The Eric Metaxas Show - Neil Thomas (Encore)

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

From England, Neil Thomas, part of the Discovery Institute, looks into one of the sacred cows of atheists with his book, "Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design." (Encore Presentation)

to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, this is the Eric Metaxus show. You know how much I love the subject of science. And I've become enamored of the Discovery Institute because they seem to publish books that I find fascinating. Recently, I got one in the mail from the Discovery Institute. The title is Taking Leave of Darwin. the author is Neil Thomas, and I was particularly enjoying the book

when I got the idea that what if I could have Neil Thomas on this program and we could at all enjoy a conversation with him. I have him now from Mary Old England, actually from Reading, England near London. Neil Thomas, welcome to this program. Thanks for having me. I loved your book. I love the way you write. I love the subject, of course. I'm fascinated with with natural selection, the idea of it, and what science is, is revealing more and more, and what we're hearing about very little, but more and more through folks like you in the Discovery Institute.

So if you don't mind, tell my audience, before you came to the subject. What is it that you do? You're really an eclectic thinker. You've written on Wagner's, operas. What do you do when you're not thinking about the subject of Darwin? Well, I am a retired academic, and my subject was German language, literature, and European literature in a wider context. So I retired some 12 years ago, and since then I've been essentially starting a second life. I've had a little bit of commercial experience in the world. I've got a portfolio of rental properties and so on. I thought it was important to diversify a bit from the academic life.

In fact, I never thought I would write another book until I was impelled to do so by finding out what I thought were the deficiencies of Darwinism. Yeah. So what led you, I mean, to be a professor on German language, and literature. I know you've written on the, how's it pronounced, Niebelingen? Niebelungen Leeds. Nebelungen Leeds? Who hasn't written a book on the Niebelungen Leeds? I haven't. The son of the Nebelungen, yeah. The Nebelungen. And you, what led you from the subject of German

language and literature into Darwinism? It's totally unexpected and very surprising. I swore blue blind to my wife that I would never write another word because I thought it was more important to diversify my life a bit. But I think that I found that I was getting dissatisfied with what was being put out as the party line on Darwinism. And I do remember when I was in post 20 years ago an Oxford literature academic using the word means to refer to cultural influences. And I thought, why on earth would you use the word means when the word cultural influence or osmosis

or whatever you like might do justice to it? And it seemed to me we had enough pretentious stuff anyway in literary criticism. And I thought, well, why import stuff in the biological realm? But more viscerally than that, I think in the last few years, I can't remember when, but I had a kind of, I woke up with a kind of shock like you do when you're falling. You have this feeling of falling in your sleep. I thought, this Darwinism can't be right. Everything must have a first cause, whether you call it God or a cosmic principle or whatever.

And I began to reframe my understanding of Darwinism in the light of that dream. In the light of what? I missed that. In the light of the dream that I had of a panic, that I felt that something in this life must have a first cause. It must have a creator. You can't have an effect without a cause in good logic. Well, I mean, the creation of life takes us into what I call abiogenesis, which really has nothing to do with Darwinism. But once you get life, and we can assume the first cell, obviously Darwin and his followers have said natural selection is what moves us along.

When did this begin to fall apart for you? Because you're not a biologist. I'm certainly not. And you're not somebody that comes at this from a real. religious point of view. You're simply a thinker and you follow the logic. But were you surprised to find yourself looking into this subject? Very surprised because I've been a lifelong member of the British Rationalist Association, which usually takes a stance against any theistic interpretation of events. And so I did, I was surprised to find myself myself.

thinking in these ways. But I mean, I don't feel that the term natural selection is a very intellectually coherent one. In fact, one of the things I'm doing, I'm doing a sort of follow-up book at the moment, and one of the things I've looked at is the way that Darwin's origin of species was translated into German. And the German translators had enormous difficulties with the term natural selection. because Darwin insisted to the translators that you must render it in some way as to suggest that there's no aim or telos in the process. And the translators just couldn't really work out where he was coming from. How can you have selection without a conscious aim?

It's just incoherent. And so I felt that this was perhaps my starting point, you know, that simple logic is against it. Now that, I don't, I agree with everything in your book, but that point is difficult for me to get. In other words, it seems that the term natural selection is a poor term because it suggests a telos. it suggests that that nature is trying to do something when of course Darwin's ideas that it's blind, that it is simply, in retrospect, it looks as though it has been selecting. In other words, the genes that are selected that survive, survival of the fittest, in retrospect, they appear have been selected. But so it's a clumsy term, but the idea never troubled me. In other words,

the idea that a giraffe with a longer neck might be more suited to life and that those longer-necked giraffes would succeed, whereas the shorter giraffes wouldn't. In other words, that idea never troubled me. But are you saying that that idea itself bothered you? Well, a lot amongst other things. I mean, the point is that how much many millions of years did it take, according to Darwin, to evolve a longer neck? Many multi-millions, I would suggest. I mean, given that the giraffe might have started off with a short neck, wouldn't it have been better to follow the migratory patterns of birds and other animals

and simply forage for food where it was more convenient, as opposed to waiting millions of years for the neck to elongate? by natural selection. I mean, I'm not the first person to have made that point. But, I mean, it does seem as a potent one. Of course, it also makes us wonder why there aren't innumerable animals with extremely long giraffe-like necks.

Why only... Very much so. Very much so. Yes. This was pointed out many years ago in the middle of the last century. Why aren't ostriches able to... fly and why aren't some animals able to swim since it would be an advantage.

And so I do feel that this selective business about giraffes, I mean, as you say, it could apply to other animals but doesn't. We're going to go to a break here since we're doing radio for much of our audience. I really love this book, taking leave of Darwin. Folks will be right back with the author. Hey, folks, are you concerned about memory? loss for you or a loved one, Vivalore's founder prayed that God would show her the solution to memory loss because her mother had dementia. After many divine encounters combining faith and her background

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I-I-V-O-L-O-R-R.com. I'm talking to the author of a new book, terrific book. It's called Taking Leave of Darwin. The author is my guest, Neil Thomas. Neil Thomas, you said earlier that you started out, you're an academic, writing on the subject of German languages and literature and other European literature. Now you found yourself leaping into the world of Darwin.

And you said that you remember the British. British rationalist association. Is that what it's called? Yes. Yes. Yes, that's right. And your colleagues there are mostly either agnostics or atheists and not yes. Yes. I would describe myself as an agnostic. I'm wavering at the moment as a result of my findings. But yes, okay. That's true enough. So you don't come to the subject from the point of view of faith. You just come to it as a free thinker, as it were. do you find as you as you get into the subject that Darwin is so generally accepted in the world in the academy that anybody who questions him immediately becomes, you know, looked at in a strange way or didn't you care about that? It doesn't affect me since I am now a retiree of independent means.

It really is irrelevant to me, but I do understand that people in the biological world of academia are threatened by all sorts of things, including dismissal. I have heard on the grapevine if they fall out of line with Darwin's thinking. Yes, yes, I have heard about that. But more so, I think that, no, I'm not a person of faith, but my wife is, and I've got many friends who are people of faith. And I do feel bad for them because I feel that in a way, this whole Darwinian bandwagon has tended to rob them of their spiritual birthright, to imply that their own instincts are wrong, that they should forsake any theistic interpretations, any idea of God. And I think that's wrong. wrong and I do and I was rather

scandalized to realize that the Anglican church back in 2008 had made a public apology to Darwin well I think that's complete nonsense because I don't think that Darwin is a proven theory at all well we know that many

main churches in particular the Anglican church they're not exactly known for their cultural bravery. But I guess I'm curious about your process. In other words, as you began to look into this, what were some of the arguments against Darwinism or what was it that was occurring to you as you looked into this? Well, one of the things, I looked at the origin of species and I looked at descent of man, which is a sort of pendant companion volume to it. And the way that Darwin argues and uses language is a very amateurish

and impressionistic and B, it's very wheedling and tries to get at you in the way that advertising does or political propaganda does. He gives everything a spin or a gloss and I interpret that as being very suspicious because it implies that he doesn't, he's not really sure of his fact

He's trying to pull the wool over eyes and push one over on us. And so I did use my sort of training, if you like, for many decades, to try and unmask what I thought was some of the false pretensions of his writing. It's fascinating to hear you say this, because that's the one thing typically that you don't hear. In other words, people looking at him, not just as a scientist, but as a writer, as a prostrator. And you did, I don't know if you used the term in England, but we say that he's putting English on the ball, you know, in billiards, that he's basically trying, rather than simply presenting the facts, he's making an argument that the lay reader maybe wouldn't notice that he's doing that. Yes. I think so. I mean, in many ways he was a very decent individual, but he had his faults. And I think that he wasn't, sometimes he wasn't straight with his audience or his readership. And also he was quite rather equivocating in his own mind. He didn't sometimes know his own mind. I mean, you've got to remember that Darwin, despite his being fated by posterity, was a rather. average school boy, to say the least.

And sort of conceptual clarity was not one of his great strengths, it seems to me. And people tend to praise him to the rooftops as if he were some sort of Einstein figure, but that was not the case. And to be fair to him, in his autobiography, he admits as much. He says, I'm not as bright as my sister, for instance. And his father thought of him is rather and, you know, which is tremendous. I mean, I like that kind of refreshing candor. What is some of the arguments as you go through, if somebody goes through the book taking leave of Darwin,

which I enjoyed immensely, I think in large part because of your own writing style, it's very engaging. But so what are some of the arguments against Darwinism or what are some of the things that you notice that people will find in the book? Well, there are, The evidence, I suppose, is that there is no empirical backup for what for his claims.

There is no empirical backup of a hybridization of animals modulating from one animal into another. And remember, Darwin's theory is not just a few biological tachons. He's suggesting that you and I developed ultimately from bacterial beings. And to accept that, one would need a little bit more proof, I think. Well, so you're saying that the transitional forms are not in evidence in the fossil record. Is that what you mean, basically? They are not in evidence. And Darwin, to his credit, says in the origin of species,

nature should, if I were right, be in a state of uproar. We should have, you know, dogs that look half like cats and cats. that look half like horses, but nothing of the sort exists. And also, nothing of the sort exists in the fossil record either. I mean, Darwin piously hoped the fossil record would redeem his reputation in the century and a half that we've had since he wrote the book and so on. But that has not been the case. The fossil record is most Darwinian, if we might put it,

like that, animals come to be as a result, they seem to be fully formed. It's as if creation had created them individually. I have to say that. I'm surprising myself, but I have to say that because that is where the scientific evidence points to from the so-called Cambrian explosion of animal life's 540 million years ago. There are no transitional forms. So what do you think, what to the proponents of blind Darwinism, so called, what did they say about this, for my audience's sake, tell us. Because it isn't an astonishing thing. Most of us are led to believe in school that this is settled,

that the evidence is there. When I talk to certain scientific friends, they're aghast that I wouldn't have accepted this. But you're saying that the record is increasingly clear, that there are not transitional forms, and we mean between species. In other words, we can find finches with different beaks. We can find what's called microevolution, but macroevolution in all these decades and now a century and a half, there's nothing.

So what do proponents of this say in answer to that question? To be candid, there is no convincing straight answer to this. I mean, the proponents of Darwinism have to consider, or they wish to consider, that this problem must be solved on a purely naturalistic level. We cannot invoke any superior or higher forces. And so what they say is, well, maybe it's an imperfect theory, but it's the best we've got so far. And that is supposed to absolve or all fault.

in the theory itself, which I don't think it does. I think it's a matter of biologists marketing their own homework. I am not a biologist. As I said to a neighbor of mine, when she said, oh, I didn't know you were an expert on Dumb. I don't think I'm an expert, I said. I think I'm a member of a jury who has been asked to adjudicate on a very technical case.

I've done my level best to master the material in order to be able to provide answers. And my dispassionate is I've got no skin in the game, really, answer is that Darwinism does not stack up logic. It will not fly. And a number of Darwin's own peers, scientific peers, not people like myself from the arts and humanities, scientific peers felt the same.

They felt that some kind of theistic evolution would it be necessary. Something must be driving. For a moment, we're going to go to another break. Folks, I'm talking to the other. Leave of Darwin, do not go away. Lost secret notebook of Nicola Tesla with his most dangerous formulas

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Final Frequency, playing exclusively on SalemNow.com, or download the mobile app. For more information, visit Final Frequency Film.com. Folks, I'm talking to Neil Thomas, the author of a terrific volume. It's called Taking Leave of Darwin. Neil Thomas, just continue the point you were making, very important. Well, that Darwin, if you look at the sepia-tinted photographs of Darwin, you see him as a rather a severe Victorian gentleman that you would have to watch your P's and Cues with.

In reality, he seems to have been a very sociable, probable person. He seems to be inspired, and I don't use this word like that, he inspired a lot of brotherly love from his surrounding peers.

And I feel that they did not want to tread on his toes by saying we think your theory of natural selection will not fly. They try to trim their responses to him because they loved him in a fraternal sense and they wanted to help him. And this is surprising.

I wish I could inspire so much love as Charles Darwin. It would help me a lot socially and professionally in my life. But anyway, he, to an extraordinary extent, he made people sort of blunt their attacks on him because he was such a charming fellow, I think. So you think that, I mean, in the book, you say, beware, you've been fooled. In other words, that Darwin, through his social graces and through his, the way he wrote, he basically, as I think you said, dulled the criticisms and enabled this theory, which, as far as you're concerned, has no actual scientific backing,

enabled it to go forward through the decades so that those opposed to some theistic solution grabbed it and said, we have to make this work, even though it has problems, there's nothing better. And then you say that what does it matter whether there's anything better, either this works or doesn't? And you say on the fact it simply does not. Yes, I think it doesn't. I think it's a number of people who have said that it's a sort of etiquette of biological research that you have to be able to put up an opposing theory before you can attack the first theory. Now, I wish I could tell you this afternoon that I had an opposing theory.

I cannot do that. All I'm saying is that myself, somebody called Norman Macbeth, who was a Harvard jurist, who like myself, came to this later in life, said the same thing. It seems a bit feeble to say that even though my theory is a bit feeble,

it'll have to do because nobody else can put up another one. I mean, that seems to be illogical, even though it coheres with the strange biological etiquette, which seems to be reigning in that discipline. I just get the impression that scientists have become philosophically materialists. They're no longer pure scientists, but they're wedded to a materialist view. And in effect, it becomes anything but God.

And so if this is the best we can do as riddled with holes as it is, we have to stick together and push on this front. Yes, yes, I couldn't have put it back myself. I agree totally, yes. So what do you account for in your own, I mean, being an agnostic over the years, being a member of the British Rationalist Association, it would seem to me you would have had similar predilections philosophically. What was it that suddenly made you decide to look at this in a more open-minded way

and to leave your colleagues behind. At least most of them, I'm guessing. Yes, yes. I do have some reservations about the people, the group of people I call doctrinaire rationalists who simply the anything but God or superior force. I mean, I do dissent from that line. I suppose that my, the freedom of retirement and being not beholden to anybody

to having a sort of second business career, I make me sound a bit like Heinrich Schliemann, I'm not in that league, I can assure you, but, you know, I'm comfortably off. And, you know, I don't, I have the kind of repose to think honestly about things, without pressures from outside. And I'm guessing, I mean, self-circologising is a little bit of a fool's game. Sometimes it's difficult to interpret yourself. But I would imagine that that was the additional factor of this particular decade of my existence,

that I felt freedom to think honestly and clearly. And I felt myself going up against what I simply taken as, read earlier on, you know, it needed more unpacking. And that's what I've attempted to do. Anybody who refers to Heinrich Schliemann is an instant friend of mine. I'd love to talk to you about and other crazy Germans of the 19th century, maybe in another conversation in the future, because I'm very interested in that. Did you read, I read literally yesterday that archaeologists in Hissarlic, Troy, discovered what they actually believe

could be the Trojan horse. That sounds preposterous to me. We've only got seconds left, but did you read that? I haven't read it. I would be surprised. I would need some convincing. When we come back,

I'll let you answer that more fully. We're going to another break, but it has nothing to do with our subject, but so what? Okay. You're on. Hey there, folks. How many years have I been telling you about relief factor? What, like four? The truth is, I know there are millions of people. In fact, some say over 100 million people struggling with some kind of pain, maybe from exercise, just getting older. That could do it, getting older, which is why I am so impressed with Pete and Seth Talbot. They are on a mission. You rarely see this kind of focus and commitment. Seriously, they recently shared with me that they are doubling down and want to literally double their total number of happy customers in the next year. And I believe they'll do it. So here's the deal. If you're struggling with back, neck, shoulder, hip,

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It's called Taking Leave of Darwin. Neil, I didn't mean to get you off on the subject of Schleiman and his sororosian horse, but I'm interested in Odysseus's invention. It was his idea. The Trojan horse was his idea. and I literally read yesterday that somebody thinks they found it. It seems preposterous to me. It would be made of wood and so on and so forth.

So I didn't mean to get you off on that. I want to talk to you more about your book, unless you have something to say about the Trojan horse. Well, it would accord with Odysseus' reputation as being a trixie kind of fellow, that he would have that idea. What doesn't seem to me totally perspicuous is that I understood that when Schliemann excavated truels, He went down too deep.

He didn't actually hit his proper target. So where this horse is, I don't know because I haven't seen what you've seen, but I will keep my eye out for that. The whole thing's crazy, but we'll follow up on that just because it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy is interesting. Hoping to sell a few copies of your book because it was such a fun read for me, it's why I wanted to get you on here.

The book is taking leave of Darwin. What made you think of writing an entire book on it? the subject. In other words, it's one thing to have some thoughts. It's another thing that your neck out. Yes, I understand what you mean. I think what happened. I originally wrote

an article which I submitted to a journal called the New Humanist in London. And they were interested, but in the end, they decided not to

not to publish it because they said, well, we've taken advice from scientific colleagues and they say don't publish. Well, I can imagine, you know, if you apply to the Guild of Biologists who mark their own homework, yes, they wouldn't take very kindly to this kind of argument. So what happened was that I kept on being interested in the subject.

I'm still interested in the subject. I'm coming to write a second book, which we can talk about some of that time, perhaps. But so I kept on working on it, and it sort of ballooned. And so it became, from an article, it became a chapter, then two chapters and so on. And the rest is history. It came from that point. Do you think that there is an openness out there in the academy,

to rethinking Darwin fundamentally. Because you go back in the book and you talk about what some of his earlier critics said. Yes. A lot of that was just dispensed with eventually and then we've gotten onto this Darwinist juggernaut. Do you think that there is an opening in these days to rethink this or to be more critical of it?

I would very much doubt it to be candid with you. I don't think that somebody in my position without biological credentials would be able to hack it where people far more higher up in the biological hierarchy have written similar things before and have not been able to penetrate this sort of armour, this Darwinian armour that the biologists wear. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but that's what I think.

But you don't mind saying so it strikes me that any time someone is not in a discipline, they seem to have a freedom that those in the discipline don't have. In other words, those in the discipline say no one who is not a tenured biologist in the academy can write on this subject. And so in a way, people outside the field can think with the freedom, can think across disciplines. And so they bring a perspective to it that people deep in the field often don't have. David Berlinski is someone else who's written brilliantly on this. He's also an agnostic. And because you don't have, as you put any skin in the game, you can look at it more freely

without fear of, you know, triggering your colleagues in the department, so to speak. Oh, very much so. And one other thing I think is, I mean, to some extent, duplicating the point you've already made, but there's a great kind of disjunction between the biological orthodoxy and what philosophers who have analyzed this subject have come up with. Philosophers have tended to suggest that there is no basis. They've more or less suggested what I've suggested. I mean, there's a sort of legendary British philosopher called Mary Mitchley, who was so dismissive of Richard Dawkins's conception about memes and so on,

and much else besides, that legend has it, that Richard Dawkins was impelled to turn down an invitation to appear with Mary. midgely on the same platform, because he feared facing her over the breakfast table in that conference. I mean, that sounds a bit sclerless. I mean, it only is a humorous point. But the point is this, that there is a very radical distinction between people like myself who look at it dispassionately. And people, like philosophers, although I'm not a philosopher, I wouldn't claim to be a philosopher, I'm a literary historian, if anything. And the biological cadre

who stick together and maintain the Dublin party line. Well, again, I mentioned that David Berlinski. Also, Philip Johnson, he was a professor of law in California. I often think that people outside a discipline can see things more clearly and can simply think without fear. and that's what I think you've done in the book. It really is a terrific book. Your writing is what recommends it most highly, I think,

that you write wonderfully. You almost write in an English accent, but not quite. Tell us, we've only have 30 seconds left. Tell us about the new book you're writing in just a few seconds. Well, it's, I've tended to try and drill down on some of the arguments and some of the themes that I've looked at. And I'm playing with the title of Darwin's theory evolution as a cosmogenic myth,

which is a kind of homage to Michael Denton's book of 1985, which started off the... I just, look, we'll have to have you back soon if you don't mind. Yeah. Get a copy of taking leave of Darwin, a terrific read by Neil Thomas. Neil, thank you. Thank you very much. Hey folks, we've got some fun stuff for you.

Oh, no. Fun. Fun. Fun. Oh, man. No, it's kind of true. People write to us, an old friend, you can pronounce his name better than I can. Yeah.

Len. Yeah. Sledgeski. What a cool name. We've known him for years, Redeemer. We have all these old friends from Redeemer here in New York. And he wrote, he sent us something, and I just thought, don't we have to read this on the air? Yeah, I would think we do.

He found it himself on the Internet. But the point is it's funny. And I don't care where it came from. Thank you, Len. And we want to have fun once in a while in this dark time that we live in. So these are fun things to think about. I just like these. Number one, what if my dog only brings back the ball because he thinks I like throwing it? Very good.

But come on, that's, that's, how come nobody's ever said that before? That is very funny. And I like this next one. If poison is past its expiration date, is it more, poisonous or is it no longer poisonous at all? That's one of those, hmm. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Which letter is silent in the word sent, S-C-E-N-T, the S-C-E-N-T? The S or the C? Who thinks of this stuff? Now, this one is like kind of random, dumb, fun stuff to think about. This one is very personal. Do twins ever realize that one of them is unplanned? Oh, that hurts.

Do they realize that one of them? of them is redundant. I told you, you and your brother, oh, your twin brother, let me be specific. You and your twin brother are twins. Is that correct? That is correct. And you've been twins most of your lives. Most of it. And you're the eldest. I am. By a few minutes. By five minutes. And one of you is unplanned. I think it was my twin brother. I'm almost positive. You could take turns. How about that? We'll do that. All right. Yeah. Why is the letter W in English called W? Shouldn't it be called double V. That's true. Now, you know something that's, I actually think it is double V. It's, it's just that we

pronounce the V. Like, this is, I don't know, this, I'm not trying to be funny. Like, but I want, I can look that up because that's actually, that bears looking into. Okay. Now, here's something that's scientific. Maybe oxygen is slowly killing you and it just takes 75 to 100 years to fully work. Wow, I never thought. That is so scary because it's hard to avoid breathing oxygen. I'm holding my breath now. This is a good one. Every time you clean something, you just make something else dirty. I want to know, like, where did Lynn get this from?

It's like from some newspaper, somebody compiled. I just love, these are so dumb, but, you know, we need dumb stuff now and again. Here's a visual. The word swims upside down is still swims. I think it's upside down and flipped over or something. You know, I actually... Look at a turn-in-paper. seen that before.

Yeah. Have you ever tried to swim upside down? Yeah, no, it does work. Turn it upside down. Swims backwards. This is like fun stuff for kids. I hope some kids are listening today. Okay.

Intentionally losing a game of rock, paper, scissors is just as hard as trying to win. Have you thought about that? Yeah, I like that. So next time you should try to lose and you might win, you'll get a nice surprise. Yeah, yeah. A hundred years ago, everyone owned a horse and only the rich. rich had cars. Today, everyone has cars and only the rich own horses. Okay, this is a good one. This is kind of heavy. This is heavy. Your future self is watching

you right now through memories. I like that. I like that. Where did Len get these? Just dug them up, dug them up. The doctors that told Stephen Hawking he had two years to live in 1953 are probably dead. And of course, so is Stephen Hawking at this point. If you replace W with T in the words, what, where, and when, you get the answer to each of them. What, that, where, there, and when then. Okay, we're almost at a time.

Many animals probably need glasses, but nobody knows it. Even the animals. They don't understand what glasses are. I know the chipmunks don't see very well. They run in front of our bikes. And here's the final dumb thing for the day. If you rip a hole in a net, there are actually fewer holes in it than there were before. Hey, folks, tune in to ericmetaxis.com.

Thank you.