Speaker 1: Doug Acts. Thank you for joining me on a commitment
Speaker 1: to reality.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I want to have you on today to discuss
Speaker 1: a new film called The Story of Everything. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, I kind of want you to
Speaker 1: introduce yourself and give me the story of Doug X
Speaker 1: and how you got involved with something like the Story
Speaker 1: of Everything.
Speaker 2: Sure, I actually became really interested in apologetics as a
Speaker 2: young believer, came to faith in my teen years. In
Speaker 2: my undergrad years, I went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, encountered,
Speaker 2: as you might expect, tension between the dominant worldview on
Speaker 2: campus and the dominant worldview of my teachers, my professors,
Speaker 2: and the Christian worldview. And there was a particular lecture
Speaker 2: where a chemistry professor used a lecture on thermodynamics of
Speaker 2: all things to criticize faith and the existence of God.
Speaker 2: And it didn't shake my faith at the time. But
Speaker 2: what it did instead is it stirred a passion in
Speaker 2: me for apologetics because I felt like this guy was
Speaker 2: abusing his podium. He's supposed to be teaching these nineteen
Speaker 2: year olds about chemistry, and instead he was using the
Speaker 2: podium to do something else, and I just started praying
Speaker 2: and feeling as though there's room for people to do science,
Speaker 2: to argue for the basic foundational principles of feis a
Speaker 2: man Christianity. And I don't know whether I was seeing
Speaker 2: at the time that I would be a part of that,
Speaker 2: but I was interested in being a part of that.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you pray prayers like that, the
Speaker 2: Lord often says, Okay, you go do that. And so
Speaker 2: that's what happened. A bunch of doors opened and I
Speaker 2: just kept walking through them, and lots of there was
Speaker 2: I don't want to sound like a saint here, there
Speaker 2: was a lot of my own pride mixed up in this.
Speaker 2: And I think the Lord used, over a period of
Speaker 2: years challenges and hardship that I encountered by pursuing the
Speaker 2: argument for intelligent design to bring a humble posture in
Speaker 2: me and to make me realize I'm not the only
Speaker 2: one who can do this. God doesn't need me to
Speaker 2: do this, and the glory is ultimately God's not mine.
Speaker 2: But that's what got me along this arc. And then
Speaker 2: I met Steve Meyer way back in nineteen ninety when
Speaker 2: I was at Cambridge with my wife. He returned on
Speaker 2: a trip to Cambridge to do his thesis defense. They
Speaker 2: call it a viva in the British system, and that's
Speaker 2: when we met. I think it was December nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: So all the people in this film virtually everyone I
Speaker 2: know personally, there's a few exceptions. I've been involved in
Speaker 2: this a long time. It's been a huge blessing. My
Speaker 2: wife and I look back at those hard times or
Speaker 2: the like what's going on here? And as you know,
Speaker 2: if you walk in in the Lord for a long time,
Speaker 2: you can often say, well, I never would have chosen that,
Speaker 2: But I can see now that God knew what he
Speaker 2: was doing. It's been consistently the case.
Speaker 1: Amen. Yeah, I mean man plans God laughs. That's one
Speaker 1: of the maxims that I love buy. So, you know,
Speaker 1: never never be surprised by the path that we're going down.
Speaker 1: I know that I never expected to be sitting in
Speaker 1: this chair. Apologetics was not my favorite thing growing up,
Speaker 1: but I think it's because I grew up in the
Speaker 1: underbelly and I was just so exposed to it. And
Speaker 1: you know, just just so you know who you're working
Speaker 1: with here. My first d was in high school biology.
Speaker 1: So when I when.
Speaker 2: Before we got cookies on the bottom, Sholf, Is that
Speaker 2: what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Before we started talking or recording, I said, you know you,
Speaker 1: everyone at the Christian Research Institute said that you are
Speaker 1: better than Jay Richards, so that you can tell him
Speaker 1: that at making the complex simple. So that's what you're
Speaker 1: working with. But I never really that's one of the
Speaker 1: best I've I've never really had any doubts about. And
Speaker 1: the heavens declare the glory of God, show the work
Speaker 1: of his hands. You know, there's plenty plenty of things
Speaker 1: in life that caused me to kind of stare off
Speaker 1: into the distance and wonder or stare at the ceiling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and theological misrepresentations or misunderstandings, Yeah, that kept
Speaker 1: me up at night. Creation never really did, and that
Speaker 1: put me at odds quite often with the prevailing worldview.
Speaker 1: And I just to me it was self evident. And
Speaker 1: I think the retort would always be, well, you're religious,
Speaker 1: of course you feel that way, But I don't know
Speaker 1: that that was the main reason. Do you understand what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, is it was does my intuition line up
Speaker 1: with reality in that case or is it a case
Speaker 1: of you believe in God? And you're interpreting it and
Speaker 1: you're kind of cooking the books so that it works
Speaker 1: to your advantage.
Speaker 2: No. I think in my book called Undeniable, how biology
Speaker 2: confirms our intuition that life is designed starts off without observation.
Speaker 2: And it's not just my observation. Other people have noticed
Speaker 2: that humans from an early age, when they look at
Speaker 2: the world, they into it that there must be a creator.
Speaker 2: I love this quote from UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik.
Speaker 2: She said, by elementary school age, children start to invoke
Speaker 2: an ultimate godlike designer, even children brought up as atheists.
Speaker 2: So and she thought this is a problem. So her
Speaker 2: take on this was, you know, by the time kids
Speaker 2: are being taught the truth of evolution, they've got this
Speaker 2: other intuition that has become quite solid in their minds,
Speaker 2: and that's a problem. So we should start early, like
Speaker 2: preschool age, and have pop up books that teach these
Speaker 2: young kids about the truth, the Darwinian the truth, the
Speaker 2: Darwinian truth about how we came to be. But when
Speaker 2: I read that, I thought, no, this is really really
Speaker 2: interesting that there's something innate in humans. When you're a
Speaker 2: young child and you see a butterfly. You know, you
Speaker 2: just know. But that came from someone from a godlike designer,
Speaker 2: As Alison Gothnik said, even if your parents are never
Speaker 2: telling you about God. So no, that intuition is firm.
Speaker 2: I understand why some people doubt and why believers. I mean,
Speaker 2: the psalms are filled with these psalms of lament where
Speaker 2: firm believers like David can go through seasons of like
Speaker 2: are He's not doubting whether God exists, but he can
Speaker 2: doubt whether God is listening to him, is watching him,
Speaker 2: cares about his circumstances. And that's a very common thing
Speaker 2: for believers to go through. And I think those psalms
Speaker 2: are there to minister to believers during those times. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Like I said, plenty of theological questions to keep
Speaker 1: me up at night. Yeah, but when I look out
Speaker 1: the window and see just the beauty of God's creation
Speaker 1: that was self evident to me. There are two competing
Speaker 1: narratives or stories of reality, right, there's a mindful, purposeful
Speaker 1: God like intelligence behind it or mindless, undirected purposelessness. Is
Speaker 1: that a fair way to frame the debate?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the film does a good job of just
Speaker 2: starting off saying here's your options. Here's the big auten.
Speaker 1: How did this become the dominant view in science? And
Speaker 1: more than anything, how did materialism win the not just
Speaker 1: the minds, but the heart of so many modern people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and it's not really
Speaker 2: a science question because now we start talking about how
Speaker 2: our culture is shaped and how do humans operate. I
Speaker 2: think if you go back, it seems as though this
Speaker 2: got a big push in the nineteenth century, because that's
Speaker 2: when Darwin published his book eighteen fifty nine on the
Speaker 2: a Species. But the rumblings of materialism you have way
Speaker 2: earlier in the eighteenth century, and even before that, David Hume,
Speaker 2: the philosopher, is really questioning whether it's rational to believe
Speaker 2: that miracles could happen. And that's way before Darwin. You
Speaker 2: have a number of thinkers who become empiricists. They're saying
Speaker 2: that the only way you can know the truth is
Speaker 2: through the scientific method. Bacon contributed to that. So Darwin's
Speaker 2: writing at a time, this is Victorian time, when I
Speaker 2: think he had his own personal reasons for wrestling. He
Speaker 2: lost a daughter at a very young age and was
Speaker 2: grieving over that. His faith may have been fragile prior
Speaker 2: to that, and I think maybe that shattered his faith.
Speaker 2: So I think part of what Darwin wanted to do
Speaker 2: is distance God from evil. There's evil in the world,
Speaker 2: and when he sees his very young daughter died, that's
Speaker 2: evil very clear to home. Part of his project, I
Speaker 2: think was to say, how can we explain everything that
Speaker 2: we see around us and put God at a distance
Speaker 2: because and maybe his initial intention was I don't want God.
Speaker 2: I don't want to think that God is directly associated
Speaker 2: with things that go so horribly wrong. So maybe there's
Speaker 2: a like a understandable intent there, but it ends up,
Speaker 2: of course, creating a bigger problem than you started with.
Speaker 2: And then I think it's like power play. I mean,
Speaker 2: people think that science is somehow above politics or you know,
Speaker 2: the petty human foibles that touch every other human sphere,
Speaker 2: but it's not. It's a bunch of humans competing for
Speaker 2: money and for prestige. And in a mix like that
Speaker 2: you always get bad things coming out. Power plays and
Speaker 2: people trying to you know, people trying to dominate the
Speaker 2: scene by ostracizing people who disagree with them, and that
Speaker 2: plays itself out to this day in the scientific community,
Speaker 2: like the other community.
Speaker 1: Doug, you were you co wrote a book with the
Speaker 1: aforementioned Jay Richards and somebody else called The Price of
Speaker 1: Panic not Bridge, and you you ran right up to
Speaker 1: that issue there, and that was something that you know,
Speaker 1: even when we started promoting that book, we in the
Speaker 1: midst of it, in the thick of it, I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there thinking, are we sure?
Speaker 2: Are we right?
Speaker 1: Oh? That came out right in the I mean pretty
Speaker 1: early on. I mean you were you were ahead of
Speaker 1: the curve, so you had to be very confident with
Speaker 1: what you were putting out there.
Speaker 2: And it was.
Speaker 1: Very contrarian to the narrative that we were told. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if COVID was a bless and I
Speaker 1: don't really want to get too deep into COVID, but
Speaker 1: whether it might have been a blessing in the sense
Speaker 1: of people saw what they were told and the reality
Speaker 1: being so different. And I mean, how did you get
Speaker 1: the bravery to kind of stick your neck out there?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So that The Price of Panic, How the tear
Speaker 2: any of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe is
Speaker 2: the book. That book came out in October twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: so we h it says William Briggs on the title,
Speaker 2: but we know him as Matt Briggs. I've never actually
Speaker 2: met him face to face, but we did a lot
Speaker 2: of work over Google docs together. I was here in
Speaker 2: La Jay was in on the East coast, and Matt
Speaker 2: was stuck in Taiwan I think, and he couldn't lead
Speaker 2: because the airports were closed. So we authored this in
Speaker 2: about two months. It was a really fun project but crazy.
Speaker 2: But I agree with you. What stirred in me was
Speaker 2: everything looked crazy. I'm here in California. Gavin Newsom was
Speaker 2: the first we were the first half a shutdown. It
Speaker 2: was I think March fourteenth, twenty twenty or something like that.
Speaker 1: You guys had a real shutdown, I mean in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: I say we had it pretty easy.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, light guys, you could go so we
Speaker 2: would go to the beach here, you could go to
Speaker 2: Huntington Beach and people were like, chill, we're not we're
Speaker 2: not playing this game. But it was a very strange
Speaker 2: era and just my my sense of this isn't usually
Speaker 2: how America operates. We don't tell people to go home,
Speaker 2: and how close they can get to other people.
Speaker 1: And what bothered me how sorry it's.
Speaker 2: Go ahead.
Speaker 1: Well, I was gonna say, it's not how science is
Speaker 1: supposed to operate, right.
Speaker 2: Like, No, you clearly had politics change its way into
Speaker 2: science because the administration at the time, the Biden administration
Speaker 2: had and the CDC, so this is a government branch,
Speaker 2: had their sort of policy that it came out with,
Speaker 2: and they realized that a lot of people are going
Speaker 2: to push back against this, and so you get government saying, well,
Speaker 2: for the sake of public health, we need to suppress
Speaker 2: counter information. And that's just not the way you'll operate
Speaker 2: in a free society. You should so at the beginning
Speaker 2: you could. You can recall the very beginning of the
Speaker 2: operat there were multiple sides being debated and X on
Speaker 2: both sides, and then very quickly one side becomes dominant.
Speaker 2: It shuts down the other side. You know, it rails
Speaker 2: against them and says, these people are not this is pseudoscience.
Speaker 2: We're telling you the truth science. And I think you're right.
Speaker 2: Seeing the scientific community behave so badly and get things
Speaker 2: so wrong during COVID, I think I was thinking at
Speaker 2: the time, one good thing that could come out of
Speaker 2: this is downsizing our sort of we tend to idolize
Speaker 2: sciences though it's a discipline that tells us the truth
Speaker 2: and nothing about the truth. And there's something inherently virtuous
Speaker 2: about everyone who's a scientist. And I think we saw
Speaker 2: the way that played out. That's not the case. You
Speaker 2: have to weigh and carefully assess things that come out
Speaker 2: of scientific community just as you would out of politics
Speaker 2: or out of big business or pharmaceuticals. These are all
Speaker 2: human endeavors where there's lots of self interest at play,
Speaker 2: and you have to kind of carefully, yeah, to step carefully. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and for so many science is a religion of sorts,
Speaker 1: and so what happens in a scenario like that is
Speaker 1: you start to develop almost a crisis of faith. Is
Speaker 1: that this thing that I believed was you know, so
Speaker 1: valiant and so value based, there was an underbelly, right,
Speaker 1: and it was and and and you know, I remember,
Speaker 1: I've got a priest, uh that's part of our parish.
Speaker 1: But he's also a very well respected medical doctor. And
Speaker 1: so we were talking to him about this and said,
Speaker 1: I don't what do you think? And he would just
Speaker 1: got he said, I've never seen science act this way before,
Speaker 1: you know, I've never seen let's say natural immunity denied
Speaker 1: by a doctor until now there's something else in play here.
Speaker 1: That's that's kind of moving the needle for sure.
Speaker 2: And once you see that, then you start say, well,
Speaker 2: where else is this?
Speaker 1: Where else it it lied to me about that? What
Speaker 1: else have you been lying to me about? And if
Speaker 1: you treated me like that? And the reason that I
Speaker 1: bring this up once again wasn't to kind of go
Speaker 1: on a diatribe about COVID, but it is a good
Speaker 1: point to jump off from to kind of say, Okay,
Speaker 1: you treated me like this about that, and I may
Speaker 1: have been largely right. The same is done to people
Speaker 1: who advocate for intelligent design. That's pseudoscience, right, And I
Speaker 1: think you alluded to some struggles earlier in the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about,
Speaker 1: but I know a lot of people in your shoes
Speaker 1: are derided by their colleagues for their belief Is that
Speaker 1: kind of what you were getting at?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I was removed from my position in Cambridge.
Speaker 2: There is a long time ago now, two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: and it was over this controversy. I didn't do anything wrong,
Speaker 2: but the director of the center where I was working
Speaker 2: did not want the controversy landing on his doorstep, so
Speaker 2: he gave a false excuse. I got an email from
Speaker 2: his assistant saying, we've run out of space. We need
Speaker 2: you to leave. I had seniority in the place. It
Speaker 2: is total nonsense, but I do understand that he did
Speaker 2: not know the controversy that could hit the center when
Speaker 2: I started putting out work that was being used by
Speaker 2: the intelligent design community. He knew I was being funded
Speaker 2: by Discovery Institute, by the way, and that didn't bother
Speaker 2: him because money's money. Until things got hot, and then
Speaker 2: he reacted.
Speaker 1: Interesting, Well, you know you said early two thousands, I wonder,
Speaker 1: I mean new atheism. When I had Jay Richards on
Speaker 1: this podcast, he said, new atheism is dead. It's over,
Speaker 1: like that era is over. I don't know if it's dead,
Speaker 1: but I do see it to be to some degree
Speaker 1: on life support. There's this concept of the surprising rebirth
Speaker 1: of the belief in God, and it's gotten to a
Speaker 1: point where I mean, when I was growing up, if
Speaker 1: you had any form of belief that automatically took you
Speaker 1: out of the realm of intelligent people, you know it
Speaker 1: just you weren't taken seriously, I see that shifting. Do
Speaker 1: you do you see that? I really want to know,
Speaker 1: especially do you see that happening in the scientific community.
Speaker 2: I think there is a shift. It can be difficult
Speaker 2: to get, you know, a reliable read on this. Some
Speaker 2: of it is you know, something observed here, something observed there,
Speaker 2: and you start to thinking, huh, is something going on.
Speaker 2: I do think there is a shift. There is a
Speaker 2: shift both in the US and in the UK in
Speaker 2: young people saying it used to have the nuns, the
Speaker 2: rise of the nuns, like I have no religious affiliation,
Speaker 2: and that trend has reversed, and there's now an uptick
Speaker 2: in people who say I'm a Christian or I have
Speaker 2: a religious commitment. And that's true in the UK, I
Speaker 2: think throughout Europe, and it's true in the US as well.
Speaker 2: So something's going on. I also, sort of anecdotally through conversation,
Speaker 2: I think people are tired of the old stick, which is,
Speaker 2: don't listen to those id people. They're a bunch of
Speaker 2: you know, creationists in cheap tuxedos. As it was someone
Speaker 2: said about us, The thing is, we keep going, and
Speaker 2: we keep having evidence, and we keep having strong things
Speaker 2: to offer. And I think this film, this film does
Speaker 2: a great job of reversing that lie very very well
Speaker 2: and showing atheists who had their own atheism challenged by
Speaker 2: their research. And that's a pretty that's a pretty powerful
Speaker 2: thing to have on the screen.
Speaker 1: Well, Doug, I told you before we recorded, you know
Speaker 1: that tuxedo isn't cheap. This film is so well done.
Speaker 1: It's based off of Stephen Meyer's book Return of the
Speaker 1: God hypothesis. That is three big ideas that he kind
Speaker 1: of bases this around. Could you explain what they are?
Speaker 2: Well? Three? Okay, So it starts off with this, You've
Speaker 2: got these two options you have. This is a universe
Speaker 2: that was brought into being by a personal intelligent creator
Speaker 2: or there's nothing but the material realm. And then it
Speaker 2: does this nice job of kind of looking at these
Speaker 2: different aspects. Starts with the universe having had a beginning,
Speaker 2: and how controversial that was among scientists for the very
Speaker 2: reasons that we're talking about. Scientists have their own predilections,
Speaker 2: their own predispositions, their own biases. There are scientists featured
Speaker 2: in this. Sir Fred Hoyle is one of them who
Speaker 2: hated the idea that the universe had a beginning, and
Speaker 2: he for his whole career he was pushing against this
Speaker 2: and he just could not get his head around it.
Speaker 2: But he also could not deny the evidence in the end.
Speaker 2: So the universe has a beginning. And then there's a
Speaker 2: section of the film that talks about the Goldilocks universe.
Speaker 2: Not only did the universe start, which sounds like Genesis
Speaker 2: chapter one, Chapter one, verse one, but it is a
Speaker 2: universe that, in measurable, quantifiable ways, is spectacularly well designed
Speaker 2: to support life. So that's the Goldilocks principle. Not too hot,
Speaker 2: not too cold, not too firm, not too soft, everything
Speaker 2: is just right. Then it goes into our position within
Speaker 2: the universe. So Earth within the universe has everything just right.
Speaker 2: We're in our own Goldilocks zone for life. And then
Speaker 2: it starts on unpacking origin of life and design within life.
Speaker 2: So it gives a full run from the origin of
Speaker 2: the universe right through intelligent life and humanity, all of
Speaker 2: this pointing to a personal creator. So if if you would.
Speaker 1: Drill down for me, why does the beginning of the
Speaker 1: universe really matter?
Speaker 2: They quote some people in the film. One of them
Speaker 2: is someone who said an eternal universe would relieve us
Speaker 2: of the burden of having to explain the origin, because
Speaker 2: prior to Big Bang cosmology was steady state universe cosmology.
Speaker 2: People said, do you if you point a telescope up
Speaker 2: into the sky, you're seeing what's been there forever. There
Speaker 2: was no start. So do you see how in that
Speaker 2: you know worldview? The universe is God? Okay, we know
Speaker 2: God is eternal and has always been, is the uncreated
Speaker 2: source of all things? People say, no, no, no, the
Speaker 2: universe is eternal and it is the source of all
Speaker 2: of all things. So it is idolatry. And yet you
Speaker 2: could get away with it until astrophysics and cosmology showed no, no, no,
Speaker 2: this is an expanding universe and that means it came
Speaker 2: from a beginning, and there was a beginning. And in
Speaker 2: this sort of tension mid twenty century tension that was
Speaker 2: working itself out among astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, they didn't most
Speaker 2: of them did not at all like the idea of
Speaker 2: the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle coined the term as a pejorative,
Speaker 2: this big Bang theory. It's stuck and now everyone believes
Speaker 2: in Big Bang theory. But the reason he didn't like
Speaker 2: it is it sounds too much like Genesis one to one.
Speaker 1: What I love in the film how they really point
Speaker 1: out the word relieve. That's not a scientific term, that
Speaker 1: this would relieve us. And it really if you really
Speaker 1: drill down on that, it gets at the motivation and
Speaker 1: I really won't want to know why in your perspective,
Speaker 1: this is such a strong motivation for so many scientists
Speaker 1: to relieve any concept of a God hypothesis.
Speaker 2: It's this strain. I mean, we were talking about Darwin
Speaker 2: and the mix of ideas that was coming out. They
Speaker 2: have their antecedents, but they really were becoming ripe. In
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. You have the Freud Marx Darwin kind
Speaker 2: of trifecta, a way of thinking that denies God and
Speaker 2: tries to come up with something that replaces everything that
Speaker 2: classically humans used to draw from a scriptural basis, a
Speaker 2: scriptural underpinning, and so an understanding of the universe, an
Speaker 2: understanding of life, and understanding of humanity, and understanding of
Speaker 2: moral structure. And to this day you have. My favorite
Speaker 2: atheist is Thomas Nagel. He's a philosopher of mind and
Speaker 2: he realizes that materialism and Darwinism can't work because consciousness, cognition,
Speaker 2: and moral sense, he says, are definitely real and they're
Speaker 2: a real part of the universe. But he says, but
Speaker 2: I don't want there to be a God, so help
Speaker 2: me think of another way to understand this. And so
Speaker 2: I think that project people saw that Darwin's theory is
Speaker 2: a cornerstone of the project of coming up with an
Speaker 2: explanation of everything that avoids God, and a lot of
Speaker 2: people for because we're all born in a state of
Speaker 2: a fallen state. We're all born in a state of
Speaker 2: rebellion against God until God doesn't work in us. And
Speaker 2: when we're in that state, we feel very uncomfortable when
Speaker 2: you see things that point to God, and so you
Speaker 2: want you want an alternative. Dawkins does a great job
Speaker 2: of describing as saying, you know, it seems very reasonable
Speaker 2: to say that if there's a garden, there must be
Speaker 2: a gardener. But we've now come up with another explanation.
Speaker 2: He's wrong on that, but he does, in saying that,
Speaker 2: admit that he's got a problem as an atheist, and
Speaker 2: Arwinism is the solution. He thinks, well, and.
Speaker 1: I think the problem just keeps getting harder and harder
Speaker 1: to solve on their end. I mean, one of my
Speaker 1: favorite parts of the entire film is it's Berlinsky, right that, yes,
Speaker 1: David Boonen talking about the multiverse, because he gives he
Speaker 1: treats it the way that I think it should be treated.
Speaker 1: Just just He's just this is utter ridiculousness. This is fantasy.
Speaker 1: This this belongs in the movies, like and I mean,
Speaker 1: do scientists really take the multiverse seriously? Because to me,
Speaker 1: it says, Okay, well, you've done a really good job
Speaker 1: pointing out the fine tuning and the goldilocks on and everything.
Speaker 1: Well we're just one of you know, any number how
Speaker 1: many millions, billions, trillions of universes and we're just the
Speaker 1: lucky one. I mean, that feels like a really faith
Speaker 1: based claim to me.
Speaker 2: It also, I think you're alluding to this. It's it's
Speaker 2: it shows that there's a state of desperation when you
Speaker 2: go to simulation theory, and they talked about briefly simulation theory.
Speaker 2: We're in a computer simulation or an infinite multiverse. These
Speaker 2: are obviously not things that you can demonstrate through scientific analysis.
Speaker 2: So there are obviously things that people ideas whacky ideas
Speaker 2: that people bring to try to solve the problem, and
Speaker 2: the problem is we don't want there to be a god.
Speaker 2: So it does show the desperation I think people will
Speaker 2: if people are desperate enough. I think multiverse cosmology is
Speaker 2: on the rise for that reason, for the same reason
Speaker 2: that people glombed onto Darwinism. They like the idea. And
Speaker 2: I think this is maybe mentioned in the film that
Speaker 2: some people have said, Look, this is the only way
Speaker 2: that we can get around design is multiverse. So get
Speaker 2: over get over your qualms about multiverse. This is the
Speaker 2: only game we have left to try to stave off design.
Speaker 1: But I mean, put your multiverse hat on for a minute.
Speaker 1: What's the best explanation that you could possibly give to
Speaker 1: make me take it seriously? Because just like I said,
Speaker 1: what you know, I never really had doubts about creation.
Speaker 1: It was intuitive. The multiverse seems the opposite. It seems
Speaker 1: intuitively ridiculous. And yes it's positive.
Speaker 2: I mean, you hear.
Speaker 1: These people who you want to or should take seriously,
Speaker 1: and they you know, we're definitely living in a simulation.
Speaker 1: The multiverse theory is true. Explain it to make it
Speaker 1: make sense to me, or you can you do that?
Speaker 2: Because I don't think it makes sense. I can't make
Speaker 2: those things make sense because I don't think they do.
Speaker 2: But you can see that if someone is desperate to
Speaker 2: write God out of the picture and they realize nothing
Speaker 2: that's been tried before is working, then we're going to
Speaker 2: have to get creative. And I think that's how you
Speaker 2: end up with these creative things and you get smart.
Speaker 2: People like Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson have said
Speaker 2: they think we're living in a simulation. I don't know
Speaker 2: how you could actually believe that. I think maybe when
Speaker 2: they're you know, they have a drink or too them,
Speaker 2: they're kind of mulling things over, they would say that.
Speaker 2: But nobody can live their life as though they believe
Speaker 2: we're in a computer simulation. So I don't think there's
Speaker 2: self consistency there. And you can actually refute these things
Speaker 2: with careful thinking. You can refute the idea that you
Speaker 2: can't prove that there isn't a multiverse, but you can
Speaker 2: prove that it doesn't explain what we see, and likewise
Speaker 2: the simulation theory, you can show that that's not consistent
Speaker 2: with what we know to be true.
Speaker 1: Well, and you get that into materialism and free will.
Speaker 1: I mean they can't really coexist very well, right.
Speaker 2: They can't. And so you get people who deny free will,
Speaker 2: or even people who deny consciousness because they're so committed
Speaker 2: to a material view of reality. And if they come
Speaker 2: to the conclusion that Adams and molecules cannot become self aware,
Speaker 2: then they say, well, then there must not be self awareness.
Speaker 2: But that's so self defeating because you only came to
Speaker 2: your view through conscious action, and now you're denying your
Speaker 2: own consciousness. That seems like you're cutting you're sitting on
Speaker 2: the limb that you're sawing off. I mean, everything falls
Speaker 2: when you deny the process by which you got to
Speaker 2: these ideas. So yeah, it's very it's very It lacks
Speaker 2: self consistency for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, your specialty is biology. Where did the first
Speaker 1: cell come from?
Speaker 2: Well, if you say the first cell, you're already in
Speaker 2: the domain of sort of Darwinian evolutionary arguing, because to
Speaker 2: a materialist, there has to be an origin of life
Speaker 2: that looks like in a pond, you know, biotic soup,
Speaker 2: things coming together and the first self replicating cell. So
Speaker 2: the notion of the first cell is a materialist thing.
Speaker 2: If as theists and Christians we take scripture seriously. There
Speaker 2: isn't really a first cell. There's first organisms. Because God
Speaker 2: is God doesn't have to let molecules come together and
Speaker 2: watch them and hope that something comes out of it.
Speaker 2: He bang, puts it, puts it there so he can
Speaker 2: create out of nothing. So he fills this planet in stages,
Speaker 2: as it's revealed in scripture. And I think the scientists
Speaker 2: who believe in evolution agree that in stages this Earth
Speaker 2: was populated by remarkable forms of life. But we don't
Speaker 2: have to talk about a first cell. Its entire populations
Speaker 2: that he brings into being and tells them to be
Speaker 2: fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And that's exactly
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what does Darwinian evolution explain. Well, well, there
Speaker 1: are a couple of things that are right about it.
Speaker 1: Darwin didn't know about DNA because that hadn't been discovered
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifteen nine. He didn't know about genetics or
Speaker 1: the genetic code. He framed his theory in terms of
Speaker 1: natural selection, which is the star of his show. He
Speaker 1: thinks natural selection explains everything, and there are modern evolutionists
Speaker 1: who still believe that Rich or they say they do
Speaker 1: Richard Dawkins, but fewer and fewer. So most evolutionary biologists
Speaker 1: realize that natural selection cannot be the full explanation, and
Speaker 1: so they think there must be these auxiliary things. But
Speaker 1: Darwin's idea is that there's natural variation within populations. He
Speaker 1: didn't know how it was caused, and that natural selection
Speaker 1: sorts or favors the more fit organisms, those that have
Speaker 1: more offspring over the less fit, and so these variations
Speaker 1: get sorted generation after gen and you end up with
Speaker 1: different properties. Now, so the true things are there are
Speaker 1: variants within populations, and this sort of sorting does happen.
Speaker 1: Natural selection is a real thing. But the false thing
Speaker 1: it's that it's a wild extrapolation.
Speaker 2: Okay, so although this is true, it doesn't explain how
Speaker 2: you get completely new versions of organism, new new designs
Speaker 2: of life. It only explains relatively minor things, but some
Speaker 2: of them have huge importance for human health. Sickle cell
Speaker 2: anemia is a great example of something that arose and
Speaker 2: has become prevalent in parts of the globe because of
Speaker 2: a Darwinian mechanism. But it's not inventing something new, it's
Speaker 2: actually breaking something existing. The reason we have sickle cell
Speaker 2: anemia and a high prevalence in portions of the globe
Speaker 2: is that malaria is a killer in those portions of
Speaker 2: the globe, and sickle cell anemia provides protection against malaria.
Speaker 2: So that is an evolutionary thing that's happened and it's
Speaker 2: changed the human population. But it's not something that could
Speaker 2: invent humans. So the big story is false, but there
Speaker 2: are little aspects of it that are true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you talked about DNA and information and how
Speaker 1: you didn't have access to that, I mean, that's one
Speaker 1: of your specialties. Why is information such a big deal?
Speaker 2: Well, I think, and information figures heavily in the film.
Speaker 2: Information in a computer age is something that we've come to.
Speaker 2: We've grappled with information. We use information, and even if
Speaker 2: people don't think about it abstractly or theoretically, you know
Speaker 2: that if your Wi Fi connection isn't working, you're not
Speaker 2: getting information to your phone or to your computer, and
Speaker 2: you know what that means. It can't do what it
Speaker 2: needs to do because it doesn't have the it doesn't
Speaker 2: have the bits that are all allowing to do it.
Speaker 2: If you're streaming a video and you lose your connection,
Speaker 2: you won't get the rest of the video because information
Speaker 2: is not streaming anymore. So I think we if we
Speaker 2: go back to you know, two hundred and fifty years ago,
Speaker 2: people had a very different notion of it. We have
Speaker 2: a very sort of real world today. Understanding of information
Speaker 2: is basically my cell phone, you know how many bars
Speaker 2: I've got, and my WiFi connection is telling how well
Speaker 2: information can communicate with my device, and I can't do
Speaker 2: anything with my device without that information. That gives us
Speaker 2: a context for talking about cells and the complex things
Speaker 2: that they do, and they likewise can't do those things
Speaker 2: without having correct information. And in the film it talks
Speaker 2: about DNA being an information carrier and it even says,
Speaker 2: you know, instead of ACG's and t's, you could represent
Speaker 2: that in terms of zeros and ones. It's very much
Speaker 2: like what we use with computing. And in the cell,
Speaker 2: that information is telling the cell how to build proteins,
Speaker 2: how to put together incorrect sequence amino acids, to form
Speaker 2: chains that fold into structures that actually do the subcellular functions.
Speaker 2: So information has a very central role in life, and
Speaker 2: information has If we look at the history of the
Speaker 2: modern intelligent design thinking, information is at the center of that.
Speaker 2: For the same reason, you can show that information is
Speaker 2: critical for life. You can show that information has to
Speaker 2: have an intelligent cause. That means life has to have
Speaker 2: an intelligent cause.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just once again going back to my d
Speaker 1: in high school biology, these things are not I don't
Speaker 1: come by them naturally, and it can be a little
Speaker 1: bit more difficult, especially if you're reading a book. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the real benefits of this film is
Speaker 1: that it kind of paints a picture for some like
Speaker 1: me who kind of ah, I get it, and you
Speaker 1: see the beauty of it. And it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you and a bunch of your biology friends get
Speaker 1: together and see something, and I might look at it
Speaker 1: and go, oh, yeah, what's that You you don't understand that.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like a football player. Okay, I've been
Speaker 1: watching pro football my whole life. I can see a
Speaker 1: quarterback throw into a tight window on the sideline and
Speaker 1: I go, that's pretty good. But pretty good?
Speaker 2: Do you know how hard that is?
Speaker 1: Like somebody who actually played football, Like, no, that's not
Speaker 1: pretty good. That's almost impossible, like to get that. And
Speaker 1: I feel like the film does a really good job
Speaker 1: and you get scientists like yourself getting excited and say,
Speaker 1: look at this. I mean, this discovery just unpack the universe.
Speaker 1: But then when you see it for yourself and you
Speaker 1: start it really gets unpacked. You go, yeah, ah, that
Speaker 1: is beautiful, and you help take the complex and make
Speaker 1: it easily understood. I mean that's the beauty of films
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think you're right. And there's something powerful as
Speaker 2: well about seeing actual historical figures who were died in
Speaker 2: the world atheists and they're deeply troubled by what their
Speaker 2: own field showed them. And that's powerful.
Speaker 1: Troubled or convinced because that and that's that's what I mean.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say that we were better then,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you really there seemed to be such
Speaker 1: a strong principled involvement that a desire to follow truth
Speaker 1: where it led. Yeah, and if if the truth converts
Speaker 1: my preconceived notions, well then I have to change my
Speaker 1: preconceived notions to evolve with what I'm seeing right before
Speaker 1: my very eyes. I mean that that was the thing
Speaker 1: about the discovery of DNA that was really really well
Speaker 1: done and beautiful in the film, kind of like.
Speaker 2: A Saul conversion on the road to mask is a
Speaker 2: very powerful apologetic because you can say, oh, these people
Speaker 2: who love Jesus, they're just duped because they've loved Jesus.
Speaker 2: And even that doesn't work. But take someone who didn't
Speaker 2: love Jesus is arguing against and is powerful and is
Speaker 2: having people rounded up and executed for loving Jesus, and
Speaker 2: he becomes a Jesus lover. That's something you have to
Speaker 2: sit up and say, hang on, that is an interesting story.
Speaker 2: There's got to be something behind that, and you see
Speaker 2: a version of that in this film with these people
Speaker 2: who were The last thing I want to be is
Speaker 2: a theist, and now I'm finding myself using the word theology.
Speaker 2: There has to be a theological explanation at scientific conferences,
Speaker 2: an interesting thing that doesn't come out in the film.
Speaker 2: But I was sitting next to Steve Meyer watching a
Speaker 2: preview of this yesterday, and he was at that conference
Speaker 2: where Alan Sandage and Dean Kenyon both said I don't
Speaker 2: see any other way to interpret this other than a
Speaker 2: theological interpretation. He was there and that's really what lit
Speaker 2: the fire for Steve Meyer. So this film actually comes
Speaker 2: out of things that got started by things that are
Speaker 2: shown in the film as old clips from nineteen eighty five?
Speaker 1: Is that is that the part where they said is
Speaker 1: I don't think he said theologically said super natural, And
Speaker 1: there was a.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Dean Kenyon said, I don't think you have to
Speaker 2: jump off the cliff something like this. I'm paraphrasing it
Speaker 2: to realize that life has to have a theological explanation. Yeah,
Speaker 2: supernatural was Alan Sandage, but those were both at that nineteen.
Speaker 1: Eighty five at the same conference, I think so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would have been something in plain English. What a
Speaker 1: specified complexity.
Speaker 2: There's a good little graphic for this in the film
Speaker 2: to distinguish between mere complexity and specified complexity. So if
Speaker 2: you take a bunch of scrabble tiles they have letters
Speaker 2: on them, you throw them out on a table. However
Speaker 2: they land is improbable in retrospect. Obviously they have to
Speaker 2: land some way, But once you see how they landed,
Speaker 2: you could say, well, if I throw them again, it's
Speaker 2: very unlikely that they will land this way. Right, this
Speaker 2: is a one off because there's so many ways that
Speaker 2: they could land. So that's complexity. You have complexity whenever
Speaker 2: you have a system that could take a very very
Speaker 2: very large number of states, but at any given time
Speaker 2: it's in one state. So that is a complex system.
Speaker 2: But that's not specified complexity because if I throw scrabble
Speaker 2: tiles on the table and you walk in, you're not
Speaker 2: going to go, oh my gosh, how could they have landed?
Speaker 2: Like that? Thing significant about it? So specified complexity is
Speaker 2: when you do have that possibility of a vast number
Speaker 2: of states, but the state the thing is in is special.
Speaker 2: So if I said, happy birthday, Dave with scrabble tiles,
Speaker 2: and it's your birthday, you know, not only is this
Speaker 2: complex because you've got a lot of tiles that do something,
Speaker 2: but it does something that's significant, Happy Birthday, Dave. And
Speaker 2: you know nobody just threw those there. Someone had to
Speaker 2: arrange it. So the implication of specified complexity always is
Speaker 2: that someone who knew how to do this arrange the
Speaker 2: things in order for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I mean, why is it so hard for
Speaker 1: an unguided process to do that?
Speaker 2: Because you have the in the In the first case,
Speaker 2: if we say just throwing scrabble tiles onto the table,
Speaker 2: the probability of you collect taking a picture of them,
Speaker 2: collecting them all together, and throwing them again and getting
Speaker 2: the same arrangement is virtually zero. Okay, So chance cannot
Speaker 2: hit a probability a target that has a probability that's
Speaker 2: close to zero, because that's the whole thing in probability.
Speaker 2: It's close to zero, it's not going to happen. And likewise,
Speaker 2: the probability of the tiles by chance saying happy birthday,
Speaker 2: Dave is close to zero. But in this case, in life,
Speaker 2: we see sequence after sequence after sequence that have content
Speaker 2: and meaning, and the probability of that happening by chance
Speaker 2: is close to zero. So it's not at all like
Speaker 2: just walking in and finding something random. That's one of many,
Speaker 2: many possibilities. It's that there are many, many possibilities, and
Speaker 2: this is the working possibility. This is the special possibility
Speaker 2: that's been landed on. So that's why you can infer
Speaker 2: design from specified complexity, but not just from complexity itself.
Speaker 1: But Doug, isn't the answer always time. With enough time,
Speaker 1: it would have eventually happened.
Speaker 2: And worst numbers are helpful because if a probability is
Speaker 2: one in a million and you've got a million years,
Speaker 2: then yeah, you can solve that. But we're not talking
Speaker 2: about one in a million. We're talking about one in
Speaker 2: ten to the you know, two hundred thousandth power, so
Speaker 2: very quickly, a billion years is nowhere near enough time
Speaker 2: for something like this to happen. And a planet and
Speaker 2: the size of Earth over billions of years is nowhere
Speaker 2: near enough opportunities for odds like that to have been overcome.
Speaker 1: Well, you and I agree on that, but that but
Speaker 1: there there is the pushback. That's the hey, with enough time,
Speaker 1: this is what happens.
Speaker 2: If someone wants to argue that, then you say, well,
Speaker 2: let's get out our pencils and our calculators and say
Speaker 2: what enough time would be, And you very quickly find
Speaker 2: that the age of the universe there're, you know, an
Speaker 2: old universe at thirteen point eight billion years is not
Speaker 2: nearly enough time for these things to have happened. So
Speaker 2: you could say, I agree with you in a way,
Speaker 2: but even you acknowledge that things that we see cannot
Speaker 2: have happened even in billions of years. There's another way
Speaker 2: to go, though, and I teach a course called the
Speaker 2: Design of Life at Biola. Another way to go with
Speaker 2: that is to demonstrate that a human being cannot be
Speaker 2: just a physical thing. We have physical bodies, but we
Speaker 2: have to have an immaterial mind, soul, spirit, our mind
Speaker 2: that's doing our thinking cannot be physical. Thought can't be
Speaker 2: a physical process. And once you show that, then you
Speaker 2: can say, even with an infinite amount of time or
Speaker 2: an infinite number of universes in an infinite multiverse, if
Speaker 2: that's physical, it can't produce something that's non physical. And
Speaker 2: a key component of a human being is non physical.
Speaker 2: So that's it's it's a category error to think that
Speaker 2: a physical universe can come up with a human because
Speaker 2: a human isn't merely a physical thing.
Speaker 1: Hmm, the hard problem of consciousness exactly. I mean, do
Speaker 1: you want to get into that at all? I mean
Speaker 1: you could bring take it down to the bottom shelf
Speaker 1: for me.
Speaker 2: Okay, in very simple terms. You can show that well
Speaker 2: the way I would think about it. And this is
Speaker 2: also relevant to AI. I have been spending a lot
Speaker 2: of time talking about AI too, because that's a big
Speaker 2: subject and they actually connect. So bringing this down to
Speaker 2: the bottom shelf, what is uh? What is thought? What
Speaker 2: is thinking if it is not dealing with thoughts? I say,
Speaker 2: there is no conception of thinking other than working with thoughts.
Speaker 2: And what is a thought is a thought made out
Speaker 2: of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and oxygen. Or is
Speaker 2: it though something that exists in a different realm. It's
Speaker 2: a concept, it's an idea. There is no coherent way
Speaker 2: to say that. Ideas basically are physical things. They're basically
Speaker 2: made out of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. That's it doesn't work.
Speaker 2: If you try that, it becomes absolutely incoherent. So if
Speaker 2: we accept the ideas and thoughts, they live in a
Speaker 2: different realm. They are non physical things, concepts. The number two.
Speaker 2: There is no physical thing that is the number two.
Speaker 2: You can get too. Here are my two fists. They're physical,
Speaker 2: but that isn't the number two. I'm applying the number
Speaker 2: two to the two fists. Right, here's two fingers that
Speaker 2: are physical. But I shouldn't do that one in Britain
Speaker 2: by it, I do it like this. Here are two
Speaker 2: things that are physical, but that isn't the number two.
Speaker 2: I'm applying the number two to it. Two is a
Speaker 2: concept that lives in a different realm. So once you've
Speaker 2: convinced someone of that, and that's you can do that,
Speaker 2: then you say, okay, when we're thinking, are we dealing
Speaker 2: with concepts? And you destroy thought if you say no,
Speaker 2: we're not. We are. We are working with concepts, and
Speaker 2: concepts are non physical. Okay, So a physical thing cannot manipulate,
Speaker 2: access touch non physical concepts, and that means our mind
Speaker 2: if it is to If our mind is to be
Speaker 2: working with non physical concepts, then our mind cannot be
Speaker 2: a physical thing. It can't be a machine. And the
Speaker 2: idea that your brain, these neurons that are you know,
Speaker 2: connected in marvelously complex ways in your brain, are thinking
Speaker 2: is a claim that a physical thing is manipulating non
Speaker 2: physical things ideas, and that's just incoherent. The only coherent
Speaker 2: understanding of what we're doing is yes, you have a brain,
Speaker 2: and your mind is knit in a beautiful way to
Speaker 2: your body, and the brain is part of it. And
Speaker 2: that's why if something happens to your brain, or drugs
Speaker 2: or alcohol, there are physical things that affect your brain
Speaker 2: and they do affect your ability to think. But that's
Speaker 2: because the immaterial part of you is knit to your
Speaker 2: physical body, and your brain is the key interface between
Speaker 2: the two. But once we realize that whatever is doing
Speaker 2: our thinking has to be working with concepts, that rules
Speaker 2: out the brain because the brain is it has it
Speaker 2: can't touch concepts. It's a physical thing made out of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,
Speaker 2: and all these things on the periodic table, and that
Speaker 2: means that no physical process operating on purely physical stuff
Speaker 2: can have produced us because we have this key component mind, soul,
Speaker 2: spirit that's not physical. And so all of this fits
Speaker 2: beautifully with the idea that God breathed He formed the
Speaker 2: man out of the dust and breathed his spirit into him,
Speaker 2: so that I think that's a reference to them. There's
Speaker 2: a non physical part. The dust of the ground is physical,
Speaker 2: but when God breathes the breath of life into him,
Speaker 2: into Adam, that's poetic reference to Okay, there's a non
Speaker 2: physical thing that's part of who you are, Adam, and
Speaker 2: will always be part of who you are, and it's
Speaker 2: part of being made in the image of God. So
Speaker 2: all of this makes total sense if you have that
Speaker 2: view of humanity. If you try to reduce humans to molecules,
Speaker 2: it all falls to pieces. It doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean there was the Stephen Hawking aspect of
Speaker 1: the film where he talked about that the first beginning
Speaker 1: was theoretical math or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's done. Is an interesting and good aspect in film,
Speaker 2: there's the Hawking quote because there is gravity, because there
Speaker 2: is a law like gravity, the universe can and will
Speaker 2: create itself out of nothing, and John Lennox does a
Speaker 2: good job of scratching his heads that's gravity isn't nothing.
Speaker 2: But basically what Hawking is another one of these scientists
Speaker 2: who his own work made him uncomfortable because he's wanted
Speaker 2: to deny a theistic understanding of reality, and yet he
Speaker 2: realized there's a singularity at the beginning of our universe,
Speaker 2: and the only thing that he could do is come
Speaker 2: up with quantum cosmology. But it ends up being like
Speaker 2: this mathematical structure that connects somehow to a beginning of
Speaker 2: a physical universe. And he himself said, there's the problem
Speaker 2: of understanding how the math could get a universe for
Speaker 2: it to apply to, because math can't produce a universe.
Speaker 2: Steve did a good job in the film of saying, really,
Speaker 2: what we're saying is the universe came out of ideas.
Speaker 2: The universe came out of mind because minds are Mathematicians
Speaker 2: always have a mind, and they're dealing with math in
Speaker 2: their mind, and that means that points to a god,
Speaker 2: and God in his mind conceives of the universe, which
Speaker 2: is true. And did God have math in mind as
Speaker 2: part of how the triune God is saying let there
Speaker 2: be light? Does he have math in mind when he's
Speaker 2: doing that? Yes, And that's why physics has such a
Speaker 2: beautiful mathematical structure to it is it comes from the
Speaker 2: mind of God.
Speaker 1: Well, you've used the word several times now, and I
Speaker 1: it's how the film ends. And I think it's beautiful
Speaker 1: and you talk about the beauty principle that it's so
Speaker 1: beautiful it must be right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great principle that's brought out in the film.
Speaker 2: It actually starts with I don't know if you know.
Speaker 2: That's my voice that introduces I was wondering. Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: several parts where it's my voice kind of talking about
Speaker 2: what's man I do. It's my voice introducing this beauty
Speaker 2: principle because it's something that struck me very, very profoundly. That,
Speaker 2: apart from all the other ways to show that Darwin's
Speaker 2: theory doesn't work, just look at what's around you. Is
Speaker 2: it like brute survival machines, ruthless survival machines? You know,
Speaker 2: everything is ugly, Everything is like you know, brutalist architecture.
Speaker 2: It gets the job done. It ain't pretty, but all
Speaker 2: it has to do is beat out the things that
Speaker 2: it's competing against. Or do you see this extraordinary profusion
Speaker 2: of elegance and beauty around you? And it's the latter,
Speaker 2: And that can only be explained by a personal creator
Speaker 2: God who in his mind is not thinking this is
Speaker 2: going to be about natural selection. He's thinking this is
Speaker 2: gonna be about something else. This is gonna be about
Speaker 2: my glory. And that's what you see and you can't
Speaker 2: deny it. I mean, there's look around you. As I
Speaker 2: said at the gathering last night, there are six thousand
Speaker 2: species of ladybug. Six thousand species of ladybug with different
Speaker 2: spot patterns and colors. That's somebody having fun and saying, boom,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make this be beautiful, interful, and that's.
Speaker 1: The path to truth leads through beauty.
Speaker 2: Open the window.
Speaker 1: I mean that the phrase that really, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just beautiful, gratuitous beauty. It's like God grabbing us by
Speaker 1: the neck and getting our attention, like look at look
Speaker 1: at that. There's no like you said, there's no survival
Speaker 1: based need for that degree of beauty Yep, for sure.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: It's just like I said, it's one of the things
Speaker 1: that a film about science that really ends with the
Speaker 1: crescendo of beauty, beauty, beauty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that part of it. In the end,
Speaker 2: the very in the film, you have these beautiful animations,
Speaker 2: these sort of ethereal animations that things come together and
Speaker 2: you see these life forms. It's it's done really really well.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. It's it's it's for people like me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I kept thinking that, like, because I.
Speaker 2: Hope it's for for for all kinds of people. So
Speaker 2: I think, I hope there are agnostics and people who
Speaker 2: are well trained in the sciences who see the film,
Speaker 2: and I hope it does I hope the Lord uses
Speaker 2: it to touch people in ways that they need to
Speaker 2: be touched.
Speaker 1: I think you will. Like I said, it's just it's
Speaker 1: so expertly done, first class in every way. Doug, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of things I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about that are a little bit of a wild card.
Speaker 1: All right, So you talked about AI. Another thing that's
Speaker 1: really popular in the the cultural zeitgeist right now is aliens.
Speaker 1: Could you unpack that for me? Because I was listening
Speaker 1: to a podcast not that long ago, and the guest
Speaker 1: said something interesting. It wasn't a religious podcast, and so
Speaker 1: that most people assume that if aliens were discovered or
Speaker 1: some sort of alien life form, that it would undermine
Speaker 1: religion or Christianity, and this guy, who was not a
Speaker 1: Christian said, I actually think it would strengthen their point.
Speaker 1: What do you say about them?
Speaker 2: It depends on whether we're talking about what we mean
Speaker 2: by alien.
Speaker 1: Uh, if we mean life, life somewhere else in the universe.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're not saying intelligent life.
Speaker 1: Just let's let's do both play, let's play with both.
Speaker 2: I think it would not be I think it would
Speaker 2: not be a contrary to scripture. If, for example, some
Speaker 2: spores of something that are very much like in earth
Speaker 2: like life were found on Mars and they've been, you know,
Speaker 2: dormant because there's no water. But it looks as though
Speaker 2: there was some sort of mold and bacterial life that
Speaker 2: did exist on Mars and it's sitting there and there's
Speaker 2: there's no way for it to live without water. I
Speaker 2: don't think that would be I don't think that that
Speaker 2: would upset anything that we should draw from scripture. I
Speaker 2: do think if we if we found there to be
Speaker 2: intelligent life, say, and that wouldn't be on Mars, but
Speaker 2: say another solar system turns out is beaming stuff to
Speaker 2: us as an intelligent life. And here's why I think
Speaker 2: that is problematic, because if there's intelligent life elsewhere, that's
Speaker 2: the sort of life that would be made in God's image,
Speaker 2: Because I think part of the imago day is our
Speaker 2: ability to think about things. So would there be life
Speaker 2: elsewhere that has the imago day. If it does have
Speaker 2: the imago day, it seems like it's going to need
Speaker 2: a savior because the thing, because what played out for
Speaker 2: us is the image of God is a good thing,
Speaker 2: but without God's perfections, it leads to a fall, and
Speaker 2: that means that were cooked. Unless God sends his son
Speaker 2: to become one of us and to save us. And
Speaker 2: the language around that event, around the second person of
Speaker 2: the God had becoming human, dying once for all, that
Speaker 2: is universal language. I think it is contrary to Scripture
Speaker 2: to think that Jesus went and died multiple times, or
Speaker 2: that his death on Earth having been a human somehow
Speaker 2: provides atonement for those other people out there in another
Speaker 2: galaxy because that would be very, very strange. The whole
Speaker 2: thing is it becomes personal when the creator of this
Speaker 2: vast universe steps onto this little planet and becomes one
Speaker 2: of us and walks among us and becomes part of
Speaker 2: our history. And that wouldn't work if scripture said, you know,
Speaker 2: to us on Earth, trust us, this guy who was
Speaker 2: born and named Jesus in another galaxy lived a perfect
Speaker 2: life and died on a cross. Trust us. It didn't
Speaker 2: happen on Earth, and so there's not gonna be any
Speaker 2: historical record here. But trust me in another galaxy, that's happened.
Speaker 2: That's that. I just can't see that that working, So
Speaker 2: I think that's problematic. I also think that part of
Speaker 2: the reason that people believe there must be life elsewhere
Speaker 2: is the materialist philosophy. They think that natural causes. It's
Speaker 2: embarrassing to an atheist to think, in a universe this
Speaker 2: vast life is only here because that looks special. It's
Speaker 2: again like the Big Bang was an embarrassment to the atheists,
Speaker 2: because that means there was a beginning. It's also embarrassing
Speaker 2: if you're an atheist to think that in all this
Speaker 2: vast universe there's only one place where life is, and
Speaker 2: it's here, and that's why they think, well, there must
Speaker 2: be life. If physics can produce life, it must have
Speaker 2: produced it lots and lots of time, so there must
Speaker 2: be life elsewhere. That's why we have the search for
Speaker 2: extraterrestrial intelligence. It's never come up with anything. I don't
Speaker 2: think it ever will. I think this is the one
Speaker 2: place where God made it all happen on planet Earth.
Speaker 2: Having said that, if there were spores and some something
Speaker 2: that's far short of, you know, microbial life somewhere else,
Speaker 2: I don't think that would upset anything. But my guess
Speaker 2: is that requires special action, and it looks as though
Speaker 2: God's special action with respect to life is here and
Speaker 2: here alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, Doug X the Story of Everything. One more
Speaker 1: pitch for it and where can people see it?
Speaker 2: I think it's a great film. It covers a wide
Speaker 2: range of arguments that are apologetic for the existence of God,
Speaker 2: but not just God, a personal God who has made
Speaker 2: himself known to us and made his love of beauty
Speaker 2: known to us. Because the beauty argument, as we said,
Speaker 2: is part of this coming out in theaters Thursday, April thirtieth.
Speaker 2: There are a number of people who are booking entire
Speaker 2: theaters for church groups to go, but I'd love to
Speaker 2: see people bringing non believing friends, agnostics, atheists, or seekers.
Speaker 2: I think it's a great film for those types of people.
Speaker 2: The more people go in the first Apparently the first
Speaker 2: four days are critical for a film to get it
Speaker 2: second week. So if we want this to stay in theaters,
Speaker 2: the more people who go and see it in those
Speaker 2: first four days it helps for it to have some
Speaker 2: longevity in the theaters, which I think would be a
Speaker 2: great thing.
Speaker 1: Amen. No, I watched it twice and I would gladly
Speaker 1: watch the third time in theaters. Doug X, thank you
Speaker 1: for joining me on a commitment to reality. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate you and your work.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. It's been a good conversation.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining me on a commitment to reality.
Speaker 1: I never do this, but I really want to let
Speaker 1: you know that if you're enjoying the podcast, please rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe. It helps a lot, and we are still
Speaker 1: in our infancies. This helps get the word out and
Speaker 1: keeps the conversation going until next time. On a commitment
Speaker 1: to reality,