Guest
Jay Richards is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation. He is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. He is also a contributor to the new book, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design.
Links
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
As Catholics, we believe that God create everything out of nothing. But how He did that is subject of intense debate among Catholics. We’ll talk today with proponent of the theory of intelligent design. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and inner chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I should encourage people to hit that Like button, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. Also, you can follow us on social media @CrisisMag, with all the various social media channels. And this month, we are asking people for donations. We only do this twice a year, and we’re doing our springtime. So, just go to crisismagazine.com/donate. All our content is free, but it’s not free to produce. So, we would appreciate any support you can give us.
So, our guest today has been with us before, Jay Richards, but I’m going to introduce him anyway because I think it sounds so impressive. He is the Simon E… I’m sorry, the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. That was a mouthful. He is also the senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, which I just found out before the podcast is coming out for a re-release soon. He has also contributed to the new book, which I have here somewhere, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is intelligent design. Welcome to the program, Jay.
Jay Richards:
Thanks, Eric. So good to be with you.
Eric Sammons:
This is great. I’m excited about this because I’ve always liked having you on the program. You have a variety of interests, of which I seem to share all of them discovered. We’ve talked about fasting here. We’ve talked about something else, I can’t even remember now.
Jay Richards:
We’re talking about economics, you know.
Eric Sammons:
Economics, that’s right, yeah. You name it, we’ve talked about it. I think this is great. But we have not talked about intelligent design, and this is one of the main things you’ve spent your career focused on. The Discovery Institute is a think tank. I’m not sure how you would describe it, but basically a think tank that promotes the idea of intelligent design. And so, I want to give a little bit of a setting for why I wanted you to come on to talk about this. Obviously, the book from Sophia Institute Press came out recently.
And it’s very good. I’ve read most. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve read most of it. So, I want to promote that on some level. But really, this is something that’s been of interest to me, but only in passing. My own views on how God created the world, the mechanisms and all that, I’ve vacillated my own views. I’ve said this before, probably because I said this to you before the program, that, often, my view is whatever I read last, because I just feel like, “That sounds good.”
And we had a debate on the podcast a couple months ago between a young earth creationist and a theistic evolutionist. And it was a good debate. I enjoyed it very much. But I found afterwards I was not satisfied myself. I still was like, “I don’t think I agree with either side here completely.” And I realized I’m going to dig into this. And so, I started reading more and more. And that’s when I discovered, this is something you have some expertise in. I had not looked in at the intelligent design arguments very closely myself. I’d heard of them. You hear things in news about all, it’s the pseudoscience, creationism just trying to sneak in all that stuff. Well, that might make it more interesting to me when the media rails on something.
Jay Richards:
You know something is going on, you can tell.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. That’s something I want to look into. So, anyway, so I’ve been reading a lot about it. So, I want to talk about it today. And so, I think the first thing we have to do, because I found this very confusing at first, is what is intelligent design?
Jay Richards:
So, intelligent design is, obviously, in a generic sense of people use that word to refer to something that an intelligent agent produced intentionally. As a intellectual research program, the so-called Intelligent Design Movement, here’s a key claim, is a claim that there are aspects of nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence or purpose rather than blind processes or standard materialistic explanations. So, in other words, it’s not just the claim, say, that God created the heavens and the earth, or the universe is the result of purpose, ultimately. It’s the claim that you can actually tell that if you study the natural world, you will find indicators of intelligence, things that are very hard to explain or at least are best explained in terms of intelligence or theology.
So, it’s a minimal claim that’s actually consistent with a lot of different theological views about the age of the universe, exactly how God did things when he did them. Even the question of theism, you could, in principle, not be a theist and believe in intelligence design if you thought there was some purpose to the universe. So, I think when you add up the list of evidences of design and you add the fact that the universe had a beginning, theism, you get to theism fairly easily. But it’s important to distinguish the claim of intelligent design is just that empirically, or at least if you look at nature with an open mind, as opposed to deciding ahead of time what it has to show you, that you will find evidence of intelligence and you’ll find places in which there are things in nature that are much better explained as the result of intelligence rather than a blind purpose. That’s intelligent design. That’s basically all it is, at least is the minimal research program.
Eric Sammons:
So, I like to point the minimal what you have to believe intelligence design, that there is some designer who has an intelligence. And therefore, that designer could be God, is the Christian God, so to speak. It could be aliens. Of course, that might just push back, who designed the aliens or something like that.
Jay Richards:
You could say that. So, if we’re just looking at the bacterial flagellum, you could say, this looks like something that requires foresight to put a system this together. We could show you that the Darwinian mechanism doesn’t have foresight. So, it’s unlikely to have produced this. And somebody could say, but we don’t know who the intelligence is. We just know they had to be intelligent enough to be able to produce this. That’s true at that level, is if you’re just in an isolated way. But, of course, if you’re talking about the universe as a whole, an alien on another planet’s not going to be active candidate for explanation. And so, you’re really going to have to get speculative and say, “Well, what’s this intelligent transcendent race or something.” And then, you’ve got Occam’s razor.
And so, I really do think the few inferential steps you get to something like theism, it just takes a few more steps. And it’s important to say, you can tell if we discovered an alien artifact on the moon, for instance, like in 2001 Space Odyssey. You could tell that’s the result of intelligence. I don’t need complicated math to tell what that is. But you might not have any idea who did it or when it was put there or how it was designed. So, just telling that something’s designed, that’s the first step, making an argument that design is a better explanation than the alternatives.
And then, there are other questions about, how did this get put together? What kinds of things were involved? But those are just secondary and tertiary questions. And honestly, just establishing that design is a legitimate explanation in nature and even in science, which is very controversial, that’s a big bite to chew off, and that’s why it’s so controversial. And so, people are perfectly happy. Look, materialists are perfectly happy with Christians and Catholics and say, “Well, I think God created the world. And of course, God’s responsible for everything, but you can’t really tell.” So, all the materialistic explanations, they still get all the explanatory power. And I’m just going to claim that, back here secretly, God created it. They’re happy to let us do that, because they get all the cognitive and explanatory power. They explain reality, and we get to have a private belief.
Intelligent designists says, “No, yeah, actually, if you look at nature, materialism doesn’t do a good job of explaining it.” And so, for materialists, and frankly for people that have compromised with the materialistical view, that seems like you’re violating their space. It’s like, no, sorry, we get nature. You guys will allow you to get private subjective religious belief as long as it doesn’t make a difference. But when you start talking about design in nature, then all of a sudden that upsets a lot of apple carts, because at the very least, if intelligent design’s right, then the standard materialistic explanations across the academic disciplines are, at best, inadequate, and I would just say actually false. So, there are a lot of oxes being gored on this. So, it’s hardly surprising that Wikipedias and the media hate intelligent design with a white passion, otherwise reserved for pro-lifers.
Eric Sammons:
Actually, it’s funny you mentioned Wikipedia because when I went to grab your bio real quick, I saw your Wikipedia page. And there’s some link on there. It’s something that says that you’re part of the pseudoscientific something about the Discovery Institute. I was just chuckling. I was, “He’ll like that.”
Jay Richards:
I hate it when people introduce me using Wikipedia, which I have no control. So, you don’t know on what day it’s going to be right or wrong.
Eric Sammons:
You’re right, exactly. Now, I want to ask a little bit more details in a minute about the differences from a theistic evolution idea, that basically we can’t even see God’s work, we just know He’s behind it, that idea. But first, I just want to make sure we lay out what we’re talking about, what we’re trying to answer. In my research, it looked to me there are three main questions that are trying to be answered in this space, so to speak. First is, how was anything created, the universe, matter, anything created? And the secondary question to that is, when was it created? The second is, how did life begin, some form of life, no matter how basic it might have been? And then, the third question is how did man begin? How did human intelligence, how were we created? And I think those are the three big questions.
And in looking at it, there are different views. And I think, to me, it seems like there was five major, and there’s a lot of overlap and nuances here, but five major views. And that was the young earth creationists, people who would say that the earth was created probably less than around 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days. The second would be the old earth creationists, who would be close to the creationists in the sense of following the text of Genesis one and two. But they would say that, for example, days might be thousands of years or millions of years.
Jay Richards:
Long epochs, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. Then, you have the intelligent design, also what I call the theistic evolutionists, which would basically accept, in general, most of the findings of Darwinian evolution, or at least neo-Darwinian evolutionists. But they would say God is behind it, ultimately. And then, you have your atheistic evolutionists who obviously just accept Darwinian, neo-Darwinian evolutionists, and they don’t think there’s anything behind it. It’s all by random chance and whatnot. And those, like I said, there are overlap, there’s nuances within them. Is that correct that those are the basic five categories?
Jay Richards:
Well, I think so. Of course, within all of those there are going to be variations. And so, you can see how intelligent design, in some way, is the odd one out in that taxonomy, because it’s not asking the question primarily how old the universe is. It’s asking about, how do we rigorously detect and confirm the artifacts of intelligence, that is the signs of intelligence, within the natural world. And so, ID tends to use a lot of information theory because we think that’s actually a really good tool for doing that. But what that means is that, as long as you think intelligence does real work in the world, then, actually, you could say, look, whatever the age of the universe is, you might be an old earth creationist, even atheistic evolutionist, or young earth creationist. You think intelligence makes a difference. You’re an intelligent design theorist. That’s all ID is.
Eric Sammons:
I thought that ID did seem to be a little bit outside of it and for multiple types of these categories, fell out of types. But I guess my question then is, how does… so, your typical person who is an ID proponent, like you or something like that, do they typically believe the universe is… I think the most common scientific idea, or by most scientists, is that the universe, for example, is about 13 billion years old. Would the typical ID proponent be like, “Yeah, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. That does seem to be what the evidence points to.” Or, would they be more suspicious of something like that?
Jay Richards:
I would honestly say it’s a bit of a mix. I would say probably the vast majority of people you would associate with the intelligent design movement accept the standard geological and cosmic ages. So, in The Privileged Planet, for instance, we make very specific arguments from big bang cosmology. We think it has strong theistic implications, for instance, and fine-tuning arguments that assume the standard cosmological ages. But you also even have some people, like Mike Behe, interestingly, who at least in principle, affirms universal common ancestry. Because really, Darwinism has two claims. There’s the claim about ancestry, and then there’s the claim about the mechanism. And so, neo-Darwinism, at least, says the primary mechanism that produces these things that look designed, this adaptive complexity, the primary mechanism is natural selection acting on random genetic mutations.
And so, those are separate questions. And so, you might think, “I think there’s good evidence for common ancestry. I just don’t think the Darwinian explanation explains very much.” That is Michael Behe’s position, for instance. I’m more skeptical of some of the over-weaning claims about universal common ancestry. But I don’t think that’s the key issue, because I honestly think that God could have created the world in which He made every individual species directly from nothing. He could have created it a different way. The key question is, is there evidence for me as a Catholic, was God really doing something? Did he actually do something? And secondly, is it detectable? Can you actually tell? Does God leave his fingerprints on the evidence, is the way I would put it as a Catholic? And that’s a significant question.
And so, you could even have different views on the extent of common ancestry, but still say, “No, I think there’s definitely evidence for design.” That would make you a design theorist. So, that’s what gets a little complicated, because some people would say, “Well, that makes Mike Behe atheistic evolutionist.” But he disagrees with the blind material Darwinian account of that.
And so, really, that ends up being the key contentious point. Whereas, a lot of people that self-describe as either evolutionary creationists or theistic evolutionists, they actually accept the entire Orthodox Darwinian line that everything just appears to be designed as the result of this blind process, to which I say, first of all, what’s the evidence for the Darwinian mechanism? Does it really explain that?
And two, what are you saying exactly? Are you saying that something, it just appears to be a blind process, but it’s really designed? Or, are you granting that it’s actually an undirected process, which actually there’s some Catholic theistic evolutionists that do that? They say, “Yeah, I accept randomness here.” And then, you’re in a logical problem because you’re saying God is directing an undirected process, which just isn’t a logical possibility. So, whatever, quite certain that you can’t have a directed process that’s also undirected.
And very often, because of the desire to paper over the difficulties with Darwinism and not to cause trouble, you’ll get Christian academics that don’t want to face that fact squarely, that Darwin, as he understood his theory, and as the leading Darwin is to understand their theory, they assume it. They mean it as a substitute for teleology and design. And so, you can’t just easily baptize that without creating a lot of confusion, to say the least.
Eric Sammons:
So, I want to delve into this a little bit more, devil’s advocate a little bit about come more towards theistic evolution. Why isn’t it plausible for a Catholic to believe that God started the whole process off and He’s the primary cause, and then through secondary causes, all these different things happened? And even even somebody who says they appear undirected, but they believe in God, they say there’s a lot of things in life that appear that God isn’t involved. Yet, we know on some level because He’s beyond our experience, He is directing it, although it appears undirected. How is that philosophically flawed to believe that?
Jay Richards:
It’s a great question. And so, I could frame this so that I would say it’s logically coherent. That’s separate question from whether I think it’s true. But if what you’re saying is that, just as you know things that appear to not have a purpose, your actions, God can direct a secondary way as a free being. I can do things when I intend to do it. And then, God is also working through it. So, we believe this Catholic God, as you said, works through secondary causes. And so, He does that with natural laws. It’s a real law. It’s a real property that He gives to the world, but it also fulfills His purposes.
So, the idea is extend that kind of explanation to random mutations and natural selection. So, now, it actually all comes down to the definition of random at this point. And so, that is why I have a 7,000-word chapter in God’s Grandeur, nailing this down. It all hinges on that single word, “random.” So, does random just mean it’s statistically one event is more as likely as the other? And so, it can appear to be purposeless or just a mere statistical probability, but really be purposeful? Or, does random mean undirected?
Now, to figure out, what is the theory claim? And so, we’ll have Catholic theistic evolutionists, like Stephen Barr, who insists, no, it’s just a statistical claim. That’s all it is. And so, God could still really be directing these things. So, there’s just no problem. Let’s not talk about it. You people are crazy that want to debate Darwinism. That’s literally what happens. I’ve had this conversation with him. He will not even actually look at the evidence because he’s certain it’s true. He’s a physicist, but he knows it’s true because his biology colleagues told him that.
And so, I say, but is that what Darwin understood the theory to be saying? Is that what all Darwinists, that the leading Darwinists… they have the right to their own theory. Let’s look and see what they say. And let’s look at what the word, “random,” means in the dictionary. Well, the primary meaning of the word is not that subtle statistical definition. It’s not directed, it’s not purposeful. That’s what every Darwinist understands it to be. It’s what Darwin wrote the Origin of Species for. He said, “No, it’s not directed, it’s not things aren’t created. They are the result of this blind process.” People have Darwin fish on their cars, not Newton fish, because that’s how they understand the theory.
So, at the very least, you’re involved in a massive campaign of equivocation to avoid offending Darwinists, at the least. Now, is it a logical possibility that God could be using these processes behind the scenes so that it doesn’t look like it? Yes. Is that likely? One and two, this is the primary question that we should be debating, not is there some complicated mental castle I can construct that’s logically possible? But what the heck is the evidence that natural selection and random variation actually explain all the stuff they’re supposed to explain? What’s the data? It’s really good at explaining variations in antibiotic resistance. It’s really good at explaining variations in finch beak thickness on the Galapagos Islands. Inside a single species, I’m sorry, it’s the same bird on different islands that are isolated.
And so, great, that’s the evidence we have, natural selection or random variation can explain things at a very low level. As people often say, it’s really good at explaining the survival of the fittest. It doesn’t do anything to explain this arrival of the fittest. You get the survival, but not the arrival. In fact, it’s not even good at explaining larger categories, taxonomic categories. It’s actually not good at explaining the origin of proteins. There’s all this kind of things at the cellular level.
And so, what I think’s actually happening is that Darwin came up with a theory in the 19th century. It swept the field because it looked like it gave a good explanation for what otherwise looked like this recalcitrant problem in biology, which is the manifest evidence of design. They said, “Oh, good, we’ve got a mechanistic explanation here.” They ran with it. They assume it explains everything that it does. We’ve got decades of evidence that it absolutely doesn’t explain this stuff. And instead of rethinking it and saying, “Actually, this is a very narrow, modest, explanatory tool,” they want to insist that it explains everything.
And then, some intellectual Catholics and Protestants get together and come up with this thing where they’ve come up with a system to just accommodate it, rather than looking at the evidence. But that is an empirical question, and that’s frustrating about the debate, is that there are too many Catholic academics wanting to capitulate to the theory and come up with a theological way of framing it that it’s possible that God could still be secretly back there doing something, rather than actually looking at the evidence.
Why are they doing that? I’ll tell you exactly why I think they’re doing it. They don’t want to cause trouble, or they don’t actually even know what the evidence says. And that’s why I spent two decades talking about this. And what does that result in? It results in a overwhelmingly materialistic explanation completely winning the day when it does not deserve to, which is what’s actually happened.
And so, that’s why I actually think digging out into the empirical details for the explanatory power of the Darwinian mechanism is so important. And just frankly, I don’t have patience for intellectual strategies that are designed to avoid conflict rather than clear thinking, which is what I think the general theistic evolutionary strategy is. I think it’s just a strategy to avoid conflict. But the strategy, it’s mostly capitulating to people that, first of all, I think are wrong on the evidence, and two are contributing to an overwhelmingly materialistic academy that’s a bad thing. So, that’s a long answer.
Eric Sammons:
That’s good. And I’m glad you brought up Stephen Barr because his book, Ancient Faith and Modern Physics, is excellent. I love it. It is so good. It was very profound for me to read that. I was like, wow, this is great book.
Jay Richards:
And he’s great on the things he knows about.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And then it was funny because then I love that book so much, but then I was reading something. I think he wrote in First Things or something years ago where he was doing this definition with “random,” and I was like, it doesn’t really… I’m always about you take what the school says and you take them at their word. You’re like, what they’re saying is what they mean. And you seem to say, well, they’re saying this, but actually it’s really something else.
Jay Richards:
It’s really this, and they can’t say that. And that’s why, look, if there’s anyone listening that thinks this is the question, then I would not normally be so self-promoting, but please at least read my chapter on randomness. Because basically, what I do is I say, if we’re going to take random to mean this, we actually have to really refine it. And so, it ends up being a paragraph long. And so, when we say random, we’re going to mean this. It’s this long. It’s consistent with theism. And it’s also a position and a definition no one’s ever held before, because it has to be so precise. And so, it’s quite obvious at that point that what we’ve done is created this mental castle to keep God from being implicated or materialism from being challenged in any way.
And what’s funny is that Barr is willing to challenge materialism in physics and cosmology. Because the evidence, you get fine-tuning, you get a universe with a beginning. I’m sorry, materialism has a hard time with that. But then, it’s frankly, the social cost of challenging materialism in cosmology is not nearly as high as it is in biology. And I think it’s because, for Catholics, it’s the Galileo problem, “We don’t want to make that mistake again.” And for Protestants, it’s the Scopes Monkey Trial problem. And Catholics really don’t want to be guilty of the Scopes Monkey Trial problem. And so, for purely sociological reasons, we don’t want to focus on this issue.
But then, frankly, I’ve got friends who want to talk about natural law and the natural moral law that’s embedded in nature. But then they concede a completely materialistic account of nature over here in biology. They want to talk about natural moral law. Actually, those things are connected. If you use the natural moral law, you’re presupposing a teleological view of the universe. And look, sometimes, scientific theories are mostly narrative and ideology and a little bit of evidence. I just think that Darwinism is one of those theories, just held on really long cause it carries a lot of metaphysical water for materialism.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And it goes far beyond just biology and what it’s used for in society.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely.
Eric Sammons:
Now, just for right now, I’m going to assume the universe is very old.
Jay Richards:
[inaudible 00:25:37].
Eric Sammons:
13 billion, 15 billion, whatever, and that earth is about 4 billion years old. Life came sometime after that, and man was sometime maybe. What’s the typical 100,000?
Jay Richards:
So, you could say, yeah, it depends on how you define these things. But again, standard people will say homo sapiens are 200,000. I, myself, just as get, I sit loosely on a lot of the paleontological data because, either if you’re looking at bones, it’s bone scraps with a lot of narrative. And so, it’s like, I don’t know. Or, it’s using highly theory-laden population genetics projections that are model-driven. And so, I just sit loosely. But let’s say homo sapiens are 200,000 years old. I’m not committing one way or the other, let’s just say, because that’s a common thing.
Eric Sammons:
So, saying all that, then we have life on earth for a long period of time. And then, there is this human life, homo sapiens, which is intelligent life. The materialists, Richard Dawkins would say there is no difference, but we know. We’re Catholics, we know there’s a difference.
Jay Richards:
Yeah, absolutely.
Eric Sammons:
And so, the question is that intelligent designers would, it sounds like, would argue that Darwinian, Neo-Darwinism, cannot explain that jump. So, then the question is how did that jump happen from life that does not have intelligence to life that does… intelligence we’re defining as human. Obviously, apes have some level of intelligence. But we’re saying that what we would know as the soul…
Jay Richards:
Rationality.
Eric Sammons:
Rationality, there we go, rationality. And so, what was the process? Do we have any idea? Does intelligence design tell us anything about how that jump happened?
Jay Richards:
So, at the moment, think of these as loci of intelligence, is that the places where it screams. So, if you’re thinking of this as a Catholic, the claim’s not that, well, God just creates the world every so often. He does stuff, but mostly leaves it on its own. No, we don’t necessarily… I assume that God’s working in the world in all sorts of different ways, sometimes secondarily, sometimes primarily. These are just places where it’s obvious. And so, the origin of the universe and the laws, the origin of life is big, because that’s the shift from chemistry to biology. And actually, Darwinism doesn’t have anything to do with it, because we don’t have replicating systems yet. And so, you need chemical evolutionary story there.
That is a massive chasm. My friend and colleague, Steve Meyer who’s written about this in Signature in the Cell, it’s like, where do you get the origin of life question? And then, once you have replicating systems, in principle, the Darwinian explanation is relevant. So, then you have to talk about the evidence for the Darwinian explanation. You have life. Somewhere there, you get intelligence or you get consciousness, you get agency. And that itself is another thing that it’s just very resistant to materialistic explanation. So, really, what consistent materialists say is that, well, it doesn’t exist, basically. It’s an illusion. You’re not really there. You’re not really an agent. But, of course, then you say, well, who’s the illusion on? Who’s being fooled? To me, this is just the logic of materialism, which can’t have teleology in the universe or in human persons.
And to me, if materialism can’t explain that I exist, if it’s incompatible with my existence, well, that’s the best possible argument I can think of against materialism. That’s like, “Thank you. Have it if you want it. That’s a stupid theory.” And so, that’s why materialism is the last thing I’m going to believe, because it’s going to have to be me that believes it. And so, any theory that’s going to be plausible and not self-refuting and self-testifying is going to have to be a theory consistent with my existence to be able to persuade me. And so, I don’t think people realize that, if they think persons exist, they probably aren’t materialists or they don’t realize they shouldn’t be materialists.
And so, that’s why, if you notice, you look at the ID literature, there’s a lot of work focused on the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of complex systems, whether they’re cells or animal body plans, and then the origin of mind and of human persons. And those are different jurisdictions. You’ll get a biologist, a cosmologist, or an astronomer or neuroscientist in those areas.
Eric Sammons:
Now, coming from a different angle, from the typical young earth creationist, something like that, our assumptions in our last scenario that we just talked about, where that there are, for examples, apes and monkeys, something like that, some hominid type creatures are walking around. And then, at some point, two of them at least all of a sudden have what we would call a soul. And from that, we then have the human races created. And obviously, we would refer to that first couple as Adam and Eve. And the question is, there seems to be some potential problems with that in that, were they just the parents. Did they interact, even mate with non-souled and souled hominids? There’s all these issues there.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. And that’s a question for everyone, except for strict theistic evolutionists, honestly. So, the strict theistic evolutionist is just going to say, you’ve got this continuous evolutionary process, and then at some point humans emerge. It always gets very foggy there because they really can’t say anything that will be inconsistent with materialism. My view is, look, I think all bets are off here. If God exists, He can do this in a lot of different ways. So, what exactly is that? I think it’s a very important research program that’s going to require us nailing down timing. What gaps are there? I’m not especially fond of this idea that you just have apes and you put souls in them, because I don’t think that’s actually consistent with soul, at least in the Thomistic sense. It’s not just a ghost, you stuck in something. And so, what is that exactly? So, that doesn’t really make sense.
So, I’ll say I think God did something very specific in the creation of human beings that wasn’t just a little tweak. Look, there’s obviously figurative language in Genesis, but it has something to do with the fact that we are both fully material, the dust of the earth, and fully spiritual. One at the same time, the breath of God and the dust of the earth. And we’re the only ones for whom that’s described. I don’t have any problem thinking something really different happened here, but that doesn’t really hinge on this question about the age of the universe or anything. Because whenever it happened, the real question is, did something really specific… did a special creative act happen there?
And I think it might be that we have a hard time telling from the empirical evidence. I do think the burden of theology, it strongly says, yeah, something specific happened here, so that humans aren’t just apes than a little piece of something stuck in that. That just sounds to me, for various reasons, not adequate and not even necessary to have to posit something, I think, so minimal.
Eric Sammons:
How about, though, the idea, I know theistic evolutionists would say you see a development in the historical record, they would say of ape-like creatures that get bigger brains, certain ways that are set up for eventually having the… because the soul interacts with the brain. I’m sorry, I should say the mind. The mind interacts with the brain. It’s not the same thing. The materialists would say it is, but it’s not. But the mind does require, it appears, a human brain. A human mind requires a human brain in order to really act. Although, once you’re dead, I’m not quite sure.
Jay Richards:
You can see how theology, you’re like, you realize all of a sudden, wait, no, we’ve got to have… if you’re Catholic, you think that we have this at least intermediate state after death before the resurrection where we persist in an incomplete state. And so, it ends up being really complicated, if you’re going to give a theological interpretation of nature. I think that we are embodied creatures. That’s why our destiny is to have new resurrection bodies. We’re not just souls floating in the world. But these are complicated deep waters that I think require a serious research program. And it also involves some things we don’t fully understand. The reality is we don’t know how the mind of a fly works or the brain of a fly works. So, it’s okay to say, look, some of this stuff we’re still going to have to work out.
I think, theologically, I could say, look, I think God did something very specific and special in creating in His image. I’m happy to sit loosely on the details of that. But that’s a theological commitment. And then, let’s look at the empirical evidence in an objective way, though, and not just presuppose this star-winning account or these reconstructions. Because, look, if you know anything about this last century in paleontology, every bone they find practically, a whole human history has been rewritten. Just Google that. It gets rewritten every three weeks. Because the actual empirical data is really, really thin. It’s very hard to reconstruct. And so, you almost entirely rely on the theory.
I can remember as a kid being caught that Neanderthals were a different species. Well, I did 23andMe, and guess what? I have an unusual amount of Neanderthal DNA in me. They’re humans. They just got different morphologies. And so, I just think that that is a mess. And it’s honestly why I don’t tend to rest any of my arguments on this stuff, on the details of paleontology. I just think it’s a messy science, compared to something like chemistry.
Eric Sammons:
Have you read William Craig’s recent book, In Quest for the Historical Adam?
Jay Richards:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
It was fascinating. But I did come away a little bit like, they’re just guessing on a lot of this stuff. I just felt like he… just for people who haven’t read the book, it’s actually a fascinating book. He’s a great Protestant biblical scholar.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely.
Eric Sammons:
And the first section’s biblical theological, who is Adam. And then, the second part is a scientific, who actually was Adam? Where did he originate? Things like that. And I found it very interesting to read and to speculate.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. And he’s a philosopher and a theologian. And so, I think what he’s do is say, look, how much of this standard account could we accommodate and still be small orthodox Christians? And he argues that, yeah, we can accommodate a lot. And so, I think he’s conceding a lot to the field. And I don’t know how much, if you really nailed him down, could you actually think this is true or you’re just conceding it for sake of argument. It’s just that I just think, look, that field is very, very messy. And so, you’ve got fields like chemistry, that there’s a theory involved, but it is a complete science. The periodic table element is well-understood. We know what’s going on. It’s not theory-laden in the same way that paleontology is, where it’s like 99% narrative and theoretical assumptions. And then, you got some strata and a few bones that you found, and you’re trying to piece them together. But even where you decide to put them is mostly dependent upon the theory. And so, that’s just why it’s like I’m glad I’m not in that field, because I feel like it’s almost all questions.
Eric Sammons:
And so, we’ve talked a lot about some issues with, obviously, materialistic evolutionists, atheistic evolutionists, and also the theistic evolutionists. But I want to talk a little bit about, also, young earth creationists. I know a number of people in our audience are young earth creationists. I’ve seen that from previous things we’ve done. But I’ll just lay my cards on the table. I just simply think that the evidence, as a layman, not an expert, just suggests a very old earth, a 13-billion or whatever universe. But the point is that the earth is millions of years. I think there’s just so much cosmological evidence for this. And so, my question is, as an ID proponent, can you also be young earth creationists? Or, do you really have a criticism because, are they rejecting certain science that is established? What do you think?
Jay Richards:
So, I would say yes. In principle, if you think there’s evidence of design in the universe, then that actually does make you an intelligent… Welcome to the club. So, you’re an ID theorist. On the other hand, I think there’s lots of evidence for design that you actually really only have access to, based upon the standard conclusions of cosmology. So, for instance, the evidence from Big Bang cosmology, the evidence of the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, the initial conditions, the fundamental constants, the forces, all these things, that only really makes sense, given contemporary cosmology. That is really strong evidence for design.
Moreover, the key question, if you want to know if the universe exists on its own or not, is, did it have a beginning? And so, if the universe has an age, whatever the age is, it has an age. That means it had a beginning, which means, look, everything that begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. It can’t be self-existent. And so, if the universe began to exist, it does not explain itself. So, that is huge.
And so, what about this question? Now, I think God could have created the universe instantly. I think He could have done, I’m going to do, six 24-hour days. And so, what we have is these two books. We have the book of scripture that we’re trying to interpret correctly and the book of nature, which itself is revelatory, which can testify to the glory and the existence and even the nature of God, according to Paul in Romans one. And so, if I look at the Genesis one initially and superficially, I might assume it’s talking about earth days. But then, when you look at it really carefully, what is happening? Well, God creates the light at the beginning and then separates the light and the darkness. And that circumscribes His days. Well, our days are circumscribed by the rotation of the sun and the appearance of the sun as the earth rotates around its axis. The sun and the moon don’t show up until day four in Genesis one. And so, to me, that’s just the text saying, God has days. They’re earth days. And they’re analogous. But the days of his creative activity are not the same as your earth days.
So, that’s why I don’t like it when people say, well, God’s day is literal or figurative. That treats earth days as if they’re the only literal kind of days you can have. But Mars has days, too. And Jupiter does. The question is, what are these days? I would say, hey, the text is very frustrating. It doesn’t give us a lot of detail. But God’s creative days have something to do with his separation of the light and the darkness on day one, which is distinct from the light of the sun, obviously. We don’t hear about the sun until day four. And then, He acts during the day, the daytime. Remember, always in Genesis one, He acts during the daytime, and then there’s evening and morning. There’s always a punctuation of evening and the morning, first day through the sixth day. And then, He rests on the seventh day.
What I think is going on is God is describing these very specific creative activities that are themselves mysteriously separated. And then, we are now in the seventh day, which is His rest, in which God is not acting in the way He did initially. Then, there’s a secondary question, do those days correspond to geological periods, which is what the old earth creationists say, to which I just don’t know. But I think there’s a lot you could say about the text. I think the text actually tells us these aren’t earth days. So, it doesn’t require that. And so, then I don’t see that there’s a conflict, because I don’t think that’s what the text is saying. I say, well, we’re going to try to figure out how old the universe is. But I don’t think Genesis one is telling us that. So, that’s my general view.
But if, look, I spent one summer, I mentioned to you off-air actually just reading the young earth literature, because I thought I need to know the arguments. And I just think there’s some good arguments. And then, there’s some that just, as Darwinists get really theory-laden so that you just presuppose the truth of your theory, whatever the evidence, I think sometimes people argue for young earth creationism, in which there’s a theoretical rigidity in what you want, is to be open to the evidence of nature and scripture enough that the evidence actually feeds back into your theories about these things. So, you have an open philosophy of science.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And I think that’s my criticism of young earth creationists as well. I think most of them are very faithful Christians, Catholics, and good people. Well, I have a brother-in-law who is one, and he’s a great guy and everything. I feel like, though, there’s always this. If you say something that goes against their literal interpretation of Genesis, then somehow, you’re against God’s word. But like you mentioned, God’s word is obviously the Bible. But in a sense, the book of nature is also God’s word, in the sense that speaks through nature. St. Paul tells us this in Romans. And so, I don’t know about you, but I do get how materialistic Darwinian evolution that undermines Christian belief. But to me, when I read about the Big Bang and about the age of universe and how these things, I’m just like, wow, that’s really cool. That makes me more believe in God than anything else, because it’s so incredible, this whole idea of time started. Because Big Bang is not just that space started, but that time started.
Jay Richards:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
That’s exactly what Genesis says, in the beginning-
Jay Richards:
That’s right.
Eric Sammons:
… God created the heaven and the earth.
Jay Richards:
Literally, this is Augustine’s confessions, that God created time itself. And also, we didn’t even imagine in the 19th century that there could be direct empirical evidence that the universe had a beginning. In 19th century, everyone just got to say, well, so far as we could tell, it’s been here. Nobody knew that. Well, the hold darn thing’s expanding from a moment in the finite past. And we discovered that it wasn’t people looking for evidence of that. It was actually Hubble accidentally looking at it, not liking it.
That’s an exciting story of the book of nature striking back against materialism. And I should say, whatever your views on these things, if you’re teaching children and you’re homeschoolers, we homeschooled our kids mostly, be careful about the things you teach them, both on the one hand that you don’t compromise their intellectual life, but also that you don’t teach them something that’s brittle so that it’s very easily refuted. So, if you give them a farfetched argument, I can tell you that the halls of the atheists are filled with people who are raised very often in Christian fundamentalist homes, but sometimes conservative Catholic homes, in which their parents, rather than inoculating them, they quarantined them.
And so, the kids get off to university. The very first class they have, it’s like, “This is an argument I had never heard before. It’s much more plausible than this thing my parents were telling me.” That is also corrosive to faith. You want to inoculate your kids against bad ideas and arm them with good arguments, so they get off to college and they’re like, “This is B-rate stuff compared to the stuff I was getting before.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. And you see, here in Cincinnati, there’s the Creation Museum, which has this idea that the dinosaurs roam the earth with men. They were on the arc and things like that, which really, I’m sorry, but that’s not going to work. It’s very easily refuted and exactly what you said. In fact, it was funny when I started really looking into these couple months ago more, I texted my adult children. I was like, “By the way, what do you guys think about creation world stuff? How old the universe is, like that?”
Because I was like, what did we teach them? Because my own views have changed. And I’m very happy that they took a somewhat ID view, even though I’d never realized this. They were like, “We definitely know God created everything and He designed anything. We don’t really care that much or even know that much, all the details. But we know that universe can be millions of years old, and that doesn’t go against an intelligent designer. We also know that man is different than apes, fundamentally.”
Jay Richards:
That’s the key thing. Look, you can be a bushman in the fifth century in Africa and you know that humans are different from apes. It’s like, this is just a common-sense deliverance.
Eric Sammons:
And only modern PhDs don’t know that.
Jay Richards:
Oh, it takes a PhD not to know that, because you also know that there are boys and girls, and the boys aren’t girls and girls aren’t boys. I always want to remember, there is a common-sense deliverance of these things. And part of what we have to do as intellectuals is account for stuff that people actually already know, sometimes correct things that they think they know that they don’t know. But there are, frankly, look, there’s a bunch of deliverances, both moral and empirical knowledge that pretty much everybody has. And if a theory tells you that you’re basically a monkey or that you’re almost like a roundworm because you share a lot of its DNA or that you don’t exist, that’s just good evidence not to believe their theory, because you know that’s crazy.
Eric Sammons:
Your instinct just tells you that. Boy, we could do this for hours, but I’m thinking we’re going to start to wrap it here pretty soon. But I want you to talk a little bit about this book, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. I just did tell people it’s grouped into three categories. It’s science, philosophy, and theology. And basically, it gives the case in each of those categories. So, tell a little bit about some of the people who contributed to it, and what’s the purpose of the book.
Jay Richards:
Absolutely. So, the official editor is Ann Gauger, very accomplished biologist and Catholic. I think everyone in the book is Catholic, if I’m not mistaken. Rob Koons at the University of Texas is a very prominent Catholic analytic philosopher and a Thomist. It’s really designed, Eric, to do a couple of things. One is to just build out the case for Catholics for the evidence of design just on its own. But it’s also designed to respond to people within the church that have criticized intelligent design because they think it’s something it’s not, because very often Catholics will think, especially if they, I don’t know for what… It might be because they saw what the media said about it. And so, they think, “Is this a weird Protestant thing? Or, is it mechanistic and it’s inconsistent with Thomism?” There’s just a lot of stuff that’s floated around for years in Catholic circles about that, which is very frustrating to those of us in the movement, because we’re like, “Look, we think and we are resuscitating the case for teleology in the natural world, which Bacon and Descartes got rid of.” We think that, to have good science in the 21st century, you need to reintroduce teleology and you can use modern tools like information theory to do that. That’s what we’re actually about.
But unfortunately, many Catholics, including Catholics that they’ll make it look like they have Catholic objections, but what they’re actually doing is wanting to capitulate the materialistic story and they’re afraid that ID is going to give everybody heartache in the academy. And so, the book is really designed to do that. And so, that’s why I feel like, there’s a philosophical case, there’s a theological case, and then there’s a scientific case. And so, that’s why we divided that up.
And then, I’m at the end, because even though I’m talking about randomness, which is this question in Darwinism, it’s actually a really difficult philosophical question. But it’s great. And so, there are priests, there are physicists, there are philosophers, there are biologists in the book. And it’s nice. This is actually a labor of love for a number of people over several years. And COVID slowed it down. And so, it’s really nice to have it come together. And so, if you’re a Catholic and you’re interested in intelligent design, you’re like, “How do I get into this and introduce myself to the topic,” God’s Grandeur is the perfect book for that.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it really is, because it does cover all the different subjects. There’s a couple different Crisis writers, in fact, Crisis editor, contributing editor, Anthony Esolen, wraps it all up at the end as only he can do.
Jay Richards:
Exactly. It’s fantastic. I just read it again last week. It’s so good.
Eric Sammons:
When I saw he was associated, too, I was like, he’s going to have some take on it that’s just going to be like, oh wow, it’s just very deep and just very beautiful and just goes above almost theology and philosophy and science and just ties it all together. So, that was a great ending.
Jay Richards:
Perfect bow at the end.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, exactly. And like I said, I want to do this for three more hours, but we won’t. So, I just encourage people to get the book, Intelligent Design. I found out in this discussion that I actually am an intelligent design person, because the way you described it, I’m like, well, I obviously believe all those things. But I do think it’s something that, as Catholics, it matters. My personal opinion is that the main attack is from the materialistic Darwinian evolutionist types who are undermining the faith. But I also think that our response to it has to be one that accepts all of the evidence that we come from. It can’t just be like we’re going to hide out in a very fundamentalist reading of certain passages of scripture. But instead, let’s look at all the evidence and see that, really, it does make the case for God, for the Catholic view of God, in fact.
Jay Richards:
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s always the trick, whether you’re dealing with the interpretation of scripture or the book of nature, is there’s the interpretive problem. And so, the scientists get the interpretation of the evidence wrong, too. And so, the trick is, what does the evidence itself say? And let’s be open to it, whatever it is.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. Well, we’ll wrap it up here. I appreciate you being on the program, Jay, very much. And I’m sure I will have you back sometime when I discover you’re also an expert in some other field I’m interested in. So, you’re a man of many talents.
Jay Richards:
Thanks so much, Eric.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, great. Until next time, everybody. God love you.