The Sean McDowell Show - The Debate over Evolution and Intelligent Design Heats Up (w/ Doug Axe)

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

What is the state of Intelligent Design? How has the conversation on the origin of life changed and been updated in today's world? Today, we talk to Doug Axe who has written on this topic. He hopes to answer questions between Darwinism and Christianity and other big questions surrounding this issue.READ: Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed by Douglas Axe (https://a.co/d/5pT3m6x)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

What is the state of the intelligent design movement? How has the conversation about origins shifted in our culture and in the church? Well, we've got the perfect guest today because he's not only a Biola professor, Doug Axe, but has also written a book on intelligent design called Undeniable. What's at stake is your posture toward science. Can we just make peace with Darwin and move on? Is there something particularly and profoundly important about humanity with respect to the rest of life?

A lot of people who are believers aren't happy with this call to make peace with Darwinism because they say there's something huge at stake here. We cannot just rush this off and carry on as Darwinists. Why would a Christian feel as though they need to make concessions to what I consider to be one of the weakest, most pathetic scientific theories that has ever come out in the history of science?

I'm on the record saying that. So good to have you here. Thanks for joining us. It's great to be here. Let me just start in, before we talk about some of the cultural shifts that have taken place, there's still a lot of confusion

about what intelligent design is. So what is it, and how is it different and or similar from, say, Young Earth creationism and Old Earth creationism? Yeah, there's similarities and differences. Both Young Earth creationism and Old Earth creationism are embarking on the project of trying to reconcile scientific results to Scripture.

And therefore, they contradict each other. Younger says the earth is young, older says the earth is old, so you can't be both. But both, people in both of those camps are actually intelligent design advocates. They may not say that, because ID is not really about making that reconciliation between scientific results and Scripture. It's about just using science

and asking, does the science say either that we are cosmic accidents or that we are the products of divine creation, and it lands on the side of we are the products of divine creation? So it's simply, it's that simple. It's a scientific approach, not trying to reconcile science to Scripture. So hence we have old earth intelligent design proponents and younger intelligent design proponents, even here at Biola Talbot School of Theology,

because it's starting with a question, is there design in nature that's empirically observable? And then the question is, how do we reconcile this with scripture? Correct. Basic difference, okay. So Doug, tell us for our listeners who may not have thought about this much before,

tell us a little bit more, what exactly is at stake in this debate over intelligent design? Well, in the broader question of what's at stake on the question of are we created or are we cosmic accidents, just that is at stake. Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going, which is huge. But are we asking like, what's at stake

if you take an ID position versus these other positions? I think what's at stake is your posture toward science. And there's, we also haven't mentioned theistic evolution, so that's another one of these positions that's common out there within the Christian community. They have different postures with respect to scripture and different postures with respect to science. It can be the case, it's not always the case, that young earth creationists can say, scripture first, if I encounter something where it looks like science is intentional with scripture,

I chuck the science and I go with scripture. And old earth creationism could be that as well. I'm not saying that everyone is offering that, but that can be. Whereas intelligent design is saying, let's just look at the science carefully and see what the science actually says and not spin it in the direction of materialism. So one of the distinguishing marks of the intelligent design movement is that it specifically is not trying to do that harmonization of science and scripture. So that's just not even on the table. Yes, but the interesting thing is, so it's saying let's do the science honestly, and when you do the science honestly, it ends up beautifully harmonizing with the big story of Scripture, okay?

And I'm not trying to... But not on the details. There's lots of details that remain to be figured out. Fair enough. And I think it's great that people are thinking about that. I also don't think that we have to get answers to some of those details. The big questions are the things that we really need an answer to. I'm really curious, your take on where the Intelligent Design movement is at,

because you go back about 10 years ago, kind of the height of the new atheists. And Intelligent Design was everywhere. It was talked about in the news media. There's major publications like Expelled that took place. There's Supreme Court rulings on this. In some ways, it seems to have faded from the collective conversation. But I also think for people that are paying attention, there are stories popping up, like Stephen Meyer being on Joe Rogan for a while, like the conversion not long ago of Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who cites intelligent design type arguments as kind of central or at least a key piece of his conversion.

What's your sense of how the movement is doing and maybe how the conversation has shifted? Yeah, it depends on how you track things. So for people who aren't really paying attention, the only connection they have to ID is when it's mentioned by CNN or something. And there, there was a blip there when it was the Dover trial, not a Supreme Court ruling yet. So it was a lower court ruling.

Oh, that's right, good call. Dover trial in Pennsylvania. 2005, I think that was. And George W. Bush, president, made a comment on that, and then suddenly all the news media are on it. And it seemed like everybody's talking about this, and it seems to have gone quiet in that respect. But if you're actually following more behind the scenes,

you see that it's actually growing. The number of people who are doing research from a design perspective is growing. The number of people who are doing research from a design perspective is growing. The number of young people who are being trained up and very interested in this is growing. So it's not at all died down. It's growing quite rapidly. But the news media have their ups and downs.

There are things that they're interested in, things that they're not interested in. So that speaks to where it's headed in the broader culture. How would you assess the state of the movement within the church, more specifically? Yeah, so there are two. There's been a, maybe eight or not. When was the Christianity today? Adam, was Adam real? This was a big debate maybe eight years ago or something like that? Yeah, it's been playing out over the past five to eight years. Yeah, so there's been a push.

Francis Collins started an organization called BioLogos, as you know, pushing for Christians to be okay with the broad Darwinian story, as long as we say God is the one who put everything in motion. There's been an answer to that, a very strong answer to that from the design community. But if we go back to Young Earth Creation, Old Earth Creation, ID encompasses both of those. Theistic evolution, a lot of people who are believers

aren't happy with this call to make peace with Darwinism, because they say there's something huge at stake here, we cannot just brush this off and carry on as Darwinists. So there was a volume that came out, Crossway Publishers, who's... 2023, I want to say, called Theistic Evolution, Philosophical, Scientific, and theological critique. Massive text. Yeah. I have a chapter in there. But it's a big answer to that, trying to say, hey, people of the church, wake up, don't

sleep on this one. There is something very significant at stake here, and we don't want to baptize Darwin because that goes down. A whole lot of dominoes fall when you do that. It is interesting. The point you made earlier about how we assess these things depends upon where we look. So there's certain publishers that 10, 20 years ago were publishing new books by Dempsky,

new books by Intelligent Design, and have leaned in much more towards theistic evolution type of books. And then other publishers, like you said, have jumped on the intelligent design movement so that There's a little story behind that so to speak Yeah, seems to me there's less debate about the merits of intelligent design But the way you framed it like should we baptize which is an interesting word Darwin and Darwinian ideas with Christianity, can we do that? What would that look like if we do so?

In other words, can we just make peace with Darwin and move on? What's your sense of that? I'm really curious because on one hand, you can make the case and say, look, if we keep the theological essentials at play, who Jesus is, Bible's inspired, but we just differ over not that we were created, but how we were created. Let's make a bigger tent. But on the other hand, it sounds like you have some reservations saying, ah, time out, not sure I want to go that direction.

Why? Yeah. So if we say, can we just take Darwinism as an account of the details, say the scientific details of how we came to be, and say God is the one who put things in motion and allowed there to be an Earth-like planet where these mechanisms could kick in, mutation and natural selection, and that becomes the scientific account of how we came to be, how the world came to be the way it is. The two big problems with that are, first, if you want to say God is the one who's involved, that is somewhat contradicted, quite profoundly contradicted by an account that says,

quite profoundly contradicted by an account that says, pure chance sifted by a simple process of selection is what accounts for all of life, because that's not very much involvement. So by that view, God was very involved in creating the laws of physics, say, and the Big Bang and getting things in motion, but after that, it's just physics does what physics does, and we're the products of that. The second thing is humanity turns out to be, it's the distinction

between humanity and the rest of life. Is it important? Is there something particularly and profoundly important about humanity with respect to the rest of life. And according to Scripture, there is. We are made in the image of God, but also the incarnation. So God, the Son, becomes one of us, not an ape, not anything else. So that means there's divine significance to humanity, and that gets very, very badly messed up if you say that we could have been anything because it's this random process sifted by selection. If you play the tape again, a thousand times you get a thousand different outcomes.

That view is saying there isn't anything particularly special about us, we could have been anything. And I think that gets, that badly messes up the incarnation, it badly messes up who we are in terms of our image of God. If I may, it feels like we had a conversation here maybe 20 years ago at Biola. And the theistic evolutionist basically argued that we have to give up the fall,

we have to give up humans uniquely made in God's image. The authority of science basically trumps Scripture. Like to anybody paying attention, that's obviously out of bounds. And I think it's heretical to go that direction. Not to mention, you know, abanity and historical Adam. It doesn't seem like theistic evolution as a whole, they're making these kinds of arguments,

like evolutionary creationism. So they would say, yeah, it's a Darwinian mechanism, but it's not materialistic or chance. God is guiding it. Just maybe we don't understand the means by which God is guiding us. So they would say, yeah, it's a Darwinian mechanism, but it's not materialistic or chance. God is guiding it. Just maybe we don't understand the means by which God is guiding it. So we're still made in God's image, and he's still specially guiding the process. It's just not typically a count at the beginning.

Maybe he takes an evolutionary process and speaks a soul into it. Now whether that's true or not, and the evidence supports it, it seems like at least the conversation is moving towards a more biblically grounded conversation than it was 20 years ago. Do you agree with that, or are you still like, time out, I've still got big concerns?

Yes, and I haven't followed Biologos closely, but I'm told that they've backed off on the, there wasn't a historical Adam. Yeah, that's true. And eight years ago or around then, they were saying, they're questioning whether there could have been a historical Adam in Eve. So there has been a shift,

and I think it's a shift in the right direction. But I still think it's important that we if we if we talk about who what is our ultimate source of understanding what is what is true? Is it the scientific enterprise or is it scripture? I think as Christians we have to say no scripture is paramount and We're we're men we're pro science But when science is saying something that contradicts scripture, we need to think very carefully. We don't go down the road of saying, well, the scientists told us this because how many times have we heard science says this and it turns out not to be true.

We need to be committed to taking scripture seriously and having that be our foundation for truth. We love science and science has delivered a lot of great things to humanity, but when it's making claims about who we are and where we came from, there we need to be really, really careful. Doug, it almost sounds like, as you describe the theistic evolution position, it almost sounds like deism. It can be, yeah. Where God started it in motion, and then as you describe it, the science sort of takes, you know, the evolutionary mechanism just sort of takes over from there.

But you describe it as, what you're describing is theistic evolution, the way it's shifted, seems to be different, that God is somehow actively involved in the evolutionary process. So I guess what I'm wondering is, what's the problem with God being involved in the evolutionary process as long as He's involved in some meaningful way? And I think we can debate about the historical atom and where that comes from. And obviously God was involved in creating human beings in his image in a way that is a bit of a departure from the standard evolutionary account. But how do you put those together in a way that might be consistent with Scripture, but yet have some credence for the science as well.

I think if you go down the road of saying God directs, so if this is a directed evolution view, now you've broken ranks with all the science. The scientists are not gonna be at all happy with that. And if we ask how did theistic evolution come about, I think it's an attempt to make peace. You can imagine a Christian who's a scientist who's in the life sciences is getting heat at church for being an, are you an evolutionist?

When they go to work, are you a Christian? Do you believe that? So you have to settle on a way of You have to settle on a way of being real and answering these questions. And I can see that theistic evolution, some time ago felt like a way that to the scientists, when I'm at work, I can say, trust me, I'm totally with you on all the scientific view. At church, you have maybe the advantage, if you want to, of playing the I have a PhD card, so trust me.

I'm a theistic evolutionist, and I know what I'm talking about, because I have a PhD. But I do think, if we go the direction of saying God guided, does that solve the doctrinal problems? It can solve a lot of them. I think you have to be very careful then what you do with humanity. So, are we related to chimps? Are we a branch of the great apes? And there, I think it becomes difficult to tease that out in a way that I think is true to Scripture. But

if one did that, you're way, way far away from what the scientists believe. So at this point, you're taking heat at work for this view. So why go that way? And another way to look at this is, I've been a careful scientific critic of molecular Darwinism for decades and decades and published a lot on it. When you see how badly wrong the theory is, when you see how badly wrong they got it,

why are you giving that theory anything? Is it, you don't need to concede anything to a theory that's this badly wrong. So my question would be one of motives. Why are people wanting to warm to some, why would a Christian feel as though they need to make concessions to what I consider to be one of the weakest, most pathetic scientific theories

that has ever come out in the history of science. I'm on record saying that. How do you really feel about that? Don't sugarcoat it, brother. I'm talking here about, as an origins theory, is natural selection a real thing? Yes, it is. Of course. I've studied it in the lab.

Is mutation a real thing? Yes. Does any material natural process account for new living things and the abundance of life we've seen around us? Not at all. It's pathetic theory actually. So we've, just to follow up on that, we've seen I think a bit more interest in a historical atom, both from theologians and I take it from folks who are immersed in the sciences as well,

where is that debate among the scientists? You know, we know where the theologians are on that, but is that becoming more credible within the scientific community? Yes, excuse me, because if we go back whenever it was, eight years ago, where this was being hotly debated, Christianity Today had an issue on it. The biologus crowd was saying there was no original couple, that humanity was never smaller than a population of something like 10,000 hominids coming out of the hominid line.

Then came Ola Hursha, my colleague in Stockholm, Sweden, a population geneticist with definite credentials. Anne Gaiger, my colleague and maybe a few others who did a couple of papers, I think maybe three papers on this where they said, hang on, because this was a mathematical argument. They were saying if you look at human genome data and you do the math, it says that there was never

an original couple. And they redid the math and said no, no, no, no, no. And they actually showed this is consistent with an original couple. So I think there's been, the science has definitely shifted in the direction of the credibility of an original couple and original Adam and Eve and I think that's broadly conceded now Part of this debate when we say, you know Should we baptize our faith with evolution depends on what we mean by evolution?

there's a big difference between common descent and what might be a materialistic Darwinian type of mechanism itself natural selection random mutation and of course Additional kind of mechanisms that today people will say contribute to that So that's the key is really defining what we mean by evolution Of course, they can mean a lot of different things. So never somebody asked me could God have used evolution I'm like tell me what you mean by evolution. Let's get on the same page with this now You mentioned some of your work in molecular biology talk a little bit about your

Work and kind of role within the larger ID movement and maybe why you think the Darwinian explanation is so pathetic And the other adjectives that you used. Fill that out for us if you will. Yeah, so really, I was drawn to apologetics as a young believer. I was not raised in a Christian home, came to faith in my early teen years. Found myself at UC Berkeley studying chemical engineering

a few years after I came to faith, and it was really there that I started becoming interested in worldview, why? Because I'm at UC Berkeley. And this view is being put across that I'm studying description, I'm thinking, wow, these people are saying something that's very different from what I believe.

And they seem to be saying it not, they seem to be saying it in kind of a religious way. We think there's no God, there is no God, but it seemed to be a doctrinal position, not something that came out of science at all. But they would sometimes, I was in a chemistry lecture, Professor Berkeley teaching on thermodynamics, so we're learning about the second law of thermodynamics.

He used that lecture as an opportunity to just bash Christianity and faith. And he said, you hear this argument, the second law is being used to argue for God's existence. The second law is the law that says that things go from order to disorder naturally. And so on planet earth, you have life, which is highly, highly, highly ordered.

How do you get life in a world that's just doing what thermodynamics does? And so that's a decent argument. It's an argument that has to be made carefully. And he was really dismantling a less careful version of the argument, saying, well, that applies to a closed system, the Earth is not a closed system,

the sun is giving energy to Earth. But anyway, I'm sitting here as a 19-year-old and feeling as though this guy is abusing his platform where he's trying to teach me thermodynamics, and he's on this rant about faith and Christianity, and got me stirred to thinking about as I am approaching my career, my education here, is there a way that I could use science to address these things and to give a scientific apologetic. And so that led me eventually to move into molecular biology from engineering,

which I think was also a God thing because I was studying the life sciences when I came to study the life sciences as a graduate student from an engineering perspective. I had learned principles of engineering and now I'm seeing these principles playing out at the molecular level and I was blown away. I thought, how can anyone look at these things and think they happened by an accidental process?

Took a postdoc at Cambridge, and that's where I was thinking about, how would you frame, excuse me, how would you design an experiment to measure the information content in an individual gene? And that's what I did eventually measuring the information content in a bacterial gene, basically by messing it up and finding out

what fraction of the messed up versions work versus don't work, messing it up in little portions, and then doing a little math to say, what if you messed the whole thing up, or what if you didn't have a protein and you had to just throw amino acids together and make a protein, what would the odds be of it coming together and doing the job?

And so this was eventually published in a paper in Journal of Molecular Biology in 2004, and the number that was put on this, if you think of it as a probability, was the odds of amino acids coming together, 150 to fold correctly. Which is a smaller protein, as I understand it. That's a small chunk of a protein, yeah.

To fold up correctly and be ready to perform a biological function, I measured at one in 10 to the 77th power. So one in, how do you say it? One in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, quadrillion. I think there's one more trillion. No, I'm just kidding, I'm messing with you.

Do you still maintain that number, by the way? Yes, actually it's held up. There have been, people didn't like it. Well, I was thinking when the paper got accepted for publication, I was thinking, well this comes out that's the end of Darwinism I was a little arrogant at the time what really happens if people don't like a result is they ignore it and that's pretty much But the ID side did not ignore it. They picked it up and said look at this and then it got critiqued But not at a high level you have these blogs who would say,

yeah, he actually did this or that wrong. This went through rigorous peer review. So the people who were critiquing it at the blog level didn't know the science very well. I interacted with some of them, I mean, before, can't remember the guy's name, Hunt, Art Hunt, did a critique of it on a blog called Panda's Thumb. before, can't remember the guy's name, Hunt, Art Hunt, did a critique of it on a blog called Panda's Thumb.

I saw that. And before he did his critique, this was shortly after the paper came out in 2004, he emailed me and said, I'm wanting to write something up on this, how I got this right, and he didn't have it at all right. And so I was like trying to educate him

on what the paper said so that he could do a critique of me. Needless to say, it was not a solid critique, but there's a few critiques that came out early. These are not peer reviewed publications, okay? This is just a blog. And then ever since then, if people wanna critique that 2004 paper, they go do their Google search and they find out,

here's the things that I grabbed. Now I do know of one paper, so in terms of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, it's actually stood the test of time. This is now a 21-year-old paper. Shortly, maybe a few years after it was published, I got a manuscript sent to me from the Journal of Theoretical Biology

for me to review as a peer reviewer, and it was a philosopher, I don't remember the guy's name, who wrote a paper that was entirely a critique of what I did wrong in my 2004 JMB paper, and I thought, this is bold. So I read the paper, he got a lot of things wrong. Like he didn't even understand the terms, which is totally understandable.

He's a philosopher, he's a non-life scientist. So I just wrote a polite- We're philosophers, so be careful. But keep going, keep going. I'm not knocking philosophy. Keep going, I'm just saying. I'm dabbling in philosophy. But he got a lot of things wrong,

and so I pointed out what was wrong, and I thought, if the editors know what they're doing, they'll can this one. And I was polite. I said, I think it's great that he's trying to enter this debate, and there are philosophical reasons to be interested in this,

but you do need to understand the work. So I thought that would be the end of it. Maybe a month and a half later, I get version two. And now he's added a biologist as a co-author to resolve that problem. And I thought, okay, we're in for round two. And usually the way scientific publishing works, if editors are entertaining a revision,

then often it gets published. They're gonna do it, yeah. So I thought, they're gonna publish this. So my approach this time was to carefully lay out one, two, three, four, five, the five things that this paper does not understand about the paper it's critiquing, so that when they publish it

in Journal of Theoretical Biology, I can say, I laid this out for them for them. And instead, two weeks later, I get an envelope that says, we've rejected the paper. Oh, wow. That's really interesting. That's good. And I want folks to realize, you're talking about like a protein coming together. This is like, you need to have this life before the Darwinian mechanism can even kick in

and create more complex diverse life. That's a whole nother problem on top of this. Let me follow up on that because you mentioned just I think in passing that a big part of this is information coming into the system. What tell our listeners a little bit more about what's the significance of that, of the emphasis on information at this really early elementary stage? Yeah, so you can think of information as being knowledge about how to arrange something so that it works. So when you send a text message,

you're putting information into your phone using your thumbs, saying, I wanna say something, I'm gonna put letters together to say what I wanna say. There's 26 letters, and there may be lots of ways that I can say the thing that I'm gonna say, but it's a very, very, very, very small fraction of the total number of ways you could just mess around with your thumbs on a smartphone, right?

So if you just jumble letters together, you're never gonna get them to say what you want to say. You have to arrange them in particular ways. There's not one unique way to arrange them, but the set of ways to convey what you want to convey, compared to the set of whole possible, all possible ways to arrange letters is extremely small, minutely small.

So that's the idea of something that is highly constrained and therefore contains a lot of information. And protein chains are like this. They have not 26 letters, but you have 20 amino acids, so it's like an alphabet. And they have to be arranged in particular ways to get the job done. Like a sentence, you could rephrase your sentence

in lots of different ways and we'll get the job done. Like a sentence, you could rephrase your sentence in lots of different ways and we'll get the job done. But like a sentence, those ones that work are very, very, very small fraction of the total number of ways you could throw letters together or amino acids together in the case of proteins. So the question was, the question I was addressing with that work was how finicky our proteins is it like letters to make sentences or are they much more forgiving and they turn out to be very very finicky it's very much like writing so one more just follow up on that too you you've talked a lot about sort of the state of the ID movement well how

would you assess sort of the state of Darwinism among the scientific community at present? Yeah, interesting things there. There was a conference, a meeting convened by the Royal Society of London in 2016 that I went to and a handful of ID people went to. The title of the meeting was something like New Directions in, I don't remember the title, something like New Directions in Evolution.

And it was really an excuse to, it was the sort of third way people, and I'll unpack that. There are people who are very smart life scientists who totally get that our critique of Darwinism is right. They say they know that natural selection and mutation cannot make life, but they don't want to be in the ID camp. So a lot of these might be agnostics or atheists.

So by third way, they're saying there's got to be something else. There's got to be a way to naturally produce life, but we acknowledge the problem with saying that natural selection and mutation can't do it. And so this was a conference where those people came together, but they also had some of the hardcore old school Darwinists there.

And it was a very interesting, tense meeting where the third way people were saying, here's, you know, you gotta take this into account and Selection can't do it. And then the Darwinists would say, this is all, this all comes under the Darwinian umbrella. You guys are protesting too much. And if you protest too much, the bad guys

are gonna hear you and they didn't know that there were so many bad guys in the actual audience. So I think, although if you pick up a textbook and look at AP Biology, I'm sure it gives the same old shtick that it's been giving for a long time. But among the scientists who know what they're talking about

in evolutionary biology, they know the writings on the, they know that the old simple story does not work and it's been shown that it doesn't work. And so they're trying to think creatively about how to augment it. And they have all kinds of ideas about what can we add to the picture that will explain the emergence of life because we know this is not enough. Which if materialism is true, is the way they should think. And eventually they would find that other mechanism. But of course, that's assuming that materialism is true,

which if it's not, would be misguiding the research. That's really where the debate lies. To make your point, by the way, Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, was on Joe Rogan a number of weeks ago now. And for about the last hour, they were talking about evolution. And as I remember it, he was somewhat chiding

the larger evolutionary community for overstating their confidence in the mechanism and how they're still working out some of those details. So I really appreciated his honesty in this, but I was like, wait a minute, where are these voices 20 years ago saying, this is for sure. And I mean like, wait a minute, where are these voices 20 years ago saying, this is, you know, this is for sure, and I mean, I have a number of quotes.

Of course, Dawkins would say this. Evolution is a fact, fact, fact. Yes, fact, fact, fact. You have Dawkins saying things like, if you question this, you're evil and insane and wicked, and of course, that's a Dawkins overstatement. We also have theistic evolutionists saying, it's as obvious as like gravity,

and obvious as plate tectonics. And I think there's more and more people saying, well, we still think this true and we're working it out, but maybe we overstated things. Now on the flip side, you could make the case that intelligent design proponents 20 years ago when this started, maybe had a little bit too much confidence. I hosted a conference, I think it was 2004,

when the ID movement was just launching. And I think that was the year that the case for creator from Lee Strobel came out. So I had J. Richards there, had Jonathan Wells there, Lee Strobel showed up. J.P. Moreland was there, because he has a chapter in there, a philosophy of mine. So I've interacted with a lot

of intelligence design proponents and followed this. In fact, as you know, in 2008, wrote a book with Dempsky on intelligent design. Like I've followed these discussions closely. It feels to me like a couple of things. Number one, early on, there was probably too much confidence that Darwinism was just gonna fall within our lifetime. But second, more positively stated, I think there was a sense of like the newness of this

movement. We're finding other people in different worlds that are making a common case, and that we got all the press and the excitement. Some of that has died down. And now it's kind of like, okay, we got to just keep plodding along step by step, train more young scientists, have more peer-reviewed journal articles, show that there's actual research that comes out of an ID format, ID paradigm, and play more of the long game rather than this younger kind of youthful triumphalistic spirit. Do you agree with that assessment? Tell me your take on that.

Ahem. Excuse me. I do, well, partially. Okay. So one question, a key question is, in what sense, because I would say neo-Darwinism has fallen. It's done, okay. But another question is,

is that being broadly acknowledged in the academy? And they're definitely not. That's a fair distinction. Yeah, so I think in a sense, the triumphalism was on the right track that we knew in 2004 is when this JMB paper came out. So I felt like it is done, it's over, okay. Scientifically, for people who care to look carefully

at the facts, I really think the Darwinian paradigm has failed, past tense is done. But if you're a agnostic, atheistic, materialistic, academic in the life sciences, the last thing you wanna do is concede that. So you wanna keep this thing limping along and say, okay, maybe there's some things that need to be added to neo-Darwinism, we acknowledge there's some problems,

but we're still holding this thing together. So I think there's a social, cultural, political sense in which Darwinism still lingers on. a social, cultural, political sense in which Darwinism still lingers on. And if you wanna distinguish true scientific understanding from that game, then it really has died. But the game goes on and there's just too large a coalition of people

who don't want to acknowledge that Darwinism has failed. They're the people who don't want to acknowledge that God exists, because you have a problem if you say Darwinism is dead and we don't have an atheistic replacement, okay? That sounds like you lost, and they don't want to go there. So is it fair to say that the ID proponents were dead on in terms of seeing and predicting the death

of the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian mechanism, but maybe underestimated how entrenched people would be to acknowledge that they had died. Is that fair? And a lot of careers have kind of played that out. So Dempsky was at the forefront of this. Dempsky took a hit. Yeah, he did. Dempsky's still active, he's still, I mean,

he's got, he's working on interesting stuff right now. I've just seen a manuscript that's not yet been published from him. So he's back. But his kind of career trajectory, maybe in some ways mirrors this. He was like at the forefront. He was.

Took a big hit, kind of stepped back and thought, this is a different kind of war than I thought it would be. And then, you know, a trench warfare that just goes on and on and on. And he kind of stepped back and got involved in other things, entrepreneurship, building companies and stuff.

But he's never left this as an interest and he's followed it and he's contributed and he's upping his contribution just recently. Doug, maybe one final question. I'm interested in how the younger generation is perceiving this. So where do you sense Gen Z, some of the younger generation, where are they at in terms of intelligent design, evolution,

theistic evolution? What's your sense of that? I think this is a generation, I mean every generation faces its challenges and has to come up with some way of conquering them. The challenges that you face now as an adolescent, as a young adult or a teenager are really kind of crazy in some ways because you've got social media. I mean, the internet brought its own challenges. Social media brings another layer of challenges. I think AI brings another layer of challenges and we can unpack that at some time. But we have- That'll be a tease for our listeners for next time.

There's all kinds of things going on right now that are, I think, providing substitutes to humans for the things that we really need. Okay, so we are made to need each other and to need interpersonal interaction We have all kinds of ways to fill in to not actually do that and fill in Social media was one way to do that but now you can have a conversation and there's nobody at the other end of your conversation and and this is Going to ramp up more and more and more So I think we have a generation that is facing a temptation to withdraw from real interaction with people

and find your own kind of imaginary space and kind of feel as though you're meeting your needs but you're actually harming yourself. And a lot of young people are seeing that. A lot of them are being drawn in and a lot who are tempted to be drawn in are seeing, no, no, no, no, no. We need to understand who we are seeing that. A lot of them are being drawn in, and a lot who are tempted to be drawn in are seeing, no, no, no, no, no. We need to understand who we are as people.

So I see a lot of really strong interest in these deep questions among young people. I'm speaking at a Maven conference. Yeah, love it. This is high schoolers who are coming together by the thousands to wrestle with these big questions. I teach a course, two courses, so one of them is to non-science majors here at Biola.

There's huge, it's packed every time, so I'm packed up to the limit. And these young people are very, very interested in seeing what the truth is and they care about it. And so that's why I love teaching it because they're very interested. Well, we love having you here. When I get out and I'm speaking

and people are asking about the Biola faculty, whenever shifts to science, I'm like, you know, we've got Doug Axe on our team. I drop your name all the time because you're doing just great work. You know, as I think about it, we used to host a lot of conferences here at Biola on intelligent design. We haven't for probably a decade. I mean, if I think about it, we used to host a lot of conferences here at Biola on intelligent design.

We haven't for probably a decade. And if we could, if you could help us, I'm asking you on the spot, get Myers, Behe, maybe Demsci yourself. And we have just like a three hour in-depth conversation, maybe a dialogue with somebody like a Brett Weinstein or someone who's just not convinced, take questions from the audience. What a dynamic, interesting exchange that would be, talking about these ideas, and maybe what the next decade looks like.

So if you're watching this or listening to this, either write a comment or send us a note. If you think that's a good idea, and if you would come, and if we get enough responses, I will almost at this moment commit to pulling this on if you'd work with me, but let's talk about that. I think it's a great idea. I think we need to do it.

Yeah, we definitely need to do it. Well, your book, oh, go ahead. You were gonna say something. Well, there's people like Brett. There's a crystallographer in Israel who's very, he's not a designer. Crystallographer, interesting. Crystallographer, he doesn't work with crystals,

so I should unpack that. To solve the structure of a protein, you get protein in crystal form and then you shine x-rays on it. Max Perutz, a guy that I got to know in Cambridge, was the first guy to solve a protein structure using x-ray crystallography. But there's someone in Israel who,

there's people who are not ID, not in the ID camp, but they recognize there's a real debate here and they're done with people saying, stop talking about there's no debate, this is a Darwinian world. And they say, no, no, no, no, no, we need to talk about this carefully. Those are great interlocutors for a conversation like this.

And I'm totally in favor of doing this. Let's do it. You and I can talk to the details who those guests would be and what that would look like when you get it back to hosting some of those conversations here at Biola. Well, I don't encourage folks to pick out your book, Undeniable.

You've got a lot of the data behind it, but it's a very readable book that's intuitive, or I think people could say, oh, I get it, I understand it. Not to be confused with Bill Nye's Undeniable. So my subtitle is How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed. If you clicked on order the Bill Nye one,

cancel that order and order mine instead. Of course, that would be an interesting debate, you and Bill Nye, but I digress. Maybe who's more undeniable, but Doug, really appreciate your work here, your contribution in the intelligent design field, and I'm excited as we talk about this, the possibilities we can do in the future.

We will have you back sooner than later, and for those of you watching or listening, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got other conversations about origins coming up. If you have comments or questions, you can send them to us at thinkbiblically at biola.edu. And we hope you'll consider sharing this with a friend. This is brought to you by the Think Biblically podcast

at Biola University. Thanks, Doug. ["Think Biblically"]