 out of 5

Keywords: Biola University, Biola, debate, Michael Ruse, Fuz Rana, apologetics, ucm_openbiola:true, ucm:captioned_contingency_june2018

Id: 2CnZ3n8I5b8

Length: 148min 35sec (8915 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2013