The Sean McDowell Show - This Scientist Says Darwinism Can’t Explain Life… Here’s Why

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Today, we sit down with Dr. Doug Axe, a molecular biologist, Caltech and Cambridge researcher, and author of Undeniable. He's here to discuss one of the most consequential questions in science: could a functional protein arise by chance? This protein folding experiment changed everything and is why Doug became a Darwin doubter at Berkeley. Join us Tuesday April 21 at 4:30 PT to follow up on the conversation. READ: Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed As Featured in the Film, The Story of Everything Paperback by Douglas Axe (https://a.co/d/0bl4aHUO) *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.

Life Audio. Is AI in any way making this easier or harder for people who are trying to explain the origin of the protein? Like, do we have better tools to figure out how it could happen materially? Or is it making people go, oh my goodness, even with AI, we can't explain this. You train an AI on here's what protein structures look like. Here's what they do. Here's their amino acid sequence. If you give them a million of these, there's a paper that where they tried that, they didn't even

and get structures, but they looked at a chemical, a catalytic function, and they got catalytic function to go up somewhat, but they acknowledge in the paper that it's nowhere near the catalytic function that you get in actual enzymes. How strong is the evidence for design in biology? Despite claims that Darwin defeated the argument for design, our guest today, one of the leading proponents of intelligent design who has studied or done doctoral research at Caltech, Berkeley, and Cambridge, says the evidence for design is undeniable. That's right. Undeniable.

He is featured a movie set for theatrical release called The Story of Everything. He's a colleague of mine at Biola, and we'd invite you to join us because this Tuesday, live at 430 Pacific Standard Time, we're going to take your questions. So if you have a challenge or an objection to something shared here, write it in as a comment or email me questions at shan macdow.org, and Dr. Doug Axe will be back in person. to address those questions. Welcome back to the show. Great to be here.

So something I've really wanted to know about you, and I think it's a great place to start is how you became a Christian. Did the design arguments play a role at all, or did you discover them after becoming a believer? Yeah, I don't think they did. So I was not raised in a Christian home. I probably would have called myself a Christian. We had a Bible at home, but we didn't go to church.

My mother started to really feel angst about this. as her four kids were in their teen years. I was 14 years old. So she was praying, and the Lord really answered her prayers in a spectacular way. Within a space of a few months, we all started going to church. I heard the gospel message for the first time. My parents did as well. I think on two different evenings at this church, this was up in the Bay Area, in Walnut Creek, California. My parents were baptized, and then the four of us kids were baptized. The next, the next cycle round. So everything changed for us very quickly. And then, you know, later on, I was at Berkeley. I was thinking about worldview for the first time because I knew I had a

Christian worldview. And I also knew that Berkeley didn't share my Christian worldview. And I thought back, and I can't, I can't say for sure, how did I think about evolution before I was a believer? My recollection is I thought it was I thought it was kind of fluff science. I didn't find it to be compelling. As I said, I would have believed, I said I believe in God, and I did, but I didn't have any really firm foundation. So it certainly wouldn't have been from a scriptural foundation that I would have rejected it when I was a 12-year-old say. It just would have been, I gravitated toward the physical sciences. They seemed solid and, you know, irrefutable knowledge comes out of that. And I found, found the sort of fossil arguments to be patchy and not compelling. But then this all changed when I actually devoted myself to it. So it started to become a question that was important for me to address. It makes total sense when you're a college student. You've been a believer, maybe two, three, four, five years, and all of a sudden you're a Christian in a place like Berkeley. You've got to land the plane on some of these questions. And you've come out pretty clearly

as a Darwin doubter. So I want to know your doubts now, because you said it originally wasn't really motivated by theology or Bible. Are your doubts now theological, philosophical, scientific? Is it about your job at Biola? If you change your belief, you lose your job? Like, seriously, when you get down to it, why are you a Darwin doubter? Yeah. So I think it started with this, you know how you get your antenna quiver when you see an argument that looks like people are being way too insistent upon something and they're not offering, it looks suspicious to me. Like these people who are being so shrill at rejecting anything but Darwinism don't seem to be able to give a compelling reason for it.

So I think it started with me being a believer being very open to Darwinism being perfectly false, but not having examined it very carefully. But then also noticing that the way people are behaving and defensive this theory is very strange. You don't get people defending F-E-E-quels-M-A this way. You don't get other theories that I consider to be rock-solid, people getting so sort of emotional in their defense of it. And so that kind of drew me to it, like being drawn to a controversy. And then I started reading, and I read books like Daniel not Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. Michael Behees,

Darwin's Black Box. I did read some, I read enthusiastically, Dawkins, the Blind Watchmaker. There's this other Australian guy I'm blanking on, 19... Michael Denton. Yeah, I read Denton's book,

Evolution of Theory and Crisis. Yep. And as I was moving from undergrad to grad, so I was now at Caltech as a grad student, I started to read everything I could. about this. And I started to wonder, what's missing here? Because when I'd read these books that were contra Darwin like Dennett and Behe, I felt like these are strong, but there's something that could be even stronger that they're not. Because they're drawing on what we already know. And I felt like,

can we go out there and find some things that we don't know and actually figure this out in a more convincing way. And that really led me to embark on a research project where I thought, okay, if you had the money and the opportunity, what would you do to try to solve this thing, resolve that one way or the other? That's a great way to put it. I think about my life that way sometimes. Like if money was not an issue, what matters most? It sounds like this issue in your life studying microbiology, you had to settle some of these questions. But if I heard you correctly, you said you're happy to reject Darwinism, but did you feel like if you embrace some kind of evolution that was threatening your Christian faith? Was that a piece of it to you, or not really?

My faith was rock solid. So I knew I was saved by the blood of Jesus and nothing else. I believed scripture to be reliable, but I could also see how Genesis is not trying to be a textbook, is not trying to give a scientific account. So I think I had an open, to, okay, how would, how did God do this? And it could have looked like different things. I rejected just a raw materialism or the idea that just nature can do this. But what it would have looked like and whether there would have been a tree of life or not, I was opening those things. And that's what made me just plunged and say, well, if I could get, if I could get rock solid data on one thing, what would it be that I think would really decisively determine this? And that's what I set out to do.

So we're going to jump into your book, but one more question. Did it ever cost you anything like a relationship or your career or a grade on a paper to push back and challenge some of these ideas? Or was critical thinking welcome in the academy in your experience? Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. So it cost me my job at one point. So I was in the U.K. This was back in 2002. I was working at the Medical Research Council Center in Cambridge. The head over the center was Sir Allen first, and I had a good relationship with him.

And he knew that I was actually being funded. At one point, I was being funded by Discovery Institute. He knew that. I wasn't hiding the funding source. But I also was not coming out of it. and saying, you know what, I'm trying to show convincingly one way or the other whether molecular Darwinism can work. What I did instead was saying I'm working on the protein structure function problems. So I'm looking at how mutations affect proteins. This is all legitimate work.

I didn't, in other words, I didn't reveal why I was going about this. And I had a feeling that if things got controversial, that my position could be in jeopardy. And that did have. happened in the spring of 2002. It happened because there was a school in the UK teaching intelligent design, publicly funded school, teaching Darwinism and design, and got hugely controversial, was debated in the House of Commons. Tony Blair was prime minister at the time. And BBC radio was picking this up and doing all these things on ID, this horrible, subversive idea that's trying to infiltrate education. That's the way they were portraying it. And first came into the lab.

I was the only one in there early in the morning one day, and he was twitchy and nervous. He was listening to this thing on BBC radio, and he was asking me, like, do you know Bill Dembski? I'd say, yes. And he walked out. We had this short conversation I could tell something's going to happen here,

and it might not be good. And it did end up. He didn't contact me, but his assistant contacted me with an email saying, we've run out of space, we need you to leave. And I was like, if not the most senior person there, I was close to it. So I knew that not only was I losing my position,

but he wasn't being frank with me about why. And we're on good terms. So since this, I've had conversation with him, so we're on good terms. And I've even said, I think I said in my book, I might have removed me, if I had been in his position, I might have removed me as well, but I think I would have done it in a, I think I would have had the honest conversation about either you need to change your project or you need to change your location. He would have been totally within his rights to do that. I just didn't like the way it happened. Well, that's understand. I'm glad about two things. Number one, that you're on good terms of them. And number two, that that was part of your journey, getting you here at Biola doing a great job. So obviously not in the route you would have picked, but we're thrilled to have you. Let's jump in your book. It's called Undeniable, which is a bold title, which we will get to. But the chapter one in your book is titled The Big Question. So what do you think is the big question? And what's at stake with how we answer it? I think I put it,

in the book, to what or to whom do we owe our existence. So something around that, who are we as humans, how did we get here and where are we going? You can't ask more important or deep or pressing questions than that in philosophy, for sure. But I think those questions are so important

that you don't need to be a philosopher to ask them. We should all as humans be wrestling with, how do we get, what are we, and why are we on this planet, What is our life for? And so that's the big question. Questions around that, I think. And the question in design directly addresses and leads into those questions.

Because it's, how did we get here? And if we are cosmic accidents, if we live in a universe where physics on an Earth-like planet produces life, complex life, and then it evolves to intelligent life, that gives us an answer to how did we get here? And what are we, really? we are these selected self-replicators that, through a long process, tried various ways, not intentionally, but sampled different possibilities, possible arrangements and ended up with an arrangement that looks like us, and we're not here forever. The sun will burn out and we will go extinct. And that gives you one view for, and a depressing one, in my opinion.

for why we're here, no particular reason. How we got here is chance in nature, and where we're going is it's going to be then. Back to the grave. Yeah, yeah. I think it was biologist Will Provine, who said if a materialistic view of evolution is true, not common descent, which you cited earlier,

that you were initially open to, there's no human value, there's no morality, there's no meaning, there's no human value, human value, there's no life after death. These are the big questions. And at the heart of it is, is there a creator? And do we bear the mark of design? Of course, the Bible starts there with, in the beginning, God created.

Yeah. So you hit at that in your book, which I really appreciate you, you start there. Okay, so let's talk about the prevailing worldview that you're kind of contrasting with is materialism. Yeah. Now, I heard you in a conference we were both speaking at recently together. you said this is not the only worldview. There might be new age worldviews. There could be an Islamic worldview. But maybe just briefly remind us what you mean by materialism and how significant you think it is in our culture and in the academy today.

So by materialism, I also call it physicalism, which might be a slightly more accurate way to put it. But it's basically the idea that there isn't anything but the physical universe. So the stuff that physicists try to explain and study, that's the sum total of everything. And so if you say, well, what is God then or what is a human? A human has to be just by this view, just a physical thing. So what we're doing right now is to a physicalist is being directed by synapses firing in our brains. We are chemical assemblages that are doing what we evolved to do. And it gets controversial when you ask, well, can we trust our thinking if we're just

evolved things, and that's a very good question that philosophers have asked. Great question. But to a materialist, a physicalist, there isn't anything other than physical. And if you ask them, well, what is God to you? They would say, God is an invention of evolved intelligent beings, that for some reason we became culturally complex as we emerged from the great apes. And in order to make society work, we invented religion and God so that there's an authority figure that helps us keep things in order. I think that's what a materialist would say. It's closely

wed to atheism because if you're an atheist, you reject God. You really, all worldviews need to have an explanation for us. What is a human? And if you reject God, you almost always accept Darwin's theory of evolution. I know one atheist who doesn't, but you're almost always a materialist. And you say, well, there isn't anything but the material universe. So you're really putting physics in place of God. When life unravels, hope can feel out of reach. But what if God is still weaving something beautiful? I'm Kirby Kelly.

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And the sum total of everything is whatever physics does. So that's materialism. And the reason I, if you, for most of us, we have friends and acquaintances who are not Christians but a small fraction of those would be materialist atheist. I venture to guess. It depends on what circles you run in, but I think a lot of people would find, no, my friends are, they like, you know, religiosity,

they like Oprah, they like to think in spiritual terms. They don't think of themselves as atheists, or maybe they're Muslim or Hindu. So a reasonable question would be, well, why focus on materialism and atheism if it's not like? the number to faith on the planet. And the reason I think is really important is because Christianity and physicalism

both have a claim to science in a unique way. So you'll find a lot of, I've found a lot, and I'm sure you run into them too, physicalists, atheists who say, I became an atheist by doing physics, by studying physics. the more I learned about how the physical universe operates, the more I realized that God is superfluous

and the more compelling the case for atheism became. So this may not be the most popular worldview out there, but I think it's really important, particularly for people who have an interest in science, because scientists in your textbooks will encounter materialism or naturalism, which is a slightly nuanced version of materialism, much more often than you encounter other religions, say.

That's a real helpful way to look at it because if materialism or physicalism is real, we can see the emphasis on science being authoritative because scientists study physical matter. Philosophers, theologians, apologists like myself, study things that are inventions and they're not real. And I would say you're right. Probably the vast majority of Americans are not materialists and beyond. It was Christian Smith sociologies who talked about moralistic therapeutic deism. Sure. There's kind of a God who's out there, but he's not involved in my life. He just wants me to feel good and be good.

But there's a functional kind of materialism or naturalism that's also in the church. I think there's a lot of Christians that do we really believe in supernatural powers like angels and demons? Do we really believe in the power of prayer, miracles? And so even if people aren't hardcore materialists, these kinds of arguments seat down and have an outsized influence in the church and in the culture. hence I think it's important to push back. So here's what you write boldly, and I love this. In undeniable, you say, for me, there is no debate. The scientific facts are in complete harmony with the universal design intuition.

Now, specifically, what scientific facts do you think best support design? Well, this is what I started working on as a postdoc, and I was like chomping at the bit as a grad student thinking, I was at Caltech as a grad student. And I was framing these ideas and thinking, what would I do if I had a lab, if I had money and lab at my disposal or equipment at my disposal, what would I do? What would the one question be that I would address to try to lay this matter to rest, this matter being Darwinian evolution? and I landed on looking at a single gene that encodes a single protein in a bacterial organism. The easiest organism to work with, you can have these genes in a test tube outside of bacteria and you can manipulate them, you can make variants of them, you can make what they call library. So millions of different variants of a gene that have genetic changes to them, stick them back in the bacteria. All this stuff is routine, much easier than, say, working with,

mice much easier than working, you know, doing anything with humans is virtually impossible for good reasons. But you just have to sort of infer things from what genetic mutations you find in humans. Very hard for good reasons to do experiments on humans. Bacteria, it's easy. So I thought, I'm going to look at a single gene that encodes. So genes are, it's DNA, it's the double hewis, Aces, Gs, and T's, they encode in bacteria in a very simple way the sequence of amino acids that get strung together to make a protein. And a protein is a chain of these 20 different amino acids. If they have the right properties, they fold into marvelously complex shapes,

three-dimensional shapes, and they do complex things, like they do chemistry, they can be parts of a motor, they can be scaffolding. So much more complex than Legos, but like Lagos, you can build things out of them that makes life cells. And this is not just bacteria. This is us, too. All of life depends upon proteins. But unlike Legos, they're using thousands and thousands of very different forms,

whereas Lagos, you've got your one thing and you stick it together in lots of different ways. These things have complex structures that enable them to do their function, and their functions all biologists describe them in purposeful terms, like what the role of this enzyme is to do this in this metabolic pathway, because there's just no other way to do it. So my thinking was, I'm going to take an example. Okay, so let me clarify. You're not trying to explain just the origin of the cell itself. You're focused on a particular protein, which is a part of many proteins that build a cell.

So you're kind of starting on what might be considered a simple, task to accomplish before you get to the cell and beyond? For sure. So if you take a simple, the simplest bacterial cell would have approaching a thousand different genes that encode a thousand different protein forms, all of which are essential for it to do what it does. Now, there's debate over what's the simplest cell. There are some cells that are obligate parasites that have to live inside another cell.

If you talk about free living cells, the sort of thing that could just live in a pond or puddle, they need well over a thousand of these genes. So that gives you an idea for how many genes and proteins you have to have, even have very simple life work. And my idea was not to say, I wasn't specifically saying what makes a cell work. I was saying, how did any one of these proteins come about? How hard is it to get DNA arranged in a sequence that produces one of these folded forms that actually works? And so I thought, There had been some experience where people just threw together random DNA and try to see if it does anything. You can argue if you don't look for actual structure or function that it might be doing something, very simple.

But I thought a better way to do this is look at an existing folded enzyme structure, a protein, and see how delicate it is, how sensitive it is to changes in the amino acids. So I messed up, basically an existing enzyme, put millions of these messed up versions in bacterial cells, and let them tell me whether it works or not, because it's the enzymes function that I chose to work on. It makes bacteria able to survive in the presence of penicillin, which is, that's the famous first antibiotic. You put penicillin on a petri dish,

put bacteria on the petri dish, they can't survive, they get killed, unless they have this special enzyme that deactivates the penicillin. So I thought, well, I'll mess up the enzyme and let the bacteria tell me which or what fraction of these messed up versions still work because those would be bacteria that on a plate with penicillin form a colony.

And if they don't form a colony, it's because it doesn't work. And that way I could actually get a fraction of these messed up versions that work and I could start to do math on it. Like, okay, how hard is it for one of these things to work? Okay, that makes sense.

So you're not really studying evolution itself, like biological evolution. You're studying what might be called chemical evolution at its very base and taking something that already exists, breaking it down. And so in a minute, I want you to tell us what you found, but what would have confirmed in your mind kind of the materialistic worldview? Like if you found this, you would have said, okay, I've got to concede that materialism can explain this. Yeah, so I had done some calculations, and I thought these protein chains, amino acid chains,

are typically hundreds of amino acids in length. I looked at a chunk of one protein that was about 150, so not even a full protein. And if you do the math of how, like say half of the amino acids are fine at every location, then you have kind of like a binary. It's almost like zeros and ones. did you get it right or not. If 10 work at each position and it might differ which 10, then it's almost like a binary chain. But even with binary,

if you have a long enough string of zeros and ones, you've got a very, very improbable, even a binary string. So, yeah, two to the tenth power is roughly equal to 10 to the third. So there's about a thousand ways to arrange zeros and ones, 10 long. but if you make it a hundred long,

you've now multiplied that by a very large factor. So instead of two to the ten, you got two to the hundred is ten to three raised to the tenth. So that's going to be ten to the thirty. You now have a very, very rare chain, even if half the amino acids worked at any given location. My suspicion went into this is it's not going to be anywhere near half.

So I had already sort of spitballed it and thought, I can't see any way that getting proteins is going to be probable. And is 10 to the 30 an extraordinary and probably 1 in 10 to the 30? Well, when you consider that the total number of organisms on the planet is maybe 10 to the 40th, in all of history, you're approaching numbers where there just hasn't been enough opportunity to sample things that could succeed at hitting a target that small. So in order for, you asked what could make materialism work, it would have to be that a protein chain almost doesn't care which amino acid goes where and it will still fold.

But it seems so implausible to me, I didn't believe it. There were people at the time that I did this experiment that were arguing that it's almost binary. you just have to have hydrophobic amino acids in the right place and hydrophilic. So that would be binary. Just get hydrophobic and hydrophilic right, and the thing will fold. I quickly found that that was not the case. It's much more subtle than that.

So I came up with a number that's much more scary than if it were binary. It's not nearly that friendly to evolution. Okay, so tell me if this is fair enough without making it too simplistic. We're dealing with probabilities here and say we want to, to spell out the word cat well c first there's 26 options and then to get an a there's now 26 options so it's 26 times 26 and then the t is 26 this is exponential growth at some point you hit a number that's so big it couldn't possibly happen by chance and of course in the flip side if we see a complex word like hydrophilic we for sure know that this was the result

of an intelligent mind who spelled it out. We see Cat, we go, I mean, maybe there's a chance if the letters fell, it could spell that out. Well, one of the things you'd say with Cat is, well, it didn't have to be Cat, it could have been bat, it could have been C, it could have been. There's all these three-letter words that it could have been, and it just happened to be Cat. And you can get a catalog. How many three-letter words are there? I don't know. Off the top of my head, there's a lot of them. And if you take 26 raises to third power, take the number of three-letter words, divide it by that. It gives you roughly the size of a target that would be needed to, by chance, get a three-letter word.

And you can get three-letter words. I use alphabet soup in my class, and you put a picture of alphabet soup. You can find messy three-letter words. You start going to four-letter, five-letter, six-letter, small phrases. It becomes just astronomically more improbable because, as you said, you have to multiply these improbabilities along the way. So how improbable is it to get, I think you said, 150 amino length chain. It's like maybe not even quite a workable protein, but let's make the most simple one conceivable. What's roughly the math or the odds? Was that one times 10 to 1030, or did I mishear what the number would be for that protein? For getting the one I examined? Forgetting the one, yeah. Yeah, I was saying 10 to the 30 would be if it were just simple,

hydrophobic polar 50-50. Okay, that's right. If at each position, you had like 50% odds of being okay, then you'd get something like 10 to the 30. I got something that's much worse than that. And I took a careful account of hydrophobic and polar because I, it's a little bit complicated, but I made sure that all my chains were, all the sequences that I introduced to these bacteria were being hydrophobic where they should be and hydrophilic where they should be. But I let it shuffle within those constraints. And even when you do that, you find, find that a very substantial majority of amino acids are not good at any given position. Or another way to put that is there's a pretty strict requirement.

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forms a fold that's ready to perform a particular function. And that's, if you just say, well, how much higher is 77 than 30? We're used to just think of numbers. Well, it's only double. But no, this is the exponent. So 10 to 30 times 10 to the 30 is 10 to the 60, and that's 17 orders of magnitude smaller than 10 to the 77. It's mind-boggling.

We're not used to dealing with numbers this large. I use a way of illustrating, what would it be like to blindfolded, throw a dart, and hope to hit a target that's one part in 10 to the 77th of the whole, say, wall or the whole thing that you could hit. And you think, okay, that's a small bullseye on a big wall.

How small is the bullseye and how big is the wall? It turns out for it to be one part in 10 to the 77th, it would be a bullseye the size of a hydrogen atom on a wall the size of a sphere enclosing the visible universe. So you can't even visualize that, right? These are numbers that are beyond comprehension. Isn't the number of atoms in the universe

one times 10 with 80 after it. Yeah, so we're approaching like there's one marked atom in the universe and that's the jackpot. Go pick an atom and look at it and see if that's the marked one. We're approaching odds like that. That's fantastic. I call it fantastically improbable is a term I coined in the book to mean once you have an improbability that's beyond even the probabilistic resources of the entire. universe for billions and billions of years, you might as well say it's the stuff of fantasy.

So it's not just improbable or extremely improbable. It's fantastically improbable. Because most people don't have, you think of winning the California lottery is that's improbable. It is improbable, but these are mild improbabilities compared to what we're talking about. It'd be like winning it. I don't even know how many thousands or millions, maybe billions of times, who knows, which at some point, it's actually, you mentioned William Dempsey earlier, In 2008, we wrote a book Understanding Intelligent Design. We're updating it. And, of course, he's a PhD mathematician and studied the universal probability bound.

Yeah. Meaning, given the amount of time and resource the size of the universe, we can actually say certain things are functionally impossible. Right. And you're saying just alone, this one protein itself is at that or far beyond it. So it's logically possible. but in terms of saying that's believable and a good explanation, it's beyond ridiculous. Is that a fair way to frame it?

That's for sure, true. Now, I don't think it meets the, I don't think one protein meets the Dembsky one, because his is like 10 to the 120 or something like that. You take the plank time. I think he pushed it back to be like as conservative as possible. If you take something that's biologically not insane, it would have to be under 10 to the 40th. because if you're talking about evolution,

evolution isn't happening in the sun right now, in the galaxy. So the vast majority of the matter that is in our visible universe is irrelevant. There aren't organisms evolving. So if you limit it to how many, if you limit it to one planet and say how many organisms have ever existed on planet Earth in the entire history of life, you end up with a number that's not larger than about 10 to the 40. and those would be the maximum opportunities for mutations to come up with something new.

So once you have a target that's smaller, significantly smaller than one in 10 to 40, you really got something that the sampling that has happened in the entire history of life could not have hit a target of that. Okay, I want to remind people, if you're listening and you're skeptic or critic and you're like, I'm not convinced, here's the study online or here's the fact that disproves this, email me questions at shan mcdowd.org write it in as a comment we have dug coming back live tuesday at 430 and we will tackle some of these now in a minute i'm going to come back to some of the objections you've received in the academic world and you've addressed a lot of these but you talk

about you mentioned this early on what you call the universal design intuition yeah so we've started was saying the beginning of this protein materialistically is functionally impossible. It's fantastic. That's critiquing materialism. Then we want to know, okay, is there positive evidence for design? Because the most common rebuttal is this is kind of God of the gaps. You're saying, no, we can actually infer design from this, but your approach is a little different than Dembski's approach, Behe's approach. You lean into this universal design intuition. So tell us what it is and why you think we can trust that when it comes to your work. Yeah. So I actually, I came across this when I was doing the initial work that was like putting together the ideas to become the book that became undeniable.

And something I came across, this may be the quote I've used more often, other than scripture, is Alison Gopnik wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal. She is, is a real thing. She is was at the time, and I don't know if she still is. She was a UC Berkeley psychology professor. She may still be. And in this article, she wrote, elementary, by elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate Godlike designer to explain the complexity of the world around them. Even children brought up as atheist, end quote. And I took it from the article that she was an atheist. She was talking about the work of someone else, Deborah Kellerman, who had actually done these studies and shown, mom and dad don't have to be talking about God, they could be atheists and

raising up son and daughter as atheist. But these kids, by, say, age four, when they see a butterfly in the back garden, they just automatically, they intuit that this had to have been made by a godlike designer. And that surprises mom and dad, because they've never mentioned a godlike designer. So her point, Gopnik's point, was, this is bad because we seem to have this sort of by nature, we seem to get this way of understanding things that we then have to educate out of kids come middle school, high school. And so the whole article was proposing that we start preschool giving, you know, three-year-olds their lesson in Darwinism, which I thought, well, that's the way you're taking this. Interesting. My take on this is, well, what if they're right? What if the four-year-old

is right? Isn't it interesting? You go to Romans 1 here. Isn't it interesting that we just automatically see this. And you don't have to be in a Christian household. You don't have to be in a theistic household. You could be being raised by atheist parents, and you see this. I thought there's something really startlingly beautiful about that. Now, I did not make the argument that this intuition, that any intuition is infallible. What I did was I started with that intuition because I said, isn't it interesting that we all have this? And then I asked the question, what do you think the kids are seeing when they, because they don't say this when they see a piece of gravel or a puddle, but when they see a dragonfly hovering in the backyard, they just intuit this. And I,

the way I put it in the book is, what are they zeroing in on? And I don't know for sure. It's hard to go back into the mind of a four-year-old, and it's hard to interrogate a four-year-old about how they thought about things. I came up with a rigorous argument. So my approach was, hey, we all see this. Some people are denying it, but can we find a way to show that what those four-year-olds are intuiting is actually factually true? And it may not be the way they're intuiting it, but can we show that there's actually a way to demonstrate that those four-year-olds are actually correct? And so I'm less committed to a claim that I've identified what's going on in the four-year-old's head, because I don't know for sure.

But for sure, you can go and do rigorous assessment and say, I don't know how they're thinking about, but they're definitely right. And it is interesting that you can come up with a very sort of intuitive way of looking at things. I think we have, humans have a very developed intuition about what could be a coincidence and what's beyond coincidence. So there's certain things that if we stumble upon them, we're very, like I mentioned, alphabet soup, if you, you know, have to do a little bit of work and you find a three-letter word in your alphabet soup, fine. But if you, you know, lift a lid on the pan of alphabet soup and it's telling you, don't forget your car keys or something, then you know your wife, like messed around with the alphabet soup. You know that's not a coincidence,

because there's a message in there. So we have, and you don't have to do the math. You don't have to do a calculation. You just know this couldn't have happened by accident. That makes sense. Now this would take us aside, but you mentioned the comment earlier about can Darwinism ground our reasoning faculties? And of course, that's because if our brains were cobbled together by this blind, purposeless process, they weren't designed to understand truth. They just resulted from survival, and we can survive with false beliefs. So here's the case where they're saying, let's root out these intuitions, but let's trust other intuitions. And I'll say, wait a minute, if you're reading out this one, because you believe in Darwinism,

you got to root all of them out to be consistent, but of course nobody actually takes it that far. For sure. Okay, so let's – let me ask you this question. What's been the toughest criticism of your research? I anticipate we'll get some questions people load will have to respond to. But Steelman, one of the toughest objections, maybe online, maybe you've seen in a journal, and what your response would be. I can give you what have been kind of the recurring objections. None of which I consider to be tough, but I'm biased.

Fair enough. That's what I want. So I think you mentioned God of the Gaps. That's a very common, and we could go into what people mean by that. But more specific to this work that was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 2004, it's a study on one enzyme, and I come to a, and it was rigorously peer reviewed by people who do not share my view, went through peer-review. top-notch editor of the journal, head of the European Bioinformatics Institute, was the editor

who handled my manuscript, published in 2004. One of the recurring objections I get, not at the level of Jmb, so I, to be honest, nobody has given a critique that has gone through peer review and is at the level of the paper itself. Oh, wow. I've had lots of people who critique in blogs and, you know, and say, Axis wrong because of this, but it's never been a high-level critique. But a common recurring theme at the lower level is, well, you just looked at one protein, and why would we believe that the numbers you came up with

with one protein would apply to all proteins? Another recurring thing is, actually what I think happened is one guy, named Art Hunt gave a critique of this on a blog called Panda's Thumb the year that the, or several months after the paper came out. For the most part,

everyone has just gone back to that original. I answered, I answered his full critique. And you'll still find if people want to critique Acts 2004, they dig around on the web. It all goes back to Art Hunt, who had some misconceptions about the paper. He's a plant biologist. He actually contacted me and said,

here's what I'm going to put on, Panda's Thumb. can you vet this for me? And I said, I corrected and I said, you haven't actually understood parts of the paper right. Be that as it made. Hunt's critique is what people keep going back to. So another critique has been that he made was Axe actually looked at a,

he actually introduced mutations into this enzyme to make it a weaker enzyme before he did the study, to get the library. So you tainted it in one sense. Yeah. Now, this is all carefully described in the paper, and the peer review said, yeah, you did that the right way.

The reason I did that is I did not want to come up with a probability for getting a highly perfected version of this enzyme. That would be far worse than one in 10 to the 77. That might be one in 10 to the 105th. It would be far worse. I perceived that if I were measuring the information content in a highly optimal enzyme, and I came up with a number, then the critique would have been, you're just looking at a highly optimal one.

Evolution can work on a much lower one. So I anticipated that, and I said, I'm going to make it a wounded, functional, but not at all optimized version of this enzyme. And then I'm going to measure how hard it is to get this low level. So the art hunt critique is actually not understanding that I bent over backwards to make it harder, not easier. To make my number lower, to make the probability less scary by looking at what evolution would need is something that's good enough that you can optimize it. Because mutation selection is a reasonably good local optimizer. If it works and you can do a few mutations to get it to work better, then you'll get that optimized.

We've shown this with beta lactamase in the lab. but you need that starting point. And that starting point has to be an actual folded enzyme that's functioning as an enzyme with an active site, and that's exactly what I started with, and that's how I got the one in 10 to the 77. That's pretty remarkable. Over two decades later,

there's no peer-reviewed published, sufficient defeaters of your work. I think that's really, that's significant. I love to hear that. And I want to remind people listening to, we're in part of a three-part series on the evidence for design, the origin of the universe. Then we have fine tuning, and we've got Steve Meyer, we've got Jay Richards as a part of this.

And you just – one of the reasons I believe in God is you start to add these probabilities together, not just the origin of life, but fine tuning, a universe from nothing. And even some arguments we're not looking at, the argument is really compelling when taken as a whole. And again, you're in the movie, the story of everything that's being released theatrically soon. A couple of questions for you. maybe a couple quick ones, is AI in any way making this easier or harder for people who are trying to When life unravels, hope can feel out of reach. But what if God is still weaving something beautiful? I'm Kirby Kelly. And in my new book, The Fabric of Hope, I want to show you that even in seasons of

suffering, waiting, and uncertainty, God is never absent or far away. Through honest stories and encouragement, this book invites you to see where God is at work stitching the broken pieces of your story with purpose. If you're longing for hope that holds, the fabric of hope is for you. Find it wherever books are sold. Explain the origin of the protein. Like, do we have better tools to figure out how it could happen materially? Or is it making people go, oh my goodness, even with AI, we can't explain this. There's different ways you could go about this. So I haven't read this paper, but I've heard and will read it of a project where they used AI to try to design a new protein. And I'm going to go do

the reading. So I won't give a detail critique. But from what I can see, what they got, so what they do is you train an AI on, here's what protein structures look like, here's what they do, here's their amino acid sequence. If you give them a million of these, which you can now, you can imagine that you could train an AI to spit out sequences that might structurally look like this. Now, when I look at that, I'm thinking, I don't believe it's actually going to be able to give you new protein structures. And I don't believe that's happened here, but there's a paper where they tried that, it appears to me, they didn't even, I think they didn't even get structures, but they looked at a chemical, a catalytic function. And they got catalytic function to go up somewhat, but they

acknowledge in the paper that it's nowhere near the catalytic function that you get in actual enzymes. I've published papers where I've shown you don't have to have a folded protein to do some simple catalysis. And you can have simple, like lemon juice can destroy penicillin. Vinegar can destroy penicillin. It's through a simple acid-based catalysis. You can hydrol. penalized penicillin. Well, a beta lactamase does that much, much, like many orders of magnitude more efficiently by having an enzyme. And that's a key distinction. So I think this AI approach, I think I'll reserve judgment for sure until I'll look at it. Maybe by Tuesday, I'll give you homework for the live Q&A. I'll be able to see more about it. From what I can tell,

they didn't actually nail it. And that would help to show that even, you know, even when you throw millions of structures at something and train it, it's not a slam dunk that you can reconfigure a protein. But even if you could, that's not giving any credence to the idea that natural processes just stumbled upon these things. Clearly, chat GPT is putting out, if I ask it a question, it's putting out sequences of letters and words that are extremely improbable in the space of all probabilities, but it's been trained to put out ones that are highly improbable, but they conform to the patterns that human writing do, to some extent. It has its flaws for sure. But there's another interesting angle on AI, and here I think materialism does get a boost

from AI, and it's the illusion, I think it's an illusory boost, the illusion that a machine can think, if we go back to physicalism, and AI, they have these huge clusters of computers that are doing the training of large language models and other AIs, and then they have powerful computers up in the clouds every time you're asking a question

of Claude or Gemini or ChattieBT. There's nobody at the other end saying, oh, we got a question from Sean. It's a machine that goes in and it spits out the sequence of... It's an algorithm, yep. Yeah. So there is the appearance that you can

have a conversation with a machine. And that means there's the appearance that a machine can think. Now, these are both false, at least with the richest understanding what a conversation is. If you tease apart the meaning of that word, you're not actually having a conversation at all.

And certainly the machine that's spitting back these words is not thinking at all. But there's a powerful illusion. And I think that powerful illusion is probably causing a lot of confusion even among people who are not. material. So Christians, you read of these people who are like having a relationship with a virtual entity that's an AI. And it's a sad thing, I think, but it's also a very confusing thing. Do these

people actually believe there's someone on the other end of this? It's that we have never had conversation with a mere thing. Conversation has always meant there's someone receiving my ideas and giving me their ideas. And now it doesn't mean that anymore necessarily because when ChatsyPT is spitting back a response, there's no idea, it has no ideas. I can interpret what it spit back as ideas, but ChatsypT didn't actually have them.

So that's something that I think needs to be addressed. I'm hoping to address. It's kind of a philosophical question. What is fundamentally the distinction between a machine and a mind and will, once you get that distinction right, will AI ever become like us? And I say it won't, but it's an interesting question. I agree with that.

That's a fascinating question. Of course, I would point out what Stephen Meyer often points out that if you have systems of AI spitting out these protein-type simulations, there's information already put into that system. For sure. And, of course, life from non-life on a materialistic system, there can't be any information input at all. So the DAC is stacked, so to speak.

and doesn't quite simulate what needs to be explained. All right, so we're going to wrap up here. Obviously, at the beginning, we asked a question about the big question. What's at stake with this? You've argued that materialism is not even close to explaining even a simple protein. We have design intuition that points towards this being designed. In your mind, what follows for the big question from this argument alone? If we go back to what or to whom do we owe our existence?

from this design argument, I think you can, it's a robust argument with lots and lots of layers. I've contributed a small piece to it, but if you look at everything that's been done, it's huge. We have a staggering case to be made against the idea that we are alone in a impersonal cosmos that maybe some, you know, some quantum, foam universe generator belched out our universe, and it happened to have the right properties that life could survive in, and planet Earth is a rare planet, but it happened to have properties that allow life to exist, and something caused a first cell, and all of that by accident evolved into us. This can now be robustly, rigorously rejected, and that means we're not cosmic accidents.

And I think if you just go the step of saying intelligent design, okay, some intelligence has to be responsible for us being here. That takes you a big step toward the truth. But I think you also see in what kind of beings are we? Well, we're persons. So now I think it's not just some like AI-type intelligence, pseudo-intelligence. There has to be a personal intelligence behind us

because we embody personhood and something that doesn't have any conception of personhood would not be able to make us. So it takes you in that kind of reasoning very close to the God that we know to be true, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a personal creator of God who had us in mind, created us in his image, and not just for entertainment, but there's a purpose for this.

There's a reason that we're here. and that gives life a whole lot of meaning, even if we go through struggles. And that's when people go through hard things. And those are the times, the hardest times are the times when we most need to be reminded of the truth of who we are and where we're going. Amen. Love it. Love your work.

Now, you're part of this movie coming up called The Story of Everything. I saw an early clip of this. You're interviewed. Jay Richards is interviewed. John Lemicks is interviewed. Stephen Myers interviewed. It is just a first-class top-quality case of what you demonstrate here with a lot of visuals beyond it, like the not just origin

of life, but the fine-tuning, origin of the universe, like you said, a sophisticated, compelling case against materialism that suggests there might be a God and a mind who placed this year for purpose. So I want both believers, I want skeptics to go watch it and check it out. Doug's been great to have you on. Your book Undeniable is excellent, it's thoughtful. You need to write an update now about 10 to 12 years removed from it. Not that the book needs it, but there's been enough time that I'd love to see a follow-up volume from it. Folks, make sure you check out the film in theater support. It's called The Story of Everything.

It is compelling. It is interesting. Bring your friends. Talk about it. Go to a meal before or even afterwards you can dissect it. And make sure you hit subscribe here. We've got a lot more interviews like this coming up on the evidence for God, evidence the revival, evidence for the afterlife. And don't forget, skeptic or believer, write in your tough questions, your objections.

And I will send the best ones to our guest today, Doug Axson. We'll be live here Tuesday, 430 Pacific Standard Time to take your questions. Mark your calendars. We'll see you then. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet. And it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review.

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I lived as a gay man in Hollywood for many, many years until I had a radical encounter with Jesus 13 years ago. Since then, I've gotten my master's degree in seminary and published a book called A Change of Affection. On my podcast, The Becca Cook Show, I sit down with fascinating Christian scholars and thinkers to address the lies of the culture and bring the biblical truth to bear on those lies. To start listening now, go to Life Audio.com or search for the Becca Cook Show on your favorite podcasting platform.