WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Visible Things: Evidence of Design with Dr. Jay Wile

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Eleanor sits down with Dr. Jay Wile, nuclear chemist and author of several Apologia homeschool science textbooks, to talk about the scientific evidence for creationism and how the complexity of creation lead him to discover God.

This is Radio Free Hillso at 101.7 FM, and you're listening to Visible Things, the science podcast that explores the visible world while honoring its invisible creator. I'm your host, Eleanor Whitaker, and joining me today is Dr. Jay Wilde, the award-winning author of several homeschool science textbooks, some of which I read myself in high school and thinker on issues of science and faith. It's great to be here. Yeah, thank you for coming on the show, Dr. Weil. I'm really excited to hear your perspectives on things that people are thinking about in terms of how science is compatible with Christianity.

Sure. So first off, I'd love to hear about your background and your career, what you're doing right now and like some of the steps you did to get there. So actually started my professional life as an actor. Yes. Did a year. And I was in the Union Actors Equity and all of that. Did about a year of professional theater and decided that was not a lifestyle. for me or really a good money maker for me.

But one thing that happened in a lot of these plays is we were using chemistry to do special effects. One of my favorite memories on stage is I was playing pilot in Jesus Christ Superstar. And there's this big glass bowl full of just clear water. And in the process of interrogating Christ, I get some of his blood on my hand. And this becomes an obsession for me. And when there's a lyric where I say, I wash my hands of you. your demolition. I put my hands into that big bull and it all turns red right away. And that's just phenylphaline. I had a little bit of base on my hand and so it turned it, you know, red right away.

And those kind of special effects made me think, you know, well, maybe I should study chemistry. So I went to the University of Rochester and studied chemistry just because of the special effects. But of course, once I got into it, I found out how incredibly fascinating it is. You know, and I kept going to the more mathematical side of chemistry and ended up becoming a nuclear chemist, which is my advisor always said that a nuclear chemist is a chemist who figured out too late in life that he should be a physicist.

And that's really true. So I did research with the National Science found, well, actually initially it was the Department of Energy, did research grants with them. And then when I went to Ball State University to teach, I ended up getting my funding through the National Science Foundation. But I was doing what a lot of people think of as nuclear physics because I was bashing nuclei together.

But specifically, I was trying to look at how nuclei handle excess energy because in a collision like that, there's all sorts of extra energy. What does a nucleus do with that energy? And so that's what was my research. And I was doing that and being a professor and so forth. But then at Ball State at the time, this was the early 90s, it was hard for homeschool graduates to get into most universities. Now, you know, you're more likely to get into an Ivy League school with a homeschool diploma

or homeschool transcript than you are with a public or private school transcript. So things have changed. But in the 90s, it was kind of hard. Ball State had fairly low admission standards. So we had a lot of homeschool graduates. I didn't know anything about them at all, didn't know anything about homeschooling until at the time, my very best chemistry student, came in and asked me a question that required a lot of deep thought just to come up with. And as we were talking about it and everything, I said, well, you know,

you know chemistry really well. You must have a great high school background. Where'd you go to school? And that's when I learned about homeschooling. And so, you know, I kind of took my observations of him and started looking at other students who might have those same characteristics and asking them if they were homeschooled graduates. And it turned out, really, my top students were homeschool graduates. So I decided to, what originally did was just give talks at homeschool convention saying, don't be afraid of college. My best students are your graduates. So don't be afraid.

Here's how to fill out applications to make your student look more attractive to the university and so forth. But pretty soon I started writing curriculum for them because I found out a lot of homeschoolers were stopping in junior high and sending their kid to high school, predominantly because of science and math. And so I wrote my high school homeschool curriculum simply to encourage parents that they could keep their children home even for high school.

And so that's, I'm still doing that. I'm writing, you know, science never stops. It's always changing. So I have to add updates all of the time to my books and so forth. And I also teach, I teach online, teach some homeschoolers online.

I also teach at Memorial College, which is an online college. Yeah, that's awesome. And then can you tell me a little bit about your faith background too and how faith formed your science? Sure. So it was actually the other way around initially because I was a pretty outspoken atheist when I was in high school, early high school anyway. And that's just because based on my reading of what I got from the schools, smart people

were atheists. That was one of the lessons I had. So I thought I was a pretty smart guy. So I decided I was an atheist because of that. But the more I started learning about science, the harder that was to be. I mean, it was really hard to be an atheist, especially when in biology. I didn't learn this in biology class because they don't typically teach things like this in biology class. But when I learned about mutualistic symbiosis, you know, two utterly different species working together,

so they both survive in really crazy ways, that's really hard to understand unless it was all thought out beforehand, you know. And so I eventually came to the conclusion there. had to be some sort of creator, but I didn't presume to know who this creator was or anything like that. But eventually, you know, if you start really believing in a creator, you want to learn who it is. So, you know, I was kind of a nerd back then. So I did what any nerd would do to try and figure out something new. I read books. And so I read the Bad Vod Gita with, I think that was my first scripture I read. And that's Hindu. It's lower Hindu scripture. and I read the Quran, which was a waste of time.

I read a collection of Taoist works, which was probably the hardest stuff to really grasp and understand very high-level philosophy, high-level thinking. And then I read the Old New Testaments. And the thing I noticed in the Old New Testament compared to these other scriptures, like the Korean was just horrible literature

and no good philosophy, nothing. But both the Bad Vodhita and the Taoist works, good philosophy. A lot of this beautiful literature, too. But in the scriptures, I had those, good philosophy, beautiful literature. But I also saw science that wasn't in any of these other scriptures. You know, Job talks about air having weight. Science didn't figure that out until Evangelista Torricelli made the barometer in 1640,

but we knew it since the book of Job from scripture that air has weight. Bible talked about an expanding universe long before science considered it. And so I saw all that in scripture. And I thought that was really impressive. That wasn't enough for me, though, but I did read some, I guess we would call apologists for both Judaism, Christianity, and some Eastern religions. And one thing the apologists of Christianity made a big deal of is the prophecies in the Old Testament that came true in the life of Christ. And so that was really impressive to me, too. You know, there's a verse in Zachariah that says how much Christ will be betrayed for,

what's going to happen to the coins, and what they'll eventually purchase. And that really, from my standpoint, was really hard to understand any way, except that this is an inspired work. And so between the science that I saw in the scripture and this prophecies being fulfilled, I ended up really being forced to conclude that Christianity is the best, most rhapsod most rational mindset worldview. And so, you know, that was in my head. It took a while for it to get down to my heart,

but nevertheless, if it hadn't been in my head to begin with it, it would have never gone down. So I was really argued into the kingdom by my own investigation, also some apologists that I read. Wow, that's such a cool story. Yeah, that really points to that this is a rational faith that we have. You can understand it with your mind and then it can come to your heart. Well, I'd love to talk more about some of that.

evidence for a designer and a creator that you have seen in creation, which I'm sure there's an abundant amount. But what are some of your favorite ways, pieces of scientific evidence or parts of nature that when you look at, you're like, wow, how could anyone not believe that God created the universe? Well, yeah, and to some extent, you have to be very careful here because as a scientist, the way you make decisions is based on large swaths of evidence. You don't take a single fact and say, therefore. And I think that a lot of people don't understand that, even a few scientists colleagues of mine don't really understand that. They see one or two data points and make a conclusion, but a good scientific conclusion, it's based on a big swath of evidence, right? So I think

under one of these swaths of evidence would be the incredible design you see in nature. I know Douglas Axe, who's a biochemist, often uses the word over-designed. The universe seems to be, or the biological world seems to be over designed because it's that good. And, you know, one way you can see that, too, is we've seen things in biological systems that we thought were bad design. So one of the classic examples that I was taught in a very, well, when I was at university, was that the vertebrate eye is wired backwards because the light sensitive cells are actually in the back of the retina. and between where the light enters and the light sensitive cells are a bunch of neurons that simply connect the light sensitive cells to the optic nerve. And so they're basically the cables that connect the sensor to the computer, right?

And so the argument is why in the world would you have the light go through all the cabling? Why wouldn't you put the light sensing cells right up front? And so that was just really bad design. I know Richard Dawkins says any engineer would laugh at the idea of doing it this way. But a couple physicists back in 2010 actually analyzed the structure of the retina and said, oh, there's a really good reason light sensitive cells are back there because that way they don't detect the scattered light that comes when the light changes mediums. And so they're back there specifically to make the image clearer.

And so something that is so advanced that we think it's an error for the longest time. You know, it's clear. A real brilliant mind came up with this. This is Radio Free Hillsdale at 101.7 FM. I'm Eleanor Whitaker and I'm talking with Dr. J. Weil. A lot of people have questions about how the Bible is compatible with Scripture and there are different views about biblical interpretation. Some people hold to a more literal account in the Genesis and other people hold to a more mythological account. I'd love to know more about your view of biblical interpretation and how you've thought about this. Yeah. So when I first became a Christian, I was will

to believe in biological evolution and billions of year old earth because I was taught it. And I didn't see a lot of, I didn't see a lot of problem with doing that with Scripture, because when you're talking about a non-repeatable event like creation, you've got to give a lot of leeway for interpretation. You really do. And in fact, this was much later, but as I studied this much later, a large swath of the early church did not believe in literal creation. You know, as far as I can tell, I'm not an expert on this, but if I read the major voices in the Alexandrian school, like Clement, for example, he didn't believe those days were even passages of time.

He believed those days were an ordering device to say what was more important to God, and that God didn't create in 724 hours, 624 hours, he created in an instant, right? So the more allegorical interpretation of Genesis has been with the church from the beginning. So that's not a big problem for me, but like most of my life, what became a problem for me was science seemed to be saying something else. So especially when it came to age of the earth, and part of this was I'm a nuclear chemist. I worked my home laboratory, which I never did any real experiments at because it was too low energy accelerator. But my home laboratory, the University of Rochester Nuclear Structure Research Lab, it was one of the most important centers for radioactive dating. And so although I never did it, I worked with these people who did radioactive dating.

And I was curious, genuinely curious, especially when we dated the Shroud of Turin. That was very curious. Yeah. And so, you know, I would watch them do these experiments where they were separating isotopes to determine age. And I would ask them, why are you? excluding these points over here. And they would say, well, this is Cretaceous rock. That's too young for Cretaceous Rock.

So I'm just going to ignore it. And that's not wrong necessarily. I mean, scientists do this all the time. You exclude irrational data as noise or something like that. But when the only reason is some geologist says that it's this time frame, and if it's not within that time frame, throw it out, that seemed a little sloppy to me. And the more I investigated, the less robust,

all these ancient earth arguments were. And then I did the really crazy thing of looking in the literature to see if other people had found other processes other than radioactive processes that could be used to date the earth. And most of those dating methods produced much younger ages. And really what I found was if I looked, I could find some dating methods that indicated the earth was only a few hundred years old.

And so they were probably wrong. And then I saw ones with billions of years old and lots of dates in between. And so that made me think that, yeah, maybe there are these, maybe these dates that we get are more assumptions than they are really measurements. And I think the biggest revelation to me was when we were doing the, when my colleagues were doing this radioactive dating, they would say, okay, this is 14.3 plus or minus 0.2 million years old. And that plus or minus, that's the error bar. That's a pretty important thing in science. But the only thing they were including in that error bar was the resolution of the accelerator, their isotopic resolution. So the only thing they thought was providing error was our instruments.

And it's like, you mean to think, do you mean to tell me you don't think any of these assumptions add any error? And that really bothered me that someone would be so sloppy as when you report an error, bar, that error bar ought to be a legitimate expression of your error. And it's clearly not. So that made me question all of this. And over time, I just came to the conclusion that if I look at science as a whole, I think the majority of the data is best understood in a thousands of years old earth, not a billions of years old earth. And so that's led you to look at the creation account and show that it is a literal creation account? Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not not wed to that theology because there are other theologies that have been around since the early

church. So, you know, and this has led to some tension between me and organizations like Answers in Genesis where they say you have to start with younger theology and then you do your science. And I was like, well, you know, I don't feel like I have to be committed to that because the church has never been committed to that. And I'm talking to church writ large. I'm not talking about any specific denomination. So if the church has never been fully committed to that, I don't think I have to be. It's just right now, it's a scientific conclusion. But like all scientific conclusions, it's tentative, right? And that's the difference between my Christian faith and my science. There are certain aspects of my Christian faith that I can know for certain. There's nothing

scientifically I can know for certain. There are only scientific statements that I have more or less faith in. Awesome. So my last question for you is do you have a favorite, like, recent science news discovery that you've heard about? Kind of recently, you've been like, wow, that's really cool. That's happened. Probably the one that's the most interesting to me. There's a computer scientist by the name of Winston Ewart. And he published a article, I think it was probably six or seven years ago now, but he's updated this research since. Where instead of looking at different genomes and different creatures as being related to each other, he looks at the genomes as collections of modules like a computer program.

And I don't know about this, but apparently, for example, Java, Java is a whole computer language where it's all modules. And so you may have never written this module before, but you need to do, you need a Java piece that does this thing. And so you go find a module and you pull it into your program. And then you go find another module that does something else. You need you pull it into your program. And he looks at genomes in the same way as here's the genome's the big program

and all of these different genes that do different things like echo location and bats and dolphins. those are modules that have been pulled in for that particular type of organism. And he does an analysis, a Bayesian analysis, to try and see, do these genomes look more like something that evolve one from another or something that look like they're just pulling different modules in from different places? And in his numbers, in his model, it's overwhelming that these genomes really do look like, God has all these genetic modules out there, and he's just pulling in, here's what I need for this creature, and here's what I need for that creature. And it's what's stunning about the research is, a lot of times evolutionists say, well, what's your, how in your mind do these genomes develop

if they don't evolve, you know, and the standard creationist response is, well, God created them, right? But that's, and that's a legitimate response, but now we have some idea of at least one, method God used to create. Right? So rather than just creating this genome and then moving on to create this genome, he did it in a real efficient way, genetic modules that he just pulls together. And that's really cool. And so I like what Winston York's doing. Yeah, that's really cool. Is that saying that you might have dolphins have similar genetics to bats, but then they also have similar genetics to like other creatures too, you might say. And if the evolutionary development model is correct, they wouldn't have those similarities.

Well, I think what this does against evolution, like if you think about the general rule is, if you see something similar in genomes, or even phenotypically, if you see similar structures, you generally think these organisms are related by a common ancestor who had those similar genomes or similar structures. But no one has the audacity to say that the bat and the dolphin come from a common ancestor that had echolocation genes. No one can say that. So the evolutionist punts and says, well,

echolocation had to develop in the strain that produced the bat, and echolocation had to develop in the strain that produced the dolphin, and just by chance, they turned out to be the same. Right. And so in this case, that genetic similarity has nothing to do with relatedness. Now, fundamentally, I don't have a problem with that, because most likely there are constraints to how genomes can change. And so I could believe that if you need to,

echolocation, there's only one way to get it no matter how you evolve. I can believe that. Here's the problem. One of the fundamental arguments is similar structures and similar genomes mean common ancestor except when they don't. That's not a scientific statement now. If you have to say, okay, can my theory accommodate these similar genomes being the result of common ancestry? If the answer is yes, they're the result of common ancestry. If the answers no, they're the result of coincidence. That's not scientific anymore because either they're the result of common ancestry or the result of random processes. Or if they're both, there has to be some objective way to know. This is random.

This is common ancestry. The only quote unquote objective way an evolutionist knows is if it fits the evolutionary model, it's evidence for the evolutionary model. If it doesn't, then it's not evidence for the evolutionary model. That's kind of crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. All right. Thank you for speaking Dr. Weil. This has been a great conversation. Well, I'm a pleasure to be here.

I'm Eleanor Whitaker, host of Visible Things. I'm speaking with Dr. J. Weil, and this is on Radio Free Hills, though, at 101.7 FM.