0:02

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am excited and

0:06

grateful that you're listening here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

0:09

We're going to change our minds about something today, and I want to give you a special guest.

0:14

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to somebody that I have revered and thought highly of for 30 years.

0:20

Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist from Lehigh University, and back in 1996,

0:26

he published a book called Darwin's Black box, the biochemical challenge to evolution.

0:33

It might surprise you because the media and public schools universally promote

0:38

Darwinian evolution as the fact,

0:43

as the way that life arose, that species develop and form.

0:48

But it might surprise you that the actual scientific research out there doesn't support that at all.

0:55

In fact, since Watson and Crick described the molecular structure of DNA,

0:59

a darwinian evolution has become more and more

1:02

and more in question as an origin of life

1:05

explanation and you frequently see things

1:08

when you actually look at the papers that propose to explain how

1:11

particular things got here like the retina of the eye or the bacterial flagellum

1:16

for example you see phrases like appeared or developed or arose or came about

1:23

you don't see here's the explanation scientifically of how this happened there's

1:27

always this filter in place of we know No, it started with evolution.

1:31

We just can't prove it. So we're going to say it arose.

1:34

We're going to say that it developed. We're going to say that it showed up.

1:37

But if you actually look at the science, it doesn't say what you think.

1:40

And it reminds me of that story that Mark Twain was attributed to having said,

1:45

it ain't what you know that gets you in trouble.

1:48

It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

1:52

So a lot of times the things that get us in trouble is that we spend our lives

1:56

believing or following things that turn out not to be so sure,

1:59

not so certain, not so true. And I just want to give you today an incredible conversation that I had with Dr. Behe yesterday.

2:07

The book Darwin's Black Box was named by National Review as one of the top 100

2:12

most important nonfiction works of the 20th century.

2:16

Let that sink in. It's never gone out of print since 1996.

2:19

George Gilder wrote that Darwin's Black Box overthrows Darwin at the end of

2:24

the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the

2:28

beginning of the 20th century. In May of 2005, in The New Yorker, Alan Orb said, Dr.

2:35

Behe is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent

2:39

design, and his arguments are by far the best known.

2:42

Darwin's black box was important to me because I found it in my residency training

2:47

when I was in Pittsburgh, and I was surrounded by a lot of people who were evolutionists,

2:53

reductionists, atheists. Certainly it was a minority position to believe that God created the earth and

3:00

the nervous system and everything else. And Darwin's Black Box gave me a sort of encouragement that real scientists,

3:08

sometimes are believers, that real scientists actually, there are people out

3:12

there who are still following the scientific method.

3:14

We had an incredible conversation yesterday. I think it's going to be helpful.

3:17

And if you're a parent of a child in public schools, or if you have have grandchildren

3:22

who are going to be going to or are in public schools, it might be helpful for

3:27

you to read Darwin's Black Box, Dr. Behe's work, and just be able to give your kids an alternative way of thinking

3:33

because evolution is taught to them as the fact.

3:37

And the truth is, it ain't necessarily so. Now, I want to be careful because

3:42

this is a common way that evolutionists will attack you if you try to bring

3:47

up intelligent design or creationism or any other type of non-evolution Explanation for Life.

3:53

Because it's a fact that species do evolve over time.

3:57

There's no doubt about that. If you take what Darwin looked at,

4:00

which was before we understood anything about biochemistry or molecules or any

4:04

of that, Darwin was looking basically at phenotype, at the way things look.

4:08

And he would say, well, if you study this population of finches,

4:11

for example, over time, the ones that have sharper beaks are more successful

4:15

in breaking seeds and the other ones die off.

4:18

And over time, the species starts to look more and more the same,

4:21

that the genetics of the particular birds start to favor one another over time

4:27

in a population or environment because the ones that aren't at an advantage will die off.

4:31

And so it is true that the features of a species in a given environment over

4:37

time tend to promote that process that benefits them becoming more and more

4:44

popular so that over time the genes start to become more aligned with one another.

4:48

And that's called survival of the fittest.

4:50

And that is undoubtedly true. It's absolutely true.

4:53

But at the same time, that fact that species evolve over time is not the same

5:00

as saying that one species evolved from another,

5:03

or even if you back it up far enough, that all species arose from a common ancestor

5:07

or that life became life out of a chemical soup.

5:11

All of that stuff is not actually scientifically validated.

5:15

And it's now, since we know how DNA works and about the information in the cell

5:19

and how complex cells are, what we're learning over time, actually,

5:23

is that it's looking more and more and more unlikely that life could have arisen

5:28

without the influence of an intelligent designer.

5:31

So Darwin's Black Box gives us a look at that. The book has held up remarkably well.

5:35

It was re-released a few years ago with the new afterward. And it's just a tremendous

5:38

look at the actual state of the science of evolutionary biology and origin of life.

5:45

And I think it was a wonderful blessing that I got to talk to Dr.

5:48

Behe. And I would just highly encourage you to read his books.

5:51

He's got several books, but Darwin's Black Box is the one that kind of led me to...

5:56

Understanding that I wasn't alone in believing that we were created and fearfully

6:00

and wonderfully made. This will encourage you. And if you find yourself a little bit lost in the science, just understand that

6:06

the book itself is written from a lay perspective.

6:08

And even if you don't know the first thing about biochemistry or molecular biology,

6:13

Darwin's Black Box will give you a really good handle on what the truth of the

6:17

state of the science is. He doesn't write it from a religious perspective.

6:20

He writes it from the perspective of a scientist who's honestly looking at the data.

6:25

And I think it'll be very helpful to you. But before we get into Darwin's Black

6:28

Box, I have a question for you.

6:31

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

6:37

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

6:40

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

6:44

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

6:47

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

6:51

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

6:54

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

6:58

healthier, feel better, and be happier. This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

7:04

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

7:09

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

7:14

Music.

7:19

A friend we're back and i'm so excited to introduce a new

7:22

friend to you today i've read his book for many years and i've

7:25

talked to you about him on the show several times before we've got dr michael

7:28

behe with us here today welcome to the show mike uh thanks

7:31

very much dr warren it's great to be with you it's so um grateful to have you

7:35

here i i don't think i've told you this yet but your book hit me in my personal

7:40

life at a really important time i was a neurosurgery resident in Pittsburgh

7:44

in the late 90s and had gone through biochemistry training as my undergraduate degree.

7:49

And it was just refreshing to find a person who was writing a book that could

7:55

sort of help a young Christian scientist not feel so alone.

7:59

And your book really meant a lot to me way back then. So thank you for writing

8:02

it. Yeah, that's terrific. It's wonderful.

8:05

In retrospect, everything is so obvious. It's astounding to me that people have

8:11

trouble seeing it. Yeah. Well, give us a high-level, you know, kind of a high-level overview of your

8:16

life and your work, and then we'll get into the details of Darwin's black box and go from there.

8:21

Sure, sure. I'm a biochemist. I went to college at Drexel University in Philadelphia

8:28

and University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia.

8:30

I studied biochemistry, which is the study of the molecular basis of life,

8:36

and I was just interested in science my whole life, as many guys are.

8:43

And I did post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health.

8:50

I worked on sickle cell hemoglobin in graduate school and in DNA structure.

8:58

In postdoc. And so I didn't have any particular views in mind about evolution.

9:04

I didn't think about evolution in my younger days.

9:08

I just wanted to be a scientist, a regular professor, and eventually got a job at Lehigh University.

9:16

And I was plugging along doing regular stuff.

9:19

But then I I kind of serendipitously read a book, Skeptical of Evolution,

9:25

and that kind of made me curious because I had never heard anybody express skepticism

9:32

about evolution in my studies.

9:36

And here I was, a tenured associate professor at a good school.

9:42

So I looked into it and I eventually came

9:46

to the conclusion that most of the received view was incorrect and that we need

9:57

to recognize that much of life was purposely designed. designed.

10:03

And since that time, I've spent the bulk of my time defending that view because

10:10

it has turned out to be pretty controversial.

10:12

I didn't realize that going in, but it turns out that way.

10:17

Wow. Now, were you a Christian already at that time, or did you come to faith later?

10:22

What was your experience with faith along that way?

10:26

No, I've been a Christian my whole life. I'm a Roman Catholic.

10:30

I was born into a Catholic family. my parents were practicing Catholics,

10:36

I went to parochial school. But in Roman Catholicism and,

10:43

I guess, other Christian denominations,

10:49

one can view evolution as sort of in a theistic fashion, and that,

10:54

well, maybe God set the universe up to unfold and, you know,

10:59

he made the laws and so on.

11:02

And so even if things unfolded the way that many scientists think,

11:09

that is apparently random things,

11:12

God foresaw that, and so it's not a challenge to that view of creation.

11:20

You know, that seemed just fine to me.

11:23

I didn't care, you know, what the heck. I was interested in other things.

11:28

And I was taught in parochial school that Darwin's theory was our best guess

11:34

at how life unfolded. So it was not for religious reasons that I started to

11:40

question Darwin's theory.

11:43

It was purely for scientific reasons.

11:46

I read a book from a scientist, a geneticist in Australia by the name of Michael Denton. Yeah.

11:53

And he set me on the path to skepticism.

11:57

So, yeah, I've been a Christian my whole life, but that played a surprisingly

12:02

small role in my skepticism about Darwin.

12:05

Well, I think it's important to just parse that out a little bit because I think

12:09

those of us who are drawn to science,

12:13

we either find ourselves kind of not thinking about the whole evolution situation,

12:18

sort of believing in God and believing in science and then sort of having this

12:23

cognitive dissonance about how the two fit together.

12:26

And I think that's important for parents too. If anybody's listening out there,

12:29

parent with kids or grandkids, and you don't know what to think about school

12:33

and the things that we're taught and all of that.

12:35

But I think it's also important because I got all the way to neurosurgery training,

12:39

Mike, and spent all these years working in biochemistry labs with everybody

12:45

else basically in my world being Darwinian evolutionary biologists.

12:50

And I always was sort of the kid in the room that was weird,

12:52

you know, that went to church and felt differently.

12:55

So it was interesting to me when I started reading your book back in the 90s,

12:59

like, wait a minute, like the things that the scientists teach us and the things

13:03

that the school books teach us aren't really scientifically validated.

13:06

They're not really proven the way that science ought to work.

13:09

So maybe just start there and talk to

13:12

us a little bit about science and worldview view and some of the things that

13:16

led you into into questioning evolution in the first place okay yeah well uh

13:21

it's interesting um growing up i never thought there was such a thing as worldview

13:26

and just what people told me you know what you're taught in school i always took my.

13:31

Teacher's word for it i mean i was just a kid you know what what do i know and

13:37

even as yourself being trained in science and even in graduate school and further,

13:44

everybody just assumed that evolution

13:48

was correct and it could explain everything we found out about life.

13:56

And it's surprising how those background assumptions can really defeat any critical

14:04

thinking, even in people who have the ability to know better.

14:09

I've written a couple times about a conversation I had with a fellow postdoc

14:14

at the National Institutes of Health back in the 1980s.

14:19

She's deceased about 20 years or so ago now, but we were, she was a fellow Catholic,

14:26

her brother was a priest, and we were talking about the origin of life.

14:30

And we said, you know, what would it take to make the first cell?

14:34

Well, of course, you need DNA, you would say.

14:37

Yeah, yeah, well, but you'd also need proteins, of course, and you need,

14:42

certainly, a membrane and metabolism.

14:45

And we kind of looked at each other and stared and said, nah, can't happen.

14:53

Then what did we do? We laughed and we kind of turned around and continued with our business.

14:58

And we figured that, well, if we didn't know, well, somebody must know or somebody

15:02

will figure it out soon or eventually or something.

15:06

So just from the background assumption that somebody knows how this happened,

15:11

even if you scratch your head and said, gee, I don't see what's going on here,

15:16

there, you don't take it any further.

15:20

I mentioned this book called Evolution, A Theory, and Crisis by a guy named Michael Denton.

15:28

That was kind of a critical read for me back in the mid-1980s.

15:35

He was, as I said, a geneticist. He said he was an agnostic.

15:40

He didn't care about higher implications.

15:45

He was just mad that he was being constantly told that Darwin's theory explains

15:51

all this stuff when he had many, many problems.

15:57

He saw many problems for it. But it's interesting for viewers to know, when you think about it now,

16:08

everybody accepts evolution. But back in the day when it was first proposed by Charles Darwin,

16:16

nobody knew what the foundation of life was.

16:21

Darwin was talking about, you know, birds and reptiles and plants and so on.

16:28

And features of them, the way they looked. That's right.

16:32

Yeah. When this arm was bigger, this one was shorter and, you know,

16:37

transformations at kind of the gross, what we'd call the gross anatomical level.

16:42

But the cell back then was thought to be just a little piece of jelly,

16:47

protoplasm. Nobody knew what a cell exactly was.

16:55

Even molecules. We now know molecules are kind of the foundation of matter, certainly in life.

17:02

But nobody was sure if molecules actually existed. They were kind of theoretical entities.

17:08

So the point is that people were actually clueless about what the foundation

17:13

of life was, and so they speculated at these higher levels.

17:17

It's kind of like looking at a computer and not knowing what a computer is and

17:23

saying, well, it's kind of got this keyboard.

17:25

This typewriter over here as a keyboard too. Maybe somehow they have something to do with it.

17:31

And as science progressed,

17:35

and especially since the early 1950s, it's been discovered that the foundation

17:43

of life, the cell, is astoundingly sophisticated and complex.

17:49

That's right. And that what we took to be pretty simple processes have turned

17:57

out to be very, very involved.

18:01

And I detail a lot of them in my writings.

18:04

But just in case anybody in the audience hasn't heard of it yet,

18:09

the cell is run literally by machines.

18:15

Machines made out of molecules. And I guess the most famous one that is kind

18:22

of a paradigm of intelligent design is something called the bacterial flagellum,

18:27

which is literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim.

18:32

And it's got all sorts of mechanical parts.

18:35

It's got a propeller and a motor, and it's got clamps to hold it in place,

18:40

and it's got regulatory apparatuses. And it's a real machine.

18:44

It's a nanomachine. machine, and trying to envision how something like that

18:49

could come about step-by-step in a gradual Darwinian process as we're taught in school.

19:02

Enormously difficult. And even more surprising to me, when I first became skeptical

19:10

of this stuff back when I read that book,

19:13

Evolution of Theory in Crisis in the 80s, when I first read that,

19:17

I said, well, yeah, you know, when you study biochemistry, you see all of these

19:22

sophisticated systems. And I had often wondered, you know, how in the world did that evolve?

19:29

But I figured somebody else knew, so I didn't bother with it.

19:33

But then, after reading that book, I said, well, who has explained this stuff?

19:37

Because Denton said a lot of things were big problems.

19:42

And so I went into the science library and looked in the journals where people

19:48

would have published papers explaining how this machine developed step-by-step from this precursor.

19:57

Here was the selective effect, and this is the intermediates it would have gone through.

20:03

And I was astounded to find that there were no such papers.

20:08

And I don't mean a small amount of them. I mean no papers, except,

20:14

you know, at the broadest speculative level.

20:18

So, yeah, it's amazing that this is really one of the kind of pillars of modern thinking,

20:30

and yet the evidence behind it is virtually nil.

20:36

Yeah, it's amazing to me. And I think there's something we need to parse out here because the,

20:41

listener will be aware that people say, well, evolution has absolutely been

20:47

proven, but we have a conflated terminology there because there are some things

20:51

that are definitely true over time.

20:53

Like some species that live in certain similar environments will start to maybe

20:58

on a DNA level, select out things that if you look at them.

21:02

In the lab, they do share similar DNA sequences and they do share similar things

21:08

that they create because they have similar purposes.

21:11

And I always thought of that as God doesn't need to build the same tool twice.

21:15

If he's going to do a particular thing in nature, he might make it the same

21:19

way in multiple different species. But there's something called conversion evolution. I published a paper in the PNAS in the 90s.

21:26

We were doing research search about ankylosing spondylitis and

21:29

and our paper in the pns has a

21:32

subtitle about convergent evolution and when we wrote

21:35

that the other authors of the paper all thought that that was a term that reinforced

21:39

darwin and in my worldview it was just a term that explained how two bacteria

21:44

ended up with similar protein structures because they do the same job right

21:48

yeah yeah sure yeah yeah you You have to be careful because, as you said,

21:54

evolution is this very flexible word, and people use it in different senses,

22:00

and they kind of slide between different senses.

22:04

And so, in general, there are three major senses in the idea of evolution.

22:16

The first is common descent. sent. That is the notion that, well,

22:21

creatures living today are descended by birth and death from creatures that lived in the misty past.

22:29

And that's an interesting idea, but in my own view, it's kind of trivial because

22:37

it doesn't say where those creatures in the past came from.

22:42

It doesn't say how they may have transformed

22:45

into creatures today it just says well

22:48

they were there and now these things

22:51

these different things are here so okay it

22:54

might be an interesting statement about

22:57

natural history but in a sense it's trivial yeah

23:01

the second the second aspect of evolution that people kind of mean is natural

23:10

selection and that is that was proposed by Darwin he says well you know out in the wild you know some.

23:19

Organisms, if they have a variation, maybe some members of a species are a little

23:24

bigger than others or faster than others or brighter in color or something like

23:28

that, that might give them an edge in the struggle to survive.

23:32

And so over time, they would have more offspring and take over the population.

23:38

And again, in my view, that's interesting.

23:41

But again, it's trivial, because who's going to dispute that if you have an

23:46

advantage that you're likely to do better than somebody else?

23:51

Well, that's kind of a tautology even.

23:55

But the third sense is the big one.

23:58

That's the one that people pay the least attention to, but that's where all the importance is.

24:04

And that is the contention that random variation or random mutation in our more

24:11

modern language language, just random changes,

24:15

accidental changes in DNA or the constitution of the organism will provide the

24:22

fodder for natural selection to build these fantastically complex,

24:28

structures that have been discovered in life, and not only at the whole organism

24:34

level but but at the molecular level as well.

24:37

And for my two cents, that is where pretty much 99.9% of the claim about evolution,

24:46

the importance of it is invested in that claim of random mutation.

24:52

And that's the one that has zero evidence supporting it.

24:58

That if you ask for evidence evidence of that, that's when I did my search back

25:04

decades ago and found that there were no papers in the science literature.

25:08

And since then, I've kept plugging away.

25:12

And in fact, you find quite the opposite, that you find that most changes that are.

25:18

Helpful to organisms and are

25:20

selected, turn out to be ones that break or degrade pre-existing systems.

25:26

You don't see any evidence of new sophisticated machinery such as that which fills the cell.

25:34

You don't see that being built by an evolutionary Darwinian process.

25:41

That's right. You know, I think it's fascinating to me, and it's interesting

25:45

because I think it's It's how God works. Like when you start searching for truth in any discipline, I think truth always

25:52

leads, all the roads in investigating truth lead to the same place.

25:56

And we're seeing it with the cosmologists and the quantum physicists and the

25:59

molecular biologists, the evolutionary biologists, all these people are discovering,

26:03

hey, wait a minute, the further we look into,

26:06

the further we get the ability to look deeper into the system,

26:10

we find it's more and more and more complex.

26:12

I think the reductionists, I think they all thought, okay, now we have DNA.

26:16

Now we're going to be able to explain exactly how this all happened.

26:19

But the truth is, when we learn something new, it just raises more questions, right?

26:24

And so if we back up all the way, like you said, take all these Darwinian processes

26:28

and the things that we can demonstrate that are true, survival advantages and

26:33

whatnot, we still can't ever back up to a place where chemistry turns into biology.

26:37

We never can explain origin of life. I don't know if it was you or Stephen Meyer

26:42

that said survival doesn't explain arrival, but that's a great little line Yeah, that that's right.

26:48

Yeah, that's a wonderful point that back in the day back in Darwin's day.

26:55

Not only was biology Obscure because didn't know much about the cell but neither neither was,

27:03

Physics and astronomy and and things like that and it's been the very progress

27:08

of science not only in biology, but in chemistry and physics,

27:13

that has pointed to a very finely tuned,

27:19

very elegant universe that points strongly to purpose and design and,

27:29

you know, onto God, of course.

27:32

Yeah, it's important to remember that back then in the 19th century,

27:38

most physicists thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging and pretty simple.

27:45

And most Darwinists thought that life would be pretty common on other planets.

27:52

They thought that Mars would have life and maybe Venus too and and and other

27:58

things and people even wrote books I've forgotten the name a fellow famously

28:03

wrote about canals on Mars and thought that they were,

28:07

And he believed in life on Mars because he thought Darwinian processes would occur there.

28:14

And he thought that, heck, if life occurs on Earth, it would probably occur on Mars, too.

28:22

And since then, science has discovered that, no, the universe isn't eternal.

28:30

The universe had a beginning. And that had very strong religious implications. What could bring a universe

28:39

into being other than something outside of the universe?

28:43

It's interesting, back in the 1980s, I have a slide of this in my deck,

28:50

there was an editorial in the journal Nature, which is, of course,

28:56

the leading science journal in the world.

28:58

And the editorial had the headline, Down with the Big Bang.

29:07

You know, down with the Big Bang in a science journal.

29:11

Because he said that the Big Bang gives creationists aid and comfort because

29:17

it points to the beginning of the universe. Yeah.

29:21

So it's been a remarkable consilience bringing together of all sorts of branches

29:28

of science, biology, astronomy, physics, chemistry,

29:33

geology, the place of the earth, the kind of privileged place the earth occupies

29:41

in the cosmos, the many wonderful things that allow,

29:47

earth to have water and water to be an effective solvent for living systems and,

29:58

many, many other features that people didn't think about back a hundred years ago.

30:06

So I like to point out that the very progress of science has been pointing insistently

30:12

beyond the universe for an explanation.

30:15

It doesn't explain itself as many scientists such as Darwin and other folks have tried to say,

30:24

but rather, the more you know about science, the more strongly it supports the

30:32

view that something outside the universe, God, is behind it.

30:38

That's right. I love I love how you broke down when you looked at that scientific

30:42

literature that was out, and I think it would still hold true today.

30:45

If you pay attention to what school textbooks say and what even published papers

30:52

say, they use words like, this feature arrived, this feature appeared about

30:58

however many million years ago. It showed up, it developed, but never how it arrived or appeared.

31:03

And so it feels, from an outside perspective, if you're just reading it objectively,

31:09

it feels like they decided on the answer, and they're trying to make all of

31:14

the discoveries fit their principle, regardless of what the data suggests,

31:19

which is kind of the anti-scientific approach, isn't it?

31:22

Yeah, it certainly is. And if you look into it and think about it for a while,

31:29

it should make you mad that school kids are being taught stuff that professional

31:36

scientists know to be false.

31:39

And that is that we know how these structures might have arisen in some naturalistic way. way.

31:48

So even Origin of Life, if you look at textbooks for high school students that

31:56

mention it, they'll say, oh, you know, there was this primordial soup or maybe this happened.

32:02

And they give, they intentionally give the students the impression that we're

32:07

almost there at explaining the origin of life.

32:10

And if you look in professional journals, why, you know, just a month or so

32:15

ago, An article was written by two origin of life professionals who are no.

32:22

Sympathizers with theism or intelligent design that essentially said,

32:27

we haven't a clue how life started and we should toss around more different ideas.

32:35

So the point is that the textbooks intentionally give kids the wrong idea,

32:44

I think because they want to to just say that, well,

32:48

science can explain it all for you, and we should all assume that naturalism is true.

32:55

I don't know why, but it's certainly the case.

33:00

That's exactly right. And we have this conflation, too, of people who are scientists.

33:06

I'll put quotes around that if you're watching.

33:09

Scientists have a media credibility where when When a scientist,

33:15

somebody like Carl Sagan or Francis Crick, says something, then it's given this

33:19

weight and credibility as if it's been proven to be true.

33:22

But if somebody who's a Christian, who's also a scientist, says something,

33:26

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.

33:32

My work as a neurosurgeon, I'm very interested in the issues around mind and

33:36

brain and the dualism there. And is the mind separate from the brain? Does the brain create what we think of as mind?

33:43

And Francis Crick, who was one of the ones who discovered the molecular structure

33:46

of DNA, said, You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,

33:52

your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the

33:56

behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

34:01

You are nothing but a pack of neurons. And so here's Francis Crick saying that

34:07

mind is just a derivative of brain. And that's basically gospel once he says

34:13

something like that because he's a scientist. But I think we have to recognize that there's statements that are made by scientists,

34:20

but they're not necessarily scientific statements, right? Yeah.

34:24

Exactly. They are philosophical. They say that the only thing that exists is the stuff that we study.

34:32

So we're scientists, we study matter, we study nerves and so on.

34:36

Therefore, mind doesn't exist. It's only nerves and connections between nerves and so on.

34:44

But that, of course, begs the question. Another convenient result of that is

34:52

that it makes scientists really very important, too.

34:55

That's right. After all, if they can explain everything, then they are the high priests of society,

35:02

and philosophers and theologians, and let alone clergy, and they can just be safely ignored.

35:11

Ignored. But it's really astounding.

35:13

If you read Crick's introduction that you just quoted and stuff,

35:20

you'd think that he got that from some experiment or other.

35:26

But it's just that he's saying, well, you know, there are nerves and I don't

35:32

believe in anything else. So this must be true.

35:35

It's a deduction. It's not a discovery.

35:37

It's a deduction from materialistic principles.

35:42

It's a self-defeating argument as well, because if you believe that you have

35:47

no free will because everything you think is just a product of the firing of

35:51

a neuron, then what would the purpose be in writing a book to convince somebody

35:55

that they didn't have free will? Yeah, that's a wonderful point. There's a man named Philip Johnson who was active

36:03

in the intelligent design movement, and he died a few years ago.

36:07

But he said, think how silly it would be if Francis Crick.

36:14

Had written, you know, I am just my nerves, and I am just a pack of neurons.

36:24

So who would listen to a person like that?

36:28

Why should we listen to a pack of neurons? But he said, you are just a pack of neurons.

36:32

Yeah, that's right. Stephen Hawking did the same thing. He said,

36:35

science will explain everything eventually. There's no role for theology, no role for philosophy.

36:39

It's all science. But that's obviously a philosophical argument and not a scientific one.

36:44

It's interesting to me, you mentioned the phrase intelligent design,

36:48

and just in case somebody is unaware of what that means, talk about the philosophy

36:53

and the science of intelligent design for a moment.

36:56

Okay. Well, intelligent design, it's a phrase, but it means something that we do every day.

37:03

It's, you know, a question, you know, can you tell that something has been purposely

37:08

arranged or is the result of intelligent activity versus just other unintelligent forces?

37:17

And if you're walking down the street, you might look to the left and there

37:21

might be, you know, some dandelions growing on somebody's lawn and,

37:25

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.

37:31

You know that the one was purposely planted and the other is not because it's

37:40

been arranged to beautify that particular area of the ground.

37:49

So the question is, how do we recognize that? We all know that there are intelligences.

37:55

We ourselves have intelligence. We recognize that other things are intelligent. How do we know that?

38:01

You know, we do it all the time, but how do we know it?

38:05

And it turns out the key to recognizing something as the result of intelligent activity is just that.

38:11

If we see that parts have been arranged for some purpose, because only intelligent beings have purposes.

38:21

Nature, unintelligent nature, doesn't have a purpose. It just does stuff. stuff.

38:26

So if we see like a machine, I use an example of a mousetrap in my book, Darwin's Black Box.

38:34

And if you just think of something like that, anybody who saw that would quickly

38:39

say, oh, well, that's purposely designed.

38:43

And why? Is it a religious conclusion that you say it's purposely designed?

38:48

No, because you see the purpose, you see the spring there and the part that'll

38:54

smack the mouse and the board that everything is arranged on.

38:59

So whenever we see a purposeful arrangement of parts, we conclude that it was designed.

39:07

It is the result of intelligent activity. And we have discovered such things in the cell and in life in general.

39:16

But in particular, we've discovered

39:20

molecular machines like that bacterial flagellum I talked about.

39:24

It's literally an outboard motor. You know, it's more sophisticated than, say, a mousetrap.

39:31

So the conclusion of intelligent design is that we can conclude that those things

39:37

were purposely designed because we see the purpose in the arrangement.

39:43

That's how we determine something was designed.

39:47

Now, of course, Darwin and his followers later said that, well,

39:54

no, we can explain it otherwise as the result of random changes and selection.

40:00

But if you look in the literature, that's all brag, no fact.

40:05

You know, they can't. And it's quite the opposite, as I've written about. about.

40:11

But the point is that intelligent design is not some fluffy philosophical or theological idea.

40:17

It's just looking at something and seeing that parts have been arranged, and it's something,

40:24

we do every day, and now when we have the ability to look at things in biology

40:31

up close and the molecular level and so on, we see exactly that.

40:37

Purpose suffuses the cell. And so the argument of intelligent design here is

40:43

that we should not ignore the conclusion there simply because we prefer some other explanation.

40:54

That's exactly right. In the years since you first published Darwin's Black

40:58

Box, This book has been in print for almost 30 years.

41:02

It's a remarkable book. You've had, what, several editions published now.

41:06

Tremendous book. The audiobook's outstanding as well. And I think in the years

41:10

since that's been published, what's happened on the scientific side in terms

41:14

of origin of life research and Darwinian evolutionary research and intelligent design research?

41:20

And where do we stand now? If you had an honest, unbiased observer who looked

41:26

at the world's literature in biology,

41:29

what would reasonable conclusions be now as to how we all got here?

41:33

Well, you're asking a biased observer to say what the unbiased observer would

41:39

say. We're back with Crick. But let me just say this about that.

41:45

Yeah, coming up on 30 years, and I talked about a number of systems in Darwin's

41:53

Black Box, blood clotting, the bacterial flagellum, intracellular transport, a bunch of other things.

41:59

And people hated that book. A lot of Darwinists simply despised it,

42:06

including a lot of really, really smart scientists.

42:10

And they were highly motivated to show that it was correct.

42:14

And yet, in the 30 years since then, even though, in general,

42:20

science, in particular biology, has progressed by leaps and bounds in figuring out how things work,

42:27

nobody has has been able to explain how any of those things might have arisen

42:34

through a Darwinian process.

42:37

People have described in better detail how they work, and we've seen that they

42:44

are more sophisticated, but nobody has published anything.

42:49

And you can look in the literature, and you can do a literature search,

42:52

look for how the bacterial flagella might have arisen.

42:55

You'll say, well, you'll see just papers that say, well, here,

43:01

this thing looks like this thing here or that thing looks like that thing there.

43:05

And and but you'll you won't see, you know, how this could have given risen

43:11

even to something closely related to it.

43:15

So one conclusion is that I stand by everything,

43:22

and I wrote 30 years ago, and the situation has gotten much worse for Darwin's

43:29

theory in the meantime. time. I wrote a book five or so years ago called Darwin Devolves.

43:37

And the gist of that is that, in fact, now that we can look at DNA much more

43:44

closely, we have the ability to sequence it and follow mutations at the molecular level very closely,

43:50

which we didn't have even 20 years ago.

43:52

Ago, you can see that the adaptations of organisms that people point to as examples

44:02

of how evolution might work, like new dog breeds and things like polar bears being derived from brown bears and other such things.

44:17

Have mutations that do adapt them to different environments,

44:23

but they're almost all by degrading genes that already existed in the ancestor organisms.

44:32

So they are devolving rather than evolving.

44:37

It's interesting that that can help them fit better with a particular niche,

44:44

niche, but the long and the short is that they are losing abilities rather than

44:50

gaining abilities. Wow.

44:53

Yeah. I mean, if you just think of dog breeds, you think of, you know, dachshunds.

44:59

Well, it turns out that what makes a dachshund, or part of it,

45:02

is that the gene for a growth factor that that allows dog to grow bigger, is broken in small dogs.

45:12

And in some larger, highly muscled dogs, a controlling element that stops growth

45:21

when it's gotten to be the proportionate size is broken.

45:26

And dogs with curly hair, a gene in hair development is broken. Wow.

45:36

And these things, dog breeds, have been touted by evolutionists for a while

45:43

as showing the great variety that you can get from an ancestor, and that's true.

45:50

But it turns out it's all due to loss of function, not gain of function.

45:56

Wow. That's really fascinating. I think it's really probably important to tell

46:01

people who haven't read Darwin's Black Box that you very carefully lay out this

46:08

book as not a religious approach to looking at Darwin and science.

46:12

I think that's the thing across the board about the intelligent design movement

46:17

that I've been impressed by is it is not a religious attack on Darwinism or

46:23

religious attack on chemical or biological evolution.

46:26

It's looking at actually what do we know from a scientific perspective.

46:30

If we say the scientific method is ask a question, develop a hypothesis,

46:34

test it, revise it, and come to the right conclusion based on the data,

46:38

then you can't get to Darwinian evolution from the data.

46:42

You just can't and that's it that's exactly

46:45

right it's it's not

46:48

an attack on science it's kind of going back

46:51

to science it turns out that darwin's theory and the subsequent sociological

46:56

development of it in the scientific community was in fact a you know a deriving

47:05

of conclusions from a non-scientific presupposition,

47:10

that is, that there is nothing that could affect life outside of life.

47:17

And if we rule that out, then something like Darwinism has to be true.

47:23

But ruling that out is a philosophical move. It's not a scientific one.

47:30

And if you look, again, at the evidence and ask yourself, what does it show?

47:36

It does not show the transformations that Darwinists say must happen.

47:44

And as science progresses more and more, we see more and more intricacy,

47:49

more and more elegance at deeper and deeper levels of life.

47:54

It's not getting more squishy. It's not getting more simple as you go down to

48:05

lower levels of life as Darwin and his contemporaries thought.

48:09

That was the importance of thinking that the cell was just a glob of protoplasm, some piece of jelly.

48:15

Because even though you could then think that even though at the whole organism

48:19

level things look kind of complicated, when you got lower it was pretty simple.

48:23

The opposite has turned out to be the case, that the more we know,

48:28

When you go to lower levels, the cellular and molecular levels of life,

48:32

things become more complex, not less complex.

48:36

So, yeah, this is where the data lead.

48:42

When you do away with the presuppositions of what we're supposed to find,

48:46

the data points strongly to intelligent design.

48:51

So what would you say from the standpoint of people listening out there who

48:55

may be raising kids or having grandkids who are in public education or getting

49:00

ready to be in public education, what would you say to them would be a good approach for what we can do to prepare

49:06

or arm our children to have a perspective on this that might be more consistent

49:12

with the Christian worldview? Yeah, well, I guess the best thing is just to forewarn them.

49:19

Tell them what they can expect and tell them, you know, simply age appropriate

49:25

way what what the problems are.

49:28

You know, when you start out with, say, a mousetrap, you can easily show a little

49:34

little child a mousetrap and say, here's, you know, here's how we know somebody made this.

49:40

Somebody did this on purpose and you can't put this together randomly.

49:46

And you have to then explain that we live in a world where a lot of people are anti-God.

49:55

They don't want God to exist.

49:59

They don't want God to have acted in the world.

50:03

And so you have to warn them saying that, you know, sometimes the things you'll

50:08

hear in school are influenced by folks with this point of view,

50:15

and yet it doesn't work,

50:20

it doesn't fit with the mousetrap, it doesn't fit with your hands and fingers

50:24

and how marvelous they are and how they work.

50:28

So you should be respectful to your teachers. You should read over what they

50:34

tell you to read and stuff. But you have to realize we live in a fallen world.

50:41

And so people we talk to sometimes will give us wrong information.

50:47

That's right. Well, something like that. I love it.

50:50

So if we have two choices in front of us as we land this plane here today, we have two choices.

50:56

We're the products of random events from billions of years ago that have led

51:02

us to this place and these lives that we have that may all be just the product of cellular activity.

51:07

And there's an empty void that we're going to go to after we die.

51:11

Or there's purpose and meaning in our lives that were designed for a particular

51:16

purpose and were exactly where we were supposed to be.

51:18

Like between those two extremes, after your long and storied career in science,

51:24

where do you land and how can people find hope in the work that you've done?

51:29

Oh, well, you know, just as almost everybody in the entire world thought up

51:36

until Darwin and even mostly afterwards, the world is filled with purpose.

51:43

And everywhere we look, you can see it.

51:47

You can see it, of course, in nature. Everybody loves nature.

51:50

You go out for a walk in the lovely woods and then the sunshine and the beautiful

51:55

weather you can have sometimes.

51:58

And you can see it in your hands. You don't have to be a scientist.

52:01

You say, holy moly, look how my hands work and I can see stuff.

52:06

And this doesn't happen by chance.

52:11

Everybody in the world knew that, you know, the world was not self-explaining,

52:17

that somebody created it. And Christianity, of course, you know, knows that God created it and so on.

52:25

But everybody knew that life was created.

52:29

And that's certainly what I understand.

52:34

And it's been a real tragedy of modern times that we have allowed ourselves

52:41

to be talked out of this by slick folks in lab coats saying,

52:46

no, no, no, you're just a bag of neurons.

52:50

And that's terrible because, you know, it leads to despair for many people.

52:57

You know, it might make some people feel self-important, like the scientists

53:02

who push this line of thinking,

53:05

but it's a tragedy for almost everybody else, and it's utterly against the facts.

53:13

So, here we are, though, and nonetheless, you can educate yourself,

53:18

you can educate your kids, and whoever else will listen to you,

53:21

just by reading and seeing that, yeah,

53:25

your intuitions, what you see in the world, it's true. It's really true.

53:30

That's the best scientific explanation for how we got here, let alone without

53:37

even touching philosophy and theology.

53:40

Wow. Beautiful. Beautiful. I've been looking forward to this conversation, Mike.

53:44

You've done a great career's worth of work in helping people sort of parse out

53:48

what's real and what's just media spin.

53:51

And I appreciate your time so well, so much. And thank you very much for the

53:56

work that you've done and your time here on the podcast this morning.

54:00

Absolutely. Thanks very much for having me. I've greatly enjoyed our conversation.

54:04

What a treasure, what a treat, what an honor to have a chance to talk to Dr. Behe.

54:10

Listen, I can't encourage you highly enough to read Darwin's Black Box and his

54:13

other book, Darwin Devolves. This is a look at the truth of the state of the science.

54:18

And again, if you're not a believer, you don't have to be a believer to approach

54:22

science as a scientist. And what is science?

54:25

Well, science is the idea that you look at something and try to explain it,

54:29

and then you ask questions of it and devise experiments to test it.

54:32

And if the experiments don't validate the assumption that you made,

54:36

then you change the assumption. But the problem with Darwinian evolution is that they decided,

54:42

and by they I mean the materialists, the scientists who, along with Darwin,

54:49

believed from the start that everything needed to be explainable through natural processes.

54:54

That's what naturalism, by the way, is.

54:56

They said, we don't believe in a God or an external creator,

54:59

and you have to explain everything from a scientific point of view.

55:02

Science can explain everything. Science is more important than theology or philosophy or any other type of learning.

55:07

It's the only thing that really counts. That, understand that, is a philosophical position, and that's where they started

55:14

with evolutionary biology. They started with the premise that we know that there's no supernatural,

55:21

there's no God, there's no creator. So how do we explain what we see since we

55:25

know that there's no supernatural? Which is a terribly unscientific position. My teaching to you all the time,

55:32

my conversation with you is, science is a process of asking questions,

55:37

designing experiments to answer those questions, and revising the questions

55:41

based on the results that we get, not to continue to hold up the answer that

55:47

we started with and make the data fit the answer.

55:50

We see that with all kinds of things, climate science and other things,

55:53

where the decision's already been made of how we're going to proceed.

55:57

We are going to believe this. We're going to teach it.

55:59

We're going to enforce it. We're going to make laws about it.

56:01

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

56:07

scientists who are promoting the data. And that's just not scientific. Okay.

56:11

So what I really appreciate with Dr. Behe is, whether you believe in God or

56:15

not, whether you believe in anything related to creationism or any of that,

56:19

what I appreciate about Dr. Behe is he was a real scientist who looked at the data and said,

56:24

wait a minute, we've got a problem with the data here.

56:26

The data don't support the ability of complex systems to have arisen by themselves.

56:32

The data don't support the idea that one species can develop into another.

56:36

The data just don't support it. So what else could?

56:39

Could and that's what led to the theory of intelligent design like

56:42

basically if you as he said in the interview if you

56:45

see a complex system in the world a mousetrap

56:48

for example you don't assume that it just sprung into existence from us from

56:52

a bunch of parts lying around but even if it could do that then the question

56:56

would be where did the parts come from how did those arise and how were they

57:00

all perfectly arranged to fit together in a way that would produce that function

57:04

well Well, that's what's happening inside your cells.

57:07

And if you're a parent or a grandparent, I would just highly encourage you to

57:11

arm yourself with this knowledge so you can help your children be prepared for

57:14

the onslaught of information they're going to receive that points towards this

57:18

conclusion that has already been made that we arose through unguided,

57:23

accidental processes from nothing.

57:26

And I just want to tell you that your friend, the scientist here,

57:29

your friend, the published neuroscientist, and I've got legit chops there, by the way.

57:34

I have a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

57:37

I have a paper in the Lancet. I've done the work too.

57:39

And so as a real scientist, I'm telling you that there's more to this story

57:44

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,

57:49

for example, that you read will show things like Java Man or things like transitional

57:53

forms and the fossils. And we know now that those things were false,

57:57

that they were not true even when they were published.

58:00

And yet they still show up in even college textbooks because they support the narrative.

58:05

So just take a step back, take a chance to read Darwin's Black Box and appreciate

58:10

that somebody like Michael Behe's out there. And he's not alone, by the way. The voices are getting louder.

58:15

And the fact is that you have to have more faith now to be an evolutionary biologist

58:20

than you had to have in the 1950s.

58:22

1950s. You're in a better position, a stronger position if you're arguing from

58:27

reason and real science than you are if you're holding on to dogma and belief.

58:31

The tables have turned a little bit, and Dr. Behe helps us get that idea in

58:35

our heads. And I think it was a tremendous conversation.

58:37

I hope you enjoyed it. And I just want to encourage you that you can't change

58:41

your life until you change your mind. And maybe you need to change your mind

58:43

about some of the things that you've been taught. And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.

58:48

Music.

58:54

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