¶ Intro / How Douglas Axe got involved with The Story of Everything film
Doug Acts. Thank you for joining me on a commitment to reality.
Thank you for having me here. Yeah.
So I want to have you on today to discuss a new film called The Story of Everything. But before we get into that, I kind of want you to introduce yourself and give me the story of Doug X and how you got involved with something like the Story of Everything.
Sure, I actually became really interested in apologetics as a young believer, came to faith in my teen years. In my undergrad years, I went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, encountered, as you might expect, tension between the dominant worldview on campus and the dominant worldview of my teachers, my professors, and the Christian worldview. And there was a particular lecture where a chemistry professor used a lecture on thermodynamics of all things to criticize faith and the existence of God.
And it didn't shake my faith at the time. But what it did instead is it stirred a passion in me for apologetics because I felt like this guy was abusing his podium. He's supposed to be teaching these nineteen year olds about chemistry, and instead he was using the podium to do something else, and I just started praying and feeling as though there's room for people to do science, to argue for the basic foundational principles of feis a
man Christianity. And I don't know whether I was seeing at the time that I would be a part of that, but I was interested in being a part of that. And you know, if you pray prayers like that, the Lord often says, Okay, you go do that. And so that's what happened. A bunch of doors opened and I just kept walking through them, and lots of there was I don't want to sound like a saint here, there was a lot of my own pride mixed up in this.
And I think the Lord used, over a period of years challenges and hardship that I encountered by pursuing the argument for intelligent design to bring a humble posture in me and to make me realize I'm not the only one who can do this. God doesn't need me to do this, and the glory is ultimately God's not mine. But that's what got me along this arc. And then I met Steve Meyer way back in nineteen ninety when I was at Cambridge with my wife. He returned on
a trip to Cambridge to do his thesis defense. They call it a viva in the British system, and that's when we met. I think it was December nineteen ninety. So all the people in this film virtually everyone I know personally, there's a few exceptions. I've been involved in this a long time. It's been a huge blessing. My wife and I look back at those hard times or
the like what's going on here? And as you know, if you walk in in the Lord for a long time, you can often say, well, I never would have chosen that, But I can see now that God knew what he was doing. It's been consistently the case.
¶ Undeniable-how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed
Amen. Yeah, I mean man plans God laughs. That's one of the maxims that I love buy. So, you know, never never be surprised by the path that we're going down. I know that I never expected to be sitting in this chair. Apologetics was not my favorite thing growing up, but I think it's because I grew up in the underbelly and I was just so exposed to it. And you know, just just so you know who you're working with here. My first d was in high school biology. So when I when.
Before we got cookies on the bottom, Sholf, Is that what you're saying.
Before we started talking or recording, I said, you know you, everyone at the Christian Research Institute said that you are better than Jay Richards, so that you can tell him that at making the complex simple. So that's what you're working with. But I never really that's one of the best I've I've never really had any doubts about. And the heavens declare the glory of God, show the work of his hands. You know, there's plenty plenty of things in life that caused me to kind of stare off
into the distance and wonder or stare at the ceiling. Yeah, I mean, and theological misrepresentations or misunderstandings, Yeah, that kept me up at night. Creation never really did, and that put me at odds quite often with the prevailing worldview. And I just to me it was self evident. And I think the retort would always be, well, you're religious, of course you feel that way, But I don't know
that that was the main reason. Do you understand what I'm saying, is it was does my intuition line up with reality in that case or is it a case of you believe in God? And you're interpreting it and you're kind of cooking the books so that it works to your advantage.
No. I think in my book called Undeniable, how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed starts off without observation. And it's not just my observation. Other people have noticed that humans from an early age, when they look at the world, they into it that there must be a creator. I love this quote from UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik. She said, by elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate godlike designer, even children brought up as atheists.
So and she thought this is a problem. So her take on this was, you know, by the time kids are being taught the truth of evolution, they've got this other intuition that has become quite solid in their minds, and that's a problem. So we should start early, like preschool age, and have pop up books that teach these young kids about the truth, the Darwinian the truth, the Darwinian truth about how we came to be. But when I read that, I thought, no, this is really really
interesting that there's something innate in humans. When you're a young child and you see a butterfly. You know, you just know. But that came from someone from a godlike designer, As Alison Gothnik said, even if your parents are never telling you about God. So no, that intuition is firm.
I understand why some people doubt and why believers. I mean, the psalms are filled with these psalms of lament where firm believers like David can go through seasons of like are He's not doubting whether God exists, but he can doubt whether God is listening to him, is watching him, cares about his circumstances. And that's a very common thing for believers to go through. And I think those psalms are there to minister to believers during those times. Yeah.
Absolutely, Like I said, plenty of theological questions to keep me up at night. Yeah, but when I look out the window and see just the beauty of God's creation
¶ The two competing stories or narratives about reality
that was self evident to me. There are two competing narratives or stories of reality, right, there's a mindful, purposeful God like intelligence behind it or mindless, undirected purposelessness. Is that a fair way to frame the debate?
Yeah, And the film does a good job of just starting off saying here's your options. Here's the big auten.
How did this become the dominant view in science? And more than anything, how did materialism win the not just the minds, but the heart of so many modern people.
Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and it's not really a science question because now we start talking about how our culture is shaped and how do humans operate. I think if you go back, it seems as though this got a big push in the nineteenth century, because that's when Darwin published his book eighteen fifty nine on the
a Species. But the rumblings of materialism you have way earlier in the eighteenth century, and even before that, David Hume, the philosopher, is really questioning whether it's rational to believe that miracles could happen. And that's way before Darwin. You have a number of thinkers who become empiricists. They're saying that the only way you can know the truth is through the scientific method. Bacon contributed to that. So Darwin's writing at a time, this is Victorian time, when I
think he had his own personal reasons for wrestling. He lost a daughter at a very young age and was grieving over that. His faith may have been fragile prior to that, and I think maybe that shattered his faith. So I think part of what Darwin wanted to do is distance God from evil. There's evil in the world, and when he sees his very young daughter died, that's
evil very clear to home. Part of his project, I think was to say, how can we explain everything that we see around us and put God at a distance because and maybe his initial intention was I don't want God. I don't want to think that God is directly associated with things that go so horribly wrong. So maybe there's a like a understandable intent there, but it ends up, of course, creating a bigger problem than you started with.
And then I think it's like power play. I mean, people think that science is somehow above politics or you know, the petty human foibles that touch every other human sphere, but it's not. It's a bunch of humans competing for money and for prestige. And in a mix like that
you always get bad things coming out. Power plays and people trying to you know, people trying to dominate the scene by ostracizing people who disagree with them, and that plays itself out to this day in the scientific community, like the other community.
¶ The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe 15:00 - The price advocates of Intelligent Design have had to pay over the course of their scientific careers
Doug, you were you co wrote a book with the aforementioned Jay Richards and somebody else called The Price of Panic not Bridge, and you you ran right up to that issue there, and that was something that you know, even when we started promoting that book, we in the midst of it, in the thick of it, I'm sitting there thinking, are we sure?
Are we right?
Oh? That came out right in the I mean pretty early on. I mean you were you were ahead of the curve, so you had to be very confident with what you were putting out there.
And it was.
Very contrarian to the narrative that we were told. And I don't know if COVID was a bless and I don't really want to get too deep into COVID, but whether it might have been a blessing in the sense of people saw what they were told and the reality being so different. And I mean, how did you get the bravery to kind of stick your neck out there?
Yeah? So that The Price of Panic, How the tear any of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe is the book. That book came out in October twenty twenty, so we h it says William Briggs on the title, but we know him as Matt Briggs. I've never actually met him face to face, but we did a lot of work over Google docs together. I was here in La Jay was in on the East coast, and Matt was stuck in Taiwan I think, and he couldn't lead because the airports were closed. So we authored this in
about two months. It was a really fun project but crazy. But I agree with you. What stirred in me was everything looked crazy. I'm here in California. Gavin Newsom was the first we were the first half a shutdown. It was I think March fourteenth, twenty twenty or something like that.
You guys had a real shutdown, I mean in North Carolina. I say we had it pretty easy.
I mean, yeah, light guys, you could go so we would go to the beach here, you could go to Huntington Beach and people were like, chill, we're not we're not playing this game. But it was a very strange era and just my my sense of this isn't usually how America operates. We don't tell people to go home, and how close they can get to other people.
And what bothered me how sorry it's.
Go ahead.
Well, I was gonna say, it's not how science is supposed to operate, right.
Like, No, you clearly had politics change its way into science because the administration at the time, the Biden administration had and the CDC, so this is a government branch, had their sort of policy that it came out with, and they realized that a lot of people are going to push back against this, and so you get government saying, well, for the sake of public health, we need to suppress counter information. And that's just not the way you'll operate
in a free society. You should so at the beginning you could. You can recall the very beginning of the operat there were multiple sides being debated and X on both sides, and then very quickly one side becomes dominant. It shuts down the other side. You know, it rails against them and says, these people are not this is pseudoscience. We're telling you the truth science. And I think you're right.
Seeing the scientific community behave so badly and get things so wrong during COVID, I think I was thinking at the time, one good thing that could come out of this is downsizing our sort of we tend to idolize sciences though it's a discipline that tells us the truth and nothing about the truth. And there's something inherently virtuous about everyone who's a scientist. And I think we saw
the way that played out. That's not the case. You have to weigh and carefully assess things that come out of scientific community just as you would out of politics or out of big business or pharmaceuticals. These are all human endeavors where there's lots of self interest at play, and you have to kind of carefully, yeah, to step carefully. Yeah.
Well, and for so many science is a religion of sorts, and so what happens in a scenario like that is you start to develop almost a crisis of faith. Is that this thing that I believed was you know, so valiant and so value based, there was an underbelly, right, and it was and and and you know, I remember, I've got a priest, uh that's part of our parish. But he's also a very well respected medical doctor. And so we were talking to him about this and said,
I don't what do you think? And he would just got he said, I've never seen science act this way before, you know, I've never seen let's say natural immunity denied by a doctor until now there's something else in play here. That's that's kind of moving the needle for sure.
And once you see that, then you start say, well, where else is this?
Where else it it lied to me about that? What else have you been lying to me about? And if you treated me like that? And the reason that I bring this up once again wasn't to kind of go on a diatribe about COVID, but it is a good point to jump off from to kind of say, Okay, you treated me like this about that, and I may have been largely right. The same is done to people
who advocate for intelligent design. That's pseudoscience, right, And I think you alluded to some struggles earlier in the podcast. I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about, but I know a lot of people in your shoes are derided by their colleagues for their belief Is that kind of what you were getting at?
Well, yeah, I was removed from my position in Cambridge. There is a long time ago now, two thousand and two, and it was over this controversy. I didn't do anything wrong, but the director of the center where I was working did not want the controversy landing on his doorstep, so he gave a false excuse. I got an email from his assistant saying, we've run out of space. We need
you to leave. I had seniority in the place. It is total nonsense, but I do understand that he did not know the controversy that could hit the center when I started putting out work that was being used by the intelligent design community. He knew I was being funded by Discovery Institute, by the way, and that didn't bother him because money's money. Until things got hot, and then
¶ Surprising rebirth of the belief in God-is that happening in the sciences?
he reacted.
Interesting, Well, you know you said early two thousands, I wonder, I mean new atheism. When I had Jay Richards on this podcast, he said, new atheism is dead. It's over, like that era is over. I don't know if it's dead, but I do see it to be to some degree
on life support. There's this concept of the surprising rebirth of the belief in God, and it's gotten to a point where I mean, when I was growing up, if you had any form of belief that automatically took you out of the realm of intelligent people, you know it just you weren't taken seriously, I see that shifting. Do you do you see that? I really want to know, especially do you see that happening in the scientific community.
I think there is a shift. It can be difficult to get, you know, a reliable read on this. Some of it is you know, something observed here, something observed there, and you start to thinking, huh, is something going on.
I do think there is a shift. There is a shift both in the US and in the UK in young people saying it used to have the nuns, the rise of the nuns, like I have no religious affiliation, and that trend has reversed, and there's now an uptick in people who say I'm a Christian or I have a religious commitment. And that's true in the UK, I think throughout Europe, and it's true in the US as well.
So something's going on. I also, sort of anecdotally through conversation, I think people are tired of the old stick, which is, don't listen to those id people. They're a bunch of you know, creationists in cheap tuxedos. As it was someone said about us, The thing is, we keep going, and we keep having evidence, and we keep having strong things
to offer. And I think this film, this film does a great job of reversing that lie very very well and showing atheists who had their own atheism challenged by their research. And that's a pretty that's a pretty powerful thing to have on the screen.
Well, Doug, I told you before we recorded, you know that tuxedo isn't cheap. This film is so well done. It's based off of Stephen Meyer's book Return of the
¶ The key concepts behind The Story of Everything
God hypothesis. That is three big ideas that he kind of bases this around. Could you explain what they are?
Well? Three? Okay, So it starts off with this, You've got these two options you have. This is a universe that was brought into being by a personal intelligent creator or there's nothing but the material realm. And then it does this nice job of kind of looking at these different aspects. Starts with the universe having had a beginning, and how controversial that was among scientists for the very reasons that we're talking about. Scientists have their own predilections,
their own predispositions, their own biases. There are scientists featured in this. Sir Fred Hoyle is one of them who hated the idea that the universe had a beginning, and he for his whole career he was pushing against this and he just could not get his head around it. But he also could not deny the evidence in the end. So the universe has a beginning. And then there's a section of the film that talks about the Goldilocks universe.
Not only did the universe start, which sounds like Genesis chapter one, Chapter one, verse one, but it is a universe that, in measurable, quantifiable ways, is spectacularly well designed to support life. So that's the Goldilocks principle. Not too hot, not too cold, not too firm, not too soft, everything is just right. Then it goes into our position within the universe. So Earth within the universe has everything just right.
We're in our own Goldilocks zone for life. And then it starts on unpacking origin of life and design within life. So it gives a full run from the origin of the universe right through intelligent life and humanity, all of this pointing to a personal creator. So if if you would.
¶ Why does it matter if the universe had a beginning or not?
Drill down for me, why does the beginning of the universe really matter?
They quote some people in the film. One of them is someone who said an eternal universe would relieve us of the burden of having to explain the origin, because prior to Big Bang cosmology was steady state universe cosmology. People said, do you if you point a telescope up into the sky, you're seeing what's been there forever. There was no start. So do you see how in that you know worldview? The universe is God? Okay, we know God is eternal and has always been, is the uncreated
source of all things? People say, no, no, no, the universe is eternal and it is the source of all of all things. So it is idolatry. And yet you could get away with it until astrophysics and cosmology showed no, no, no, this is an expanding universe and that means it came
from a beginning, and there was a beginning. And in this sort of tension mid twenty century tension that was working itself out among astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, they didn't most of them did not at all like the idea of the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle coined the term as a pejorative, this big Bang theory. It's stuck and now everyone believes in Big Bang theory. But the reason he didn't like
¶ Why are so many scientists desperate to disprove the reality of God
it is it sounds too much like Genesis one to one.
What I love in the film how they really point out the word relieve. That's not a scientific term, that this would relieve us. And it really if you really drill down on that, it gets at the motivation and I really won't want to know why in your perspective, this is such a strong motivation for so many scientists to relieve any concept of a God hypothesis.
It's this strain. I mean, we were talking about Darwin and the mix of ideas that was coming out. They have their antecedents, but they really were becoming ripe. In
the nineteenth century. You have the Freud Marx Darwin kind of trifecta, a way of thinking that denies God and tries to come up with something that replaces everything that classically humans used to draw from a scriptural basis, a scriptural underpinning, and so an understanding of the universe, an understanding of life, and understanding of humanity, and understanding of moral structure. And to this day you have. My favorite
atheist is Thomas Nagel. He's a philosopher of mind and he realizes that materialism and Darwinism can't work because consciousness, cognition, and moral sense, he says, are definitely real and they're a real part of the universe. But he says, but I don't want there to be a God, so help
me think of another way to understand this. And so I think that project people saw that Darwin's theory is a cornerstone of the project of coming up with an explanation of everything that avoids God, and a lot of people for because we're all born in a state of a fallen state. We're all born in a state of rebellion against God until God doesn't work in us. And when we're in that state, we feel very uncomfortable when you see things that point to God, and so you
want you want an alternative. Dawkins does a great job of describing as saying, you know, it seems very reasonable to say that if there's a garden, there must be a gardener. But we've now come up with another explanation. He's wrong on that, but he does, in saying that, admit that he's got a problem as an atheist, and
¶ The multiverse theory is evidence of desperation
Arwinism is the solution. He thinks, well, and.
I think the problem just keeps getting harder and harder to solve on their end. I mean, one of my favorite parts of the entire film is it's Berlinsky, right that, yes, David Boonen talking about the multiverse, because he gives he treats it the way that I think it should be treated. Just just He's just this is utter ridiculousness. This is fantasy. This this belongs in the movies, like and I mean,
do scientists really take the multiverse seriously? Because to me, it says, Okay, well, you've done a really good job pointing out the fine tuning and the goldilocks on and everything. Well we're just one of you know, any number how many millions, billions, trillions of universes and we're just the lucky one. I mean, that feels like a really faith based claim to me.
It also, I think you're alluding to this. It's it's it shows that there's a state of desperation when you go to simulation theory, and they talked about briefly simulation theory. We're in a computer simulation or an infinite multiverse. These are obviously not things that you can demonstrate through scientific analysis. So there are obviously things that people ideas whacky ideas that people bring to try to solve the problem, and the problem is we don't want there to be a god.
So it does show the desperation I think people will if people are desperate enough. I think multiverse cosmology is on the rise for that reason, for the same reason that people glombed onto Darwinism. They like the idea. And I think this is maybe mentioned in the film that some people have said, Look, this is the only way that we can get around design is multiverse. So get over get over your qualms about multiverse. This is the only game we have left to try to stave off design.
But I mean, put your multiverse hat on for a minute. What's the best explanation that you could possibly give to make me take it seriously? Because just like I said, what you know, I never really had doubts about creation. It was intuitive. The multiverse seems the opposite. It seems intuitively ridiculous. And yes it's positive.
I mean, you hear.
These people who you want to or should take seriously, and they you know, we're definitely living in a simulation. The multiverse theory is true. Explain it to make it make sense to me, or you can you do that?
Because I don't think it makes sense. I can't make those things make sense because I don't think they do. But you can see that if someone is desperate to write God out of the picture and they realize nothing that's been tried before is working, then we're going to have to get creative. And I think that's how you end up with these creative things and you get smart. People like Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson have said they think we're living in a simulation. I don't know
how you could actually believe that. I think maybe when they're you know, they have a drink or too them, they're kind of mulling things over, they would say that. But nobody can live their life as though they believe we're in a computer simulation. So I don't think there's self consistency there. And you can actually refute these things
with careful thinking. You can refute the idea that you can't prove that there isn't a multiverse, but you can prove that it doesn't explain what we see, and likewise the simulation theory, you can show that that's not consistent
¶ Materialism and free-will cannot coexist
with what we know to be true.
Well, and you get that into materialism and free will. I mean they can't really coexist very well, right.
They can't. And so you get people who deny free will, or even people who deny consciousness because they're so committed to a material view of reality. And if they come to the conclusion that Adams and molecules cannot become self aware, then they say, well, then there must not be self awareness. But that's so self defeating because you only came to your view through conscious action, and now you're denying your own consciousness. That seems like you're cutting you're sitting on
the limb that you're sawing off. I mean, everything falls when you deny the process by which you got to these ideas. So yeah, it's very it's very It lacks self consistency for sure.
¶ Was there a first cell?
Yeah. Well, your specialty is biology. Where did the first cell come from?
Well, if you say the first cell, you're already in the domain of sort of Darwinian evolutionary arguing, because to a materialist, there has to be an origin of life that looks like in a pond, you know, biotic soup, things coming together and the first self replicating cell. So the notion of the first cell is a materialist thing. If as theists and Christians we take scripture seriously. There
isn't really a first cell. There's first organisms. Because God is God doesn't have to let molecules come together and watch them and hope that something comes out of it. He bang, puts it, puts it there so he can create out of nothing. So he fills this planet in stages, as it's revealed in scripture. And I think the scientists who believe in evolution agree that in stages this Earth was populated by remarkable forms of life. But we don't
have to talk about a first cell. Its entire populations that he brings into being and tells them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And that's exactly
¶ What does Darwinian evolution explain well?
what happened.
Okay, So what does Darwinian evolution explain. Well, well, there are a couple of things that are right about it. Darwin didn't know about DNA because that hadn't been discovered in eighteen fifteen nine. He didn't know about genetics or the genetic code. He framed his theory in terms of natural selection, which is the star of his show. He thinks natural selection explains everything, and there are modern evolutionists who still believe that Rich or they say they do
Richard Dawkins, but fewer and fewer. So most evolutionary biologists realize that natural selection cannot be the full explanation, and so they think there must be these auxiliary things. But Darwin's idea is that there's natural variation within populations. He didn't know how it was caused, and that natural selection sorts or favors the more fit organisms, those that have more offspring over the less fit, and so these variations get sorted generation after gen and you end up with
different properties. Now, so the true things are there are variants within populations, and this sort of sorting does happen. Natural selection is a real thing. But the false thing it's that it's a wild extrapolation.
Okay, so although this is true, it doesn't explain how you get completely new versions of organism, new new designs of life. It only explains relatively minor things, but some of them have huge importance for human health. Sickle cell anemia is a great example of something that arose and has become prevalent in parts of the globe because of a Darwinian mechanism. But it's not inventing something new, it's
actually breaking something existing. The reason we have sickle cell anemia and a high prevalence in portions of the globe is that malaria is a killer in those portions of the globe, and sickle cell anemia provides protection against malaria. So that is an evolutionary thing that's happened and it's changed the human population. But it's not something that could invent humans. So the big story is false, but there are little aspects of it that are true.
¶ Why is the discovery of information such as DNA such a big deal?
Yeah, when you talked about DNA and information and how you didn't have access to that, I mean, that's one of your specialties. Why is information such a big deal?
Well, I think, and information figures heavily in the film. Information in a computer age is something that we've come to. We've grappled with information. We use information, and even if people don't think about it abstractly or theoretically, you know that if your Wi Fi connection isn't working, you're not getting information to your phone or to your computer, and
you know what that means. It can't do what it needs to do because it doesn't have the it doesn't have the bits that are all allowing to do it. If you're streaming a video and you lose your connection, you won't get the rest of the video because information is not streaming anymore. So I think we if we go back to you know, two hundred and fifty years ago, people had a very different notion of it. We have
a very sort of real world today. Understanding of information is basically my cell phone, you know how many bars I've got, and my WiFi connection is telling how well information can communicate with my device, and I can't do anything with my device without that information. That gives us a context for talking about cells and the complex things that they do, and they likewise can't do those things
without having correct information. And in the film it talks about DNA being an information carrier and it even says, you know, instead of ACG's and t's, you could represent that in terms of zeros and ones. It's very much like what we use with computing. And in the cell, that information is telling the cell how to build proteins, how to put together incorrect sequence amino acids, to form chains that fold into structures that actually do the subcellular functions.
So information has a very central role in life, and information has If we look at the history of the modern intelligent design thinking, information is at the center of that. For the same reason, you can show that information is critical for life. You can show that information has to have an intelligent cause. That means life has to have an intelligent cause.
¶ The power of visual representations in a film like The Story of Everything to help non-experts understand science
Yeah, and just once again going back to my d in high school biology, these things are not I don't come by them naturally, and it can be a little bit more difficult, especially if you're reading a book. And that's one of the real benefits of this film is that it kind of paints a picture for some like me who kind of ah, I get it, and you
see the beauty of it. And it's like, you know, if you and a bunch of your biology friends get together and see something, and I might look at it and go, oh, yeah, what's that You you don't understand that. It's like it's like a football player. Okay, I've been watching pro football my whole life. I can see a quarterback throw into a tight window on the sideline and I go, that's pretty good. But pretty good?
Do you know how hard that is?
Like somebody who actually played football, Like, no, that's not pretty good. That's almost impossible, like to get that. And I feel like the film does a really good job and you get scientists like yourself getting excited and say, look at this. I mean, this discovery just unpack the universe. But then when you see it for yourself and you start it really gets unpacked. You go, yeah, ah, that is beautiful, and you help take the complex and make
¶ Intellectual honesty and the search for truth
it easily understood. I mean that's the beauty of films like this.
Yes, I think you're right. And there's something powerful as well about seeing actual historical figures who were died in the world atheists and they're deeply troubled by what their own field showed them. And that's powerful.
Troubled or convinced because that and that's that's what I mean. I don't want to say that we were better then, but I mean, you really there seemed to be such a strong principled involvement that a desire to follow truth where it led. Yeah, and if if the truth converts my preconceived notions, well then I have to change my preconceived notions to evolve with what I'm seeing right before
my very eyes. I mean that that was the thing about the discovery of DNA that was really really well done and beautiful in the film, kind of like.
A Saul conversion on the road to mask is a very powerful apologetic because you can say, oh, these people who love Jesus, they're just duped because they've loved Jesus. And even that doesn't work. But take someone who didn't love Jesus is arguing against and is powerful and is having people rounded up and executed for loving Jesus, and he becomes a Jesus lover. That's something you have to sit up and say, hang on, that is an interesting story.
There's got to be something behind that, and you see a version of that in this film with these people who were The last thing I want to be is a theist, and now I'm finding myself using the word theology. There has to be a theological explanation at scientific conferences, an interesting thing that doesn't come out in the film.
But I was sitting next to Steve Meyer watching a preview of this yesterday, and he was at that conference where Alan Sandage and Dean Kenyon both said I don't see any other way to interpret this other than a theological interpretation. He was there and that's really what lit the fire for Steve Meyer. So this film actually comes out of things that got started by things that are shown in the film as old clips from nineteen eighty five?
Is that is that the part where they said is I don't think he said theologically said super natural, And there was a.
Yeah, Dean Kenyon said, I don't think you have to jump off the cliff something like this. I'm paraphrasing it to realize that life has to have a theological explanation. Yeah, supernatural was Alan Sandage, but those were both at that nineteen.
Eighty five at the same conference, I think so, yeah, yeah, that would have been something in plain English. What a
¶ What is specified complexity?
specified complexity.
There's a good little graphic for this in the film to distinguish between mere complexity and specified complexity. So if you take a bunch of scrabble tiles they have letters on them, you throw them out on a table. However they land is improbable in retrospect. Obviously they have to land some way, But once you see how they landed, you could say, well, if I throw them again, it's very unlikely that they will land this way. Right, this is a one off because there's so many ways that
they could land. So that's complexity. You have complexity whenever you have a system that could take a very very very large number of states, but at any given time it's in one state. So that is a complex system. But that's not specified complexity because if I throw scrabble tiles on the table and you walk in, you're not going to go, oh my gosh, how could they have landed?
Like that? Thing significant about it? So specified complexity is when you do have that possibility of a vast number of states, but the state the thing is in is special. So if I said, happy birthday, Dave with scrabble tiles, and it's your birthday, you know, not only is this complex because you've got a lot of tiles that do something, but it does something that's significant, Happy Birthday, Dave. And you know nobody just threw those there. Someone had to
arrange it. So the implication of specified complexity always is that someone who knew how to do this arrange the
¶ Why specified complexity infers design
things in order for it.
Yeah, So I mean, why is it so hard for an unguided process to do that?
Because you have the in the In the first case, if we say just throwing scrabble tiles onto the table, the probability of you collect taking a picture of them, collecting them all together, and throwing them again and getting the same arrangement is virtually zero. Okay, So chance cannot hit a probability a target that has a probability that's close to zero, because that's the whole thing in probability.
It's close to zero, it's not going to happen. And likewise, the probability of the tiles by chance saying happy birthday, Dave is close to zero. But in this case, in life, we see sequence after sequence after sequence that have content and meaning, and the probability of that happening by chance is close to zero. So it's not at all like just walking in and finding something random. That's one of many, many possibilities. It's that there are many, many possibilities, and
this is the working possibility. This is the special possibility that's been landed on. So that's why you can infer design from specified complexity, but not just from complexity itself.
¶ The constraints of time for evolutionary theories
But Doug, isn't the answer always time. With enough time, it would have eventually happened.
And worst numbers are helpful because if a probability is one in a million and you've got a million years, then yeah, you can solve that. But we're not talking about one in a million. We're talking about one in ten to the you know, two hundred thousandth power, so very quickly, a billion years is nowhere near enough time for something like this to happen. And a planet and the size of Earth over billions of years is nowhere near enough opportunities for odds like that to have been overcome.
Well, you and I agree on that, but that but there there is the pushback. That's the hey, with enough time, this is what happens.
If someone wants to argue that, then you say, well, let's get out our pencils and our calculators and say what enough time would be, And you very quickly find that the age of the universe there're, you know, an old universe at thirteen point eight billion years is not nearly enough time for these things to have happened. So you could say, I agree with you in a way, but even you acknowledge that things that we see cannot
have happened even in billions of years. There's another way to go, though, and I teach a course called the Design of Life at Biola. Another way to go with that is to demonstrate that a human being cannot be just a physical thing. We have physical bodies, but we have to have an immaterial mind, soul, spirit, our mind that's doing our thinking cannot be physical. Thought can't be
a physical process. And once you show that, then you can say, even with an infinite amount of time or an infinite number of universes in an infinite multiverse, if that's physical, it can't produce something that's non physical. And a key component of a human being is non physical. So that's it's it's a category error to think that a physical universe can come up with a human because a human isn't merely a physical thing.
Hmm, the hard problem of consciousness exactly. I mean, do
¶ The hard problem of consciousness
you want to get into that at all? I mean you could bring take it down to the bottom shelf for me.
Okay, in very simple terms. You can show that well the way I would think about it. And this is also relevant to AI. I have been spending a lot of time talking about AI too, because that's a big subject and they actually connect. So bringing this down to the bottom shelf, what is uh? What is thought? What is thinking if it is not dealing with thoughts? I say, there is no conception of thinking other than working with thoughts. And what is a thought is a thought made out
of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and oxygen. Or is it though something that exists in a different realm. It's a concept, it's an idea. There is no coherent way to say that. Ideas basically are physical things. They're basically made out of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. That's it doesn't work. If you try that, it becomes absolutely incoherent. So if we accept the ideas and thoughts, they live in a different realm. They are non physical things, concepts. The number two.
There is no physical thing that is the number two. You can get too. Here are my two fists. They're physical, but that isn't the number two. I'm applying the number two to the two fists. Right, here's two fingers that are physical. But I shouldn't do that one in Britain by it, I do it like this. Here are two things that are physical, but that isn't the number two. I'm applying the number two to it. Two is a
concept that lives in a different realm. So once you've convinced someone of that, and that's you can do that, then you say, okay, when we're thinking, are we dealing with concepts? And you destroy thought if you say no, we're not. We are. We are working with concepts, and concepts are non physical. Okay, So a physical thing cannot manipulate, access touch non physical concepts, and that means our mind if it is to If our mind is to be working with non physical concepts, then our mind cannot be
a physical thing. It can't be a machine. And the idea that your brain, these neurons that are you know, connected in marvelously complex ways in your brain, are thinking is a claim that a physical thing is manipulating non physical things ideas, and that's just incoherent. The only coherent understanding of what we're doing is yes, you have a brain, and your mind is knit in a beautiful way to
your body, and the brain is part of it. And that's why if something happens to your brain, or drugs or alcohol, there are physical things that affect your brain and they do affect your ability to think. But that's because the immaterial part of you is knit to your physical body, and your brain is the key interface between the two. But once we realize that whatever is doing our thinking has to be working with concepts, that rules out the brain because the brain is it has it
can't touch concepts. It's a physical thing made out of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all these things on the periodic table, and that means that no physical process operating on purely physical stuff can have produced us because we have this key component mind, soul, spirit that's not physical. And so all of this fits beautifully with the idea that God breathed He formed the man out of the dust and breathed his spirit into him, so that I think that's a reference to them. There's
a non physical part. The dust of the ground is physical, but when God breathes the breath of life into him, into Adam, that's poetic reference to Okay, there's a non physical thing that's part of who you are, Adam, and will always be part of who you are, and it's part of being made in the image of God. So all of this makes total sense if you have that view of humanity. If you try to reduce humans to molecules, it all falls to pieces. It doesn't work. Yeah.
Well, I mean there was the Stephen Hawking aspect of the film where he talked about that the first beginning was theoretical math or something like that.
Yeah, that's done. Is an interesting and good aspect in film, there's the Hawking quote because there is gravity, because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing, and John Lennox does a good job of scratching his heads that's gravity isn't nothing.
But basically what Hawking is another one of these scientists who his own work made him uncomfortable because he's wanted to deny a theistic understanding of reality, and yet he realized there's a singularity at the beginning of our universe, and the only thing that he could do is come up with quantum cosmology. But it ends up being like this mathematical structure that connects somehow to a beginning of
a physical universe. And he himself said, there's the problem of understanding how the math could get a universe for it to apply to, because math can't produce a universe. Steve did a good job in the film of saying, really, what we're saying is the universe came out of ideas. The universe came out of mind because minds are Mathematicians always have a mind, and they're dealing with math in their mind, and that means that points to a god, and God in his mind conceives of the universe, which
is true. And did God have math in mind as part of how the triune God is saying let there be light? Does he have math in mind when he's doing that? Yes, And that's why physics has such a beautiful mathematical structure to it is it comes from the
¶ The beauty principle-"it's so beautiful it must be true"
mind of God.
Well, you've used the word several times now, and I it's how the film ends. And I think it's beautiful and you talk about the beauty principle that it's so beautiful it must be right.
Yeah, that's a great principle that's brought out in the film. It actually starts with I don't know if you know. That's my voice that introduces I was wondering. Yeah, there's several parts where it's my voice kind of talking about what's man I do. It's my voice introducing this beauty principle because it's something that struck me very, very profoundly. That, apart from all the other ways to show that Darwin's theory doesn't work, just look at what's around you. Is
it like brute survival machines, ruthless survival machines? You know, everything is ugly, Everything is like you know, brutalist architecture. It gets the job done. It ain't pretty, but all it has to do is beat out the things that it's competing against. Or do you see this extraordinary profusion of elegance and beauty around you? And it's the latter, And that can only be explained by a personal creator God who in his mind is not thinking this is
going to be about natural selection. He's thinking this is gonna be about something else. This is gonna be about my glory. And that's what you see and you can't deny it. I mean, there's look around you. As I said at the gathering last night, there are six thousand species of ladybug. Six thousand species of ladybug with different spot patterns and colors. That's somebody having fun and saying, boom, I'm gonna make this be beautiful, interful, and that's.
The path to truth leads through beauty.
Open the window.
I mean that the phrase that really, I mean, it's just beautiful, gratuitous beauty. It's like God grabbing us by the neck and getting our attention, like look at look at that. There's no like you said, there's no survival based need for that degree of beauty Yep, for sure.
I mean.
It's just like I said, it's one of the things that a film about science that really ends with the crescendo of beauty, beauty, beauty.
Yeah, I love that part of it. In the end, the very in the film, you have these beautiful animations, these sort of ethereal animations that things come together and you see these life forms. It's it's done really really well.
It's incredible. It's it's it's for people like me. I mean, I I kept thinking that, like, because I.
Hope it's for for for all kinds of people. So I think, I hope there are agnostics and people who are well trained in the sciences who see the film, and I hope it does I hope the Lord uses it to touch people in ways that they need to be touched.
I think you will. Like I said, it's just it's so expertly done, first class in every way. Doug, there's a couple of things I want to talk to you about that are a little bit of a wild card.
¶ Would the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe contradict Christianity?
All right, So you talked about AI. Another thing that's really popular in the the cultural zeitgeist right now is aliens. Could you unpack that for me? Because I was listening to a podcast not that long ago, and the guest
said something interesting. It wasn't a religious podcast, and so that most people assume that if aliens were discovered or some sort of alien life form, that it would undermine religion or Christianity, and this guy, who was not a Christian said, I actually think it would strengthen their point. What do you say about them?
It depends on whether we're talking about what we mean by alien.
Uh, if we mean life, life somewhere else in the universe.
Okay, so we're not saying intelligent life.
Just let's let's do both play, let's play with both.
I think it would not be I think it would not be a contrary to scripture. If, for example, some spores of something that are very much like in earth like life were found on Mars and they've been, you know, dormant because there's no water. But it looks as though there was some sort of mold and bacterial life that did exist on Mars and it's sitting there and there's there's no way for it to live without water. I don't think that would be I don't think that that
would upset anything that we should draw from scripture. I do think if we if we found there to be intelligent life, say, and that wouldn't be on Mars, but say another solar system turns out is beaming stuff to us as an intelligent life. And here's why I think that is problematic, because if there's intelligent life elsewhere, that's the sort of life that would be made in God's image, Because I think part of the imago day is our ability to think about things. So would there be life
elsewhere that has the imago day. If it does have the imago day, it seems like it's going to need a savior because the thing, because what played out for us is the image of God is a good thing, but without God's perfections, it leads to a fall, and that means that were cooked. Unless God sends his son to become one of us and to save us. And the language around that event, around the second person of the God had becoming human, dying once for all, that
is universal language. I think it is contrary to Scripture to think that Jesus went and died multiple times, or that his death on Earth having been a human somehow provides atonement for those other people out there in another galaxy because that would be very, very strange. The whole thing is it becomes personal when the creator of this vast universe steps onto this little planet and becomes one of us and walks among us and becomes part of
our history. And that wouldn't work if scripture said, you know, to us on Earth, trust us, this guy who was born and named Jesus in another galaxy lived a perfect life and died on a cross. Trust us. It didn't happen on Earth, and so there's not gonna be any historical record here. But trust me in another galaxy, that's happened. That's that. I just can't see that that working, So I think that's problematic. I also think that part of the reason that people believe there must be life elsewhere
is the materialist philosophy. They think that natural causes. It's embarrassing to an atheist to think, in a universe this vast life is only here because that looks special. It's again like the Big Bang was an embarrassment to the atheists, because that means there was a beginning. It's also embarrassing if you're an atheist to think that in all this vast universe there's only one place where life is, and it's here, and that's why they think, well, there must
be life. If physics can produce life, it must have produced it lots and lots of time, so there must be life elsewhere. That's why we have the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's never come up with anything. I don't think it ever will. I think this is the one place where God made it all happen on planet Earth. Having said that, if there were spores and some something that's far short of, you know, microbial life somewhere else,
I don't think that would upset anything. But my guess is that requires special action, and it looks as though God's special action with respect to life is here and here alone.
Yeah. Well, Doug X the Story of Everything. One more pitch for it and where can people see it?
I think it's a great film. It covers a wide range of arguments that are apologetic for the existence of God, but not just God, a personal God who has made himself known to us and made his love of beauty known to us. Because the beauty argument, as we said, is part of this coming out in theaters Thursday, April thirtieth. There are a number of people who are booking entire theaters for church groups to go, but I'd love to see people bringing non believing friends, agnostics, atheists, or seekers.
I think it's a great film for those types of people. The more people go in the first Apparently the first four days are critical for a film to get it second week. So if we want this to stay in theaters, the more people who go and see it in those first four days it helps for it to have some longevity in the theaters, which I think would be a great thing.
Amen. No, I watched it twice and I would gladly watch the third time in theaters. Doug X, thank you for joining me on a commitment to reality. I really appreciate you and your work.
Thank you for having me. It's been a good conversation.
Thank you for joining me on a commitment to reality. I never do this, but I really want to let you know that if you're enjoying the podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe. It helps a lot, and we are still in our infancies. This helps get the word out and keeps the conversation going until next time. On a commitment to reality,