 Hey, this debate's about to start but in case you didn't know, it's also available on our modern day bait podcast right now in case you want to listen to it on the go. So here is that debate right now. Hey everybody, today we're debating whether or not there is evidence for intelligent design and we are starting right now. Thank you. I'm Salvador Cordova. I run the Evidence and Reasons for the Christian Faith video channel and I'm a molecular biophysics researcher. I will be arguing that there is evidence for intelligent design and just a little bit of self-promotion. I was recently voted by a panel of evolutionist YouTubers as the number one YouTube creationist. So here is a picture of a bacterial flagella motor and I'll be talking about why this, why I feel this is one of the evidences of intelligent design that was provided by a panel program with a professor I work with in the field of protein research. So hats off to Dr. DeWeese, who's an associate professor at Lipscomb University and an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine for that video. The argument from an intelligent design appears to have begun with Socrates, pagan philosopher. That's according to the Wikipedia entry on the telelogical argument. The Christians have co-opted it, most notably William Paley in the 18th and very early 19th century. He put forward the watchmaker argument. There is the classical design argument. It's under the same Wikipedia entry on the teleological argument. The intelligent design argument is an argument for the existence of God or more generally that complex functionality in the natural world, which looks designed is evidence of an intelligent creator. And I mentioned Paley, those are his books. The famous one is on natural theology, which is an intelligent design argument. And he also wrote books on evidences of Christianity. That being said, the modern day intelligent design formulation is a little different than Paley's. It avoids or minimizes the relation of intelligent design, ID arguments to a deity that may be for political reasons. Plus, there's also atheist ID and space alien ID. But today, I'll be arguing mostly Paley's original argument for design, where he famously said, if we found a watch in the field, he actually used the word key. But if we found a watch in the field, we would know that it was intelligently designed, not the product of an undirected environment. The design is identifiable without knowing when and exactly how the watch was made. In biology today, this is from a article written by a Nobel Prize winner, Aziz Sankar, who is not an intelligent design advocate, so I'm not going to represent him as such. But he did point out, he wrote this article, The Intelligent Clock and the Rube Goldberg Clock, where he surveyed the clocks in watches that were found in biology. Some of the clocks in biology are very precise, bat echolocation, the sonar imaging that they use, so to speak, to be able to do their to live requires the ability to measure time, a clock, if you will, with microsecond precision. Even if we do assume common descent, universal common ancestry, one of the evidences of that is building trees like the one you see here. I actually built this tree. That's a separate question from the elegance of design. And Darwin argued that natural selection is the mechanism of this. Richard Dawkins attacking Paley's watchmaker argument, he attacked it with a book, The Blind Watchmaker. So he, I'll discuss a little bit of the pros and cons of the various viewpoints. Total aside, that smirk on his face reminds me Emperor Palpatine. That's neither here nor there. I'd say the strongest argument against intelligent design is articulated by Darwin. He wrote what a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel work of nature. The devil's chaplain may be referring to an individual named Robert Taylor. That's just incidental. But in contrast to that, the biophysicists, which is the field that I'm interested in biophysics, are arguing that life is more perfect than we imagine. That is, many of the machines found in life are operating at the extreme limit of what's possible by physics. And that's astonishing them. And this does relate a little bit to the distinction between creationism and intelligent design. Tertullian is an early church father. He's a Christian. He articulated the creationist case. William Paley is also a Christian, but he's articulating the intelligent design case. I'm just going to cover a little bit of the distinction. Creationism assumes intelligent design, but the converse is not true. Colloquially, creationism says the world is intelligently designed and intelligently cursed. So creationism attempts to resolve the paradox of an intelligently designed world and a broken world. Some forms of creation devote a lot of time to the question of Noah's flood in the age of the fossil record. Young Earth creationism has a timeline of events. Intelligent design does not. So going back to Paley's watch, again, it's just focusing on whether an object is designed, kind of the criteria we would use to assess human-made designs. And it's pretty much, I'd say, a assumption that we can extend this to what we would call God-made designs. I don't have time to cover this article by Natalie Anjir. We might be able to revisit it. Darwin's answer to the problem of design was natural selection. I will point out the fundamental theorem of natural selection, as articulated by Ronald Fisher, has been disproven and shown relatively useless. It was never biology-central theorem. There are other problems in natural selection, which we can try to address in the remainder of this debate. So if I were to describe science, I'd start with the accepted description or approximation of the laws of nature. This is a pretty good description of the major fields of physics on which most of modern technology and our understanding of the universe is built. It's not exhaustive, but it counts for a lot. I'd like to point out the, if you could see my cursor here, this equation of quantum mechanics, it's one formulation of it, and the psi function. The psi function can be described like, say, the equation of all reality. And one way it was described by Douglas Haas-Statter, a mathematician, he said, one way to think of the universal wave function of quantum physics is, as the mind or brain, if you prefer, the great novelist in the sky, God. Another quantum physicist who was in my textbook, mentioned in my textbook in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics when I was in grad school, said this, we do see how quantum theory requires the existence of God. Of course, it does not ascribe to God defined in this way any of the specific additional qualities that the various existing religious doctrines ascribe to God. Acceptance of such doctrines is a matter of faith and belief. If elementary systems do not possess quantitatively determinate properties, apparently God determines these properties as we measure them. We also observe the fact, unexplainable but experimentally well-established, that God and his decisions about the outcomes of our experiments shows habits so regular that we can express them in the form of statistical laws of nature. This apparent determinism in macroscopic nature is hidden God and his personal influence on the universe. From the eyes of many outstanding scientists, a professor at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, physicist. He also echoed Bell and Fonte's views that the universe is immaterial, mental, and spiritual. Now, a lot of physicists will totally disagree with that characterization. I'm just putting on the table to point out the idea of God is not necessarily just something we conjured up with our imagination or philosophy. The fundamental of laws of nature, interpretations of it, definitely allow it as a possibility. I will argue that this God that was described by the physicist is eternal. This eternal God that they've argued exists omnipotent, all powerful, has shown his fingerprints in both the fine-tuning of the universe and also in the machines of biology. That's my opening and I'll hand it to Dr. RJ. You got to thank you very much, Sal, for that opening statement. I want to let you know, folks, if you haven't heard, we have some juicy upcoming debates that you don't want to miss. As an example, I've already mentioned, as you see at the bottom right of your screen, Dr. Kenny Rhodes and Matt DeLahunty will be debating whether or not there is good evidence for God, but we are also excited that next month Apostate Prophet will be debating Christian Dr. Michael Brown on whether or not God exists as well. So, folks, hit that subscribe button. You don't want to miss these upcoming debates because they're going to be epic and we're pumped for it. With that, we're going to kick it over to RJ. Thanks for being with us and the floor is all yours for your opening. Yeah, and hopefully my connection, I switched the laptop was having problems so I'm on the PC and hopefully that will function tolerably well for the whole thing here. The topic I had originally wanted for the debate isn't the one that we have, which is the evidence for intelligent design. I wanted to have a discussion of the intelligent design model and do they have one? And if they don't, why don't they have one? And Sal did not want to have that as the debate topic, but I still need to address that. The presentation that Sal has done so far is classic intelligent design that kind of dangles God off in the corner somewhere, but argues that there are intrinsic features that lead to inevitably the foot in the door for the design. The problem is it's never gotten past that. I'm old enough to remember back in Michael Denton's time in the 1980s when the first little ripples and William Thakston of the intelligent design movement were starting to come on the scene and they're all still around now. We have a long track record of absolutely nothing from the intelligent design movement. We've got starting off with Michael Denton in 1985 as of his latest books, he still hasn't figured out what he thinks happens on anything. He has not Darwinism, not natural selection, not this, not that, but not what he thinks happens in any case whatsoever. It hasn't got to that point. I've interacted with him personally trying to get him to pin down on the reptile mammal transition, which he functionally accepted, not Michael Beehe, who has now a bunch of books down the road where it's kind of moved in the goalposts over to yet new examples. We still don't know what he thinks happens on anything. When were flagellum designed? How many flagella were designed? In what taxa is anything naturally related to anything else? Any of that systematic issue? No. And Beehe has been roundly criticized again and again and again for deck stacking his arguments, for suppressing information, bypassing stuff that he doesn't want to think about. That's both in the imapenem case that he brought up in the Dover trial in 2005 and also in the chlorocline case he went into in the edge of evolution, which I wrote a whole big section on in evolution slam dunk, looking into the limitations of what he was doing there in regards to Thornton's work. So Beehe, only one example that was in his presentation today, Sal's, was one of the examples that Beehe brought up, which is the flagellum, which by the way wasn't even his idea, it was Michael Denton's from the 1980s. And there was a whole back and forth that goes on on the intelligent design literature on that. But other areas like the Krebs cycle, Beehe never claimed that was intelligently designed. Why? Because we by that time knew enough about it that even though you could have presented it as such, if you knew less about the subcomponents, he didn't try doing that and never tried to defend that. And so that boundary layer of what exactly is designed and what isn't where the boundaries are, the intelligent design and irreducible complexity mantra gets used widely by people, often bringing up subjects like eyes, which Beehe never claimed to be an irreducibly complex system in Darwin's Black Box. So you get this fog bank of debate going on. But still, to this day, I think Beehe was on Dan Stur and Cardinale show, we still don't know what he thinks as to what was designed when map of time clarity of a model. Then we have Bill Demsky, the developer of irreducible complexity theory, no free lunch complex specified information. He's a mathematician. He's got all these little formulas. He's never applied it to genetics. And he's basically walked off the field now in his writing theology books. Here, you would be able to theoretically show in the genomes of actual organisms, this supposed complexity and how it works out in a rigorous way at that mathematical formula level that Sal was bringing up regarding quantum theory and physics and all these other examples. The reason why they can come up with high level formulas, and by the way mathematics is used in evolutionary theory all the time, biological systems are quite more complicated than physical systems. And yet there are even today some physical systems that we don't know the explanations for at a mechanistic level like lightning in a thunder cloud. Nobody is arguing that Zeus is doing that. And yet still there are always levels of things we don't understand. That's the boundary layer of how intelligent design approaches the problem. It's to find a thing where there's a big question mark or even a small question mark and argue that there is the doorway for our design. We don't have to identify the designer. We've established that air quotes, there must be design and please don't bother us with any of the model. That's where we got into with Erica Gutsick Gibbon just a week or so ago when she had a long discussion debate with Gunter Beckley, who is their one and only paleontologist operating in the intelligent design field, where Erica was explicitly trying to pin him down on his model, the lack of a model. Why, what do you think happens? Beckley accepts common descent, common ancestry. He thinks that the fossil record is okay for that. He's okay with the reptile mammal transition. And yet he argues that biogeography supposedly is a problem for common descent. Well, where exactly are you coming down? Is anything related to anything? What exactly is designed? What isn't? What design events? What would they look like? Beckley understands that there is a problem here that he doesn't want to wait into and Sal may or may not want to wait into, which is if you create a boundary layer of design, doesn't that apply everywhere where that boundary layer is? And if you're looking at, for example, a molecular interactions, that this is a lock and key and it must have been designed, well, aren't all lock and keys in biology like that, including the ones that cause diseases, including the ones that create messages for things. At that point, you're in a theodicy issue of where God is having a design that's creepy. God has the parasites. God has all the weird stuff. That was what troubled Darwin way back in the 19th century. And a lot of people that they go, that for some, it was much easier not to bother about it. Beckley didn't want to bother about it either. He recognized that there was that slippery slope, which is why he deliberately wanted to avoid a meddling designer who comes in and design stuff. What does he think happens then? Well, maybe a quantum consciousness thing is happening. That doesn't explain anything. It's a way for him to distance himself from the data field. So this is a phenomenon that we have been observing all through the intelligent design field for decades. Steve Meyer, Jonathan Wells and Gager, Douglas Axe, all of them, only a few interact at the technical level. Axe and Gager, most notably, it's notable that Gager is one who's collaborating with Gunter Beckley on the promised upcoming paper on whale evolution. Oh boy, am I looking forward to seeing that one. And also feathers. That's a big Michael Denton issue that he's been bringing up on feather evolution. And I want to see them interact and engage at the data floor level. But what remains over 35 years is there is no there there. The reason why the Einstein formulas are there and the Newton formulas are there is because Newton worked out a rigorous testable model that worked really, really well. And eventually they noticed some anomalies in it. They couldn't explain the perihelion of Mercury. So maybe there's a planet closer to the sun Vulcan that's bending Mercury's orbit a little bit. And you could predict outer planets. So that's why we figured out where Neptune and Uranus were predicted purely on gravitational theory. And so there was no reason to throw Newton out the window just because the perihelion Mercury was a little wonky until the Einstein guy came along and said, Oh, according to my model, which junks standard physical notions and comes up with space time in the bending of space time and all of these other things that now Newton works fine for small objects and distant from big stars and the like. But when you start getting close like Mercury now, relativity is playing a case. And we can say why precisely the perihelion of Mercury is precessing relativistically, whereas Newton can't explain it. Does that mean we junk all of Newton's data? No, Newton still works. NASA doesn't use Einstein formulas to send probes to Jupiter. It's really complicated formulas. It's easier to use Newton because for what they needed to do still applies. So what you do when you have a paradigm shift is you have a model that is rigorous, that makes predictions that you can test that accounts for all of your opponent's data because the data ain't going to go away and also accounts for the new data that supposedly can't be accounted for. And so you have a testable model. Intelligent design has never got to that level. And for that matter, the younger creationism that Sal apparently also believes but often doesn't discuss in detail, that too theoretically has, as he mentioned, a timeline. But other than cartoons, young earth creationism has never got any farther than that either. All they've ended up with is just cartoons. We can test this out with Andrew Snelling and the various people at Institute for Creation Research that they can never get to the level of detail that you find in the actual geology papers and the cosmology papers. So even though there's a cartoon in principle for young earth creationism, it never gets to the model stage. And likewise, intelligent design being creationism light can't even get to that level. No intelligent designer can figure out how many flagella were designed, in what circumstances, in what time. Bill Demsky was challenged by Ken Miller back in a debate at Natural History Museum, I think in 2004, somewhere around there, and pleaded with him to tell him when this took place. And whoop, no, it's a fog bank. And yet design events must have taken place in time and space. There must have been a moment when there were no flagella, and at some point by some process, there must come to be flagella all at once, separately, multiple designs, independently in different organisms, or common ancestry from a commonly designed unit. What do you think happened? When and if intelligent design ever gets to that stage, then they can work their way up to challenging the paradigm. I'll have to repeat because we're about 11 minutes and almost out of time there. Absolutely nothing we say in this debate is changing any of the facts. Nobody in the scientific community is bothering about what I'd say in defensive evolution or what Sal says in criticism or defensive intelligent design or criticism of Darwinism. It's pure schlocky entertainment. Bear that in mind for what we're going to be talking about in the next times. And I believe I'm just about 12 minutes and we will say bye-bye. And on to the next phase. You got it. And want to let you know, folks, this is part of a 12-hour stream. We are pumped as it has been epic so far, and it's going to become even. It's just the entire day. Phenomenal, you guys. Tom Jump and Nathan Thompson are debating the shape of the earth tonight. That's been a long awaited debate. You don't want to miss it. And that is showing at the bottom right of your screen with that. And we warn people if they are using this as a drink moment, do not become drunk and stupor from the various things you encounter along the way. This is not good for your health. Not for 12 hours. Juicy. And we will kick it into open conversation. Thank you so much, RJ. And Sal, the floor is all yours. Thank you, RJ. You're one of the most formidable opponents I've ever faced. Very sharp and fast mind. And annoying, as I well know. We agree to have kind of like, I'll be the interrogator for 10 minutes and we'll switch. We won't be anal about time. I do want to contest a few things. The scientific community, if you say they don't pay attention, I've received words from editors that some of my papers are being accepted. They are relevant to this topic. So just to correct that. I don't disagree with that. Theoretically, some of these things, the journal Theoretical Biology, various intelligent design material stuff from Sanford gets published in there. Okay. I'm saying that so far, they've had no impact whatsoever on what actual the scientific community is doing in research lines or citations as saying, yeah, we agree with that. And then so I do want to thank James because I said I wasn't going to argue the model and he's correct that I'm not arguing for a model or mechanism in the sense that it's repeatable, testable and controllable. And the irony is we're talking about coherent and workable models. Evolutionary theory does not have workable models of some of the examples that I'll be citing and then also a biogenesis. I'll also point out it should be consistent with physics and chemistry. The arguments I'm putting forward today are not arguments of ignorance. They are arguments by contradiction and there's a subtle, there's an important distinction between an argument of contradiction and an argument of ignorance. It's an argument by contradiction to say tornado passing through a junkyard is not going to assemble a 747. That's not an argument for ignorance. And if anybody in the biogenesis was claiming that, then you would have a point. That's a straw man. It's not because we have experimental and physical evidence that there are disorganizing principles active in biology. So if you'll permit me my 10 minutes, I'm going to ask you questions. On origins robust as I was anticipating. Yeah, thank you. So this is from my slideshow. This is an illustration of quarters and I'm so glad you're going for that one. If we had a random, if we had to tray and we threw these, these are fair coins, presumably. And this, this is just an illustration. If we threw it on the, on the tray, we would get what we call a random pattern like this. Now it is astronomically improbable that we could ever repeat this pattern. So in a sense, yes, it's random and it's astronomically improbable because we're not able to repeat it. We wouldn't expect it to be repeated. However, if we looked at a something a little bit more like this, we'd begin to doubt that a randomizing process is the source and then even more so with this. So this is also, this is also astronomically improbable because we can't repeat it with a random process, but it is also improbable as a matter of principle. If we borrow language from statistics and statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, we would say this, this is improbable as a matter of principle because it is a, in a low multiplicity state, you can take the binomial distribution and at the tails of the distribution, the head, all heads is at the extreme tails. Whereas 50% tails and 50% heads is kind of in the middle of the distribution. Why am I bringing this up? Would you agree with that? So that's my question. Oh yeah. Now let me, let me put in a question of my own. Please. Excuse me, sir. This is my 10 minutes if we could. Oh, okay. Okay. I'll wait to drop the end or after you're done. Then you can, then you can chew me out in your 10 minutes. That's fine. Thanks, James. So do you agree that this is improbable as a matter of principle? It should stand out. Do you have a problem with that, James? Oh, please present your presentation. Don't ask for reactions from me because yes or no deck stacking is not appropriate. Just present your. Okay. Agreed. We'll do it that way. So this is improbable as a matter of principle. The thing is, as we see, and then, you know, we could also say the same of these cards if we took the cards and just through them randomly. We couldn't repeat it. We could say it's astronomically improbable, that particular set, but we wouldn't be astonished. We wouldn't make a design argument from that. However, we would make a design argument from a configuration like this or a configuration like this. The configuration is improbable, not only in the sense of the pattern, not only in the sense that the pattern is not repeatable by random process, but as a matter of principle. It's astonishing because it violates natural expectations of what would happen from random events, moving cards in random orientations, random speeds, random positions. Again, this is like the proverbial tornado passing through a junk yard. It's not going to assemble something like this. It might make something like that. And so this, again, I said that a term we could use is this is in a state of low multiplicity at the tails of the distribution. We find this same pattern in biology. In fact, it gives free energy profile and that involves a little bit of thermodynamics. It would resist the formation of this in a random prebiotic soup. The Urie Miller experiment could not make homochiral amino acids like this. James Tourhead, who's a very fine chemist, he spoke before the United States Congress on another matter, but that's just all to say he's a top chemist. He said this problem has not been adequately solved. There may be some things that sort of suggest it for amino acids, but it's really bad for sugars and nucleotides. So we have this pattern that we have experimentally established is not is resisted by what we know about chemistry and physics. So at least for now, unless barring a future discovery, this is an argument by contradiction. It is not an argument by ignorance. We know that this shouldn't happen. And then also we call the three prime to five prime connection in DNA, and I'll cover that a little bit. This is also a violation of the law of large numbers. So I've shown the reason I started out with the coins is just trying to establish the violations of law of large numbers here. It would be evidence for design. In this case, if we happened upon a something like this in a room, we would assume it was intelligently designed. That's partly helped by the fact we know human designers can do this. So the outstanding question is, since God doesn't appear to most of us, whether we could extrapolate the same kind of statistics and make that inference, but still it stands. We know experimentally that this is very unnatural. We cannot duplicate it, especially for the sugars, especially for the sugars, maybe a little bit for the amino acids, but it really fails for the sugars. It's something that's created by spontaneous the reason it deviates from that is what we call spontaneous isomerization. And we can go into that for those interested to get really nerded out. I would do talk about this on my channel at length on the chemistry. We have PhD chemists who talk about this, but back to the three prime, five prime connection here. I don't know if you can see it, but you have like this little carbon here called three prime, and it's connected to a phosphate group to the five prime. The five prime is actually up here. To get this to consistently connect, we have to have very special machines if we're synthesizing this from scratch. We need intelligent designers to be able to assemble a DNA when we're doing genetic engineering. And I work for genetic engineers, one of the most famous ones. And this is not easy to do. It is literally or perhaps say figuratively similar to arranging coins to be all heads, but this has to be done at the molecular level. So it's not just the connections. We would call this consistent linkage. And change tan is a molecular biologist who is encouraged to be a molecular biologist by a Nobel Prize winner, George Smith. She's a creationist and ID proponent. She was the one who pointed this out. It's one of the most difficult problems to solve for origin of life. And again, this is not argument by ignorance. This is argument by contradiction that this does not naturally arise. It's not that we're saying we don't know how it could. It's not expected to. Neither are the ribose sugars here. This is the beta D2 deoxyribose furnace form. This is extremely hard to synthesize and make into a nucleotide. So there are many violations of the law of large numbers. This is evidence of design. I pointed out the laws of physics can be interpreted to suggest the existence of God. The kind of what you see here with the DNA exceeds. A lot of the things in DNA exceed our technology is better than all the minds put together on planet Earth to be able to build some of the things we see in DNA. And to me, that is prima facie evidence of intelligent design. And James RJ, thank you for your patience and off to you. Okay. That was about eight minutes. That's reset my little clock here. I am glad you brought up the coin analogy because there's significant differences between that kind of coin analogy and the biochemistry that the origin of life researchers are doing. And I definitely encourage you on the work that you are talking about in the last slide. We're looking forward to that monograph. We're looking forward to the publication of that. We're looking forward to see what pushback it gets from other researchers. Get in there and deal with that. That would be absolutely delightful. The problem with the coin analogy is the same problem that Bill Dempsky would have when he would bring up scrabble tiles. It's divorced from the connection to actual biology. Every one of the coins that would be being generated in a prebiotic context aren't static objects not doing anything. They're biological molecules in general that are interacting in varying ways, and there we get into complexity to where a molecule of a particular form in a wet drive cycle is favored as opposed to other molecules that weed out precisely because they don't have those dynamics. And so a lot of the research has been going into the dynamics of how these things are actually behaving in actual prebiotic context. The wet drive cycle issue is one that is showing up Jason Hines' stuff on the origin of single chirality of amino acids and sugars. And then there was, let's see, trying to find that other little paper in there. I'm trying to plow around through my notes. Anyway, that again is an origin of life issue. And so I'd like to ask you, when do you think there was the origin of these DNA systems? Was it a single event involving a single precursor organism or multiple ones? And what do you think happened? I want you to think about what you think happened. Please tell us all. Did you want me to respond? Yeah, that's called a question. Yeah. Okay. Yes, sir. I have my opinions. People know that since I'm a young earth creationist, I would say that's 6,500 years, but I'm not in a position to defend that. I've actually criticized some of the young earth models. So some of that's taken on faith. So that's beyond, I mean, that's my opinion, but that's, I'd like to point out that's not relevant to the argument that I'm making today. No, that's your model, that there were individual biblical kinds that were created at a six day frame. Would that be correct? A single creation week and never before or since, correct? Yes. And I don't believe that I know some of my colleagues in the young earth creation community will take exception to the fact that I say that I don't think the model is completely defensive. It's not defensible at this time. It's not ready for prime time. What I did lay out in my argument against the biogenesis, I think a four and a half of four billion year old independent creation of multiple organisms that are bacteria only from which organisms developed afterwards by natural means. Is that a defensible one based on the intelligent design literature? Can you repeat the question? There would be multiple bacteria designed by one or more designers four billion years ago from which extant organisms have developed independently by natural means. Is that defendable from a design perspective, from what the material you presented so far? For the bacteria only, not the eukaryotic organisms. Oh, why do you draw the line there? Eukaryotes have things like membrane bound organelles and all sorts of transport. So you are arguing that intelligent design absolutely rules out an endosymbiotic origin for eukaryotes. It has a flimsy explanation for the mitochondria. It does not explain the nuclear membrane. Define flimsy for me. I'm sorry. Define flimsy. What do you mean flimsy argument? Well, 85% of the the genes inside the that are mitochondrial that form the mitochondria are from the nuclear and the alpha protobacteria that supposedly formed it would only contribute at best 15%. You have some documentation on that. I do hope we get, I'd love to know about that. Yes, I'm happy to provide that. Pennies, the irreducible nature of eukaryotes published with two other researchers actually covered that. That's where I got the statistics. So if you look up the title of the peer reviewed paper, irreducible nature of eukaryotes, and I love that title, irreducible, he will cite those statistics and the problems of the alpha protobacteria being an origin for that. You mean, okay, that's Curlin, Collins, and Penny, 2006. What's the view currently? That's 15 years ago. Have any of them changed their views? I don't know, because Coonan has come in and said the problem with eukaryotic evolution is a mystery. It's getting worse. The problem's not getting better. To be just saying that it's 2,000. So you have not checked to find out whether Curlin, Collins, or Penny's view in 2021 has altered from what they were writing in that 2006 piece. That is correct, because the data is now making the case worse. In fact, I've checked more recent literature, so it's not relevant whether Curlin or others. It's relevant whether it's one fact. Just to hear the real rest of the actual response from Sal. I think sometimes the question is asked to Sal, and he answers partway, and then he gets cut off with another question. Thanks, guys. I have read on my channel current literature on eukaryotic evolution, and it is problematic. I had two articles on my channel, it was just a journal club reading. The insinuation is I'm not kept up with the literature I have. Why did you bring up Curlin 2006 if it doesn't matter whether their views have changed because you have different data that doesn't depend on Curlin for your argument? I was citing where the statistics were. You asked me for a reference for the statistics of the 15%. That's where I happened to know it off the top of my head. But if you'd like, we can actually do a literature search to see if that number still holds. Yeah, we want to do that in the side thing. So you then would draw that there's a now intelligent design argument, which is not Young Earth Creationists, would have a separate design event taking place regarding the eukaryotes. Would that be the intelligent design model? I don't believe they're intelligent design models. Ever? They're models that there's not one uniform model. Let us hypothesize an intelligent design hypothesis here. Is it a legitimate intelligent design hypothesis to have a design event for the origin of life involving multiple bacteria, a later design event billions of years later for eukaryotes, independent from that and possibly done by a completely different designer? Is that a legitimate intelligent design hypothesis based on the available data today? One could put it put forward like that. Stephen Meyer has one that is similar to that. It's not well developed and that would be more an off the cuff type speculation. It's not something of deep interest to most ID proponents. So if you're complaining, we don't have this. And why isn't it? Can you speculate as to why it isn't a deep interest of intelligent design proponents? It's beyond the reach of us to figure all this out. Even though you've got a timeframe for eukaryotes, you're not arguing there's any evidence that eukaryotes date back to say four billion years, do you? I'm sorry. I don't see I don't see what your line of questioning is. I'm just saying I just stated what's going on in your map of time. And I'm suspecting that there are a lot of times where the question is asked to Sal and then he doesn't have a it's not as clear as a full chance to respond. As long as you're not filibustering Sal, which I don't think you are, we'll want to be sure you get a chance to respond. Yeah, let's give Sal a couple minutes to say what he thinks is the range of intelligent design argument that would be available in the repertoire that would be consistent with the data that would relate to the origin of eukaryotes. I believe it has to be rather instantaneous. It's irrelevant whether it's billions of years ago or not, because the transition would require multiple simultaneous changes. And I'm going to show videos on that in my 10 minute segment, why it would have to be, and you'd only get maybe one shot at it. And that's why it would have to be in tells. So we're in perfect time because I'm about at 10 minutes. That's only 18 seconds into the two minutes. So it just do you have more? So let's give let's give Sal his 10 minute next and present the material on the eukaryotes. Let's dive into that. Sure. But I do want to give him a chance to actually, I don't think he was done finishing answering that question. So I do want to give him that time as well. Yeah. I will have a chance to I'm going to I think maybe I'll go ahead and talk about the difficulty of the eukaryotic transition. And that might answer RJ's question. So this is at 1807. So I'll talk about this transition. It would also show why if we assume the case for universal common ancestry, we would have to invoke miracles that are indistinguishable from special creation. So here is the difference between the eukaryote and prokaryote architecture. Probably one of the most important features is that the eukaryotes have membrane bound organelles. And I'll highlight, especially one of them, the nucleus here. So this stringy thing here in the prokaryote is the DNA. The DNA is also in the eukaryote, but to access for chemicals to access it. It has to go through this nuclear poor through this nuclear membrane in the membrane has little gateways that we call the nuclear poor complex. So again, this is the eukaryotic nucleus. And the difficulty is that proteins have to go in and out through these poor complexes. So if we just create a membrane without the complexes, the creature is dead because there's no way to access the DNA and all the proteins. Instant death. Natural selection would not be a good explanation for this. Neither would random mutation, obviously. I'm going to show a little bit of the complexity of the nuclear poor complex here. This is silent, by the way. We can all hum music. 456 proteins of 30 different types. Membrane spanning proteins, which creates another problem. So even if we assume just a few, even a few proteins might be too difficult in terms of random chance. So James is asking me why I think this would require intelligent design. I'm trying to show depict visually why this is. And for things to go in and out of the nuclear poor complex here, it has to identify what is supposed to go in and out because not anything can go in and out and the system would be functional. So I'm going to skip a little bit here. I hope that one made the point. Now I'm going to show how things go in and out of the nuclear poor complex. This would have to be in place for the eukaryote to exist. This is why I don't, if we accept universal common ancestor, you need miracles to make it happen. Consider all the parts that are needed to facilitate this. This is a four minute video. The nuclear poor complexes are the only channels through which small polar molecules, ions, and macromolecules can travel between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. By controlling this traffic, the nuclear poor complex plays a fundamental role in the physiology of all eukaryotic cells. Most proteins and RNAs are too large to move through the complex by passive diffusion and must move by an active process in which appropriate proteins and RNAs are recognized and selectively transported in a specific direction. Let's consider proteins imported from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. Only a subset of proteins can enter the nucleus and they are allowed in by virtue of having specific amino acid sequences called nuclear localization signals. Nuclear localization signals typically consist of one or two short segments of basic amino acids. Nuclear localization signals are recognized by nuclear transport receptors called importans, which carry the cargo proteins into the nucleus. With its cargo attached, importan binds to specific nuclear poor proteins in the cytoplasmic filaments. By sequential binding to more interior nuclear poor proteins, the complex is translocated through the nuclear poor. At the nuclear side of the poor, the complex is disrupted by the binding of a protein called RAN to importan. RAN carries a molecule of GTP. This binding changes the confirmation of importan, which then releases its cargo protein into the nucleus. The important RAN complex is then re-exported through the nuclear poor. A protein in the cytoplasm called RAN GAP for GTPase-activating protein stimulates RAN to hydrolyze its GTP to GDP, an action that triggers RAN to release importan back into the cytoplasm. RAN plays a key role in protein import and export. Note that while RAN is bound to GDP, it cannot disrupt the binding of importan to a cargo protein. In an action that prevents the depletion of RAN from the nucleus, the RAN GDP, formed in the cytoplasm, is transported back to the nucleus by its own import receptor, a protein called NTF2. In the nucleus, another protein called RAN GAP for guanine nucleotide exchange factor stimulates RAN GTP to release its GDP and pick up GTP. In this form, RAN GTP can disrupt the binding of importan and its cargo, triggering the release of the cargo in the nucleus. By the actions of RAN GAP found only in the nucleus and RAN GAP found only in the cytoplasm, a steep gradient of RAN GTP and RAN GDP is maintained across the nuclear membrane with RAN GTP inside the nucleus and RAN GDP in the cytoplasm. Similar to imported proteins, proteins are targeted for export from the nucleus by specific amino acid sequences called nuclear export signals. Nuclear export signals are recognized by receptors within the nucleus called exportans, which direct protein transport through the nuclear pore complex to the cytoplasm. RAN GTP promotes the formation of stable complexes between exportans and their cargo proteins. Note that this same form of RAN does the opposite for importance in their cargos. The effect of RAN GTP binding on exportans dictates the movement of proteins containing nuclear export signals from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. Following transport to the cytosolic side of the nuclear envelope, GTP hydrolysis and release of RAN GDP leads to dissociation of the cargo protein, which is released into the cytoplasm. Exportans are then recycled through the nuclear pore complex for reuse. So I have a few more minutes. I'd like to cover a little bit more in my time. So that was my answer why I think that needs, that's a partial answer. That also addresses the problem of the nuclear genes that have to be coded and then made to proteins and then have to enter the mitochondria. That's why the endosymbiosis problem hypothesis has these challenges. It's not going to go through just one nuclear complex. It's going to go through other complexes of transmembrane proteins. This is a disaster for the endosymbiotic theory. And what I'll usually get from evolution is they'll say, oh, well, we have these phylogenetic reconstructions that show that they evolved. And I'm going to criticize that. But you see, just being able to build trees of similarity does not explain how this complexity could evolve simultaneously or how it's worked around. And so that's why I believe that there had to be an intelligent design event if there's universal common ancestry, if we accept it, even with the mainstream timelines, that's going to be problematic. So I'm glad you brought that up, why you wanted to argue eukaryotic evolution. And this is only a fraction of the problems. And so evolutionists can hand wave this away, which they usually do, and they just do these phylogenetic reconstructions in trees. And these are non sequiturs that they're actually posing to me from an engineering standpoint in the problems of statistics. It just doesn't agree. Violations of natural expectations. And I showed a little illustration of that in a biogenesis as far as the chemicals. And by the way, what happens with the chemicals, you're saying that the coins don't reflect it adequately. That's correct in that it's the problem's worse at the chemical level. So I'll hand it off to you, James. And thank you for bearing everyone. Let's explore more of that eukaryote thing. So there are lots and lots of lots of eukaryotes, tiny microscopic ones and us and insects and plants and all of these other things in there. So the poor mechanism that you assert on intelligent design grounds is irreducibly complex and designed instantaneously. This was an instantaneous design for each organism that was done or what? What do you think happened? That's my opinion. That's different than whether I can make that claim defensible and I'm not in a position to do that today. But I appreciate the question. I mean, it's good you're asking. I'm not objecting. I'm just saying. So what would be the range of thinking on this in the intelligent design community from a Steve Meyer to a Jonathan Wells to a Dempsky and others on origin of eukaryotes? How many origin events were there? How spaced out in time are they? Because we're a long way away from the first eukaryotes. I don't think they've explored it. I don't think they I haven't seen any literature to it. We don't talk. I'll agree with you. Neither have I. Okay. They haven't thought about this. That's part of the no model issue. So who are some of the major researchers in that that you brought up the video there on the the RAND GTP and GDP export and import and who have been some of the major researchers in that area? I'm not familiar with the names. This is basically textbook cell biology. Did you do any investigation on whether or not the various components have had literature working out evolutionary aspects of how those who developed? I looked at it a little bit and I get a short answer. No, because if you'll allow me to explain why I see the same garbage recycled all the time and I just get tired of wasting my time on it because what they'll do is just make a phylogenetic tree, which I pointed out is not an explanation of mechanism. So you are asserting you are right to say that I maybe didn't look at it because I get tired of seeing the recycled garbage that they represent as scientific explanations that's no more than storytelling without any study of statistics or physics and chemistry, the probability of this emerging. Neither do they look at whether even selection is a good explanation. So so you are asserting that the various papers that have thought about the evolution of the various components of that poor system are drawing on only phylogenetic trees for their inferences and offering no biological details other than that. Just garbage. Mostly. Mostly garbage. Mostly garbage. Okay. For the reader's benefit, we can go through these papers and that's a testable prediction. It's going to be the same. Exactly. I'm writing it down. Yes. So we can do that on my channel or somewhere. We'll go through the papers and we'll see it's going to be phylogenetic reconstruction, which is tree drawing, which is not much more than first grade just drawing up trees. I mean, really, it's not as much as I submit to you that they would be using phylogenetic trees as guideposts because you need to have a sense about what is happening in what order to give a better clue as to what might be going on as the system develops and alters from one to another. Here's another empirical question I'd like to have nailed down. Are you contending that the poor system in eukaryotes is absolutely a universal and that there's absolutely no variation from one organism to another on it? No, I'm not. Can you characterize what range of variation there are among eukaryotes on this system? No. Have you thought to look as to what range of variation there is among eukaryotes on this? I've thought to look at it, but considering how many eukaryotic systems there are, that would be intractable. Okay, I can tell you that is an issue I have not investigated and therefore I'll be coming in to a cold to see what exactly is, has been done or not on this matter and anybody watching the show then can mark this down. Okay, testable hypothesis that we can work through. I think we've done this one out to death. I think it'd be nice to get Sal's next heavy gun that he wants to bring up as what he would consider a really solid instance of intelligent design and then I'll be wanting to find out more about how that fits in at all in the intelligent design framework. Okay, thank you. It is 1821. I will show an example of where phylogenetic trees fail. It will be with the topoisomerase enzyme which I've recently published on. I expected you to bring that one up. That's your latest thing. By the way, when can we expect some technical work? I think you've been working with Sanford or who on this? There was an article May 14th on my work in structural biology, bioinformatics published. It was an announcement in The Fasted Journal. If you go to my channel, you actually see my announcement of it. It was a team of researchers including computer scientists, protein biologists. And what was the abstract concept? What was the issue that was being presented in that paper? Is this my time or yours because then I'm going to reset the clock to 1822. I'm sorry. I will remain silent. That's cool. I appreciate it. I'm a curious guy, Sal. I like to know things. You are. I appreciate your interest, James. So I take no offense that you asked me that. So if you'll indulge me, I will show what the topoisomerase enzyme does. So first, I'll show the sequence. This listing here, if you see the alphabetic letters, this is a listing of the amino acids represented by English alphabetic letters for the topoisomerase. And it's relatively small, about 1500 amino acids, 1500 residues or so. And I'm going to show what it does. Oh, I know now I'm criticizing phylogenetic reconstructions. So this is the human topoisomerase. And then there's the bacterial homologue of that, which is called gyrace. And I actually built this diagram from all the sequences. I used a evolutionary program to build this tree. And I'm showing that I'm going to try to argue why this is not a mechanistic explanation for the evolution of the topoisomerase going from a prokaryote to eukaryote. I'm going to specifically highlight the problems. But first, let's learn a two minute video on the topoisomerase. Let's consider what happens as DNA unwinds during replication. As DNA unwinds, it acts like this rope when we pull apart its two strands. As you pull the strands apart, twisting tension builds up in the rest of the coiled portion. It is actually adding one twist to the remaining rope for each twist pulled out of it. At some point, you can't separate the strands anymore. The remaining rope is too tightly twisted. If you relax your tension on the rope, it will twist around itself in a supercoil. It is releasing tension. If you want to keep pulling the rope apart, you have to release the tension periodically. And one way to do this is to cut the rope and splice it back together. This problem has been best characterized in small circular DNAs. There are two methods of dealing with this problem in DNA. One cuts only one strand of the DNA double helix, and the other cuts both strands. Let's look at the first. Topoisomerase 1 enzymes cut a single strand of the double helix, pass the other strand through the cut, and reseal the break, relaxing the overwhelmed molecule, which now has one fewer twist. Topoisomerase 2 enzymes do the same thing, but with both strands of the double helix. Topoisomerase 2 cuts both strands of a double-stranded DNA and passes another double strand through the break and then reseals the break. So if a molecule of DNA is supercoiled, Topoisomerase 2 can remove the supercoiling, two twists at a time, to yield a relaxed circle. So that was the Topoisomerase, that's its action. I'll point out why this is problematic for natural selection. Just for the Topoisomerase, then I'll point out why this is difficult to evolve going from a prokaryote to eukaryote if we assume that we have the Topoisomerase inherited by common ancestry from the prokaryote, the bacteria to the new eukaryote. I'm going to highlight the reasons why. But first off, the Topoisomerase in itself, it's hard to evolve by natural selection. It cuts. Let's say you have a Topoisomerase ancestor. All it can do is cut. It doesn't ligate. That is to say it doesn't reconnect the DNA pieces together. It's going to shred the genome. So the idea of an incremental evolution of this, at least in those terms, is outrageous. It's ridiculous. This is approved by contradiction, not an argument from ignorance. It's not going to happen. By the way, Topoisomerase is a target disrupting it in chemotherapies. We can kill cells by disrupting Topoisomerase. It's life critical. Then also, if you have something that doesn't cut but it ligates, that's pretty useless. Or if it cuts and ligates but doesn't untangle, it's useless. So the idea of incremental evolution of this from either a biogenesis or some protocell, this is going to be very problematic. So now the random mutation or natural selection is an adequate explanation. But more to the point, what happens if we're trying to inherit a Topoisomerase that is in a bacteria to a eukaryote? The major problem and the reason I'm glad I showed the nuclear pore import export, and if you'll remember in that video, some of you will remember it, the narrator mentioned the nuclear localization signal. You can find the nuclear, by the way, since RJ loves references and I have five more minutes, you can get this sequence from the Uniprot database, just type in top two, top two A, you'll get this sequence, that's the human Topoisomerase. There are other Topoisomerases if you're interested in that. The nuclear localization signal was in an article called the Bipartate Nuclear Localization in Topoisomerase. You can Google it, you'll find it, and I was able to get the sequence right here. It's highlighted in red. That's the nuclear localization. That's like a password for it to go through the nuclear pore complex. So what's the point of this? The phylogenetic diagrams, I'm sorry, let's see if I have it, the phylogenetic diagrams was just sort of gloss over that problem. But if it's not there and it whole, just like a password, if it's not spelled correctly, it doesn't work. And there's only one chance you get at this, otherwise the creature's dead. And so that's something, that is an example where the phylogenetic reconstruction glosses over a serious problem. And let's see if there's anything else on the Topoi. That's all I had on the Topoisomerase as far as nuclear localization. I'll point out that any other inherited, any other inherited proteins that come from, supposedly got inherited from the bacteria to the eukaryotic form would also have to have nuclear localization signals inserted in them for them to work. And the nuclear localization signal problem also is confronting this whole thing about endosymbiosis. So that the extent that the mitochondria has lots of the 85% of nuclear genes that are part of end up coding the proteins in the mitochondria, they need these localization signals too. And on top of that, there's localization, this is the localization signals at the amino acid level. I haven't even talked about the mRNAs, their localization signals involved there, it might be a little easier, because they may be on the poly A tails. But these are things that you ask you're criticizing the ID community for not being interested in certain things. It's partly because we're interested in these things was the evolutionists don't talk about because they don't have no solutions, they only pretend to have them. So I hand it off to you if you have any questions on this. Yeah. So that the the Dewey's you mentioned Dewey's that would be Joseph Dewey's the Young Earth creationist, right? I want to mention RGA, I promise I'll give you a chance to respond. The only reason I'm jumping in is just to let people know that we'll probably go over another five to 10 minutes and then we'll be jumping into the Q&A. Oh, goodie. Oh, actually, I'm rather than beating a dead horse, I think it'd be perfectly fine to go into Q&A because we did start late. And they were bumping in and out and all that stuff. So if it's okay with Sal, let's go with the Q&A. I can't see any of the questions. I'm not watching the video. So I don't know what kind of live chat or who's in that. So I'll just hand on you, James, to act as the font of communication between that window and ours. Does my I'd like to I'd like to just finish off the respond to the quick question that RJ asks is that Joe Dewey's the Young Earth creationist. He's an associate professor of biochemistry at Lipscomb and an adjunct professor of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Oh, yeah, he's public. I've got quite a few of his papers in my reference base. He's one of the body of Young Earth creationists that have published in regular technical literature, often collaboratively with other people. So I'm fine with going to the Q&A. You got it. And folks, I want to let you know we are thrilled as up next at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight. In other words, in about an hour and a half, this debate is happening, namely T-Jump and Nathan Thompson are going to debate it out. This will probably we'll take a break from Flat Earth debates probably for a while after this one. It's going to be epic though, folks. You don't want to miss it. And so that's going to be right here on this stream as we are doing a 12 hour nonstop stream of debates debate again. And so first question. Thanks so much for yours. Answers in atheism says I have an after show to do an autopsy on Sal after the debate. Juicy. Sal, no response or comment than a question. Bubblegum gun. Thank you. Thank you for the super shot. Bubblegum gun says the best masterpiece movie is hard to be a God. 1989. I've never heard it. Is this a real movie, RJ? I haven't heard of it either, but there's a lot of movies I don't know about. And Andrew Rus. Thanks for your question says James. Just a reminder that you're the man. Thank you, Andrew. You are the man. We appreciate your support seriously. And my name is mud. Thank you. Of course you're a man. You're an endothermic vertebrate, too. Thank you, RJ. I've never heard such a sweet thing in all my life. And John W. Thank you for your question says do not think we do not understand. Sal is a vet in parentheses as well as me. While he defended us, we got to learn and focus. Do not attack Sal. Do not denigrate, but educate. That's kind, John. And that's a great opportunity for me to remind you, folks, want to encourage you. Attack the arguments as maliciously and with as much malevolence as you can. However, we do want to ask that you would not attack the person as we do appreciate them. And you guys, 99.9% of you do a fantastic job. So we appreciate that pancake of destiny says if we are designed, designer is not intelligent. Sal, there are too many flaws in our bodies that could be fixed by the average dumb Joe. What do you say to that Sal? The average dumb Joe cannot fix our problems. Otherwise, we would have healed all diseases. As I said, creationism argues that the world is cursed and it is by God's design that he makes us know that we're not God. So the flaws in our body are reminders. And there are a lot of people that think they know better than God. And so God has left reminders that we are flawed, that we are mortal, and we are diseased and we're in need of redemption and a savior to bring us into the next life. So that's part of the intelligent design also. Although intelligent design movement tries to avoid that. Just as a demographic, I'll point out the vast majority of intelligent designers are relatively conservative Protestants. There are some Jews and Catholics knocking around in there. And you get quasi agnostic free thinkers like Michael Denton pops into that category that are technically non-believers and David Browinsky. But by and large, it is a wink, wink, nudge, nudge theology thing. And I'll just say that the designer, Isaiah would have had no problem with the idea that everything bad and good is all due to God. And that would include all the nasty diseases. But it does make God kind of a sadist because they didn't realize how bad things were. I'll give you the last word, Sal, since the question was originally targeting you. Well, we have self-destructive designs like fireworks. And we also even have self-destructive biological designs. Monsanto built these terminator and trader seeds. So just the fact that something dies or self-destructs is not evidence against intelligent design. The fact that the terminator trader seat self-destructing is pretty clever, honestly. Chris Peacock, thanks for your super sticker. Do appreciate your support as well as John W says, I trust Sal. And I know there is something out there. We do not have faith in the same ideas. But he is a brother, even if not the same. Glad. Thanks, John, for your what's the word? Thanks for your kindness. And Pancake of Destiny says, if we are designed... Oh, we got that one. And thanks, Heinrich van Nuusen. Thank you for your question says, the design argument fails. The laryngeal nerve in giraffes. Human eating and breathing via the same pathway. The anus being so close to the sexual organ. These are, as I think they're trying to argue, these are bad design examples. Sal, go ahead. We'll give you a chance to respond. We don't know that they're bad design examples. I talked about the biophysicists that say we're excellently designed. But even a feature of bad design, I mean, Rube Goldberg machines could be argued to be bad designs, but they are not created for the benefit of the Rube Goldberg machine. They are meant to impress the viewers of just the ingenuity that something on the verge of collapsing actually can still work. And I dispute some of the claims about the laryngeal nerve. And so to take this, just consider the question, is a Rube Goldberg machine designed or not? It's irrelevant whether one would classify it as good or bad. It's the improbability that's the real question. Oh, by the way, thanks to all that have been super chatting. Thank you for the question. I'll just say from an evolutionary point of view, bad design is not quite the term I would use, contingent design. The laryngeal nerve is a matter of where back when vertebrates were really early and didn't have long next to worry about that one nerve just went one way and another goes to the other. And it's a nice, neat, compact thing in basal chordates. But as the system changed, there's no designer to say, well, maybe I could run it over here just as easily, not a problem. As things get longer and longer and longer, the thing still has to loop around as the system developed. And there's a lot of contingent systems in that. Jackson Wheaton, I dealt with some of that in the rocks were there, volume one, book plug. You got it. And thank you very much for your, let's see. Oh, Sal, given that the that I don't want to gang up on you. So given that that last question was meant to challenge your position, I'll give you the last word. I'll let RJ have the last word. So I'm done. Thank you for the question. You gave exactly the response that condensed down what you would find you could easily go to the Joshua. I was offering Sal. Okay, Joshua. Thank you for your question says, Sal, sorry for interrupting RJ. Just to jump into you got a lot of questions. Sal says, Joshua, Alex says, Sal, your coin analogy doesn't hold water because it ignores selective pressures. What is select? Thank you for the question. I was referring specifically to a biogenesis. The selective pressure is for disorganization. That's demonstrated by the Gibbs free energy. I have a reference from it somewhere from a stereochemistry book. That's also true for the riboses and all. So the selection that the that the individual was posing is fantasized. It's not what's actually seen in chemistry. You got it. And thank you very much for your question coming in from John W. Strikes again says, stop RJ is he is acting like a predator and taking over? Let Sal speak. Yeah, well, don't worry, we're good. And Gordon Fiala, thanks for your super sticker as well as soldier of science who says, Sal, is there a biological process you think isn't complex enough to be designed? I think there's some biological processes that don't have to be designed. Thank you for the question. Or I wouldn't bother arguing for it, even if it is, there's some. And so one, I haven't really focused on those. And so sorry, I can't give more substances answer. It's not anything I really thought about. So but thank you anyway for donating to the modern day debate channel. That's RJ. It looks like it sounded like you had something to add. Go ahead. No, no, no, I was just marveling at the response. You got it. And soldier of science says, Sal is got that one standing for truth. Thanks for being here. It says, keep up the good work, James. One day I'll hopefully be able to rock that subject as well as you do, brother. God bless. Thank you for your kind words, standing for truth. I promise as a result of such a kind message, I will stop calling you standing for poop for at least two weeks. So thank you for that. I appreciate that. But really, I'll do appreciate standing for truth. That's right. And the Batman with a trollish super chat. Let's see. I think we've got more serious questions coming up. So let me just reload this page and we'll look at those. So want to mention in the meantime, thank you very much, folks. Our guests are linked in the description. So that way, if you want to hear more from them, well, you certainly can by clicking on those links down below. Soldier of Science with the question says, Sal, your entire argument was an intelligent designer. How do you get to a personal God after that, though? You wouldn't get it through. Thank you, Soldier of Science for the question. I believe the personal God has to reach out to each individual. And so it's really God finding us. I had a vision when I was very young. It's something I can't run away from. There have been certain people that have experienced miracles in their lives and a lot of them are on my channel. It does raise the question why God would reach out to some and not others. And I covered that on my channel. I don't think that any answer to that is satisfactory. But I don't think we can go from a kind of the designer I described through quantum mechanics and the equations of physics and the arguments of Paley's watch to the personal God. That's something that God has to do for you. Dr. Joshua Alex says, Sal, selective pressures aren't limited to reproduction. A crystal forms in its shape because chemical laws select that arrangement over all others. Thank you for the point. There is selection in a crystal formation. But there is, you can't really describe what happens in spontaneous isomerization. And I could show these diagrams of like, say, the aldopentoses. You don't end up, even though the chemical formula is, I believe, C5H10O5 for the aldopentoses. There are at least eight major forms. And even in those there are other more isomers. You can't characterize that as selection because one of those forms, the beta 2, the beta D2 deoxyribose or ribose, depending RNA or DNA, thornose form is the one that is selected for the nucleic acids. I mean, that appears in the nucleic acid because there's no selection pressure for that. There's actually, if we are going to use the word selection, which is really a misnomer, it would be against that. And also for the consistent leakage, I'd like to also promote Change Tan and Rob Stadler's book that actually cover that. And thank you for the question. And sorry to disagree because we're having so much fun. Is there any discretion in those chemical bonds? In other words, could any gods decide to make oxygen not bond with stuff just by fiat? I never thought of that. Sorry, I don't have a good answer, R.J. Gotcha. And food for thought. This next question coming in from bubble gum gun says, watch, quote, hard to be God, 1989, put it on YouTube. Gotcha. I'm thinking they're saying like search for it on YouTube. Sound movie plugs. And John W. with another question says, I am 31 and do not play Fortnite. And as well, just try and learn. Thank you, John W. We appreciate that. And thank you very much. If anybody can make any sense out of what that meant, let me know. I'm confused by two cosmic reach says, when it comes to observations, we are working post the coin analogy makes an appeal to a pre infinity. How do you fix this, Sal? Are you trying to prescribe what we are describing? Thank you for the question and the comment. The coin analogy really is to illustrate a mathematical abstraction that we call the binomial distribution. One doesn't need to appeal to infinity to describe the binomial distribution. And the problem actually works really. The problem it poses actually works well in finite universes. And you only have a finite amount of time to be able to to mix the coins before they can be all heads. So if I misunderstood on that very particular point, Sal and I are in agreement. Okay, you heard it. We're in agreement. So, yeah, binomial theorem, it doesn't depend on an infinitely long universe that it would come up in any context. One of the problems with working out a biogenesis issues is that the only things we have to look at are existing organisms that are a long way removed. And we can't even tell how many lineages have died out along the way like the ancestor of the mitochondria. Gotcha. And this question coming in from Nick do appreciate it. Nick asks, if an intelligently designing personal God existed, wouldn't it be obvious to everyone instead of having to rely on God of the gaps arguments? That's a great question, Nick. I addressed the question of the hidden God on my channel. And I'm obviously promoting this. This is by like debates. It's a chance for free advertising. But the question of the hidden God, why would God be so hidden? Why isn't he as evident to our senses as the air we breathe? That's a very legitimate question that I would say that that's one of the main causes for atheism. And my answer to that is, and this is my interpretation and I believe it's consistent with what's taught in the Bible, is that the hidden God, mostly hidden God, it says in Proverbs 25, 2, it's the glory God to conceal a matter. The glory Kings that search it out. And Jesus also says that I thank you, Father, heaven and earth, that you've hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children. The mechanism, the choice of God being hidden to most is a way that he can separate those who really want to pursue him from those that don't. He makes it really easy for those who want to close their eyes. And hence the design argument is one way it's subtle enough that if people want to close their eyes to it, they won't see it. And that's how that's one of the mechanisms that he uses to separate those who want to pursue the Christian God versus those who don't. And that's my answer. That's not a scientific answer. Thank you for the question. And of course, all the other religions get to play too. And what evolves is that human beings make up the little fiddly bit details to fill in all of the hidden parts, which is most of it. Sorry, our next one, tape deck. I was just watching Sal's face. That's the only reason I'm laughing. Tape deck says, do Sal or RJ believe an intelligent mind can exist without a brain? I believe in a disembodied, the possibility of the disembodied intelligence. That was really the suggestion when I showed the laws of physics and then I quoted the physicists. The assumption is whatever that mind is, it's composed differently than the minds here. And by way of extension, one could postulate disembodied minds too. There was a physicist, Paul Davies, that talked about this in one of his books. I actually never read it. It would be interesting read. So thank you for the question. We're sort of in an other rare instance of agreement. I don't rule out in principle disembodied supernatural entities as well. The question is, is there really good evidence that they interact? And if they are interacting in time space, then now we can potentially delineate whether or not they're doing anything here versus somewhere else. And my general position would be that based on the history of the God of Abraham tales is that that one is not even a contender because the narratives there don't match up with what we can see in nature. And all the other religions have the same problem. Next up, thank you. I had no further comment. You got it. This one coming in from JC93013 says, Sal, provide irrefutable, indisputable proof of God. I can't because I'd have to be God to do that. But thank you for the question. People are sent to God or no God. Well, people are sent to God through faith. It's not by direct proof. So it is a God question. And I'll give you Euler's answer. He once is alleged, I guess, to have written on the blackboard e to the power plus one equals zero. Therefore, God and dared anybody to disagree with him on it. So there's all sorts of people who want to find routes to God can find them. People who don't won't. Juicy bubblegum guns says seriously, watch quote hard to be God 1989. I've seen so many movies. This is just a masterpiece. Above all, must see before you die. Is that the second plug for that? It is. He's a really big fan. And Nick, thanks for your question says, is a hidden God not indistinguishable from no God? I think that's for you, Sal. Thank you for the question. If it's hidden from your eyes, I guess it wouldn't be indistinguishable. But I believe that it's not completely hidden. If it were completely hidden, we'd have no chance. But I think there's evidence and that's what we're talking here today. And then additionally, like I said, a lot of people on my channel that are Christians believe that they witnessed miracles. So to them, God isn't hidden in their lives. That does pose other theological problems. But you know, I'm just, you know, I can only represent my experiences that I believe I've seen miracles and I believe I've talked to people who are credible witnesses like astronaut Charles Duke who healed a blind girl after praying in the name of Jesus. I would consider that not so hidden. So thank you for the question, Nick. And thank you very much, John W. For your question says, I am the only vet I know on here besides Sal and who else defends their home? When did your knowledge help or else for the country and being a man for it all, not just what you were doing? Was that a question or could you read it? I was hoping you guys would have gotten it, because I didn't. John W. says, I am the only vet I know on here besides Sal and who else defends their home. Sal, you got to, is that it? You big on John's? No, it makes sense. I wanted to say, John W. I think because you saw me in a pilot outfit, you thought I was a veteran. I apologize. I think you showed up on my channel and thank me for being a veteran. I'm not. I worked as a defense contractor and I also built machines to help veterans. I mean, active duty soldiers and sailors and pilots both here and in Kuwait. So along those lines, happy Memorial Day weekend to everyone, body, and I'd like to thank all the veterans who protected the United States in particular. I'd like to just say thanks to them. To the veterans, most of them had passed away. He liberated my mother's village in World War II. She lived in the Philippines and the Japanese occupied it and a lot of very fine young men died so that she could live and we could be here. And so a blessed Memorial Day to all the families of our veterans. Thank you. Another thing we can agree on, Sal. Amen to that. Thank you. Agreed. Anybody who has served, thank you so much for serving. We do appreciate it. And we initially, I thought he was thinking that the guy was saying that he was a veterinarian and neither one of us are veterinarians. But then, you know, now they said, when did your knowledge? So they asked John W. Had more of a question coming from that said, when did your knowledge? I think they're referring to you, Sal. Help or else for the country and being a man for it all, not just what you are doing. I think maybe like they're saying what was like the broader, bigger thing for the country overall that you think you contributed. I'm not sure. I kind of read the question a little differently. And I'll just give my take is that he asked, when did I get the knowledge to or when did it start to help me? It was when I nearly left the Christian faith and I studied science. And then I've always been very patriotic for the reasons I stated, you know, when my mom keeps telling me the story of when she was alive, of how wonderful it was to have her homeland liberated in her village. And that's why I value the freedoms we have in this country and what it's done. And it's a glorious thing that someone would lay down their lives to liberate a third world country. And I'm eternally grateful for that. Although technically at the time it was a colony of the United States. Next up, this one coming in from, do appreciate it, Mick Ghost Loven. Thanks for your awesome question and I appreciate your question, your name. They said, did God create Emery, Iwana? I don't know what Emery Iwana is, but they said merely to tempt me. Sal, what are your thoughts? I don't know. Oh, I think he might be referring to that Mary Jane stuff. Oh, I see. You're right. That makes sense. Increasingly legal in many states, including my own in Colorado and other places. You live in Colorado too? Wait, you don't live in Washington state. We passed an initiative here in Colorado, did it there. Last time I was in Denver, the place was sprouting marijuana shops like dandelions in summer. Oh, yeah. What are your thoughts, Sal? That's a really good question. Why would God make marijuana and I don't have an answer. I'm sorry. So I would presume all things were made prior to the fall of man for our delight and pleasure. So don't say that. Don't take that as an endorsement indulge in drugs now. Juicy. I'm not a pot smoker, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. You got it. And thank you for your question. Ian Chen is in the house, says, buy RJ and Jackson's book. The rocks were there. Do it now. Got you. Thank you very much. Ian Chen. And also thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from John W. Says, I am Canadian. Thanks. That was the person who just mentioned that you guys are both bets. Thank you, John W, for being with us. And that goes for everybody, folks. As always, want to let you know, modern day, neutral debate platform. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. I am not a veteran. I narrowly missed going to Vietnam in 1969, but my draft number was too high for that. But no, I'm not a veteran. Oh, you bet. You got it. And then ex floreo. Thank you very much for your question says, evolution ontologically would have to be a metaphysical mechanism. But how can a metaphysical mechanism exist in an atheist, materialist worldview? That for either one of them. I'll take it. Yep. The ironically, in principle, an origins of life issue could still be a miraculous phenomenon. And then everything after that, completely naturalistic evolution that there's all sorts of options going on in here. If you are an atheist and you don't believe in magic sparkle gods that are meddling and designing stuff, then in principle, you do indeed need to work out how life managed to originate at some point. And it's an ongoing piece of research, an interesting one. None of that will make all the evidence for evolution after that go away. Gotcha. And thank you very much. Thanks for the question. I have no point. You got it. This one coming in. Oh, Sal had a comment. I think, hold on. I might have missed one. I'm going to just quick scan, see that I got it. This next one coming in from, do appreciate your question, pro-social pessimists. This isn't per se regarding the biology in terms of all intelligent design. But they're asking, why would God, Sal, why would God make so many parts of the earth inhospitable? Thank you for the question. I've never, I've actually never thought about that. Although actually one could say there are many places in the universe. In fact, most places in the universe are inhospitable. And so I would argue that the inhospitability is a pointer that we are special. We live on a privileged planet. And I do think some parts of the earth has become inhospitable because after the fall of it. The main point of the inhospitability of the universe in general is pointing that we are a very special place in the universe. And a professor of mine, James Treville said, everything we've learned recently or in last 20 years when he wrote the book, he said, I'm not a particularly religious man, but in light of everything we've learned in the last 20 years, I'd say that we are special in God's sight. Gotcha. I would argue that inhospitability. That everywhere is inhospitable in some way or another. There are earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, locusts, plate tectonics. All of these things are happening so that there's very few places anywhere that are potentially idyllic and free from potential problem. The main thing is we, as a species, going way back even before Homo sapiens into the Homo erectus, are extremely adaptable and diverse. And in the case there's been several andes in Tibet of where natural mutations have led to a greater adaptation for extreme high altitude to where regular folk who go up there are gasping for breath because of the lack of oxygen, but the thing has evolved since then and there are papers on the technical evolution of that. So everywhere is inhospitable unless we make it otherwise. That's the human thing. Gotcha. Ian Chen says, congrats, Sal, on your published paper. Yes. It was more of a press release. It was in the FACED Journal, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, May 14. We talked about a software implementation of an algorithm that was published in 2012. The author of that algorithm, Kirk Durstin, was actually on the team. We're able to infer a protein structure by doing cross-species analysis. Like say, we'll take a taupe isomerase from the plant. We'll take it from a dog or a human. We'll put this. We'll do a multiple sequence alignment. The evolutionary biologists know what I mean. If you pump it through the algorithm, various algorithms can predict the 3D protein structure and then our algorithm also predicts the possibility of chemical interactions. So that was a big deal to be God willing, more publications along that line. Don't be surprised if evolution is to make use of it and come up with conclusions you may not like. Juicy Mike Q922, thanks for your question, says, what are your thoughts on theistic evolution? Could be either of you if you want to respond. I'll go if Sal doesn't or Sal, go ahead. I think we can argue against it on scientific grounds and then it would be if it fails scientifically, which I've tried to argue that at the very least it has problems that would preclude it from being accepted on the level, say of electromagnetic theory, that then until it gains really more traction as and solved all these problems, there's no reason to accept it is truth. Certainly not or not truth. Certainly not gospel. Certainly not gospel. And I'll point out there's passages in the New Testament where Jesus turned water into wine. So to the extent that one sees problems in biology that are best solved by a miracle, then there's no need to invoke theistic evolution of you if one already accepts other miracles in the Bible. So those are my thoughts. Yeah, a theistic evolution suffers from some of the same problems that intelligent design and creationism do in that they aren't terribly good at working out a model that if you look at swamadas and various other people that it starts getting foggy at the detail level. And you would like to know what exactly where was the God doing stuff in this particular sequence. And so it's all the same map of time modeling issue that's the difficulty. If you're comfortable, theistic evolutionists are one that will be accepting more of the standard science and attempting to incorporate it into their theological perspective. Your and this paleontologist Robert Asher, various ones in that regard. If they are much more finicky about which branches of the theology that they're willing to accept that may preclude in principle any form of evolution theistic or otherwise. And finally, Michael B. He might be considered. He's an intelligent design advocate. Some people would consider him a theistic evolutionist where there's universal common ancestry, but then some sort of design along the way. Yeah, Michael and Günter Beckley, the all that in principle, except a common ancestry, I will put it with the caveat it's a meaningless concession in that they never apply it to anything. So it's just off their floating again as a thing. Oh yeah, I accept that in this case, this case, this case, and then suddenly boop, it's gone. Gotcha. And this question coming in from we do appreciate it. Joshua Eleg says, RJ, do you know what a proto cell might have looked like or what structures would be required for something to be called a proto cell? Oh, very good question. I think if you look at the various researchers in the field, they need to have several things happening together as a unit, although not necessarily that each one of these things happen all at once. It's going to have to have a metabolic system that's bringing energy into the thing to fuel it. That probably has to have occurred first. Otherwise, anything that develops replication, which is one of the other factors, is going to eat itself out of house and home. So I'm definitely a metabolism first person if it had a naturalistic origin. The third element definitely is the membrane system, which brings up the pores and all the little things that Sal was alluding to in the videos, which is why they're useful pieces of information to do up. And I will say this as a gauntlet issue is that it's perfectly fine for Sal and intelligent designers and creationists to be throwing down these where you can't explain this and you can't explain this precisely because it acts as a prod to the scientific community to continue to do work in the field. Don't be surprised that they're going to continue to figure this out. But nonetheless, from that point of pot stirring, it's perfectly going to bring it up. So you've got membranes, you've got replication, and you have metabolism. Now, the one unanswered question that we have is, are there other answers to those systems than the ones that we know of that is inferred from the last universal common ancestor, Luca, from which all organisms developed? And we don't know the answer to that. There may have been alternate versions, which they may well be encountering in a biogenesis work experimentally that might have been dominant systems at one time or another, first hundred million years, and then fizzled out as a new competitor that eventually becomes Luca. So there's still an awful lot that isn't knowing about this, but can I conceptualize the basic boundary layers? Yeah, and I think most of biogenesis people can, at least the ballpark of what needs to be done. Juicy, this one from Bubble Gum Gun says, there are multiple gods, not just one and other entities. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sal. Marduk, Marduk! What do you think of Sal? I have a thank you for the comment. I do have a pipe and I like Captain Black Tobacco. You got it. And we are pumped, you guys, as we've got maybe one more question that we can fit in and then also want to let you know, oh, baby, you guys, this debate coming up at 8 p.m. Eastern. In other words, about 55 minutes from now, T-Jump and Nathan Thompson are going to collide on Flatterer. So that's going to be juicy. Spoiler alert, the earth isn't flat. It's going to be juicy. And Marshall, the meat prophet, thank you very much for your question, says, Sal, why do so many people have experiences of gods that are not the Christian God? Does God appear as Krishna or are those people mistaken? If so, how do you know Christians aren't mistaken? We don't. Thank you for the question. And that is a very probing question. The, can you repeat the question? I do, this is such a good one. I want to try to do it justice. Roughly speaking, I'll summarize, like paraphrase it. So people have these other experiences of other gods like Krishna or whoever, whether it be near death experiences or maybe even just, you know, things that experience throughout their lives. And so if you would say that they're not real, well, then how do you know that people's experiences or alleged experiences of Jesus aren't real? I don't think anyone in the ultimate sense or absolute sense can establish one way or the other. We accept certain things by faith. Like we do a lot of things in in life. We have incomplete information. We make decisions on it. But I do acknowledge that other people of other faiths have experienced miracles. The Christian answer to that is that if they are legitimately supernatural, that they are not a Christian God, they are the devil. And that's why it was very important when Jesus was casting out demons that his miracles are better. So that's, that's about the best response I can give. The sociological point of view, I'll just say that the vast majority of people on the planet tend to believe whatever religion of their local group is. So people who are raised in a Christian environment believe in Christianity, people who come into the Hindu environment are believing in Hinduism and so forth and so on. The one outlier group are Buddhists, where a large proportion of Buddhists live in cultures where Buddhism is not the majority religion. Now psychologically individual people, some will be more attracted to the religion of the culture. Some will want to hunt. There's something that's invalid or inaccurate or they get that the hypocrisy of it and they settle on a religion that's an outlier group. And so there's a whole pure research follows these kinds of things, sociology of religion people. And it's a very interesting subject that as a non-believer is a fascinating thing. Why do people believe stuff and why do they end up with the particular beliefs they do? Gotcha. And this one coming from Steven Steen, nasty guy, says, I think this is directed toward you, RJ, says, Ooh girl, don't you stop? Don't you stop till you get enough? Honey, ooh, honey, honey pie, honey, honey, honey pie. Oh, I think that is a song lyric, although I'm not familiar with it. I will counter with ooh, ee, ooh, ah, ah, ting, tang, walla, walla, bing, bang. That's really hot, HAWT. So we want to let you know, folks, our guests are linked in the description. We are thrilled, want to let you know, we really do appreciate them. We are going to, I'm going to be hanging around here in between as we have our intermission leading up to the big debate tonight with Nathan Thompson and T jump, which is pictured right here on the bottom right of your screen. So baby, it's going to be epic. I want to say thank you RJ and Sal. It's been a true pleasure to have you guys. I think it was a fun and informative discussion. I think it brought up an awful lot of interesting things I'm going to be looking into and all the rest and it's fun. It doesn't matter to anything. We're just a video debate, but still it was fun. And thank you RJ for suggesting the debate. I just got a letter from Mr. Coons here that you wanted an opponent and so I got volunteered. Oh, I had a completely different understanding that he had set up a thing with you on the debate. Are you trying to edge us together, James, you know, coming along there like the person doing the movie thing saying, Hey, I've got this big star in here. There's all settled and you use that as bait to bring the other person in. Are you into that thing, James? That's funny. Believe me, I thought about it, but no, I can't remember. I'm trying to remember what I said to you guys. I know that I figured I was like, have you guys debated before because people always love new matchups. And so we have interacted in previous circumstances. I just wanted to say, I don't have your email, RJ. Oh, let me get, in the private chat window, I'll stick my email in there. And the reason I'm saying that is out of courtesy. I am inviting you to my 9 p.m. show on the history of ID and creationism. I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. It's just the history. What time is that? At 9 p.m. So you can... I may be otherwise engaged, so I have to view it afterwards. But anyway, email, once the show is done, then, because I can always comment on it in the stream afterwards. You see my email in there? Yes, I'm going to grab it right now. And so speaking of which, at 9 p.m., I'm having a show on my channel on the history of creationism, intelligent design, creation science, et cetera. And I did try to invite people like Gutsick Goodman and at my own website, they'll find the tip 1.6 and 1.7 are history and commentary on creationism from its main roots in the early 20th century and then the intelligent design movement and its interactions up to the Dover trial. So that's another shameless plug from my website. You got it. So thank you, everybody. 100%. Everybody stay safe. We're still not out of the woods on COVID. The little bastards mutate. You got it. And so we want to say thank you, Sal, and thank you, RJ. We'll be back in any moments, folks, with a post-credits scene, or you could say an intermission. And thanks so much for being with us. We're excited for this upcoming debate in 48 minutes. Be right back in just a moment.