S10E47
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Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am excited and
grateful that you're listening here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.
We're going to change our minds about something today, and I want to give you a special guest.
Yesterday, I had a chance to
talk to somebody that I have revered and thought highly of for 30 years.
Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist from Lehigh University, and back in 1996,
he published a book called Darwin's Black box, the biochemical challenge to evolution.
It might surprise you because the media and public schools universally promote
Darwinian evolution as the fact,
as the way that life arose, that species develop and form.
But it might surprise you that the actual scientific research out there doesn't support that at all.
In fact, since Watson and Crick described the molecular structure of DNA,
a darwinian evolution has become more and more
and more in question as an origin of life
explanation and you frequently see things
when you actually look at the papers that propose to explain how
particular things got here like the retina of the eye or the bacterial flagellum
for example you see phrases like appeared or developed or arose or came about
you don't see here's the explanation scientifically of how this happened there's
always this filter in place of we know No, it started with evolution.
We just can't prove it. So we're going to say it arose.
We're going to say that it developed. We're going to say that it showed up.
But if you actually look at the science, it doesn't say what you think.
And it reminds me of that story that Mark Twain was attributed to having said,
it ain't what you know that gets you in trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
So a lot of times the things that get us in trouble is that we spend our lives
believing or following things that turn out not to be so sure,
not so certain, not so true.
And I just want to give you today an incredible conversation that I had with Dr. Behe yesterday.
The book Darwin's Black Box was named by National Review as one of the top 100
most important nonfiction works of the 20th century.
Let that sink in. It's never gone out of print since 1996.
George Gilder wrote that Darwin's Black Box overthrows Darwin at the end of
the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the
beginning of the 20th century.
In May of 2005, in The New Yorker, Alan Orb said, Dr.
Behe is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent
design, and his arguments are by far the best known.
Darwin's black box was important to me because I found it in my residency training
when I was in Pittsburgh, and I was surrounded by a lot of people who were evolutionists,
reductionists, atheists.
Certainly it was a minority position to believe that God created the earth and
the nervous system and everything else.
And Darwin's Black Box gave me a sort of encouragement that real scientists,
sometimes are believers, that real scientists actually, there are people out
there who are still following the scientific method.
We had an incredible conversation yesterday. I think it's going to be helpful.
And if you're a parent of a child in public schools, or if you have have grandchildren
who are going to be going to or are in public schools, it might be helpful for
you to read Darwin's Black Box, Dr.
Behe's work, and just be able to give your kids an alternative way of thinking
because evolution is taught to them as the fact.
And the truth is, it ain't necessarily so. Now, I want to be careful because
this is a common way that evolutionists will attack you if you try to bring
up intelligent design or creationism or any other type of non-evolution Explanation for Life.
Because it's a fact that species do evolve over time.
There's no doubt about that. If you take what Darwin looked at,
which was before we understood anything about biochemistry or molecules or any
of that, Darwin was looking basically at phenotype, at the way things look.
And he would say, well, if you study this population of finches,
for example, over time, the ones that have sharper beaks are more successful
in breaking seeds and the other ones die off.
And over time, the species starts to look more and more the same,
that the genetics of the particular birds start to favor one another over time
in a population or environment because the ones that aren't at an advantage will die off.
And so it is true that the features of a species in a given environment over
time tend to promote that process that benefits them becoming more and more
popular so that over time the genes start to become more aligned with one another.
And that's called survival of the fittest.
And that is undoubtedly true. It's absolutely true.
But at the same time, that fact that species evolve over time is not the same
as saying that one species evolved from another,
or even if you back it up far enough, that all species arose from a common ancestor
or that life became life out of a chemical soup.
All of that stuff is not actually scientifically validated.
And it's now, since we know how DNA works and about the information in the cell
and how complex cells are, what we're learning over time, actually,
is that it's looking more and more and more unlikely that life could have arisen
without the influence of an intelligent designer.
So Darwin's Black Box gives us a look at that. The book has held up remarkably well.
It was re-released a few years ago with the new afterward. And it's just a tremendous
look at the actual state of the science of evolutionary biology and origin of life.
And I think it was a wonderful blessing that I got to talk to Dr.
Behe. And I would just highly encourage you to read his books.
He's got several books, but Darwin's Black Box is the one that kind of led me to...
Understanding that I wasn't alone in believing that we were created and fearfully
and wonderfully made. This will encourage you.
And if you find yourself a little bit lost in the science, just understand that
the book itself is written from a lay perspective.
And even if you don't know the first thing about biochemistry or molecular biology,
Darwin's Black Box will give you a really good handle on what the truth of the
state of the science is. He doesn't write it from a religious perspective.
He writes it from the perspective of a scientist who's honestly looking at the data.
And I think it'll be very helpful to you. But before we get into Darwin's Black
Box, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
A friend we're back and i'm so excited to introduce a new
friend to you today i've read his book for many years and i've
talked to you about him on the show several times before we've got dr michael
behe with us here today welcome to the show mike uh thanks
very much dr warren it's great to be with you it's so um grateful to have you
here i i don't think i've told you this yet but your book hit me in my personal
life at a really important time i was a neurosurgery resident in Pittsburgh
in the late 90s and had gone through biochemistry training as my undergraduate degree.
And it was just refreshing to find a person who was writing a book that could
sort of help a young Christian scientist not feel so alone.
And your book really meant a lot to me way back then. So thank you for writing
it. Yeah, that's terrific. It's wonderful.
In retrospect, everything is so obvious. It's astounding to me that people have
trouble seeing it. Yeah.
Well, give us a high-level, you know, kind of a high-level overview of your
life and your work, and then we'll get into the details of Darwin's black box and go from there.
Sure, sure. I'm a biochemist. I went to college at Drexel University in Philadelphia
and University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia.
I studied biochemistry, which is the study of the molecular basis of life,
and I was just interested in science my whole life, as many guys are.
And I did post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health.
I worked on sickle cell hemoglobin in graduate school and in DNA structure.
In postdoc. And so I didn't have any particular views in mind about evolution.
I didn't think about evolution in my younger days.
I just wanted to be a scientist, a regular professor, and eventually got a job at Lehigh University.
And I was plugging along doing regular stuff.
But then I I kind of serendipitously read a book, Skeptical of Evolution,
and that kind of made me curious because I had never heard anybody express skepticism
about evolution in my studies.
And here I was, a tenured associate professor at a good school.
So I looked into it and I eventually came
to the conclusion that most of the received view was incorrect and that we need
to recognize that much of life was purposely designed. designed.
And since that time, I've spent the bulk of my time defending that view because
it has turned out to be pretty controversial.
I didn't realize that going in, but it turns out that way.
Wow. Now, were you a Christian already at that time, or did you come to faith later?
What was your experience with faith along that way?
No, I've been a Christian my whole life. I'm a Roman Catholic.
I was born into a Catholic family. my parents were practicing Catholics,
I went to parochial school.
But in Roman Catholicism and,
I guess, other Christian denominations,
one can view evolution as sort of in a theistic fashion, and that,
well, maybe God set the universe up to unfold and, you know,
he made the laws and so on.
And so even if things unfolded the way that many scientists think,
that is apparently random things,
God foresaw that, and so it's not a challenge to that view of creation.
You know, that seemed just fine to me.
I didn't care, you know, what the heck. I was interested in other things.
And I was taught in parochial school that Darwin's theory was our best guess
at how life unfolded. So it was not for religious reasons that I started to
question Darwin's theory.
It was purely for scientific reasons.
I read a book from a scientist, a geneticist in Australia by the name of Michael Denton. Yeah.
And he set me on the path to skepticism.
So, yeah, I've been a Christian my whole life, but that played a surprisingly
small role in my skepticism about Darwin.
Well, I think it's important to just parse that out a little bit because I think
those of us who are drawn to science,
we either find ourselves kind of not thinking about the whole evolution situation,
sort of believing in God and believing in science and then sort of having this
cognitive dissonance about how the two fit together.
And I think that's important for parents too. If anybody's listening out there,
parent with kids or grandkids, and you don't know what to think about school
and the things that we're taught and all of that.
But I think it's also important because I got all the way to neurosurgery training,
Mike, and spent all these years working in biochemistry labs with everybody
else basically in my world being Darwinian evolutionary biologists.
And I always was sort of the kid in the room that was weird,
you know, that went to church and felt differently.
So it was interesting to me when I started reading your book back in the 90s,
like, wait a minute, like the things that the scientists teach us and the things
that the school books teach us aren't really scientifically validated.
They're not really proven the way that science ought to work.
So maybe just start there and talk to
us a little bit about science and worldview view and some of the things that
led you into into questioning evolution in the first place okay yeah well uh
it's interesting um growing up i never thought there was such a thing as worldview
and just what people told me you know what you're taught in school i always took my.
Teacher's word for it i mean i was just a kid you know what what do i know and
even as yourself being trained in science and even in graduate school and further,
everybody just assumed that evolution
was correct and it could explain everything we found out about life.
And it's surprising how those background assumptions can really defeat any critical
thinking, even in people who have the ability to know better.
I've written a couple times about a conversation I had with a fellow postdoc
at the National Institutes of Health back in the 1980s.
She's deceased about 20 years or so ago now, but we were, she was a fellow Catholic,
her brother was a priest, and we were talking about the origin of life.
And we said, you know, what would it take to make the first cell?
Well, of course, you need DNA, you would say.
Yeah, yeah, well, but you'd also need proteins, of course, and you need,
certainly, a membrane and metabolism.
And we kind of looked at each other and stared and said, nah, can't happen.
Then what did we do? We laughed and we kind of turned around and continued with our business.
And we figured that, well, if we didn't know, well, somebody must know or somebody
will figure it out soon or eventually or something.
So just from the background assumption that somebody knows how this happened,
even if you scratch your head and said, gee, I don't see what's going on here,
there, you don't take it any further.
I mentioned this book called Evolution, A Theory, and Crisis by a guy named Michael Denton.
That was kind of a critical read for me back in the mid-1980s.
He was, as I said, a geneticist. He said he was an agnostic.
He didn't care about higher implications.
He was just mad that he was being constantly told that Darwin's theory explains
all this stuff when he had many, many problems.
He saw many problems for it.
But it's interesting for viewers to know, when you think about it now,
everybody accepts evolution.
But back in the day when it was first proposed by Charles Darwin,
nobody knew what the foundation of life was.
Darwin was talking about, you know, birds and reptiles and plants and so on.
And features of them, the way they looked. That's right.
Yeah. When this arm was bigger, this one was shorter and, you know,
transformations at kind of the gross, what we'd call the gross anatomical level.
But the cell back then was thought to be just a little piece of jelly,
protoplasm. Nobody knew what a cell exactly was.
Even molecules. We now know molecules are kind of the foundation of matter, certainly in life.
But nobody was sure if molecules actually existed. They were kind of theoretical entities.
So the point is that people were actually clueless about what the foundation
of life was, and so they speculated at these higher levels.
It's kind of like looking at a computer and not knowing what a computer is and
saying, well, it's kind of got this keyboard.
This typewriter over here as a keyboard too. Maybe somehow they have something to do with it.
And as science progressed,
and especially since the early 1950s, it's been discovered that the foundation
of life, the cell, is astoundingly sophisticated and complex.
That's right. And that what we took to be pretty simple processes have turned
out to be very, very involved.
And I detail a lot of them in my writings.
But just in case anybody in the audience hasn't heard of it yet,
the cell is run literally by machines.
Machines made out of molecules. And I guess the most famous one that is kind
of a paradigm of intelligent design is something called the bacterial flagellum,
which is literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim.
And it's got all sorts of mechanical parts.
It's got a propeller and a motor, and it's got clamps to hold it in place,
and it's got regulatory apparatuses.
And it's a real machine.
It's a nanomachine. machine, and trying to envision how something like that
could come about step-by-step in a gradual Darwinian process as we're taught in school.
Enormously difficult. And even more surprising to me, when I first became skeptical
of this stuff back when I read that book,
Evolution of Theory in Crisis in the 80s, when I first read that,
I said, well, yeah, you know, when you study biochemistry, you see all of these
sophisticated systems.
And I had often wondered, you know, how in the world did that evolve?
But I figured somebody else knew, so I didn't bother with it.
But then, after reading that book, I said, well, who has explained this stuff?
Because Denton said a lot of things were big problems.
And so I went into the science library and looked in the journals where people
would have published papers explaining how this machine developed step-by-step from this precursor.
Here was the selective effect, and this is the intermediates it would have gone through.
And I was astounded to find that there were no such papers.
And I don't mean a small amount of them. I mean no papers, except,
you know, at the broadest speculative level.
So, yeah, it's amazing that this is really one of the kind of pillars of modern thinking,
and yet the evidence behind it is virtually nil.
Yeah, it's amazing to me. And I think there's something we need to parse out here because the,
listener will be aware that people say, well, evolution has absolutely been
proven, but we have a conflated terminology there because there are some things
that are definitely true over time.
Like some species that live in certain similar environments will start to maybe
on a DNA level, select out things that if you look at them.
In the lab, they do share similar DNA sequences and they do share similar things
that they create because they have similar purposes.
And I always thought of that as God doesn't need to build the same tool twice.
If he's going to do a particular thing in nature, he might make it the same
way in multiple different species.
But there's something called conversion evolution. I published a paper in the PNAS in the 90s.
We were doing research search about ankylosing spondylitis and
and our paper in the pns has a
subtitle about convergent evolution and when we wrote
that the other authors of the paper all thought that that was a term that reinforced
darwin and in my worldview it was just a term that explained how two bacteria
ended up with similar protein structures because they do the same job right
yeah yeah sure yeah yeah you You have to be careful because, as you said,
evolution is this very flexible word, and people use it in different senses,
and they kind of slide between different senses.
And so, in general, there are three major senses in the idea of evolution.
The first is common descent. sent. That is the notion that, well,
creatures living today are descended by birth and death from creatures that lived in the misty past.
And that's an interesting idea, but in my own view, it's kind of trivial because
it doesn't say where those creatures in the past came from.
It doesn't say how they may have transformed
into creatures today it just says well
they were there and now these things
these different things are here so okay it
might be an interesting statement about
natural history but in a sense it's trivial yeah
the second the second aspect of evolution that people kind of mean is natural
selection and that is that was proposed by Darwin he says well you know out in the wild you know some.
Organisms, if they have a variation, maybe some members of a species are a little
bigger than others or faster than others or brighter in color or something like
that, that might give them an edge in the struggle to survive.
And so over time, they would have more offspring and take over the population.
And again, in my view, that's interesting.
But again, it's trivial, because who's going to dispute that if you have an
advantage that you're likely to do better than somebody else?
Well, that's kind of a tautology even.
But the third sense is the big one.
That's the one that people pay the least attention to, but that's where all the importance is.
And that is the contention that random variation or random mutation in our more
modern language language, just random changes,
accidental changes in DNA or the constitution of the organism will provide the
fodder for natural selection to build these fantastically complex,
structures that have been discovered in life, and not only at the whole organism
level but but at the molecular level as well.
And for my two cents, that is where pretty much 99.9% of the claim about evolution,
the importance of it is invested in that claim of random mutation.
And that's the one that has zero evidence supporting it.
That if you ask for evidence evidence of that, that's when I did my search back
decades ago and found that there were no papers in the science literature.
And since then, I've kept plugging away.
And in fact, you find quite the opposite, that you find that most changes that are.
Helpful to organisms and are
selected, turn out to be ones that break or degrade pre-existing systems.
You don't see any evidence of new sophisticated machinery such as that which fills the cell.
You don't see that being built by an evolutionary Darwinian process.
That's right. You know, I think it's fascinating to me, and it's interesting
because I think it's It's how God works.
Like when you start searching for truth in any discipline, I think truth always
leads, all the roads in investigating truth lead to the same place.
And we're seeing it with the cosmologists and the quantum physicists and the
molecular biologists, the evolutionary biologists, all these people are discovering,
hey, wait a minute, the further we look into,
the further we get the ability to look deeper into the system,
we find it's more and more and more complex.
I think the reductionists, I think they all thought, okay, now we have DNA.
Now we're going to be able to explain exactly how this all happened.
But the truth is, when we learn something new, it just raises more questions, right?
And so if we back up all the way, like you said, take all these Darwinian processes
and the things that we can demonstrate that are true, survival advantages and
whatnot, we still can't ever back up to a place where chemistry turns into biology.
We never can explain origin of life. I don't know if it was you or Stephen Meyer
that said survival doesn't explain arrival, but that's a great little line Yeah, that that's right.
Yeah, that's a wonderful point that back in the day back in Darwin's day.
Not only was biology Obscure because didn't know much about the cell but neither neither was,
Physics and astronomy and and things like that and it's been the very progress
of science not only in biology, but in chemistry and physics,
that has pointed to a very finely tuned,
very elegant universe that points strongly to purpose and design and,
you know, onto God, of course.
Yeah, it's important to remember that back then in the 19th century,
most physicists thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging and pretty simple.
And most Darwinists thought that life would be pretty common on other planets.
They thought that Mars would have life and maybe Venus too and and and other
things and people even wrote books I've forgotten the name a fellow famously
wrote about canals on Mars and thought that they were,
And he believed in life on Mars because he thought Darwinian processes would occur there.
And he thought that, heck, if life occurs on Earth, it would probably occur on Mars, too.
And since then, science has discovered that, no, the universe isn't eternal.
The universe had a beginning.
And that had very strong religious implications. What could bring a universe
into being other than something outside of the universe?
It's interesting, back in the 1980s, I have a slide of this in my deck,
there was an editorial in the journal Nature, which is, of course,
the leading science journal in the world.
And the editorial had the headline, Down with the Big Bang.
You know, down with the Big Bang in a science journal.
Because he said that the Big Bang gives creationists aid and comfort because
it points to the beginning of the universe. Yeah.
So it's been a remarkable consilience bringing together of all sorts of branches
of science, biology, astronomy, physics, chemistry,
geology, the place of the earth, the kind of privileged place the earth occupies
in the cosmos, the many wonderful things that allow,
earth to have water and water to be an effective solvent for living systems and,
many, many other features that people didn't think about back a hundred years ago.
So I like to point out that the very progress of science has been pointing insistently
beyond the universe for an explanation.
It doesn't explain itself as many scientists such as Darwin and other folks have tried to say,
but rather, the more you know about science, the more strongly it supports the
view that something outside the universe, God, is behind it.
That's right. I love I love how you broke down when you looked at that scientific
literature that was out, and I think it would still hold true today.
If you pay attention to what school textbooks say and what even published papers
say, they use words like, this feature arrived, this feature appeared about
however many million years ago.
It showed up, it developed, but never how it arrived or appeared.
And so it feels, from an outside perspective, if you're just reading it objectively,
it feels like they decided on the answer, and they're trying to make all of
the discoveries fit their principle, regardless of what the data suggests,
which is kind of the anti-scientific approach, isn't it?
Yeah, it certainly is. And if you look into it and think about it for a while,
it should make you mad that school kids are being taught stuff that professional
scientists know to be false.
And that is that we know how these structures might have arisen in some naturalistic way. way.
So even Origin of Life, if you look at textbooks for high school students that
mention it, they'll say, oh, you know, there was this primordial soup or maybe this happened.
And they give, they intentionally give the students the impression that we're
almost there at explaining the origin of life.
And if you look in professional journals, why, you know, just a month or so
ago, An article was written by two origin of life professionals who are no.
Sympathizers with theism or intelligent design that essentially said,
we haven't a clue how life started and we should toss around more different ideas.
So the point is that the textbooks intentionally give kids the wrong idea,
I think because they want to to just say that, well,
science can explain it all for you, and we should all assume that naturalism is true.
I don't know why, but it's certainly the case.
That's exactly right. And we have this conflation, too, of people who are scientists.
I'll put quotes around that if you're watching.
Scientists have a media credibility where when When a scientist,
somebody like Carl Sagan or Francis Crick, says something, then it's given this
weight and credibility as if it's been proven to be true.
But if somebody who's a Christian, who's also a scientist, says something,
then the burden of proof falls on you, right?
So, like, here's a quote I'll read you from Francis Crick. I'm sure you've heard.
My work as a neurosurgeon, I'm very interested in the issues around mind and
brain and the dualism there.
And is the mind separate from the brain? Does the brain create what we think of as mind?
And Francis Crick, who was one of the ones who discovered the molecular structure
of DNA, said, You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the
behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
You are nothing but a pack of neurons. And so here's Francis Crick saying that
mind is just a derivative of brain. And that's basically gospel once he says
something like that because he's a scientist.
But I think we have to recognize that there's statements that are made by scientists,
but they're not necessarily scientific statements, right? Yeah.
Exactly. They are philosophical. They say that the only thing that exists is the stuff that we study.
So we're scientists, we study matter, we study nerves and so on.
Therefore, mind doesn't exist.
It's only nerves and connections between nerves and so on.
But that, of course, begs the question. Another convenient result of that is
that it makes scientists really very important, too.
That's right. After all, if they can explain everything, then they are the high priests of society,
and philosophers and theologians, and let alone clergy, and they can just be safely ignored.
Ignored. But it's really astounding.
If you read Crick's introduction that you just quoted and stuff,
you'd think that he got that from some experiment or other.
But it's just that he's saying, well, you know, there are nerves and I don't
believe in anything else. So this must be true.
It's a deduction. It's not a discovery.
It's a deduction from materialistic principles.
It's a self-defeating argument as well, because if you believe that you have
no free will because everything you think is just a product of the firing of
a neuron, then what would the purpose be in writing a book to convince somebody
that they didn't have free will?
Yeah, that's a wonderful point. There's a man named Philip Johnson who was active
in the intelligent design movement, and he died a few years ago.
But he said, think how silly it would be if Francis Crick.
Had written, you know, I am just my nerves, and I am just a pack of neurons.
So who would listen to a person like that?
Why should we listen to a pack of neurons? But he said, you are just a pack of neurons.
Yeah, that's right. Stephen Hawking did the same thing. He said,
science will explain everything eventually. There's no role for theology, no role for philosophy.
It's all science. But that's obviously a philosophical argument and not a scientific one.
It's interesting to me, you mentioned the phrase intelligent design,
and just in case somebody is unaware of what that means, talk about the philosophy
and the science of intelligent design for a moment.
Okay. Well, intelligent design, it's a phrase, but it means something that we do every day.
It's, you know, a question, you know, can you tell that something has been purposely
arranged or is the result of intelligent activity versus just other unintelligent forces?
And if you're walking down the street, you might look to the left and there
might be, you know, some dandelions growing on somebody's lawn and,
you know, a few weeds over here.
And you look to the right and by the mailbox, there's this nice arrangement of flowers growing out.
You know that the one was purposely planted and the other is not because it's
been arranged to beautify that particular area of the ground.
So the question is, how do we recognize that? We all know that there are intelligences.
We ourselves have intelligence.
We recognize that other things are intelligent. How do we know that?
You know, we do it all the time, but how do we know it?
And it turns out the key to recognizing something as the result of intelligent activity is just that.
If we see that parts have been arranged for some purpose, because only intelligent beings have purposes.
Nature, unintelligent nature, doesn't have a purpose. It just does stuff. stuff.
So if we see like a machine, I use an example of a mousetrap in my book, Darwin's Black Box.
And if you just think of something like that, anybody who saw that would quickly
say, oh, well, that's purposely designed.
And why? Is it a religious conclusion that you say it's purposely designed?
No, because you see the purpose, you see the spring there and the part that'll
smack the mouse and the board that everything is arranged on.
So whenever we see a purposeful arrangement of parts, we conclude that it was designed.
It is the result of intelligent activity.
And we have discovered such things in the cell and in life in general.
But in particular, we've discovered
molecular machines like that bacterial flagellum I talked about.
It's literally an outboard motor. You know, it's more sophisticated than, say, a mousetrap.
So the conclusion of intelligent design is that we can conclude that those things
were purposely designed because we see the purpose in the arrangement.
That's how we determine something was designed.
Now, of course, Darwin and his followers later said that, well,
no, we can explain it otherwise as the result of random changes and selection.
But if you look in the literature, that's all brag, no fact.
You know, they can't. And it's quite the opposite, as I've written about. about.
But the point is that intelligent design is not some fluffy philosophical or theological idea.
It's just looking at something and seeing that parts have been arranged, and it's something,
we do every day, and now when we have the ability to look at things in biology
up close and the molecular level and so on, we see exactly that.
Purpose suffuses the cell. And so the argument of intelligent design here is
that we should not ignore the conclusion there simply because we prefer some other explanation.
That's exactly right. In the years since you first published Darwin's Black
Box, This book has been in print for almost 30 years.
It's a remarkable book. You've had, what, several editions published now.
Tremendous book. The audiobook's outstanding as well. And I think in the years
since that's been published, what's happened on the scientific side in terms
of origin of life research and Darwinian evolutionary research and intelligent design research?
And where do we stand now? If you had an honest, unbiased observer who looked
at the world's literature in biology,
what would reasonable conclusions be now as to how we all got here?
Well, you're asking a biased observer to say what the unbiased observer would
say. We're back with Crick.
But let me just say this about that.
Yeah, coming up on 30 years, and I talked about a number of systems in Darwin's
Black Box, blood clotting, the bacterial flagellum, intracellular transport, a bunch of other things.
And people hated that book. A lot of Darwinists simply despised it,
including a lot of really, really smart scientists.
And they were highly motivated to show that it was correct.
And yet, in the 30 years since then, even though, in general,
science, in particular biology,
has progressed by leaps and bounds in figuring out how things work,
nobody has has been able to explain how any of those things might have arisen
through a Darwinian process.
People have described in better detail how they work, and we've seen that they
are more sophisticated, but nobody has published anything.
And you can look in the literature, and you can do a literature search,
look for how the bacterial flagella might have arisen.
You'll say, well, you'll see just papers that say, well, here,
this thing looks like this thing here or that thing looks like that thing there.
And and but you'll you won't see, you know, how this could have given risen
even to something closely related to it.
So one conclusion is that I stand by everything,
and I wrote 30 years ago, and the situation has gotten much worse for Darwin's
theory in the meantime. time.
I wrote a book five or so years ago called Darwin Devolves.
And the gist of that is that, in fact, now that we can look at DNA much more
closely, we have the ability to sequence it and follow mutations at the molecular level very closely,
which we didn't have even 20 years ago.
Ago, you can see that the adaptations of organisms that people point to as examples
of how evolution might work,
like new dog breeds and things like polar bears being derived from brown bears and other such things.
Have mutations that do adapt them to different environments,
but they're almost all by degrading genes that already existed in the ancestor organisms.
So they are devolving rather than evolving.
It's interesting that that can help them fit better with a particular niche,
niche, but the long and the short is that they are losing abilities rather than
gaining abilities. Wow.
Yeah. I mean, if you just think of dog breeds, you think of, you know, dachshunds.
Well, it turns out that what makes a dachshund, or part of it,
is that the gene for a growth factor that that allows dog to grow bigger, is broken in small dogs.
And in some larger, highly muscled dogs, a controlling element that stops growth
when it's gotten to be the proportionate size is broken.
And dogs with curly hair, a gene in hair development is broken. Wow.
And these things, dog breeds, have been touted by evolutionists for a while
as showing the great variety that you can get from an ancestor, and that's true.
But it turns out it's all due to loss of function, not gain of function.
Wow. That's really fascinating. I think it's really probably important to tell
people who haven't read Darwin's Black Box that you very carefully lay out this
book as not a religious approach to looking at Darwin and science.
I think that's the thing across the board about the intelligent design movement
that I've been impressed by is it is not a religious attack on Darwinism or
religious attack on chemical or biological evolution.
It's looking at actually what do we know from a scientific perspective.
If we say the scientific method is ask a question, develop a hypothesis,
test it, revise it, and come to the right conclusion based on the data,
then you can't get to Darwinian evolution from the data.
You just can't and that's it that's exactly
right it's it's not
an attack on science it's kind of going back
to science it turns out that darwin's theory and the subsequent sociological
development of it in the scientific community was in fact a you know a deriving
of conclusions from a non-scientific presupposition,
that is, that there is nothing that could affect life outside of life.
And if we rule that out, then something like Darwinism has to be true.
But ruling that out is a philosophical move. It's not a scientific one.
And if you look, again, at the evidence and ask yourself, what does it show?
It does not show the transformations that Darwinists say must happen.
And as science progresses more and more, we see more and more intricacy,
more and more elegance at deeper and deeper levels of life.
It's not getting more squishy. It's not getting more simple as you go down to
lower levels of life as Darwin and his contemporaries thought.
That was the importance of thinking that the cell was just a glob of protoplasm, some piece of jelly.
Because even though you could then think that even though at the whole organism
level things look kind of complicated, when you got lower it was pretty simple.
The opposite has turned out to be the case, that the more we know,
When you go to lower levels, the cellular and molecular levels of life,
things become more complex, not less complex.
So, yeah, this is where the data lead.
When you do away with the presuppositions of what we're supposed to find,
the data points strongly to intelligent design.
So what would you say from the standpoint of people listening out there who
may be raising kids or having grandkids who are in public education or getting
ready to be in public education,
what would you say to them would be a good approach for what we can do to prepare
or arm our children to have a perspective on this that might be more consistent
with the Christian worldview?
Yeah, well, I guess the best thing is just to forewarn them.
Tell them what they can expect and tell them, you know, simply age appropriate
way what what the problems are.
You know, when you start out with, say, a mousetrap, you can easily show a little
little child a mousetrap and say, here's, you know, here's how we know somebody made this.
Somebody did this on purpose and you can't put this together randomly.
And you have to then explain that we live in a world where a lot of people are anti-God.
They don't want God to exist.
They don't want God to have acted in the world.
And so you have to warn them saying that, you know, sometimes the things you'll
hear in school are influenced by folks with this point of view,
and yet it doesn't work,
it doesn't fit with the mousetrap, it doesn't fit with your hands and fingers
and how marvelous they are and how they work.
So you should be respectful to your teachers. You should read over what they
tell you to read and stuff.
But you have to realize we live in a fallen world.
And so people we talk to sometimes will give us wrong information.
That's right. Well, something like that. I love it.
So if we have two choices in front of us as we land this plane here today, we have two choices.
We're the products of random events from billions of years ago that have led
us to this place and these lives that we have that may all be just the product of cellular activity.
And there's an empty void that we're going to go to after we die.
Or there's purpose and meaning in our lives that were designed for a particular
purpose and were exactly where we were supposed to be.
Like between those two extremes, after your long and storied career in science,
where do you land and how can people find hope in the work that you've done?
Oh, well, you know, just as almost everybody in the entire world thought up
until Darwin and even mostly afterwards, the world is filled with purpose.
And everywhere we look, you can see it.
You can see it, of course, in nature. Everybody loves nature.
You go out for a walk in the lovely woods and then the sunshine and the beautiful
weather you can have sometimes.
And you can see it in your hands. You don't have to be a scientist.
You say, holy moly, look how my hands work and I can see stuff.
And this doesn't happen by chance.
Everybody in the world knew that, you know, the world was not self-explaining,
that somebody created it.
And Christianity, of course, you know, knows that God created it and so on.
But everybody knew that life was created.
And that's certainly what I understand.
And it's been a real tragedy of modern times that we have allowed ourselves
to be talked out of this by slick folks in lab coats saying,
no, no, no, you're just a bag of neurons.
And that's terrible because, you know, it leads to despair for many people.
You know, it might make some people feel self-important, like the scientists
who push this line of thinking,
but it's a tragedy for almost everybody else, and it's utterly against the facts.
So, here we are, though, and nonetheless, you can educate yourself,
you can educate your kids, and whoever else will listen to you,
just by reading and seeing that, yeah,
your intuitions, what you see in the world, it's true. It's really true.
That's the best scientific explanation for how we got here, let alone without
even touching philosophy and theology.
Wow. Beautiful. Beautiful. I've been looking forward to this conversation, Mike.
You've done a great career's worth of work in helping people sort of parse out
what's real and what's just media spin.
And I appreciate your time so well, so much. And thank you very much for the
work that you've done and your time here on the podcast this morning.
Absolutely. Thanks very much for having me. I've greatly enjoyed our conversation.
What a treasure, what a treat, what an honor to have a chance to talk to Dr. Behe.
Listen, I can't encourage you highly enough to read Darwin's Black Box and his
other book, Darwin Devolves.
This is a look at the truth of the state of the science.
And again, if you're not a believer, you don't have to be a believer to approach
science as a scientist. And what is science?
Well, science is the idea that you look at something and try to explain it,
and then you ask questions of it and devise experiments to test it.
And if the experiments don't validate the assumption that you made,
then you change the assumption.
But the problem with Darwinian evolution is that they decided,
and by they I mean the materialists, the scientists who, along with Darwin,
believed from the start that everything needed to be explainable through natural processes.
That's what naturalism, by the way, is.
They said, we don't believe in a God or an external creator,
and you have to explain everything from a scientific point of view.
Science can explain everything.
Science is more important than theology or philosophy or any other type of learning.
It's the only thing that really counts.
That, understand that, is a philosophical position, and that's where they started
with evolutionary biology.
They started with the premise that we know that there's no supernatural,
there's no God, there's no creator. So how do we explain what we see since we
know that there's no supernatural?
Which is a terribly unscientific position. My teaching to you all the time,
my conversation with you is, science is a process of asking questions,
designing experiments to answer those questions, and revising the questions
based on the results that we get, not to continue to hold up the answer that
we started with and make the data fit the answer.
We see that with all kinds of things, climate science and other things,
where the decision's already been made of how we're going to proceed.
We are going to believe this. We're going to teach it.
We're going to enforce it. We're going to make laws about it.
We're going to make businesses around it.
And if the data doesn't support it, then we ignore the data or we attack the
scientists who are promoting the data. And that's just not scientific. Okay.
So what I really appreciate with Dr. Behe is, whether you believe in God or
not, whether you believe in anything related to creationism or any of that,
what I appreciate about Dr.
Behe is he was a real scientist who looked at the data and said,
wait a minute, we've got a problem with the data here.
The data don't support the ability of complex systems to have arisen by themselves.
The data don't support the idea that one species can develop into another.
The data just don't support it. So what else could?
Could and that's what led to the theory of intelligent design like
basically if you as he said in the interview if you
see a complex system in the world a mousetrap
for example you don't assume that it just sprung into existence from us from
a bunch of parts lying around but even if it could do that then the question
would be where did the parts come from how did those arise and how were they
all perfectly arranged to fit together in a way that would produce that function
well Well, that's what's happening inside your cells.
And if you're a parent or a grandparent, I would just highly encourage you to
arm yourself with this knowledge so you can help your children be prepared for
the onslaught of information they're going to receive that points towards this
conclusion that has already been made that we arose through unguided,
accidental processes from nothing.
And I just want to tell you that your friend, the scientist here,
your friend, the published neuroscientist, and I've got legit chops there, by the way.
I have a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I have a paper in the Lancet. I've done the work too.
And so as a real scientist, I'm telling you that there's more to this story
than your kids are going to be taught in school.
And some of the things that you're taught in school, some of the textbooks,
for example, that you read will show things like Java Man or things like transitional
forms and the fossils. And we know now that those things were false,
that they were not true even when they were published.
And yet they still show up in even college textbooks because they support the narrative.
So just take a step back, take a chance to read Darwin's Black Box and appreciate
that somebody like Michael Behe's out there.
And he's not alone, by the way. The voices are getting louder.
And the fact is that you have to have more faith now to be an evolutionary biologist
than you had to have in the 1950s.
1950s. You're in a better position, a stronger position if you're arguing from
reason and real science than you are if you're holding on to dogma and belief.
The tables have turned a little bit, and Dr. Behe helps us get that idea in
our heads. And I think it was a tremendous conversation.
I hope you enjoyed it. And I just want to encourage you that you can't change
your life until you change your mind. And maybe you need to change your mind
about some of the things that you've been taught.
And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.
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