The Sean McDowell Show - The Evolution Divide: Two Scientists Find Common Ground and BIG Differences

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

What is the evidence for and against evolution? Is it a secondary issue Christians should move beyond or is more at stake? In this dialogue, intelligent design advocate Doug Axe and evolutionary creationist Sy Garte discuss the scientific status and importance of the contemporary theory of evolution. READ: BEYOND EVOLUTION: HOW NEW DISCOVERIES IN THE SCIENCE OF LIFE POINT TO GOD by Sy Garte (https://rb.gy/qay695)* 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_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org  Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easier to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study KJV and download the app today. Is it time for Christians to move beyond? the evolution wars. Our disputes about evolution resolvable and should we look for unity beyond our

differences. And as modern mainstream biological research in several fields now providing evidence for a divine creator, these are the questions that we'll explore with our two guests, both scientists and authors, Dr. Seigart and Dr. Doug Axe. Fellows, thanks for joining me for this conversation. Great to be here. me too so this is not a debate this is a substantive conversation to clarify for people what's at stake with the issue of evolution in the church and beyond but i would love it if we could just start with each of your journeys to faith and i'm curious if science had anything to do with it sye let's start with you all right well uh my journey to faith was somewhat unusual because

where I started from, I was raised in an atheist household, a very militant atheist household. They weren't just people who didn't quite believe in God. They were opposed to religion of any kind. My father was a chemist, and I grew up as a strong atheist. I thought the idea of God was ridiculous and impossible. And I went into science. I started as a chemistry major and then became a biochemists and got my doctorate in biochemistry and went on into academia and was a research scientist for about 35 years. How I got to faith was a long story and I did discuss it with you, Sean, a while back. And I have a couple of books about it, but I'll just summarize it very quickly, which is that first, yes, science did have an effect on me. What I started learning about

quantum theory and some other strange things in mainstream science, that kind of broke down my belief in pure materialism and the idea that, you know, everything is easily understood by science. No, it turned out this, that's not really true. And then when I began studying about how life works, the biochemistry of life, I was just completely stunned. unfortunately you have to go to graduate school before you get that kind of education. So most people don't get it, but when you do, you just, I mean, for me, I was left wondering, how is this possible?

How does the ribosome do what it does? How do you get protein synthesis? It just was incredibly amazing to me. Didn't turn me into a theist, but it opened the door in a sense that I began at least considering the possibility that there might be. might be something beyond just pure materialistic science. And that opening the door allowed the Holy Spirit to come in. And I had a couple of dreams.

I had several experiences. I started going to church. Bren brought me, and I found it not as horrible as I've been taught. I thought it was going to be a horrendous experience. In fact, I quite liked it. And eventually, I had a waking experience. that was somewhat of a vision that absolutely convinced me that Jesus Christ is real and I had to make the best of it. And I was quite concerned how that would affect my scientific worldview.

And in fact, it had no negative effect at all because as it turned out, I began to see that there were many, many scientists of Christian faith, both in the past and in the present. And that, you know, many, I was a, you know, strong believer in evolution, and so were many other Christian scientists. So I didn't have to change my scientific worldview at all other than the fact that now that I knew that God was real, that Jesus was real, it led me to wonder, you know, how does science and faith get together? I mean, is there any truth to the idea that the conflict thesis is a bunch of lies? And I found out, yes, it is definitely true that the conflict thesis is a lie. And when I realized that, I began thinking about my own journey and my own life and my science, and I started writing books about it. And as you know, I'm now about to release my third book showing that not only is,

there no conflict between science and faith, but as my second book title is, they're in wonderful harmony. And as this current book, I hope to show, is that there's an awful lot of actual scientific evidence for the reality of a divine creator. And I'm so tired of certain well-known atheists whose name I don't need to mention saying, there is no evidence for God. I mean, That's just not true. And I think it's time for the general public to be led in on some of these scientific realities that absolutely point, as I said, to a divine creator. We're going to get into a lot of those issues.

And I want folks to know that your book about your story is incredible, where we unpack that. And the other YouTube interview, you and I did, our link below is just captivating. So people know you fit into camp what would be called evolutionary creationist. classically theistic evolution. We're going to come back to that. Doug Axe, full disclosure, is a colleague of mine at Viola. I've written a book on Intelligent Design, and he is one of the most outspoken supporters of intelligent design.

My role here is to facilitate this conversation, but Doug, maybe tell us about your journey to faith and whether or not science had anything to do with it. Yeah, it's interesting. There are some points of contact between mine and size. I grew up not in a Christian home, but not at all an atheistic home. We probably would have described ourselves as being Christian, but only in sort of the nominal sense. We were not churchgoers.

And then in my early teen years, my high school years, really through the Lord answering my mom's prayers about her family, we all ended up going to church, all ended up hearing the good news of, gospel and responding. We were all baptized together. So in a very short period of months, we went from being not Christian, but not really knowing that we weren't Christian, to being fully in and saved by the blood of Jesus, attending a church up in. This all happened in the Bay Area in Walnut Creek, California. Now, not long after that, I was at UC Berkeley studying

chemical engineering and then went from there to grad school. And I had an experience is very similar to what I described, but as a believer, encountering the intricacies of molecular biology for the first time and sitting there in a lecture theater and thinking, my goodness, how can anyone see these things and not praise the Lord for them? Because it just seemed so obvious to me that blind causes could not produce things that were so stunningly elegant. I was a believer.

That was kind of the early point. of me starting to scratch my head, hearing the naturalistic account of these things and not believing it, I started praying and thinking about apologetics for the first time quite deeply in my undergraduate, my late undergraduate years and my graduate years. And I'm not sure what would happen with that, but the Lord opened doors. I started to become more and more interested in proteins in the information problem. I got an opportunity to do a postdoc in Cambridge and really kind of the birthplace of modern molecular biology and went there kind of covertly to examine the plausibility of molecular Darwinism and ended up losing my job over that, over the

controversy, not over anything wrong that I did. But the Lord provided I had another place in Cambridge to finish the work. And really my career work, I didn't anticipate this when I first had these interests in apologetics, but my career work has really gone in that direction. A careful critique of molecular Darwinism. What can natural selection do? What can it not do? And allowing science to speak to that. That's really helpful.

Now, a lot of the way we interpret the evidence in this discussion and debate is based on assumptions that we have about the intersection of science and faith. Sai, you've written an entire book on this. So maybe just give us a sense of how you see that intersection because in the past decades ago, one criticism of the theistic evolution position was that science would trump scripture and scripture needed to get in line with where science was. Do you agree that? Do you disagree that? How do you see the intersection between the two? Well, I disagree with that pretty strongly. I don't think science trumps scripture. I think that there is one truth, and that that truth is exemplified by the reality of the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his teachings and his life. Now, how does that, what about science?

Well, yes, science is also something that seeks truth. But let's think about this. you know, Jesus taught us a lot of stuff when he was speaking to his, to his disciples. He never said a word about science, did he? I mean, he talked about the scriptures. He talked about how to behave. He talked about many, many things. He didn't tell us that, you know, the, the earth is this old and the, you know, and, and how things work. He didn't say anything. And I think the reason for that, Obviously, he knew. God knows everything. But the reason he didn't tell us anything about the scientific reality of nature is that's our job. Because the scientific reality of nature is something we keep learning about. We're never done. And what we knew 100 years ago and called this is the scientific truth is no longer true. And that is continually happening. I'm seeing that happening right.

now in the world of biology, things that I said and believed three or four years ago are no longer accurate. And so what is the relationship between science and Christianity? I think that what it is, is that Christianity, Jesus, is our beacon of truth. And by that beacon, by that light, as C.S. Lewis said, We get to see everything, including the natural world, but it's our job to learn about it. And learn about it through the methods of science, largely, but not only, because at least the science that we know today, I don't think it's complete. We know a lot about how physics and chemistry work. We know a lot about how biology works, but we know very little about how it came to be, if anything. So my view is that, yes, we don't need to override scripture.

What I say in that book you mentioned is that science and Christian faith say the truth, but in different ways that are harmonious, but not identical. So in other words, we don't have to have, you know, we don't have to rewrite Genesis to say, you know, that, that to make it look like, you know, the Earth was, is, or the universe is 13 billion years old. It's no point to do that because the purpose of the Bible is not to tell us science. It's to tell us about God and how we came to be and how we should be. This is a really important point because I don't, this, I think it was before you're there, Doug.

We had a somebody from the Discovery Institute and a prominent theistic evolution, maybe 15 years ago at Biola, just having a conversation. And this prominent theistic evolutionist wrote a book and argued that because science tells us there's no historical atom, because science understands certain about the past, we need to move beyond and reinterpret historical atom, the fall. So it was kind of like science, at least the way it's understand in our modern moment, trumps theology and theology needs to get in line with what science tells us. Sy obviously represents a different perspective than that. What's your understanding of the intersection between science and faith?

Yeah, it's a great question, and there's a lot that can be said on this. Basically, we have general revelation, which is what God has created and everyone can see. So Romans 1 talks about this. Everyone sees the handiwork of God, whether they call it that or not. We have special revelation, and that is the revealed word of God in scripture. And we have personal revelation, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, becoming one of us in entering creation. And all of these are of God.

They're all divine things. So they can't ultimately be in any conflict. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy to take your science textbook and your Bible and say, okay, here's how they all line up. And I'm actually of the opinion that we don't have to complete that lining up project. that a lot of what appears to be conflict, well, I believe since these are all of God, there is no ultimate conflict. A lot of what appears to be conflict is happening because people are not approaching their discipline with the appropriate humility. If we approach scripture with humility,

we would say some things are very, very clear and some things are less clear, and we can scratch our heads over how you interpret certain passages is not abundantly clear. The same thing is true of science. You don't know things automatically by pointing a telescope at things or putting things under a microscope. There's inferences, there's background assumptions that go into all scientific inference. And scientists as well as readers of scripture can be guilty of not bringing an appropriate degree of humility to their discipline. They say, we know this because science has shown it. Well, show us exactly what science has shown and be careful to different. between data and assumption because they both go into science and that's not a bad thing.

That's how humans work. So my view is we don't need to fully tie up all the points of apparent disagreement between scripture and science. We can be content to approach both of them with humility and honesty and say, if we do that, I'm convinced, and I think Cy and I are both convinced that on the really big things, there's beautiful unity, and that gives me great hope that ultimately we'll see that there's full harmony. And right now, there might be some aspects where I can't say exactly how this matches up with this, and that's okay. That's great. And again, this could be a huge question,

but that's kind of a philosophical question about how science and faith intersect. Theologically or biblically, just give us a sense of how you read, maybe Genesis 1 through 12, or even just the creation account. Do you approach this looking for points of science? Do you approach it theologically? What's the lens, Cy, that you look at a book like Genesis through? You're asking me.

We'll start with Cy and then I'll come back to you. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a wonderful question. Let me just say first, I agree with everything that, that Doug just said, because, you know, I think that that's absolutely correct, every part of it. Now, yeah, your question about that, that's interesting,

because up until very, very recently, I read Genesis as pure theology as the story of creation, presented in a way that, as Doug said, that's not science, it's not supposed to be science. It's supposed to be, listen, folks, there's one God, and that's the creator of everything. The moon is not God, is not a God, neither is the sun. You know, it's everything was created by this one Lord, and including us, including life, including everything else.

How that creation came about is, well, you know, it's kind of hinted at. But recently, I've been looking at one line, which is repeated about 20 times in Genesis 1. And thinking, wait a minute, something is going on here. And that line is according to their kind. Okay. So when Genesis 1 begins talking about the creation of life, everything is created according to its kind. or is somehow we get the impression that all of life is involved in perhaps reproducing according to its kind or something. In other words, the kinds are very important.

And, you know, that has been used by young earth creationists to suggest that, you know, everything was created. Every living organism was created directly by God. any evolution. Now, Young Earth Creationists have changed that view. They now hold that the kinds are not what we see today, and you can see this in their publications and also at the Creation Museum, and there are some quotes from Jason Lyle and other Young Earth Creationist scientists, who will say that, in fact, there is some little degree of microevolution going on so that the original cat kind eventually evolved into all the kinds of felines that we see today. And in fact, in the book, I have a figure that shows the phylogeny,

the development of the various cats according to both the Creation Institute and mainstream biology, and they're almost identical. So, you know, that's very interesting. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that they agree with everything, but that part, you know, is there. So when you see a verse in the Bible, like according to its kind, which is scientifically accurate, I mean, no living thing ever gives birth to anything other than itself,

its same species. Some people think evolution means that, you know, light moths gave birth to dark moths or something. And no, that's not correct. So everything does, in fact, give birth to itself. Now, you know, you would imagine that the people of that time knew this because they were farmers and herders and they saw that, you know, sheep only gave birth to sheep, et cetera.

So that wasn't a mysterious thing. But it's fascinating to me that it's repeated so often. And I think in the book, I make a big deal of this. And I talk about how this shows that replication is more important than evolution. Now, I'm going to come to Doug. But I got to admit, that example somewhat surprised me because in my experience, Cy, typically evolutionary creationists will keep the science apart and distinct from Genesis entirely. And this opens up the door to say, wait a minute.

Genesis is not a scientific text, but there could be some intersection in terms of what is spoken here and modern science. That's a very interesting move to take. Doug, give us your take on this. Yeah, so again, I say go to scripture and read it carefully with humility. Read all of scripture. Don't just pick a verse and read it and try to let scripture give you an idea about how you interpret scripture. do the same thing with science and you may end up with some things where you scratch your head and say I don't know how these go together science seems to say this and scripture seems to say this

and that's okay if on the most fundamental things we find that there's harmony and I say that there is harmony on the most fundamental fundamental things so if we go to genesis one and two I see there being an account that first of all primarily is saying God is the one who did all this. So there is a personal creator God over all of creation, and there's no exception to that, that he did it in an orderly way. There's a sequence of days. I don't know. I'm not a Hebrew scholar. It seems to me very reasonable that those don't refer to 24-hour days because you get the great light and the lesser light on day four for telling the times and the seasons. So it seems to me reasonable to say, well, whatever we're talking about day there in Hebrew, it must be a great light,

not be talking about the 24-hour cycle that we experience on Earth because that's described after we've already had three of those days. And there may be Old Testament scholars who say I'm butchering this and that's fine. I'm open to hearing what people think about this. Of course. It seems to me on just a careful, honest, humble reading, there are certain key things that are being communicated in Genesis 1 and 2. And I agree with Cy that the kinds is part of it, that being fruitful and multiplying is part of it, that distinguishing things. So at the very beginning, the earth is formless and void. And then you have these acts of separating the waters above from the waters below, the dry land from the sea. So there's a clear theme of demarcation and bringing order to

something that originally was chaotic. Now, I agree with Cy that I think, The word kind is repeated so frequently, there's something very, very key there. And reproducing according to their kind, being fruitful and multiplying. I think that spells a problem for evolution because evolution only happens if there's a differential in kind between the offspring and the parent, because that's the only way you get from bacteria to humans, which are very different kinds, is if all along the way, this is the evolutionary count,

if all along the way it wasn't really quite the same kind. It's a difference of kind. Close at every step, but different enough that you can end up with humans descending from bacteria. And those are radically different kinds. So I would read the scripture use of kind there as challenging the notion of common descent,

and I'm sure so I would disagree with that, but that's the way I would read it. We're going to come back to some of the evidence for and against evolution, but I do want to highlight an area of common ground here that is interesting, is both of you are saying primarily, Genesis is a theological, biblical text about God being the creator, building distinctions into creation, building order into creation. But there are at least minimally some intersections between modern science and the text.

So there's a kind of at least mild concordance that we could look to, which raises a million questions we won't get to. But that's a fascinating common ground. I have to admit, I didn't expect. Now, I know a few people, the moment you said that the days are longer and not 24 hours, some people watching this are going, wait a minute, where is the Young Earth Creationist voice? And the answer is we can't have everybody here. There's a number of voices we're not, including I had a Young Earth Creatist on not long ago.

that's a conversation we can have in the future. This is between an intelligent design proponent and evolutionary creationist to see what common ground we can find. All right. With that said, let's shift to your book, Cy, which I hope gets a lot of conversation, whether people end up agreeing with you or not. I think it's written graciously. I think it's interesting. You're obviously a good writer and have a knack for taking things for non-specialists to understand. And obviously, Doug, you have that ability as well.

but maybe take us to the premise of your book because I think this is where some of our differences might start to emerge. So what are you arguing for and why should we move beyond evolution? Yeah, thanks. I have two main premises in the book which are somewhat related, but I decided to use them both. The first premise is, and this, by the way, when you said you think you don't know whether everyone will agree with me. I think almost no one will agree with this. I mean, I'm, I'm tiptoeing very carefully at the edge of evolutionary creationism. And I think some of my friends will not be happy with some of the things I say in the book. So we'll see what happens. But one of my main points is that evolution is not worth fighting about.

because for several reasons. First, it is not as many people think, and as famous quotes have said, the center of biology, it's not everything can only be understood in the light of evolution. I see evolution as a fairly trivial thing, and it's something that I believe, and not just believe, I've published mainstream scientific papers on this, that evolution is a now. natural result of the real thing in biology that is incredible and that makes biology amazing and unique. And that is the ability of every living cell on the planet to accurately replicate itself. Nothing else does that, only life. And I have a whole section on that and I talk about why

crystals don't replicate them. You know, there's a lot of things. A lot of people think that that's not true. is true. And when you have that system in place and all of life has pretty much the same system to do that, evolution just means, well, if there's a mistake, a very, very tiny degree of mistake, you get, you know, a difference in the kinds of genes that the offspring have. And then just naturally, like a filter, some of those are going to live better than others. I mean, that's how Darwin came. Darwin knew very little science in terms of biochemistry, no biochemistry, no molecular biology. He really came up with what he felt was a logical argument that, you know, there is variation. He didn't know where it came from, but he knew there was variation in every species,

and some do better than others. So they're going to live better. They're going to live longer. They're going to have more kids. And so eventually in a population, you get change and you get fairly slow and, moderate change. So that's something that Doug and I may get into a little bit is, you know, how does evolution actually work? But for now, what I think is that that the amount of argumentation and division and dissension and anger related to evolution is something that all of us

scientists of Christian faith. And from young earth, young earth creationism all the way to, you know, evolutionary creation and everybody else, we need to tone it down and agree that, agree where we can and agree to disagree where we, where we have different views. But there are people weighing in on both sides that are,

and of course not just Christian, There are many atheists who use evolution very improperly as evidence for atheism, which of course is nonsense. So, you know, that part of the first couple of chapters in my book are about why first of all, so many people who are in favor of evolution use it improperly. So many people who are against it don't understand what it is. And, you know, let's, I just think we need to stop. We need to call it. And especially as Christians, we need to focus on what's really important, which is what scripture and especially the Gospels really tell us is, you know, Jesus Christ is Lord and creator of everything.

And that's the theology that's important. That's, I'm sorry I'm taking too long, but that's the first major theme. The second major theme goes further. and this, I know already that this is very controversial because I've already had some interesting discussions with some of my colleagues. And that is that biology has moved extremely quickly in the last few years. Most of this is unknown to the general public. It is known among some scholars, but not all. And that is that the whole idea of evolution has become quite changed.

And I don't just mean because of the extended evolutionary synthesis, the third wave, which added some interesting things to the general evolutionary mechanism. But now a book was just published, actually about a year ago, by MIT Press. and none of the editors and writers are Christians. They're all biologists. And the book has the title, Evolution on Purpose. Now, the word purpose is a forbidden word in biology. It has been for years.

This is a book that summarizes some of the very recent work that's been done showing that all living creatures, and I am including bacteria, have evidence of purpose, agency, and believe it or not, cognitive. And I have to tell you that when I, and I just wrote a review of that book, which will be published in September in perspectives in science and Christian faith, the journal of the American Scientific Abiliation. And when I talk about that and when I sent in that review, I got a lot of pushback because I was very favorable towards the book and still am, of course.

But, you know, these are well-known scientists, not of Christian faith, including people like Dennis Noble in England, Stu Kaufman, James Shapiro, many people who've been on the forefront, the pioneers of pushing biology forward. and a lot of other folks who are doing work that's just literally incredible. And what my view of that is that all of this is crying out for a new theory. Now, it doesn't mean evolution is wrong, but what it means is it's not enough. And that's why the title is beyond evolution. We have to go further.

We're not done. This is, to me, this is very much like what happened when everybody in the 19th century thought physics was over, except for one little tiny problem about light, right? And then it turned out physics was far from over. There was a huge amount more stuff that came out from Einstein and Planck and all these people with quantum theory, et cetera. We're on the verge of that right now in biology, and I think everyone should know about it.

Okay, so I'm going to come to Doug in a minute, but the title, Beyond Evolution, is you're arguing that within the church, we need to go beyond the division and anger over the topic of evolution. And in the wider scientific community, we're on the precipice of a scientific revolution where people are not rejecting evolution, but going beyond it for deeper theories that include purpose and cognition that biology is more open to now that it was in the past. Is that a quick, fair summary? That is beautiful.

I wish I thought of saying it that way. No, no, fair enough. So really, one last thing before I come to Doug, you said you didn't think anybody was going to be happy or be with your book. Is that because young earth creationists and intelligent design proponents will disagree with evolution on one side? And of course, we have to define evolution. Some people like Michael Behe are okay with common descent, but they reject some of the mechanisms behind it. But then evolutionary creationists won't be happy with you because you write in your book, he said, I should clarify that I doubt that science, including the science of biology, will ever prove the existence of God. but it can provide evidence.

Is that why the evolutionary creationist might not be happy with you? Well, that would have been the case maybe 10 years ago at the time that you mentioned that you had an evolutionary creationist who denied Adam and Eve. And that's kind of that issue has kind of gone away too. I mean, evolutionary creation has moved a bit, quite a bit. However, like in every field, there are still people who, I mean, I know several people who will really hate this book because they already have told me. And, you know, so there, yeah, I mean, I'm taking that risk, but I'm not writing for them. The people I'm hoping will read the book are not necessarily scientists at all because this is not written. to sign, it's not a technical book. The book I mentioned, Evolution on Purpose, is a technical book,

and that's written for, it's an academic book. My book is trying to tell ordinary people who are not scientists, but probably know a lot about, you know, scripture. They know a lot about their faith that don't believe everything you're seeing and reading right now because everything is changing and it's going to be a whole new thing coming along. And I'm hope, and I don't think I'm the only one doing this. There are several other people I know who are thinking about writing the same kind of thing. So hopefully this word will spread. And that will be very useful, I think, for the faith.

So let's take these one by one, Doug, because he has two kind of premises. And one is that evolution is, I think, used the word, in terms of the bigger picture of life and theologically. Before we come to whether there's purpose and cognition in biology, there certainly is in biola. In biology, is evolution trivial and something we should move beyond in the church? Well, I think, Cy also pointed to the fact that many atheistic biologists use evolution. I mean, Richard Dawkins is famous for this.

Darwin's theory made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. So you have this sort of sign might say it's pure propaganda and it doesn't really flow from the science and I would disagree with him on that. But even if it's pure propaganda, the fact that natural selection that Darwin's theory is being used as a talking point for promoting atheism is a very good reason to push back against it, or at least to push back against that abuse of it. And I think Si would say he is pushing it back against that view of it. I actually, you know, if I were an atheist and I never was, Cy was.

If I were an atheist, I would be looking for theories that provide an explanation for the things that seem to require the hand of God. And it seems to me that Darwin's theory does just that. it given some initial primitive life form it's the thing that hits us and strikes us about life is extraordinary as though someone with genius made it and if someone can come up with a theory that says well actually there's no genius at all just natural mechanism produces giraffes and oak trees and mushrooms and humans given some simple protobacterial cell it does all of that work, I would say that's a huge win for removing God from the picture. And if that's false, and I emphatically say it is false, then that's a very good thing to push back against and to point out

the falsity of it. So we disagree there quite strongly. But I do want to say, while I have a chance, I love the book. And I love the things that you've done, Sigh, that I do think are going to give you some heat from evolutionary creationists. And I was surprised by them. I've had lots of conversations with people in that camp. They may not be as recent. So it's interesting to me to hear that you're saying that that they're shifting there. But when I read from you that science can indeed provide evidence for God, I'm thinking, that's great. Amen to that because I've sure heard people who think that they bought into the non-overlapping magisteria notion of Stephen Jay Gould that science is about the natural world and theology is about the supernatural world and there's no

connection between them. So I delighted that you disagree with that. I'm also particularly delighted that you see particular strength in the evidence that comes from biology because so many people in the theistic evolution, evolution and creation camp seem to say it all goes down to the fine-tuning, you know, cosmological fine-tuning. Everything else is physics and you're, you're doing God of the gaps arguing if you're arguing that biology gives evidence for God. And I think that's nonsense and you do too. So I'm really, really happy with that. There are points where we disagree and we disagree big time on natural selection,

but we can get into that later. And that's something I want to unpack. But go ahead, Sean. Good. That's really helpful. So I want to come back to the biology point about having, you know, change and purpose within it. but first maybe it'd be helpful just in principle if each of you could give why sigh for example you use some pretty strong words in your book like the evidence i don't think you use the word

evolution but i'm sorry overwhelming but it's convincing and it's established you have a lot of confidence in this i'd love to know specifically one or two examples that you think are just most telling for this and then what your critique would be dug why you're not convinced by And then I'll just have each of you respond to one another, give another perspective, and then we'll move on towards common ground. But, Cy, maybe start with what you find so convincing. You give, I think, five or six examples in your book. Maybe pick one or two that you're like, this just convinces me that evolution is true. Yeah, well, so first of all, I want to now say what I believe evolution is, because that's important.

Good. And what I use is simply the up until very recently, and I think maybe still, the accepted scientific definition of evolution, which is a change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Just to define what an allele is, allele is a form of a gene. genes can have slightly different forms, different sequences, and that happens because of mutation. And the different, the reason that we don't look alike, the three of us, is because we have different alleles in a lot of genes. And the only people who have exactly the same form of every gene are identical twins. And that's called a clone.

So most people have these different, and all, I should say not people, but most, All animals have different alleles in all the genes. Most of those different alleles don't do anything. They still work. Either they work just as well as the others, or maybe they don't work at all, which is a problem. Or maybe they work a little better. Now, what happens is if you have a population,

and that's the key word here, a population is a group of, of creatures that are able to mate with each other. And if it's not, if it's bacteria, whatever, then they're not mating completely, but it's a different thing. But it's a group of organisms of a particular species that are in one place, literally. So they, if they're mammals or reptiles, they can mate or whatever. And what happens is if you have that population isolated from,

another population. And this is where Darwin got his data from the various islands where they were different birds living. If the populations are isolated from each other that they can't mate, you can get all kinds of differences in one population that don't show up in the other. Sometimes it's just random chance. It's called drift, genetic neutral drift. And it's just happens that there's some, you know, new alleles in one of the populations that don't go into the other, and that population begins to look a little different. Sometimes one of the alleles might be really good for the environment for that particular population, and it spreads throughout the whole population, and this is where over time is important, because that can take many, many generations.

So the example I've often used is, you know, before there were lions and tigers, there was a common ancestor, which was some form of cat that looked. In fact, they even have a picture of it in the Creation Museum, the ancestor of tigers and lions. And they were separated. There was a population of these cats that was in Africa and one in Asia, and they couldn't interbreed. So in one case, these changes occurred and you ended up with stripes and that eventually turned into tigers. And in another case, you ended up with males having these big mains and that, of course, was lions. And that takes a lot of time. But eventually, enough mutations and enough changes in the genetic structure of these animals occurs so that they can't interbreed anymore.

They're now two different species. And that's the evolutionary model for how species develop. And as I said, that's not in dispute because even Young Earth creationists agree that that happened. What is in dispute is macroevolution, which is larger changes than that. And I will say that the general standard answer by evolutionists, whether they're Christian or not, is that macroevolution is just microevolution always. And I'm not sure that's completely true. I think there are times when we really don't know how a particular evolutionary change occurred.

It's not always possible to come up with that, but we can unpack that a little bit more later after Doug talks. But I want to just quote something that is in my book very quickly. And this is someone who's opposed to evolution, and he wrote this on social media, and he was explaining why he's against evolution. And he says, the story goes that there were dark moths and light moths living in England. And this, Sean, goes to your question about what a given example. So the idea of what's called the industrial, the industrial change of color of moths is one of the most classical.

evolutionary examples. And this opponent of evolution says that industrial pollution or soot started to make the bark of the trees darker. True. The light colored ones stood out more so the predators could see them easier. True. And soon there were more dark colored moths. They tell you this is evolution, that the dark ones suited their environment better and natural selection took out the lighter colored ones. See, nothing happened. The light colored ones were removed. That's it. The dark ones already existed. Now they were just more. It's not like the white ones started having darker offspring. He is absolutely correct because that is what evolution is. No dark moth was ever expected to give birth to a white moth. There were dark ones and light ones. The dark ones were removed.

all we, I'm sorry, the light ones were removed. All we have the dark ones because they stood out better. I mean, they were able to, you know, merge into the dark trees. That's evolution. He got it completely right. But he thought that, you know, this is not about populations. He thought that an individual moth gives birth to a new species, to a new variant. No, that never happens.

And so that's an example of microevolution in action. And it's also an example of how so many people don't really understand what evolution says. That's really helpful. Doug, I'd love to know if you agree with the definition, kind of your take on that example, and then ultimately your critique of why maybe you're not convinced. Yeah. So evolution is,

is a slippery term because it gets defined in different ways. So size said it's changing allele frequency with time. Okay. I'm reading from Sy's book page 43. So if we say evolution, by evolution, we mean change in allele frequency in a population with time. Page 43, size says, the general theory of evolution by natural selection has great explanatory power when it comes to understanding how the vast panoply of complexity in life came to be. very different. Yeah. So unless you can tell me how

I agree with that at all. Unless you can tell me how dark moths being eliminated by birds explains the vast panoply of the complexity of life. And I think that's what you're misinterpreting the person you're quoting. I didn't read the original quote. The person isn't saying that this sort of thing can't happen, that dark maws can't have an advantage over light moths under certain conditions. The person is saying there was no actual generation of something new.

And if you're going to explain the vast panoply of life, you have to have something that explains how genuinely, radically new things come about. And I don't think you have it, not with changes in allele frequency. So if I want to go to another example, page 53 from the book, where Sy writes, one example of such a revolutionary event. Now, here he's talking about these various things, natural genetic engineering, things that have become kind of a third way additions to Darwinism. He says one example of such a revolutionary event is when the entire genome of an aquatic organism somehow duplicated. This allowed for descendants of that animal to experience an unusually high rate of mutation without the danger of losing important gene function. As a result of such a risk-free high mutation rate, those descendants, rapidly developed new anatomical structures like a backbone and the entire group of vertebrates came

into existence in the form of a bony fish. That is as hand-waving an account as I have ever encountered in my entire life. And if you want to unpack that, Sigh, and if you're just saying you're giving a summary of something that has actual scientific rigor to it, I'd love to see the full expanded form because I don't think there's any scientific rigor to that whatsoever. And what What puzzles me is you're very good at critiquing hand-waving arguments when it comes to RNA world and things like that. And you've done it very well and you've published on it. Why don't you apply the same rigor to natural selection? Okay.

So let's go to that whole genome duplication event. Yeah. The, let me explain why that's important. It's not, whole genome duplication is not a mutation. It's not a simple mutation. It is a mutation. Anything that changes the DNA sequence is a mutation. But when you have a, remember that we have, our DNA is in double strands.

So we have two strands of DNA, one from each parent in every cell. Two chromies. Yeah, sorry, two chromosomes, right. So one chromosome from the mother, one from the father, and that's true for all animals. Now, if you have complete duplication of a chromosome, see, the problem with a mutation is that if you, if you knock out a function and it's homozygous, which means it's the only copy you have. then you're in trouble because there's no other copy to take over. But if you, if the first thing that happens is you're, you are copying the entire strand of DNA, the entire, all the genome, the whole genome is being copied.

Now you have an extra strand. So even if you lose by mutation one of the, one allele or one gene that is really important, it doesn't matter because you have that extra backup strand. I'm not saying this very well, but I'm trying to talk off the top of my head. So it's an extremely rare event to have these whole genome duplication events. And there is evidence that it did occur at some point in the, just before the appearance of vertebrates. And what that whole genome duplication allows is a huge, huge amount of mutation. In fact, everything can be mutated. And what we're assuming, and you're

right that this is somewhat hand-waving, because we don't have evidence for it, but the assumption is that so many mutations were able to be made without killing the animals, that some of them turned out to be good. And there's evidence for this, for example, in the phenomenon of hypermutation, where you have bacteria that deliberately increased their mutation, even though it's deadly, with the hope, more or less, if I can use that word, that some of those mutations rather than killing the individual bacteria, will actually lead to some useful thing that allows them to survive. And that works, but you have to have the whole colony doing it at the same time.

And most of the colony will die, but a few will get those lucky beneficial mutations, and they will grow and repopulate. So there's a whole story behind that as well, that we know happens. And so the whole genome duplication event is somewhat like that. You're, you're getting a huge number of mutations and some of them turned out to be useful. Now, do we know the details of how that works? We were not there. It's very hard to do that kind of thing in the lab, although things similar to that, I think, have been done, but I can't quote references. So I'm not going to go further. But I think that it's not hand-waving. It's what I think it, well, it might be

hand-waving in a sense, but we got to remember that when we talk about evolution again, and this is a legitimate criticism that I've heard many, many times, you know, a lot of our conclusions are based on what we can see and we can't go back in time. So we can't say, this actually happened, but we can tell what happened based on what we see now. So there are certain mutations that we can tell that they're very old, that they happen a long time ago, and they're correlated in phylogenetic trees. And then we can say, okay, well, that mutation must have been involved in the evolution from this kind of animal that was alive then to another kind of animal that was alive later.

And there's a lot of that that works. So I think when you say that the molecular, evolutionary molecular mechanisms are all hand-waving, I don't think that's accurate. I think that there is perhaps a bit more drawn from than should be. But the basic reality, when you do molecular genetics and phylogenetics, you see evidence of genome-producing evolution, changes in. body plans, changes in species. Doug, go ahead.

Lots of things to say there. Just the fact that you do a full genome duplication does not give you free reign to mutate everything. There's something called dominant disorders, which you're very familiar with. So there are lots of disorders, genetic disorders, where the person suffering from the disorder, it has one correct copy of a gene that makes a correct protein and one mutated copy of a gene that makes an incorrect protein. And the incorrect protein fowls up the system such that it doesn't matter that you have a good gene. You're still in

trouble because the bad one is assembling with a good one and preventing it from doing its job. And that's not uncommon. So the fact that you've, what I'm saying is hand-waving is the mere fact of going from a presumption of a duplicated whole genome. That's very feasible. There are plants that you can actually catch in the act of becoming polyploid plants. Right. I would like to see a serious attempt of saying, here are the steps of going from an invertebrate to a vertebrate. Here's a mutation. And the excuse of saying, well, we can't replay history, that's irrelevant because I'm not, I'm not saying we have to replay history. I'm questioning the plausibility of the whole account. And for it to be scientifically plausible, we should be able to say, well, we don't know exactly how vertebrates happen historically, but we can show that it's possible.

Here, we did this and this and this, and here's how a backbone emerged from it. And we can show it. There's nothing like that. This is entirely hand-waving. It's entirely hand-waving. And you shouldn't be content with this. Sorry, because you're not intent with much less hand-waving in R&A world. Okay?

R&E world is much more plausible than this, and you reject R&A world, and then you just let this go free. I just don't get it. And if you think of wrong, let's spin up a website, and you flesh this out. You show me the details of how. C elegans can become a vertebrate in terms of scientifically verifiable facts. It will be embarrassing because you won't have anything. Well, I'll take you up on that challenge.

I don't think we can do it now, but I definitely will look into it. And my impression, and I may be mistaken, is that all of those steps have been, in fact, replicated. And people know what they will. Then this is a, this is gold. Okay, because when you go to show that, if you can show that all the steps, we can actually verify that you need a vertebrates from invertebrates, and we're not saying this is the actual path that was taken. We're just saying we verified this is a way that it can happen.

I'm a theistic evolutionist. 100%. You won't do it. But this is. You have a lot of witnesses. Yes, indeed. Let's do this. And I will say if I can't find that, I think I can. But if I cannot find it, I will give up that argument.

Very good. Wow. We are making some serious progress here in terms of the root of the issue, the mechanism what needs to be explained and accounted for. What I appreciate here is we're kind of on the same page of what's at stake and what needs to be demonstrated. Cy, you're confident it is. Doug, you're confident that it can't and won't be. I think that's the divide at least on the issue of evolution itself.

Now, you have further examples in your book side that you point towards that people can read and assess. Doug, I know you have further critiques of this that we won't go into here. But I wonder how much common ground we'll find on this. is in your book you said specifically that Cy biology can give evidence for a divine creator or for a divine design. I'm going to come back to you and ask you what that evidence is,

but let me switch back to Doug. And if you'll clarify for us, what makes intelligent design unique in terms of how we detect, and recognized design, not just in fine-tuning, but also in biology. And then, Sy, I want to see where you agree and or differ with him on that take. Well, I don't know if Cy describes himself as being an advocate of intelligence sign, but I would say he is.

So, Cy, I would say you've got a foot in ID and a foot in evolutionary creation. I don't know if you're happy with that, but it seems to me that you're like RID arguments. because you're saying not only is there not a plausible account for the origin of life in terms of natural processes, you're saying there's good reason to think there can't be such an account. And it's not good enough for me to say, we don't know exactly how vertebrates came from invertebrates. I'm saying we have every reason to believe, scientific reason to believe that that can't happen in a naturalistic way. That's what I'm saying. And I've done this work on protein, origin of protein folds, origin of protein systems. I've done multiple studies of the efficacy of natural selection, and it's just not the powerful thing that people claim that it is. Our most recent published paper was looking at whether natural selection can even retain genetic information in a small population. It can't. You lose the information you already had. Natural selection is very, very pathetic. So the idea that it is this great creator is, I mean, it's ridiculous in terms of scientific evidence.

Okay, Doug, one more thing really quickly for clarification. You're not saying that natural session can't explain a, therefore it's intelligently design. You're saying there's not an in principle cannot be a full naturalistic account of certain features in nature. But intelligent design also says there's positive. features that we know intelligent agents cause, such as the information in DNA, that's what makes intelligent design unique, correct? That's another component.

But basically, you have only so many buckets you can draw from in terms of the categories of causal explanation of physical things. You have chance. You have physics and you have design, or I call it craft, someone reaching into the physical world and moving things around and doing something with them. So if you can show that chance is not an adequate explanation and physics is not an adequate explanation, then you're left with design inference. And then you can add on top of that, and this is what Steve Meyer is famous for saying, well, we actually know that agency that intelligence does cause these things, but you don't actually need that to make

the argument. It's basically a process of elimination. You only have so many ways you can explain something. and if you can show that two of those categories are not sufficient, then you're left with the third category. And let me just say one other thing in terms of what natural selection can and can't do. Natural selection is real. I study it. But the key problem is how big or small is the target that mutation and doesn't have to be random, just blind accidental mutation? how large or small is the target that it would have to hit in order for some new significant thing to be selected and in the cases that you referred to sye where you do actually have demonstrations of natural selection working the target is big enough that it can be hit but you can show that in the interesting things and vertebrate the origin of vertebrates is way beyond this on the interesting problems the target is infinitesimally small

which means you're never going to have the variant that has this phenotype, which means it's never going to be selected. Cy, there's probably a lot you want to respond to here, this final, there's either this final critique. You're welcome to respond to that. Or we could just pivot back towards when you talk about there is evidence in biological systems, what you mean by that. And whether that's the same thing intelligent design proponents mean or not. Yeah, let me do the second one first. When it comes to the origin of life or looking for evidence for God, I say that life is evidence for God. This should not be life.

I even use those words in the book. Because life is this crazy chemistry that does things that nothing else does. and why is it there? There's so much evidence for what is now called, well, it used to be called biogenesis, which was the law that came up in the 19th century when people were thinking that spontaneous generation was real. And people like Tyndall and Pasteur and Virchho

and a number of other people, and Spalenzani even earlier, did a lot of experiments showing that, no, you don't get life from non-life. You only get life from life. And that was called the law of biogenesis. And in fact, my next substack is going to be about that because I talk about a guy named Charlton Bastion, who was a proponent of spontaneous generation. He thought that evolution explained the origin of life.

It does not. And nobody thinks it does. Richard Dawkins will tell you it does not. So the origin of life is unexplainable and not just because of the data we have from spontaneous generation, but from the last 70 years of people trying to create life or trying to come up with some how life could have come to be from chemistry and with no success. I mean, at any stage, we don't know how the big polymers arrived. We don't know, even if there were polymers, how they got together into biochemical machinery, all of which is required for evolution, by the way.

So, you know, you can't have evolution until you have, as I said before, accurate self-replication and accurate self-replication is an amazingly complex phenomenon, which is called protein synthesis, which I try to get into a little in the book, but it's very technical, but it's very complex. And so there's been no success in the, I mean, I echo James Tour. I mean, I think he's completely right when he says, and he only talks about the early stages. He doesn't even talk about the biochemistry.

He talks about the organic chemistry. But none of it works. So we have so much evidence that biogenesis is true. And what Dawkins says, and I think he has the most rational view of any atheist on this issue, is it's extremely unusual. It's extremely rare. but there are so many planets where life could occur that it probably occurred once.

And my answer to that, and I just gave this recently at an interview, is yeah, you can use that argument. This is the old argument that if you deal out, you know, a billion cards, hand of poker, you'll get several royal flushes of states. And my answer to that was, yeah, but you'll never get ever, no matter how, even with an infinite number of hands,

you'll never get a royal flush of loops because there's no such thing. It's impossible. And that's, to me, now, here's where I'm going, you know, way outside the mainstream of evolutionary creationism. And I've had some major arguments, both verbally and in print, with some of my colleagues and friends on this. I do not believe that life can come about through the chemistry and physics that we know.

And it might be possible at some point if there are new theories and new laws that have nothing to do with what we now know, that we will have a so-called scientific naturalist explanation for the origin of life. But when that, if and when that ever happens, I believe that those explanations will be strong pointers to a creator. Because there has to be, and here I think is where Doug and I are pretty close agreement. I believe there's absolutely no question that whatever we, whatever we find in science, ultimately life is a creation by a divine agent. And one more thing to say is we can't make life and we're intelligent. Okay, we may not be divine, but we're intelligent. So we have all the materials that you need for life.

We can make any DNA, any protein, any membrane. We can make all that stuff. We can put it all together. Nothing happens. It doesn't live. So the experiment has been done. It doesn't work because we're not God. There's something even beyond intelligence, beyond agency.

There's something divine about life. Part of the question is, I think we would all agree that life goes beyond intelligence, but it's intelligence required to go from those chemicals and molecules to life as we know it, minimally speaking. And that's where I think intelligent design comes in, like Doug said, where we rule out chance or necessity or both. both were left with intelligence. Doug, is that how you see it? Flesh that out for us, if you will. Yeah, I mean, the simplest way that I think about it and teach it in the course that I do is

elimination. You've only got so many categories of cause for physical effects and three. I don't even think chance is a real one. So one of those is artificial, but you've got physical processes. You've got chance, if that's a real thing, I don't think it is. I think it's just a shroud for ignorance. And then you've got design, or I call it craft actually in my course. And so if you rule out two of those and you can rigorously rule them out, then you're left with design. Now, it's also the case that we as intelligent agents do this all the time. Every time you send a text message, you're doing something that physics and chance can't do. Now in the age of chat, GPT, we have to slightly nuance the argument

because you have a very complex physical thing that seems to be able to write, it seems to be able to write, but it's only doing that because a huge amount of human writing has been put through it, and its weighting factors have been made just so, so you have a large language model that can emulate that process. But it's a machine that was trained on actual.

intelligence and that's why it acts like it's intelligent. I'm going to ask each of you just kind of in a minute here to give kind of final thoughts. You have stuff in your book, Cy, that maybe you weren't able to bring out here. I want to make sure you can make those points. If you had a final area of agreement, Doug, or even maybe just an area of disagreement with this book, want to make sure each of you can kind of bring that out. We need to have a follow-up conversation or two. In some ways, we just scratch the surface.

But before we get to that, Cy, one thing. I'm just trying to understand in your book. On page 122, this is under the section called Abbiogenesis Hypothesis. You said, I believe that despite all these problems and hurdles, there must be a solution to how life began. I think everyone would agree that there must be a solution to it. Do you mean there must be a naturalistic solution?

If we probed deeply enough, we would understand how, And of course, within your system, you would say that God set it up to play out this way, so God is ultimately the creator and designer behind it. But do you mean if we probe further enough, we'd find kind of a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life in the way you see there being a naturalistic explanation for the origin of species? Or do you see the origin of life qualitatively different than the origin of species? Yes, the latter. I see it qualitatively different. I do have a naturalistic view of evolution, and I think the holes that we now have, and we have a lot of holes, by the way, one of the things I didn't come up with is human beings. I don't think that evolution, as we know, it explains very much about us. So in that regard, I would certainly agree with Doug. But in, in going

back to your question about that sentence. That sentence, you know, we're all writers and you know how it is with writing, right? Sometimes things can flow and sometimes you're stuck for an hour or a day. That sentence was tough. And I deliberately left it unclear because the fact is I don't know. I don't know whether there will ever be, I kind of doubt that there will ever be a naturalistic explanation based on what we now know. and who knows what can come up in the future in terms of biochemistry, some new principle may be involving cognition or involving agency that at this point we have no idea how that could be. So I don't know.

It's possible, but as I said, if it was something that would be naturalistic to the point of just saying, well, it's just chemistry. We have already found it, and we haven't. So I think that's not going to happen. And if anything that happens, if anything, it's going to be, well, I don't know. But again, my own belief, my view, is that nothing like that is going to happen unless it includes a divine creator. Because I really do believe that life is divinely created.

Okay, that's really helpful. Let me, Sigh, let me ask you one more question about this. Sure. Help us understand what you consider the evidence from biology for God and for design. And you even say from evolution to there being a God. What is that evidence and how does it point from the biology itself to a designer? Yeah. Well, as I said, the origin of life, which includes such things as the origin of information.

Now, information has several different definitions and things get very crazy, but if we just look at information defined as we know it, not in physics, but as we know it in regular life, something means something, okay, meaning, the genetic code has meaning. It is the first example of meaning in the universe, and it's only found in life. Where did that come from? And, you know, as Doug said, we're basically reflecting Steve Myers' signature in the cell and other work. But it's an extremely good point. We don't know where information came from. I heard somebody say recently, there's information everywhere. Tree rings are information.

No, no, no. Yeah. We can get information from tree rings, but they are not information. They weren't put there to tell us how old the tree was. the genetic code was put there to tell the ribosome what proteins to make. That's information of a kind that never existed before. Where does that come from? Where do you get information from?

You know, and how do you even explain what information is without already having life? So to me, that's part of it. And everything else about life is like that. the complexity, the agency, the fact that every single, excuse me, every single worm, every single bacterium does stuff by itself. It doesn't wait for, you know, gravity or wind or something to do. It does things, it makes a decision and it goes here or goes there or does whatever. That's only life. Where does that come from? Where do we get agency from? And I don't see any of that coming from evolution either.

I don't see any of the critical original components of life. It couldn't have evolved because we don't have the mechanism to do evolution. Evolution requires a very advanced mechanism. So that's not in the picture for explaining anything. And I agree with Doug. A chance, don't be silly. I mean, you're not going to get a genetic code by chance. You know, it's just silly.

And physics, well, we've tried. that we've tried we've looked at chemistry and physics as hard as we can and brilliant people i mean jack shell stack is a Nobel prize winner he's one of the leading origin of life guys he's genius we're not getting anywhere so it's the creation is telling us something it's telling us listen to god he's the truth Doug let me let me come over to you before we come to kind of final thoughts Sight shared a couple things about agency, how he doesn't think evolution has the capacity to explain away agency. Made a point earlier that he has confidence in natural selection in terms of origin of species, but is very skeptical when it comes to the origin of life. How confident are you, you express that you have very little confidence in natural selection to explain the origin of species?

are you less confident the origin of life? Do you look at both those completely just improbable, mathematically speaking, or do you assess them differently? And what's your take on evolution explaining agency? Okay, great, great questions. First of all, speciation is a tricky thing. I'm not saying that natural processes can't explain speciation, because if you get into the technical details of what is a species,

There can be fairly simple natural processes where you isolate, divide a population, you end up with something that could be called speciation. I'm talking about natural selection explaining the origin of radically new forms. And there I think it's absolutely impossible. It's impossible for the same reason that origin of life is impossible. You have to get too many things together and all of them are important. probable by naturalistic blind processes. So if you put the whole thing together, it's just never going to happen.

I call it functional coherence in my book, and I argue that anything that has a high-level functional coherence, it has to happen by intelligence. There's no other cause for it. So that's the case for the origin of life. But if I compare how much has to come together to get a simple bacterial cell from raw chemical ingredients to what has to come together in a world that has simple bacterial cells to get a human, the second one is harder than the first. They're both impossible, but the second one is harder than the first. There's much more that you would have to do to convert it bacterial cell

into a human being than what you'd have to do in my estimation to convert raw chemicals into a bacterial cell. But they're both way beyond the plausibility of chance. Another thing I would add to this is I don't really like, I don't like to think that whenever we have a negative statement that this is not possible, that we're saying something that has to be held tentatively in a way that positive statements don't have to be held tentatively. You can demonstrate that things are not possible. So it's not just that, well, we gave up, we tried, and we and do it. Maybe they'll do it in 10 years, maybe they'll do it in 20 years. There are certain things you can show why it will never happen. We gave up on alchemy.

We don't say, well, you know, it didn't work so far, but maybe alchemy will work. We know why it doesn't work. So there can be an advance of knowledge that precludes certain things ever working. And in that case, you don't say, well, maybe someday they'll come up with it. Say, no, we now know why it will never, this will never happen. And we know why. And relevant to the whole issue of information. William Dembski is a great thinker on the subject of complex information and information theory. He has a manuscript that will come out this summer, which is a general and simplified proof of the conservation of information. I've seen the manuscript that's coming out this summer. If he's wrong, then he's wrong. If he's right, this is a demonstration of why you cannot get

high information things without an intelligence putting that information in. And that would preclude the origin of life, but it would also preclude the development of diversity of life by natural causes without an intelligent agency from a simple protobacterium. Was there a second thing you asked me about? That was a great answer. One of the questions that Sai has pointed towards was that agency and purpose. Oh, agency. Yeah.

Yeah, there's an openness in biology. I think you said, say, over the last three to four years to teleological language that in the past, that wasn't allowed at all. Yeah.

One of the things I'm trying to understand is it seems to me, and both you could correct me if I'm wrong, there's a difference between saying a, a bug acts with some kind of purpose to escape a predator or to find food. Like it seems completely,

undeniable that there are those kinds of purposes within the natural world. And like you said, SIE, human beings clearly act with purpose. I think the only reason anybody would ever deny that is if they had a clear materialistic bias that just ruled it out from the get-go. That seems to me differently from saying there's purpose when we look at the structure of a bug. We look at the DNA of the bug. So acting with a kind of purpose is different than what I think intelligent design proponents are saying, saying we can look at features of the world and not say they're acting with purpose, but they were made with purpose and they point towards a designer beyond themselves. Does that make sense, Cy? Would you agree with that distinction? And then I want to come back to

you and get your take on that, Doug, if you will. Okay. Yeah, I think that that's, I wouldn't disagree with that. I mean, I have to think about it a little bit, but I think that does make sense. Part of the creation of life was to instill every organism, probably the very first ones, if we're talking about an evolutionary pathway, with a sense of purpose and the ability to act on it.

And that, you know, some people will say, well, that's just evolution, because the ones who had a purpose survived than the others didn't. But where did it come from? I mean, how does a single cell get all of that? And, you know, how does it get the point where it knows what it should do and it does it? That's a mystery.

And that we don't know what that comes from. And I think it comes from the creation. It's part of the creation, as you just said. Okay, that makes sense. Doug, your thoughts on purpose and agency, as Sai writes in his book. teleology, purpose, agency. Cy also uses the word cognition. It is very interesting that these words were verboten strictly until relatively recently. And I think people realized, oh, hang on, we don't want people to get the wrong idea.

We're talking about, you know, why this, what is the purpose of this enzyme? We've been taught to put it in more sterile terms, what's its function, what's its activity. Don't imply that it's supposed to do something. Just describe what it does do. And oh, by the way, it's pretty interesting that it does that and pretty helpful that it does that. So I think biologists have wrestled with this from the beginning because you look at biological systems. It's almost impossible to talk about them. I would say it is impossible to talk about them without talking about purpose and why things are there

and how they do what they're supposed to do. And, oh, this is broken, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. You can talk about geology without any of those terms. The volcano is not supposed to do something. It just does do things. But you can't talk about biology that way. So it's interesting, but it's also complex because a lot of the people that side quotes, and he knows this, I'm not revealing anything new, like the third way people,

they would distance themselves. They're still naturalists. they would distance themselves from a conclusion that God is above any of this. So they want to use purpose language, but they want to remove any sort of theistic implications from it. And I think that's a tricky dance in the end because you're talking language that's begging for a ultimate, high-level purpose. And it's going to be very difficult to continue down that path without opening that door. But I think that's what they're trying to do, paradoxically. I kind of think along the lines when it comes to agency, consciousness, cognition, and moral sense,

those are the categories that atheists, interestingly, Thomas Nagel, philosopher of mind, uses. And those are the categories that led him to reject materialism. And he says, this cannot be a material universe. I don't want there to be a God above it. I have my own personal reasons for not wanting there to be a God above it. But this definitely is not a material universe. And the reason is consciousness, cognition, and moral sense are real. And he as an atheist says, I can't deny it.

Not only are they real, they're at the centered reality. So we need a new version of naturalism, a new conception of nature that puts those at the middle. I think that's a, it's a bold and brave step. I think ultimately you can't go that far without abandoning your. naturalism and ultimately your atheism. I think it's just walking into a theistic understanding of reality. So I object mildly to use of cognition, certainly consciousness, agency in a way that's stripping away an immaterial component. because I think for those terms to mean what they really want to mean, you have to have an immaterial component. People who are using those terms don't want that.

So they're trying to give a material interpretation of that. Doug, that's really helpful. Let's go ahead and this conversation. There's so many different strains we could go down. I looked at the clock. It's gotten away from me. I want to ask you each just for kind of final thoughts. Maybe there was a point that was made that you didn't respond to or a point in your book that you want to.

advanced side that didn't come out. I want to kind of give you a chance to each just kind of make final points, but I know some people sitting here going, you've been talking for an hour and a half and you didn't talk about theological issues. What about death before the fall? What about age of the earth? Although that's scientific too. That's because I'm talking with two scientists.

That would be another conversation for another day. Sai, final thoughts. Yeah. I did want to bring something out from my. book, which again, relates to cognition because that was the most shocking thing that I was amazed at what I was reading when I saw it even looking at the literature about cognition in bacteria. So I'm just going to read a very short, it's like five lines from the book about cognition. Bacteria also have biochemical systems that allow them to use current

conditions to predict and deal with future events. They can learn, for example, that a change in temperature under certain conditions is followed by a change in oxygen levels. Then, by measuring temperature, they will make adjustments to adapt to new oxygen levels before those changes actually take place. I mean, that's bacteria. It's amazing. I know people who can't do that kind of thing. I mean, they have what is brought out in the book is the details of how all bacteria, all single cells have receptors, and they communicate by signal transduction, and they become aware of themselves. They know when there's a bunch of them together at the same time so they can do things like, oh, let's all hypermutate because, you know, we have a poison here and we have to get a mutation that will save at least a few of us.

I mean, it's amazing when you look into the details. And that chapter in my book is my favorite. It's called Agency Cognition and Teleology Act. It goes into a lot of scientific information that I would say almost nobody is aware of because this has all been in the literature. The scientific literature has not gotten into any popular venues yet that I know of. And to summarize, to give a final comment, you know, I don't know how this book will do. I may be very wrong on a lot of things.

I may be wrong on everything from the evolution up to this, you know, idea of new theories and new ways of thinking. But if I'm not wrong about any of it, I'm hoping that it will make a difference, especially related to the issue of Christian unity, and this is sort of getting off the topic we've been discussing all along, but I believe that in the world of today, we need Christian unity wherever we can get it. And I see that, you know, Doug and I have a strong disagreement

about natural selection. It doesn't bother me. I mean, I would say to people who agree to Doug and people agree with him, great. If that's what you think, it's not going to affect anything. It's not going to bother me. It's not going to have any effect on the world. It's the way you believe. You believe in Jesus Christ as the center of the universe, as the savior of humanity. So do I. And that simple statement is so important and so powerful these days. That's what we need to keep in our minds all the time. And, you know, eventually the truth will come out. And I, you know, we'll find out one way or the other. I mean, I'm looking forward to that. It's going to happen, you know, not that long in the future.

So when I find out, I'll be able to say, oh, man, Doug was right all along. Damn it. Or I'll say, thank God. I said something right. Thank you, Sire. That's great. Doug, final thoughts? I would just finish by saying it's been a delight to read your book.

Sye, look forward to meeting you at some point. I love the way your passion for the truth comes out and the way you write. And I mark up books as I read and I've got pencil marks all over your book. And well over half of what you wrote, I agree with. Some of it I agree with emphatically. So there's all these all caps, yes, exclamation point, exclamation point. There are the points where we disagree. I even love the fact that you're willing to think more about the points where we disagree

because I think there's real possibility of closing what everyone thinks of as being a huge intellectual gap. If both parties are willing to look at evidence and willing to be shown a new way of looking at things, and I am willing to re-examine my skepticism toward natural selection. I've put a lot of work into studying. I love the fact that Sye is willing to look at things in a new and fresh way. And as I said, so many of the things that you said, Sye in the book, surprised me in a positive and helpful way because I've had interactions with people who wouldn't have taken the steps that you've taken. And I love that you've taken them.

Great response. I would love some people to weigh in on some of the evidence that we talked about that really is kind of the dividing line between natural selection, being efficient. vacacious or not, as well as some of the other mechanisms alongside with it. Now, if you're going to make a video and just bash one side of the other, don't tag me because that's not helpful to anybody. But if you think you can add positively to the conversation, please do so and tag me. I'd like to see where this conversation goes. And I hope it invites some scientists on all sides of this to just weigh in with the evidence and maybe move the ball forward a little bit. thoroughly enjoyed this.

Appreciate both of you taking the time to come on. Cy thoroughly enjoyed your book. It's well written. It's interesting. I think it's gracious. It's going to move the ball forward in terms of the conversation. And Doug, love having you as a colleague. I hope people will pick up a copy of your book, Undeniable,

that lays out some of your critique of natural selection and evolution, but your case for intelligent design as well. Folks, make sure you hit subscribe because we are going to do some other shows like this in the future. If there's a conversation you want me to host or individuals related to science and faith or beyond, tag me right down below what those conversations are in the area of worldview and apologetics. We want this to be helpful to you.

And in our Masters of Apologetics program, we also have a master's in science and religion. Doug does some teaching for us in that at times. We really go into detail on some of these issues. And I think in the future we should take your book, Si, as a text, and just interact with it. I think that's one reason you wrote it. Fellows, this has been a joy. We'll do it again. Thank you.

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