 Today we've got Dr. Joshua Svamedas as well as Dr. Nathan Lentz. We're going to get started here. We have the opening format of this is going to be an open discussion, pretty flexible between five and 10 minute openings, as well as we're going to have a about 60 minute open dialogue for the two debaters here. It's going to be more of a discussion between the two, a pretty friendly discussion. But we also are going to have a Q&A section of about 25 minutes. So first I want to give a shout out to Dr. Lentz's new book, Human Errors. And also Dr. Svamedas's book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve. Now let me know out there if we have any technical difficulties, but it looks like the audio and everything's good. Oh no, we have a frozen picture. Hang on one second and I will introduce the two contenders here. Dr. Svamedas, would you like to go ahead and kind of introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Dr. Josh Svamedas. I'm a scientist here at Washington University in St. Louis. And I'm also a Christian, but I'm also entirely OK with evolutionary science. This is one thing Nathan and I have in common. I'm a Christian, he's an atheist. We both are OK with evolutionary science, which is part of what I think is going to make this conversation interesting. Because I really do think that the bad design argument, or the argument from bad design is not a good argument, a bad design argument. Therefore, it is a bad argument. Perfect. Nathan, do you want to go ahead and give a just kind of open introduction of yourself and maybe some of the things that you're working on right now? OK, well, I'm a scientist also and I'm at John Jay College at the City University of New York. And I work on genome evolution currently. And specifically of the human genome and how it's taken shape over the last few million years. And the argument from poor design, as it's called, goes all the way back to Darwin. And I do think it's a valid argument, although I think it raises different issues that have to be addressed, depending on what your belief system is coming into it. So somebody who doesn't accept common descent, I think the argument from poor design poses a lot of challenges for someone who doesn't accept common descent. So I think that most of the value in the argument from poor design is in demonstrating that all living things do have common ancestry with one another. And because otherwise the seams, as Josh calls them, I call them quirks, flaws, glitches, whatever sort of suboptimal design that calls out for an explanation. These examples, and we're going to get into some of these, I'm sure. Although we might not even need to, because I think we agree on a lot of these examples. But these examples... You should get an test for your own, because that's what you're really known for. Yeah, we can talk about a few of them. But the point, though, is that these examples, when they pop up, they don't pose a challenge. They don't really need any kind of explanation. We have an elegant explanation for them in terms of common ancestry, because what we have in our bodies and our genes inside ourselves is the legacy of millions, even billions of years of ancestry that has left its marks on us. And not all of those marks are positive. Some of those marks are leftovers from adaptations that are no longer appropriate or whatever. And they don't always get removed quickly. So just being inefficient is not enough necessarily for natural selection to act. However, if you don't accept common ancestry, then these examples of poor design are a conundrum to be explained, especially when the alternative explanation, meaning that we inherited them from common ancestors, is so simple. And so the most valid argument generally, when you have a question like that, is the simplest one. As Einstein said, your explanation should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. So I think that the biggest blow towards to creationism that comes from the argument from poor design is towards for those who don't accept common ancestry. If you do accept common ancestry, then the argument is a little bit different. And so the intelligent design community has a major problem with the whole argument from poor design. But it's not quite clear what their issue is, because half the time they argue that this really isn't poor design and we just don't understand it. And then the other half is, well, we never said it had to be perfect design. It's just intelligent design. So they sort of speak out of both sides of their mouths on that. And the reason why is that intelligent design doesn't make predictions that you can test or that hold up. So it's not really falsifiable in that sense. But the argument from poor design does come from the theory, evolutionary theory, and a proper scientific theory not only explains evidence, but also predicts future evidence that could be found. Future evidence meaning future things that might happen, but also future evidence that we could find from the fossil record or whatever. And the argument from poor design, I've never contended. I don't think anybody has contended that by itself is a slam dunk for evolutionary theory. But it just fits in with lots of other lines of evidence that not only do we have common ancestry, but that evolution is unguided and is sloppy and it doesn't fix all possible problems. And that is not surprising to anyone who accepts evolutionary theory and sort of a purely natural materialistic way of looking at evolution. But if you believe in supernatural intervention into evolution, then I do think it raises some issues that you at least have to answer for. I'm not saying that the answers will prove anything one way or the other, but it does raise issues that you have to at least think about. Perfect. Well, I appreciate that. That actually fills in some of the gaps and it makes me really interested in how this is gonna unfold. So I'm really interested in this exchange because I've already got Dr. Schwarmendass' book, The Genealogical Avenue, but I've got to get human error now. So I've got to add that. Claire, we got, Human Errors is a great book that isn't actually about, to be clear, the bad design argument. No, it's not. Sure, but it's, I gotta get some of the words here. And I think so that's what got put into that box. And now actually Nathan is kind of well known for talking about this too. And by the way, of all the people who make this argument, he makes it better than most. Well, great. That's why I want to pick up some of his material as well. Cause I haven't actually, I've only heard about Nathan recently, our Dr. Lin. So I appreciate both of you guys being here. I guess before we get started, let me just say, one of the things of modern database, this channel is we want to make sure that everybody feels welcome no matter of your background, you know, what you believe, where you're from, anything like that. So we want to start with that. Secondly, I just want to say that anybody who has a question, if you could hold it toward the end, and when we get into the open discussion and we get toward the end of it, I'll kind of say like, hey, look, we're getting toward the end of the discussion. You guys wrap it up, you know, and you guys tag me with your questions. And if you would tag me at Converse Contender, I just posted like five waving hands in the chat. So, and you'll see me throughout. So if you'll wait toward the end though, that way, cause I'm running everything today and that way I can check all that. James is the professional. So with that, I appreciate both of you being here. And if Dr. Swaminath, would you like to start? No, I think Nathan should start. He already kind of got a bit of a start. I think because he's really the one who is, I think presenting even what I would say is the dominant duo among many biologists to be fair. I don't think what I'm saying is outside of mainstream science, but it may not be the dominant way it's explained. So I think it makes more sense for him to explain it. Okay, Dr. Lin. I give what my counterpoint is. Sure. Yeah, and just to be clear that my book, Human Errors Catalogs, a lot of examples throughout the human body, human mind cells, DNA of suboptimal design, quirks, things that are leftover from evolution. But what it doesn't do is present them as an argument for anything. So that when I say that my book was not written as an argument against intelligent design or an argument about bad design in a sense, it really wasn't written that way. I wasn't thinking that I was in dialogue with anybody. I was presenting a book that I thought would be interesting to people to read that they would kind of head scratchers that make you appreciate how life works. And that's all. I really thought I was only talking to people who were sort of already bought in to evolutionary theory. So I found myself in the middle of this argument unintentionally. And I would have written the book differently if I were making that argument. Although if I had to do over again, I still am not interested in that argument necessarily. So I don't think I would do it differently unless my goal had been different, which was to make this as a strong argument. Anyway, but let's talk about what the argument really holds. So when, and I think that we can't totally divorce this from what it's arguing against in the sense of creationism. And in the 19th century, in the mid 19th century, the dominant view, especially outside of science, but even within science was that we were looking out in the world at God's perfect creation. And so the instances of poor design that Darwin talked about and that other people were talking about really were head scratchers for them. And the idea that God could ever make mistakes was problematic. And that's what Josh means when he says this is a theological question. It's scientific and to use science to argue theology is bad form. I agree, I just think it works the other way as well. And so what Darwin was saying is if you see these examples of poor design and if you accept common ancestry that we're all descendant from ancestral populations, then we actually, not only does that explain the instances themselves, we actually don't expect perfection in nature if it operates by purely natural principles, unguided natural selection through mutations and other genomic events, you get diversity and then that diversity is acted upon through natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms actually. And what you end up with is a hodgepodge and our body is a hodgepodge. There's instances where it would be very easy and conceivable to design a better system than what we have if you had the foresight but evolution doesn't have foresight. It does not think ahead. It can make tiny tweaks and tugs with anatomy and with cells as they exist hoping that each step along the way is at least neutral if not advantageous. That is not a recipe for whole scale redesign. However, right now several forms of creationism including intelligent design hold that interventions periodically through some intelligence and they try not to say God because they don't want to run a fowl of separation of church and state that fools no one but they say an intelligence has to intervene periodically to provide new genetic information. Well, then that comes back to, okay, so if new information is provided to help overcome some major evolutionary transition or I should say to facilitate a major evolutionary transition why does it leave behind all the inefficiencies? If the goal of that intervention is adaptation or improvement or innovation when anybody's redesigning anything or adding a new design they take care of glitches and the design that they already have, right? Now, this is where Josh would say but now you're trying to understand the mind of God and making decisions about or trying to understand how those decisions were made. I don't think it was the mind of God that did this, right? So I'm not the one that has to answer that question. I'm posing that question anyone who's gonna make a claim about an outside intelligence that's involved they have the explaining to do because what we see is not just inefficiency we see death, destruction and suffering as the theme in nature that death, destruction and suffering is way more common in nature than its opposite. And if there's an intelligent loving force that's at work that will take all of the presence of mind to help us evolve wings for a say but not evolve our way out of a parasite that eats children's eyes from the inside out that's the confusion to me is that how we can think that an interventionist force that's intelligent could simply provide information towards innovation without taking care of any of these very obvious glitches and seams and quirks. And so the argument from intelligent design or from poor design, excuse me is not just supportive of common descent it's certainly supportive of common descent but it's also supportive of a view of nature that it is unguided by anything other than the randomness of genomic rearrangements and mutation followed by the non-randomness of a selection. And it fits within that mold. It doesn't fit within them with other explanations that we have particularly anything that invokes supernatural intervention. That's my view. So should I give my little opening statement too? You're in it, Dr. Swamadas. Thanks so much for that, Dr. Linzo. Nathan, I really appreciate too that you're not like pigeonholing me as things that I'm not. So I affirm common descent. I also have a lot of objections to intelligent design so that's not what this is about. But this is also a place where I do agree with some of the objections at least at a high level that are made to how sometimes scientists that are supposed to be secular enter the conversation. So my critique is not really gonna be from the point of view of being a Christian it's gonna be from the point of view of being a secular scientist where we wanna be carefully keep the scientific claims really clearly demarcated. And yeah, we can talk about theological things as I do but we wanna be careful not to yoke it to what science is saying to type. So let me give you some examples of where I think from a secular scientific point of view the bad design argument goes poorly. And in fact, at times might even pull us in ways that might even be anti-science unintentionally not that the people who make this argument are anti-science but that the rhetoric of the argument and the meaning of the argument takes you elsewhere. And one great example is to connect it too tightly to evolution as you did. You said that it started with Darwin but actually if you look at the evidence that's not true. I mean this actually is connected to the very ending question you brought up of theodicy. So there's this quote I have here from Lucretius who's about 100 BC says had God designed the world it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see it. That's not having anything to do with evolution. That's not the Darwin that was over 2,000 years ago. And really it is connected to the question of theodicy or the idea is how do we make sense of an omniscient benevolent and off all powerful God in a world that's not perfect. That is the question that's there and I completely agree with you. That's also a grand question. It's a question that people have been wondering about that's not gonna be amenable to simple answers. And in fact that's a question that several religions take very seriously. For example, that is the central question of Buddhism is how to understand suffering. That's also a central question in Christianity to understand how it is that God who's perfect made a world that was very good but not perfect and a world that we find ourselves that has fallen right now. So if we're gonna make that theological argument we have to actually engage the actual theology behind it and that larger history of discourse. And to do that, well, I'm not really sure is really science. It starts to become theology and really what it becomes more like it feels like sometimes it's a bit of a drive by a scientist who doesn't understand the theology making a pretty strong theological claim. That isn't that we haven't thought about it. I mean, we have, it's just not science. That's one reason. The second reason is that the bad design argument actually presumes that something is bad design from a starting point. And maybe that is true, but not always. A great example that's brought up is how the retina is. People will say that the eye is backwards. It's wired backwardly. That you have basically the nerve coming up in front of the world, light has to go and then diving in to the back which doesn't make any sense. But I think this is actually a really big mistake on several levels. This is actually a point where we're starting to make a point that you can't even justify scientifically. One is that these wires that supposedly people are worried about are entirely transparent. It's not even really clear that this is a problem. So the analogy to saying that it's wired back backwardly isn't even clearly bad science. There's even some scientific work that suggests that this is positive that it's wired this way because it actually works to focus light in a particular way on the actual photoreceptor part of the cells. And I think perhaps the part that I'm most convinced by is the importance is that because the light has to go through the entire cell body before it reaches the cell receptors that there's vesicles that can be put there by our body and our cells that watch you tune the frequency of light to which you're actually adapted for. So it's possible that it's actually necessary to have it wired this way in order for, or the cell to be ordered this way in order to have its color vision. Now, of course, we know that octopi don't actually have it wired that way. They don't have it wired correctly, but they don't have color vision. They don't have the cutie we do and all these sorts of things. And maybe also there's a way to wire it so it could have color vision otherwise, but then that makes you think, well, wait a minute, then it's kind of irrelevant. To say that it is bad design, I don't even sure if I can agree with the premise that the eye is wired backwardly and that's bad design. That just seems a little bit, it seems an anti-science, frankly, to just leave behind all these details and not to really ask the question, which I think we see weird things in nature. What we're supposed to do as scientists is look at them and say, is there a reason for this or not? And I think the bad design argument gives us that shortcut to say, well, maybe not. Maybe it's just bad and to do it too quickly. And I think that that's not good science. Well, Josh, if I can respond to that, the idea that we could see something and conclude that it's sub-optimally designed does not end the story for the research, all right? And even if it did, that would be on exactly the same par with saying, well, that's just how God designed it. So I don't think that's a legit idea. Well, yeah, I agree, but I'm not saying the God doesn't do it in a critical way. But more importantly, you're also mistaking, so it's true that the axons themselves are trans, they're actually translucent, not transparent. So, and that involves some scattering of light and you're right that there's some vesicles that exist that help concentrate basically trying to compensate for the scattering that's already happened. But so to me, what you have is you're mistaking adaptations around the weakness for design with the whole thing in mind. That's one thing. Secondly, the axons converge on the optic disc to form the optic nerve. And at that point, you have a blind spot, an unavoidable blind spot in the retina because all of those axons have to converge at some point in order to dive back out of the retina towards the back. Now, if the retina wasverted properly, it would not have to do that. And indeed, cephalopods do not have an optic disc, they do not have a blind spot in the retina. But all vertebrates do have a blind spot. And we compensate by having binocular vision and we cover both fields of vision. But lots of mammals have their eyes on the side and they don't compensate and they have a blind spot because of the optic disc. I have yet to hear anyone even theorize about how that could be advantageous, the optic disc. You're not letting me finish. Like I'm getting to that. So what I would say though, Nathan, is that as a Christian, if I was going to step out of my scientific shoes for a moment and say as a Christian, I've seen nothing that makes me think that design has to be perfect. And it's clearly, I mean, my eyes are good enough to do exactly what I think God wants me to do. So I'm not troubled by that particular issue one bit. And so I'm not saying that as a scientist to be clear. I'm saying it as a Christian. I mean, it's kind of like a, this isn't nearly as much of a problem as larger questions of theodicy. To kind of worry about this issue. I mean, it's not even really sailing it from a theological point of view. I mean, I do think there are some real challenges to think through, but that's probably not one of them because it's certainly good enough. It's certainly very good. But we can come back to that example and I want to. The other example I was going to give was the issue of vitamin C deficiencies that we can all have as humans and how we found out about this fairly late. And it's a pseudo gene that we have to be able to make vitamin C that a lot of the great age have and we don't. No primates have it. Well, no primates. You know the details more than I do, but the key thing is that you have to eat a lot of fruit. And we found out about this actually when we got ships that have people at sea and they would get scurvy. And people point to that as an example. Now, and in one sense from I would say from a human point of view that does look like poor design, at least from an Europeans point of view. But, you know, I think there's an issue here too where we had to start making a lot of assumption and inferences about what God's purposes are to really be concluding that that's actually bad design. It certainly is evidence of common descent. And that actually puts us in a different sort of argument than maybe we'd have with the Earth creationists about this, right? But I think, you know, from my point of view as an Indian maybe God, you know, kind of put that there because he wanted to slow down colonialism a little bit, give us at least a couple of 50 years before we had to deal with that. Maybe that there was that purpose and he actually put that there by design. I'm not saying I know God's mind, but we have to kind of rule out everything like that to really say that that makes making some inferences about what God really intended in the grand story of history that I don't actually think anyone can really make with confidence. And so I don't think you can even conclude that that is an example of bad design. And though I would agree, it doesn't fit what we believe as humans will be a perfect design and as I already said from a theological point of view there's really another reason to worry about that. Now the third reason I just gave and then I'll turn it over to you Nathan to try and rebut. Is that I think it actually doesn't even really match our emotions as scientists as we engage with nature or just people that engage in nature. What the world is not perfect. You can definitely see examples of suffering and pain and poor design if you want to call it that. But when you look at the eye for example or the way how the body is made or all these other things where you can see them as not perfect, they also evoke this notion of incredible awe and beauty. And it just seems to really and it seems to undermine that emotion and that emotion is important because I think that's actually one of the driving emotions of science. That's why a lot of us are scientists that's the experience we have as we study things like the eye even as we then go on to make the argument for bad design from the eye. And that just doesn't seem to be terribly coherent. I think honestly, yes the world is not perfect. It's fallen, it's not perfect, it's very good. And it's also true that it seems that we're fearfully and wonderfully made at the same time. Now that doesn't mean I'm making some sort of argument for design or for God. I'm just saying that as secular scientists I think we do a better job representing science if we really more focused on these not as glitches and errors but as quirks and seams that give testimony of common descent but also raise real questions about what's really going on and we want to study a scientist and we want to do it in what's welcoming to people from all sorts of theological points of view. All right, thanks so much for that opening, both of you guys. I think that's enough to get us started. Dr. Linz, you want to start with the open discussion? Well yeah, I'm trying to be as kind as I can about this but so you had, I think again, rightfully say that when we try to understand the mind of God it gets us a scientist into theology and you often frequently call it bad theology. My response is, is there good theology on any of this? Because, so for example, you just offered a potential hypothetical about the mind of God regarding the gulogine for potentially slowing down colonialism and listen, I despise colonialism as much as anyone. The mutation that first knocked out the gulogine was more than a hundred million years ago. Oh, sure. Probably trillions of individual primates all the way up through our closest ancestors and us have died at debilitating horrible death from scurvy. Scurvy is one of the most painful ways you can go, right? You bleed all of your tissues. Is it really that common? Help me out, I didn't realize it was that common. What? Scurvy? Well, let me put it this way. Every, so scurvy, the lack of the gulogine has restricted primates essentially to tropical rainforests and the environs right around it. And primates never successfully colonized the entire continent of Europe, for example, until hominins did. And they got scurvy when they did. What that means, though, it's not that primates knew better. They said, well, we better not go there because there's no good source of vitamin C. It means that primates went there and died of scurvy when they tried. And so they didn't leave offspring. They didn't successfully colonize. Scurvy was an absolute scourge. And remember, we solved it mostly through farming. Imagine how many of our ancestors died as they traveled the world and explored the world in all different, with no idea how they were dying or what they were doing wrong. What they were doing is their tissues were losing all their integrity and they were dying a slow, horrible, painful death, going back 100 million years. And it's not just primates, it's actually supraprimates. I'm actually really curious about this because we know, for example, oscimos don't need any fruit. No, but they have a diet that is the high in fish liver. I also know that there's gonna be very high selective pressure for finding alternate sources of micronutrient. I don't actually know if there are examples in history of scurvy at all because of that. So maybe they would go up to a place where there's no fruit, but then they would get a very strong instinct to go back and get some fruit. What's different with boats is that people couldn't actually satisfy that instinct. So can you really justify what you just said there? I mean, it'd be great if you could. I'm honestly curious. How would you, I don't even think it needs justification. Scurvy has been with humanity all along. And there was not an instinct to bring fruit or to seek out fruit. If you did, you survived and if you didn't, you didn't. And so the oscimos, for example, the Inuit and the Beringian people before that got incredibly lucky because a diet rich in fish, specifically fish liver, because why is fish liver high in vitamin C? Because fish can make vitamin C in their liver like everything except primates and a couple of other exceptions. And the point is, is that it's just luck. And the good luck left descendants and populations in places where they could eat out of it. The battle disappeared from history. And remember, recorded history only goes back what, 10,000 years at the moment? 10,000 years? I'm curious about this from a just honestly scientific point of view. So I mean, if you have actually looked into this, I haven't, but now you just have me really curious and I want to know. So I'm not meaning this to be difficult, but I mean, is there actually any examples of an animal we have with scurvy? Because it's just that there is a strong instinct that we'll have. I mean, because there's gonna be strong selection for it to not just require fruit, but to also desire fruit. So that's gonna, I mean, if you require something, there's gonna be a very strong selective to actually desire it too. I mean, that's why also they had very like velled ovaction and things like that. And so I'm just not entirely sure that what you're saying, I mean, you're saying does it have to be just, I think it kind of does. I'm giving you an alternate hypothesis. And I'm wanting to see where that's the case. And I'm okay with it if what you're saying is true. I just not even sure if it is. And isn't that worth asking and looking into? Yeah, I mean, what you're asking for is a historical record that before writing was invented, I'm not sure what you're looking for. You know, canzies, excursing out of places where there's fruit and getting scurvy even right now. Because they live where there is vitamin C, right? That's where they live. Yeah, but you also said that they couldn't expand and what was happening was that they were leaving their spots and going to, based on two things. The, if you look at where primates currently live and can live and you map that onto where vitamin C is readily available, you have to also remember it's not just geographic, it's also lifestyle, right? What they're eating. They overlap and they're, so the assumption that they're never trying to expand, life is always trying to expand. Organisms are always moving out and branching out and trying new things. And if they ventured outside of where vitamin C could be found, they would dive scurvy. Well, I mean, that's one theory, but the other theory, which I think is more likely is that they would venture out, they wouldn't find it. And so they'd venture back to get it. I think that- What would make them do that? You think they realize? Humans didn't realize what scurvy was. Animals will realize when they're missing a micronutrient and we'll find ways to get it even in very creative ways. That's if they can connect. No, it's not that actually. I think it's actually very instinctually driven. But you still have to connect an instinct, a deficiency in a very specific thing. I can, I don't, I know of no cases where an instance, besides salt, appetite, salt and water appetite, maybe there's a couple of others, but connecting a specific micronutrient with a specific craving for food, come on, there's no, where's the evidence that that exists? Well, I mean, I can go look that up for you. That'll be fun to follow in fusel science, but there is some evidence that there's actually quite a bit, but that's, I mean, it's not done on a conscious level as a key point. It's actually genetically hydrocardoid. Well, it would have to be. Well, yeah, but besides, okay, I mean, I can grant you that, but that still kind of gets to this issue of, I think it gets to the bigger question of what you asked of what actually is good theology. And I think that's really the right place to start. So what I would argue is when it comes to scientific questions, there's no such thing as good theology. We definitely can recognize that theology. We have good theology to deal with this. And you said, in my, me telling you that this is just scientists doing bad theology. And then you said, but here's my question. I think it's a good question, but then you asked like, is it even good theology? Is there, what is good theology? It all seems like it could be nonsense. So I think the real, to answer you, I think it really, we were able to kind of clarify what good theology is, right? Yes, because as far as I can tell in a scientific realm, there isn't good theology. That doesn't mean that I think theology is wrong or bad or a waste of time. I just mean, when theology is bad theology. There should be neither good nor bad theology. We should kind of keep that up, check that out. Anytime it encroaches, it's by definition, bad theology. Yeah, so what I said is that this is bringing bad theology into science. It's bringing theology to science, which we shouldn't do. And it's not even just theology. It's bad theology into science. So I don't think we should do that as secular scientists. Right. And so if you agree with me there, that's enough reason to say that, we need to be very cautious about these bad design arguments. And in the same way we have rigor of doing really good science in science. Right, right. And I think that when we are making bad design argument, we shouldn't pretend that it's science and we should at least do it in a way that's good theology. And here's why it's still fine to make it in science. So for example, photosynthesis is an incredibly wonderful thing that has allowed everything else on this planet, at least in terrestrial environments. Everything is based on photosynthesis at the bottom of the food chain. However, photosynthesis is not particularly efficient, especially when it comes to carbon fixation. And we now know way more than we need to when it comes to biochemistry to have designed a much, much more efficient system of bringing the energy that we initially fit who are very good at harvesting the energy of light but very poor at loading it into carbon molecules. And we can now do this with organic chemistry way more efficient than photosynthesis ever could. And we also can understand why photosynthesis never ever optimized past a certain point because to do that you need a whole scale redesign of the molecules themselves, which has way too big of a hump to overcome in terms of natural selection. You could never get there by natural selection because there's too many changes that would have to occur all at once. That would be negative changes along the way only when they're cumulative. So why I think that's good science is that these questions of why isn't this better? Why isn't this better designed? Why isn't this matching up with that? That forces us into that curiosity of asking the question. It doesn't, and at one point you sort of implied that it ends our pursuit into it. I think the exact opposite. When we find these head scratchers, these seams in these glitches, it forces us to dig down and say why isn't this better matched? What are we missing? And it could be that we just don't understand it enough. Like maybe with the retina we keep going and it really does look like that's a better design and that's the reason it didn't flip around the other way. Maybe that's the case. I doubt it because there's other problems with having an inverted retina, but we'll never know unless we pursue understanding the retina as well as we can. So I think it does drive us to research these things more when we find instances of bad design, of suboptimal design. So this is why I say you're the best person out there making this argument, because you're doing it in a fairly soft way, which I don't have maybe my strongest objections to. I mean, there's not that much space in between you and I scientifically. Yeah, I mean, what I would say is, I'm not trying to say that the bad design argument always causes us to step out of a scientific point of view, but it often does. And I think what it does is there's only a certain type of findings that will support a bad design argument. And if you're making a bad design argument, you're going to do that rather than really giving the full story. And that's why it's problematic. So what you're saying is even an example, which actually might have a lot of facts that could fit with idea of a suboptimal design from a certain point of view. But to say it's bad design, you have to actually show that that's the correct point of view and that it really is. And I'm just not even really sure if that's really the case you're making. What you're saying is, like from this narrow point of view, which may not even be ultimately the correct point of view, you're saying this narrow point of view, this is not optimal and I want to understand why. And I can explain it through common sense and I can explain why from common sense I can make that jump. I have no objection to that. The problem is when now we extrapolate that to the theological argument, we're not saying from this narrow point of view, from God's point of view, if God existed, this is bad design and he would not have done that. And so that shows that that's not valid, but you didn't actually say that. You said something different. And so, and to be clear, it's not just that, you know, I'm making a strong man of the argument because I'm saying that you didn't just do it right there, but a lot of other people do. And that's all kind of grouped into the bad design argument. What they're really saying is exactly what ID does on the other hand. They're saying bad divine design. Right. And then the idea is saying intelligent divine design and I just think that, you know, I do think that scientists should play in those theological places. But what we should be doing is by trying to really be that, you know, truthful and honest and as neutral as possible and really engaged with people who have expertise in theology to tell them, well, hey, here's this situation over here that we've seen. I'm gonna really help you understand it. How did this connect with a larger theological conversation that's going on there? And you tell me how you make sense of this. That I think is the right way for us to do this which might actually end up supporting a good argument against for bad design or not, but we're not really qualified to give a good theological argument. We are qualified to bring them into direct contact with what we're saying in science. So they understand it for real on both sides of it and help us make sense of it. And I think that's a much better role for us to be playing. It's less aggressive, it's more friendly and frankly, it's more fun. No argument there. I just want to clarify one thing. The argument- You're having good amount of one. What's that? If there's no argument there, that's my point. Well, yeah, but see, let me finish. So what I mean is the argument from Porta Design as a scientific argument for or against anything, I agree just runs up against the brick wall, but it's useful as a rhetorical argument because it forces the question right back on the people who would claim otherwise. So you're talking about the people who would claim otherwise. Because I don't think scientists do have anything to answer for when it comes to Porta Design. And that's why, in a sense, it isn't really a scientific question or a scientific challenge. But the people who would claim that supernatural intervention occurs and occurs regularly on all of this, then they have to sort out what's an intervention and what's not, what's what happened about by natural means. And that's why we've seen Bhe and others try to draw this line. Well, this natural selection can do without help, but past this line, they can't and they can't support that line, right? Because all you have to do is research further and further until the line disappears. And that's kind of where I'm going with the bad design argument as well, in the sense that there's a lot of structures we have in our genomes, in our cells, in our bodies that really don't make a lot of sense from a design point of view. If you think that... Let me slow you down, Nathan. So first of all, if what you mean by design is God specially creating things without any history of common descent, I agree with you that there is a legitimate point to be made, because if that's the case, a lot of the explanations we have for the way things are, the way they are, are a problem. However, there's a better way to frame that. To say, for example, as I've said before too, and you see me do it, it's like there's all these quirks and seams that just don't make any sense without common descent. And so what's your explanation? So that's actually far more neutral, and it makes it more likely for them to understand and appreciate and maybe even accept common descent, because you're not yoking the evidence of common descent to theology that they'll never accept. If you want to actually convince them to change their point of view and understand what you're saying, you will never yoke it to theology that is not intrinsic to the science, and that they will never accept. It would be better to say, hey, this is a quirk, a scene that I can explain in common descent. How do you explain it in special creation where God's trying to create things in a different way? I got, you don't, I mean, if you do it that way, that is actually a theological argument, but it's actually a bit sounder in the sense that it's not yoking it to something else, okay? Do you see that, at least? I do, but I mean, it's, we're splitting the hair here based on who we're talking to and what they accept, which is what science is not supposed to do anyway. So now we've almost switched positions now because- Well, no, I mean, I would say that- I think science should say- We cannot have a debate about theology, we should do it in a way that doesn't yoke the science to theology that people accept. So what I think should happen is science shouldn't be talking about bad design in that way, or they're not implying divine design, and when we step outside as ambassadors of science, we're gonna talk about theology and we should, we should do it in a way that's welcoming and isn't yoking things to it that isn't necessarily demanded by science. Okay, well, for the record, the book that I wrote was never intended as an argument, divine design, hold on. But it was intended to help dispel people of a common misconception that secularists have that nature produces perfection, that nature perfectly adapts organisms and that everything that exists has been so fine-tuned by natural selection that it's just- A lot of people have that bias that they approach nature with, regardless of the theology. And my point was that actually, no, that's not how evolution works at all. Evolution, as you said, gets you sort of good enough. And also you can only operate, natural selection can only operate on so many variables at one time- Sure. With the anatomy that you already have. And so there's- There's also a lot of stuff- There's just limits. There's just limits. All seeing, all knowing God has no such limits. And so when they're providing intervention, the other thing I wanna say is so you had mentioned about framing it in certain theological terms that would be less aggressive, more amenable and lead to interesting conversations. But that only counts. That is only possible if you have a common ground of that theology. Theology begins with a set of assumptions that not everybody accepts anyway. Like- I don't know if that's true, Nathan. So this gets back to the question of what good theology is. Good theology isn't actually about having a common set of assumptions. I'd say theology, I'd make a distinction between that and doctrine. Doctrine is about a certain point of views. Theology is really about a conversation between different points of views where you try and make sense of everything together. And so for example, you can do good theology even as an atheist by entering it. Now I've even seen you do this actually, Nathan. I mean, you're actually really quite good at this. You're trying to ruin my reputation on all sides where you'll sit down and you'll talk to a theologian and just try and understand them in their own terms and then try to explain what you're seeing in science in a way that can make sense to them. That I would say is not because you are, I mean, you're an atheist. You're not saying I agree with you now that God exists. But you're an effective ambassador of science. You're sitting down and actually explaining what you're legitimately, what we're all legitimately seeing in science, explaining in a way that is kind and truthful and neutral to give them a chance to make sense of it. That's what is good theology, I would say. And I think that that's what we should all be doing as scientists. We shouldn't be trying to take the beauty that we find in nature, that we find in science and then use it as a weapon for a particular viewpoint. That's not what we're supposed to do. That actually ends up undermining science in profound ways. Because science is supposed to be neutral that way. It's supposed to be more welcoming. To be clear, we find stuff that contradicts religious belief all the time and we should be truthful about those things too. So I'm not at all trying to say that, but for the things that we do find, we shouldn't be trying to go create fights in theology about it when we should just be explainingly seeing and helping theologians come alongside us. Now they may not agree with us. And by the way, you do do this. I've seen you do it multiple times, Nathan. And I think that is just fundamentally more in line with the secular values of science than the other way, right? Yes, exactly. And that's why to get to bring us all the way back to the beginning, that's why I wrote the book actually, is that a lot of these things that you find in the body, there's an upside to recognizing these things because you can live in better harmony with your body when you understand it's past and its limits and how it can be most optimal given its limitations. And that's something that it doesn't matter what you think led to the body taking the form that it has now. It doesn't matter what you think about how we got to be this way. If you can understand the body on its own terms, its limits, its past, what it's optimally designed to do versus not do, not optimally, but as much as you can, then you can make choices in how you live your life and really harmony with your body. However, if I can, theology, theology had 2,000 years to do that, Christian theology, right? Oh, no, no, no, I didn't do it. We were thinking about theology because this is not a question that has not been addressed by theologians. So to do good theology, it actually has to be making correct statements about the history of that conversation. And so to kind of just make up a claim that ends up being totally false, that is clearly bad theology. And I'm not really sure you want to do that. So like I said, I can agree with you that a lot of this is bad theology. I'm just not sure what good theology is in terms of... I'll give you one example, I'll give you another. So how you as an atheist can do good theology without... So I think one is, like I said, actually, like let's just just actually become trusted, people who are conveying what we've seen in science and actually confronting theologians with that in a way that doesn't have theological agenda except for just inviting them into what we're saying. And by the way, I think you already do that. I just don't think the bad design argument is aligned with that. But the other way to do it too is like you said that you don't have to answer for the bad design problem. That's true. But I think there's the flip side of the bad design argument that I do actually think that if we're gonna step into that realm as an atheist that we do have to answer for it. I think one of... And I'm not saying that there isn't answers for it, but I do think that the flip side of it is the problem of beauty. It is to be clear, I'm not saying that there's some problem that evolution hasn't given a good scientific account for, but I don't think we've given a good philosophical account for why the world is as beautiful as it is. And from a purely naturalist point of view. I don't understand the question in a sense because you're not asking a question about the world, you're asking a question about our minds, right? We find the world beautiful. Yeah, that's the thing. We definitely just as an objective thing. I have not heard yet a good account of why we find the world beautiful. That's actually the issue. It didn't have to be that way. It doesn't clear what the selective benefit is for us. To be clear, we find some things beautiful. I look out in the world today and there's plenty of non-beauty to be seen in fact. I mean, you're right, but that's the point. So that gets us, I think that gets us close to understanding the answer, right? Is if we understand what we're drawn to, what we take pleasure in, what gives us dopamine spikes in our brain versus that which triggers disgust, that which triggers contempt, there's a lot to be learned that are about our social evolution. And I think it does tell us about our past, about the groups that we evolved in. And actually I'm a proponent or at least weekly a proponent of multi-level selection and how it works in the social environment. To me, I don't think these are lacking in theoretical explanations. Are they lacking in data? Of course, because that's a really hard thing to gather data on. But I'm just trying to argue that science has paradigms for understanding beauty and other positive emotions like that and the contempt and disgust. And at least as much as theology does, but what science has over theology on that question is that we can conceive of experiments that would give us some data. To actually get somewhere to test the hypotheses that we have. These are really hard questions. I give you that. But I can't say that theology has any advantage over science in trying to get answers for them. There's a lot of things you're doing that are really good here, Nathan, are actually very different than the bad design argument that are actually really important. So what you're doing is you're actually talking about two sides of paradoxes. So we see this and we see this. And that's the reality of the world that we face. It's not actually a perfect world. It's not actually a fully evil world. We see good and evil in it at the same time. And really what's going on, now if you just ignore one half of it. So one thing that like for example, young earth creationists do and the bad design argument ends up really actually kind of reinforcing this view is when they talk about evolution and they talk about like death in the world and things like that. They say, this doesn't make any sense from the point of view of a good God except for what they leave out is the other half of there's also an immense amount of life and beauty and goodness too. And really what we see is in the world is really kind of these two things that are working together and really trying to understand the relationship between them and how it got to be this way and how that can make sense with like all the complex paradoxes we have in the human condition is really where all the interesting questions are. Now that's actually how good theology is too. It engages not just one half of it. But really the both halves that are in tension with one another and try this to make sense of that. And there is actually a history within theological thought of doing that. And in fact, I think that in some ways you're echoing that maybe unknowingly as you discuss these things in terms of science. And I think that that's beautiful. That's not bad. I think that's part of the discussion that we're supposed to be inviting non-scientists into to kind of bring and make sense of. And actually what we benefit from too is only engage with good theology that way is instead of kind of just becoming like a pawn in a cultural battle we can actually be starting to tap ourselves into these very contemporary debates in science can be connected to much deeper histories of discourse about what it means to be human in a way that's much more grounded and accurate. And we can even learn from experts that understand that history better than we do. And I mean, these are grand questions. I just think that they're gonna unsettle simple answers. They're gonna up-settle simple answers on the scientific side and they're gonna unsettle simple answers on the theological side. But that's what makes them interesting because that's why we have like a dynamic exchange of a conversation. And that's actually what good theology is or it could be or it should be. By and large, I agree with most of what you just said. In fact, I'm a college professor and I'm a strong proponent of a big general education meaning I think you're a better biochemist for reading Shakespeare. And I think you're a better cell biologist for learning African art. I really think there are connections here. I agree with you too. Yeah, because we are tussling with big questions that don't have simple answers. We're also stoking curiosity. But I do wanna be clear that ultimately the goal is different. So I think with theology and even to a lesser extent in philosophy we might be able to get to a point where we understand how we think about good and evil. But what science can do hopefully is really try to understand the roots of the very concepts. And so what we find good, and what we find evil, believe it or not, I really believe that there are naturalistic, materialistic explanations for all of that rooted in our social evolution as a species that relied on one another very closely, tight knit groups over millions of years that solve these problems together. And we stopped relying on our bodies and our individuality and we started relying on each other. And what we find good ultimately is a social good. And what we find evil ultimately is a social evil. It's very hard to conceive of an evil act that takes place entirely on one's own that affects no other people. And theology doesn't always agree with that, right? There are lots of sins that theologians have told us are sinful even though they are a single individual acting in no way that affects anyone else. And I would say that's wrong. That's where theology has missed it. However, the vast majority of what all religions have found is good and is evil and their work in theology all lines up. So their creation stories are all different. Their mythology is all different. They're even the nature of God is all different. But all religions pretty much have settled on the same general outlines for good and evil. I don't think that's a coincidence. It's because the concept of good and evil is baked inside of us through our social evolution. We've been, we recognize good because it helps people and it benefits people. We recognize evil because it hurts people, right? That's, we evolved to recognize good and evil in that way and that's what made us successful. Humans really superseded biological evolution to drive, to go into cultural evolution, social evolution, to work together as almost like a super organism. And I think that's a better way to think about good and evil than scripture or some other, well, this is, we know this is wrong because of X. I can know what you're saying, Nathan here. Is that first of all, you're approaching a grand question and you're not saying this is what science tells us. You're saying this is what science adds to the conversation and I would agree with you. And you're also saying it's what you think and I think that's true. So what that does is it creates a space for conversation about what I would say is actually one of the grand questions of what is good? What is the good life? What is it? That's a conversation that's been had for thousands of years. And I think the part where I was also very strongly agree with you is I think that science adds important information to that conversation that's new. And one example is you wrote another book called Not So Different. I think one thing that's been very surprising for a lot of theologians that we've been talking to, as you know, is that there's actually moral behavior among animals and most of them didn't know that. And that's new information for a lot of them. So for example, I do think that we are the only beings on earth with the moral law, but we are probably not the only moral agents. That's that makes any sense. That's a little bit of a subtle distinction because a law I think you can articulate and you can discuss, we can do ethics, but monkeys can't articulate things at that level. They have more of a gut instinct, which does give them actually a moral agency, I believe. I think so too. Yeah, I mean, I don't, we don't know how interesting. I'm trying to give you information that's important. It brings us to the grand question, but you're not doing it as science. You're talking, you're saying that this is the new information that science brings. That's important when you have to think about it. I'm just saying that the bad designer argument departs from that pattern. But regardless, I think we should stop now and I wanna hear what our moderator thinks and if there's any questions we can take. By the way, Nathan, I think that it's been a fun conversation. Like I said, I actually like how you approach these things. And I think the main reason why I think you should drop the bad designer argument, it's not actually consistent with what you're doing. Yeah, I have been very interested in this and we are coming up on just over an hour now. So maybe it is time to kind of transition the questions, but I have been very interested in this because I do like the conversation aspect a lot better. Sometimes there's more entertainment value in a debate, but you don't get as much intellectual content or as much raw contending or interacting with the actual issues. So I think everybody can appreciate that. And I would say you guys are probably at a more higher level, it's more of a collegiate discussion than the internet debate. So I appreciate that. You're a fire reading dog as your mascot. I'm not sure which one of us is fire reading. I'm sorry if we just... Well, we do have some questions already and a few super chats. I really appreciate that to everyone who has already sent in their questions. But why don't we do this? Why don't we give you guys another maybe 10 minutes to kind of wrap up and do final talking points of what you might wanna get out, some things that you might wanna draw together like the threads of this conversation. And I'll give my summary of things, Nathan, and you can have a last word. And while they're doing that, if you do have a question or you want to send in a super chat, just make sure and tag me at commercecontender in the side chat and I'll make sure to get that question in after their closing. Thanks, go ahead. So I'm sure Nathan will dispute me because, but actually maybe not. Maybe he will give us some ground and actually agree on these points. I think I'd demonstrated that bad design isn't the best way to frame what we're finding in science. There's a better way to approach this that's more consistent with the secular approach of science and ambassadorships that invites a larger conversation. And in fact, even as an atheist, I think he's interested in that theological question. Even though he doesn't believe that there's God, we want to engage these grand questions about what is good? Why are we here? Why are we in this tension in a world that has a lot of good and beauty in it, but also a lot of ugliness and suffering in it? Those questions that touch into whether or not there's a God or there is no God, that is actually the grand questions. And so even as atheists, we should want to actually engage those grand questions. Certainly as a Christian I do and as a scientist, even though I'm not a theologian and as scientists, I think we do actually have something to add to it, but it's gonna be done the best as if we can actually keep our science secular. And when we enter these conversations, really still throw on our personal views, but keep it clear that it's our personal views. And in that way, really enrich our science by tying it into the long conversation of history. Thanks so much for that, Dr. Lintz. Yeah, so to clarify my position on bad design, I do think it's per scientific investigation. And I think that when scientists speak among themselves about bad design, it's not necessarily that we're trying to think, well, how would we design it? So much as we're trying to understand the history of it. And to understand why bad design I think is a good rhetorical technique, if not a good scientific one. It's certainly good rhetorically because it puts a nice sharp fine point on what a true scientific theory can do and does not do. So a scientific theory attempts to explain all of the evidence that we see. And when it does that, and it springs forth hypotheses from a theory. So a theory is a large overarching explanation that unites lots of fields and explains lots of different kinds of observations. But from a central theory, what springs forth from there are specific hypotheses that are narrow and that can be tested. Sometimes they can be tested in the laboratory, sometimes you have to go digging to find this, but it makes predictions of what you might find. And so when you have instances of suboptimal design of quirks and seams, those flow directly from the central theory of evolution by natural selection in the sense that we don't expect anything different. It would be unusual actually to not find these quirks and seams, to not find the marks of our past in there. And so in that way, maybe it's not strong evidence for or against, but it's at least consistent with an evolutionary worldview when you find these quirks and these seams, these glitches of things that don't quite match up as well as they could if they were expressly designed. So they are consistent with evolutionary theory. I do think it's important rhetorically the bad argument. It's one of the toolkits that we can use when having this conversation with those who are against an evolutionary theory is that they then have something to answer for because they're inventing, if you forgive me for saying this, but they're inventing explanations to fill in various gaps of knowledge. So here's a gap in knowledge. What's the story that you're gonna invent to fill it? Whereas evolutionary theory, it's not a gap. It's exactly what we predict. So a good scientific theory predicts the future, predicts future behavior, future observations. The prediction from evolutionary theory is that examples of suboptimal design are expected. They're interesting. And when you study them, you really get a good clue into the past, at least in some examples. But if you think that the great grand diversity of life has come about through intelligent agent intervening at periodic points of view in order to provide, excuse me, points of time in order to provide new adaptations and all this source of thing, then that becomes a question that they then have to contend with because it's not predicted by their model. Their model doesn't predict or even... That's not true though. So that last part is not actually correct. I think actually what we see is consistent with either of you. I agree. It's not consistent with an interventionist. It's consistent with an unguided evolutionary view. And so... It's consistent with a guided view. How could it be consistent with a guided view? Well, again, I don't have that position, so I can't imagine what that would be. But if you're going to simply say, well, every time there's an adaptation that we don't know how it came about, we'll just fill in a supernatural intervention. That's not the only way to be an interventionist, right? So you could be an interventionist in the sense of saying that, maybe more like I am, where I think that evolution can do quite a bit, but it also doesn't rule out that God intervened at times. And so I'm not saying that I don't think science can actually tell us if God intervened So what's the criteria then to determine if it was an intervention or if it was natural? Oh, I don't think we have a way to do that. I think that... And that's kind of my point. That's my point. That's my point is because you run up against this limit where there's no way to collect data that would answer the question. And if there's no way to collect data to answer the question, it's not a scientific position. By definition, science... I've never said that I'm a scientific, but I do think it's consistent with science, right? I mean, I think you know that. I mean, it could be, it just depends on how it's formulated. And so, and that's what I mean, that in science we're constrained for the most part with ideas that at least you can conceive of how they might be tested. You could conceive of future experiments or future observations. And sometimes we're very far away from this. Right now the field of evolutionary psychology is in something, not a crisis, but it's dealing with this. Ultimately, we can't test some of these things. So does this really count as science? And then other people say, no, you can't because it's consistent. But that's a really interesting conversation about the nature of science actually. And I've gotten pulled into this just because I think it's fascinating to see how this is gonna work out. But if you believe in interventionism, supernatural interventionism, there's not even a conceivable way where you could test it, right? And especially because, and every time they try, and they're presenting it because science then goes and finds the data. So they just, we keep hemming this into this position and ultimately it becomes unfalsifiable. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it's not science. And I think that the argument from core design, what it shows, it doesn't even really support unguided evolution in the sense that it just forces the other view to contend with something that they won't be able to contend with it scientifically. They can contend with it, but not scientifically. Whereas the scientific view of the diversity of life on earth, there's no challenge. The suboptimal design is not a challenge for it. Well, we're kind of reopening our conversation. Sorry about that. These aren't really trying to close in comments, but- Yeah, we haven't closed it yet. We agree with you on the extremes. It's just that I'm in the middle ground and I think I have a position that's consistent with science and that isn't putting forward dumb science. I've never heard you put forward dumb science. Yeah. And when I do make mistakes, I retract them quickly too. But here's the thing. Like I just don't think that science tells us. And so I'm not gonna accept that my view is less scientific. I'd say it goes beyond science. So I would say it's more of a theology of nature, but it's accepting the exact same science that you do. I'm filling in gaps based on theology, not gaps in saying this is precisely where God did it, but gaps in a full view of things. And you filled in those gaps too by just, for example, saying that there is no God. I think that there is a God. Well, no, no. I didn't fill in a belief there. What? I didn't fill in the belief. Well, the only explanation is that there's no God. I don't think that science has a position on that whatsoever. My position is that I don't see any evidence that there's an intervention in how life played out on Earth. I agree with you there too. Right, so that's it. So my theological position on God is just simply that there aren't the signs that he intervened in order to make things play out the way that they did. That doesn't mean that he didn't, but if he did, he really made it look like he didn't. And that's why. That part, I think, so we gotta cover this on the forum sometime, but I listed out, I think about six different ways that I think every biologist would agree would have a profound impact on the direction of evolution, but none of them we'd be able to actually predict or identify. So I don't think you would have to hide it. I think it's actually fairly hard to find examples of an intervening that we would be able to detect. Well, right. And in fact, actually, I don't remember what the forum was, but ultimately Bihie, Michael Bihie, the Proponent of Intelligent Design. I'm speaking with him this coming, I think Thursday in Texas. Ultimately though, they were talking about specific innovations, molecular innovations. And it eventually, and I can't remember who he was tussling with. It wasn't Jerry Quinn, because I know he wouldn't talk to him, but there was at one point, it got to the point of where Bihie said, well, you're mistaking the question of how it happened from whether or not it happened. I agree it happened this molecular rearrangement. The question is how? So ultimately, ultimately the disagreement came down to, I say, not I, but science says that these things randomly came together and he says that this mutation was substituted by a divine act. That's not something that you could ever find evidence for or against, right? Of course the mutation happens. We consider them random and unguided, because that's how it seems to behave in the laboratory, that there's randomness to it. There's a difference between me and Bihie, because I'll tell you right up front. Yeah, I don't think science can tell you that, but he's actually trying to argue that we have strong evidence. That's the problem. And that's why Intelligent Design is, rubs people the wrong way. It's not that people have a belief in God and that God guided the earth. No one has, that's fine, believe what you want. What they're trying to claim is, no, no, no, there's scientific evidence and here it is, here it is, here it is. And all we do is disprove them one at a time and it's like playing whack-a-mole and they make something else up and it's like, so I mean, ultimately though, it comes down to this, is it guided or not? The moment an adenine mutates into a cytosine, we can't prove that that was guided or not. Yeah, that's the exact point. So I just think that science doesn't tell us either way. And if that has got how it creates us, that explains why we see all these quirks and seams and it also explains why it's not a profession. Frankly, from a theological point of view, the actual teaching of scripture is that the world is very good and fallen, but not actually perfect. That is a fundamental teaching. So if we actually saw a perfect world, that would be in conflict with what we see in scripture. Okay, however, however, let's remember that the world was imperfect long before scripture came around and told us it was imperfect. This was a prediction. You're saying that this whole view that we're finding in science, now you're kind of flipping the strip now. You're saying you're finding all the professions in science that are conflict with what scripture says. Now I say, well, actually, this is what the teaching is. You say, what we knew was perfect long before science. No, no, one of the things we knew was perfect. The world was what it was and then the scripture writers wrote about it. Like they didn't get credit for getting it right when it was obvious to look around and say that it was right. We know what we're gonna find in evolutionary science back then. I'm just telling you that actually Christian theology long before we actually looked at genomes teaches that we're not perfect, that we are very good, and that we are fallen, but the idea of perfect does come in. It says that we'll be perfected. So that's a future, that's an eschatological claim as they might say. So, I mean, I think the reason why is, I understand you don't believe the scripture is actually inspired in whatever way. And so maybe what you say is that it's just speaking to things that are actually readily apparent to people. Right, and also it does, I think the Bible is a wonderful piece of literature in certain ways anyway, because it does reflect a lot of what we want to believe or what we want to see. And it also reflects the struggle that we have and the question of suffering and all of these, but so doesn't every other ancient texts. I don't see that, I don't privilege any one of those ancient texts, because they all speak to the common humans. I think theology is important because it really matters to get into detail. So I'm telling you is that like Christian theology does have a very good account of why the world we find it is not perfect, but it has qualities that are negative and qualities that are positive. It has that account. And so to critique traditional, I mean, you can certainly critique certain types of inner-earth creationism on this, but the critique, you know, traditional theology or Christianity based on that is to really just be unaware of what its actual teachings are. And once again, to say that all other religions have, I mean, actually the way how, for example, Buddhism engages with suffering is diametrically opposed to how Christianity engages with suffering. And that matters. I mean, at the very least, it's interesting to understand it. We wouldn't want to say the answer. I mean, they give totally different answers. And for both of them to begin with that position that we have this thing called suffering, it's real and it calls out for an explanation. Yes. Right. Yes. But the rest of it is only consistent with if you hold that theological point of view. And so what I would say is that I don't give credit to, I give credit to scriptures when it comes to putting a nice fine point on the common struggles that we have as human beings and giving stories and other accounts that bring these issues into focus. I give lots of credit to scripture for that. I don't give credit for scripture for recognizing things like the world's good, but not perfect. Because I mean, if that was, that was sure that wasn't a revelation even back then. Everybody intuitively knew that. You don't get credit for what everybody knew was true. That you're critiquing for saying everything should be perfect. That version of the earth creations, which is not all versions of the earth creations, but that version is not even consistent with what scripture is saying. Yeah. That may be a good point to stop on there. Thanks to both of you guys because that was a cool interchange there. And we do have a lot of questions. And so I'm gonna try and go ahead and get to some of them, but that did make for an interesting exchange. So I guess we will start in it. And again, I just want to tell anybody, if you have a question you want to get it in late, just tag me at converse contender and I'll see if I can get it in here. So first we had a super chat. Thank you so much for your super chat. Andrew Handelsman, $2 super chat. Here's a couple for being homesick from James. Thanks so much for that. Steven Steen, $2 super chat as well. Thanks so much. He says, I miss seeing James's face. So I'll take that as a compliment for James. All right, Steven Steen again, $2 super chat. Thanks so much for that. Make modern day debates face great again. Thanks so much for that. We have Tioga. Maybe I hope I'm not pronouncing that wrong. Says, can we prove we didn't form out of the ganunga gap? Ganunga gap? Are you guys familiar with that term? It's a pagan term for like the, if I may murder it, but it's like, basically it's similar to how we have, like you would have the minor gods, little G gods, and then you would have big G gods that created all things. Well, in some form of paganism, there's like this ganunga gap, which all things kind of came out of. If you're not that familiar with it, maybe it's not a question you're able to tackle, I'm gonna get that out. It sounds a little fantastical. Okay. So, but thanks so much for that super chat anyway, Tioga. One thing I would say is that the question was worded funny in the senses, can we prove something didn't happen? Generally not how we pursue these sorts of questions. And maybe if you make a claim, you provide evidence for that claim. You keep making a negative claim and challenging someone else to come up and prove a negative is generally not how we operate. That's a good point Dr. Linz. It could actually be that that was the question for Dr. Swamidals in saying, can we prove we didn't format the ganunga gap? Like, can we prove that? So I do think that there's a distinction. So like science is very evidentially driven. Would you agree with that, Nathan? Hopefully it's all it is, yeah. And, but I think there is sometimes if we're not careful in our evidentialism, it can slip into positivism. So positivism is the idea is that if we don't have evidence or something, it didn't happen. Or if we, or if something did happen, we will have positive evidence for it. Okay. Well, yes, I mean, but we'll, We just finished what I'm saying. So that's positivism when you have that strong view in a global sense. And I think that that really actually a lot of science is oriented in just really marking out the boundaries of knowledge. To say that, hey, past this line, the evidence that we're looking at in science doesn't tell us one way. And so if a person makes a claim that science tells us X and you say, well, actually, can you disprove that it wasn't X but Y? That's actually a legitimate point. And that's not because we're saying that Y certainly happened over X, but rather to say, well, maybe the evidence doesn't actually tell you X and really the limits of our knowledge is a little bit farther back. And that means that there's a bit more freedom for other ways to think about that. Maybe eventually we will find out it's X. So really what I'm really doing when I talk about it in that way is not to make a case for God intervening per se, that's not what's happening in that conversation. Rather, I'm just talking about what actually are the limits? What actually have we been, what is that actually mainstream science is telling us that it's found? And in that way, when sometimes we overstate what it's told us, that form of argument can be helpful in clarifying and pushing back a little bit, that's all. Right, and the only, I think that's true. What I would say is that ultimately what science operates under the assumption that when things happen, they leave traces behind. And so if you think something happened, you would say, what do we predict? If this were true, we would predict that this would be left behind or that. And if you don't find it, it doesn't prove it didn't happen, right? But you just, that's how you evaluate two competing ideas is, okay, which one... Well, those ideas we care about in science or it's going to leave evidence behind. Yeah, yeah. And if you can formulate the claims such that there'd be no evidence for or against it, it's not a scientific claim. Doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just, it's not scientific. Sure. Well, if you can't have evidence for or against it, there's a lot of evidence around with that. They really do fit that category. I mean, so I think it gets subtle. So for example, before we conceived of something like the large heldron collider, the hypothesis of a Higgs boson would not leave behind any evidence, either way. Well, right. So the expansion of what is covered by science, marches forward with technology. Yeah, I'll agree. Same with the germ theory disease. That conceived, I think it still was a potentially scientific, I mean, I just think it's blurry. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, I'll agree with that. Okay. And all I'm doing with my argument is not to make an argument for God's action, but to rather say the science doesn't actually tell us either way about his guidance. That's all I was saying. And sometimes, and the only reason why that's important is because sometimes people claim that it's shown that it was unguided. I mean, this comes up in my book, too, on the whole de novo creation of Adam and Eve. On some senses, the argument that there's no evidence against the de novo creation of Adam and Eve with a larger population is some people find it to be trivially true. In fact, once you understand the science here, it is trivially true, except that people have been claiming for 160 years that evolution has strong evidence against this. And so, given that fact, then maybe there is actually a contribution of pointing this out. Not my demonstrating screw, but that's your show. Well, maybe, actually, that wasn't a comment. Right. And in fact, this will sound unkind, but let me finish the point. I was talking with someone who I won't name about your book, and this person was asking me why I was willing to put my name on it and so forth. And what he said was ultimately, when I had clarified what your position really is saying versus what it's not saying, he said, well, ultimately what you have then is sort of a parlor trick that will allow this to exist alongside science. And I said, yes, except for it's a parlor trick that's extremely important for certain people, for many, many, many people to know that it's possible. And that once it becomes possible, then they can drop their resistance to science. This is a really good thing. And if that's all this accomplishes is that people stop resisting evolutionary science because they realize that it doesn't contradict their faith. If that's all that comes out of this, that's a great thing. Thanks so much for those explanations, guys. Did you wanna add something else, Ms. Dr. Charmedos? Quite a bit of an answer to a question that I didn't even really understand in the beginning. So I hope we were on target there. Sure, yes. And actually Tiaga clarified and said that is what said that that was a good explanation of the Ganunga gap. I had ocean on my show one day and I kind of looked into it after we discussed it. I looked into it more. But with our next us, we have another super chat from Jay Shai. Thanks for your $2 super chat. Says Dr. Charmedos's thoughts on process structuralism. Yeah, so that structuralism and evolution which is this idea that some of the outcomes of evolution are somewhat predetermined by underlying structures and reality. So Ventin takes this argument really far and ID far than probably anyone else would. But you can even see this in science fiction with things like Star Trek where you see humanoid people that are somehow reproductively compatible with us on all these other planets. That's an example of structuralism too, to an extreme. I don't know how that could be possibly plausible, especially not the reproductive compatibility thing. But so yeah, I think that the way how a lot of things work like in science is that in even these debates that in certain contexts you're gonna see more examples of a certain amount of predeterminism. In a sense that in certain contexts maybe you'll see the same sorts of convergence. We can already see that in terms of like seeing many different types of eyes that have arisen in nature where you see common themes that arise independently that rhyme with another and even as actual things like that. We can even see certain gene networks that arise and that type of, which it all points to type of structuralism or predetermination or convergence. At the same time, we also see contingency where we can't actually predict all the time the way how things are gonna go. Like a really great way to look at it is Lensky's experiment. And he has, I think, 12 bottles where he has this long-term experiment with bacteria. And he's shown that he can take E. coli and have them evolve the ability to metabolize citrate. And here's the part that points to structuralism. It happened more than once. It happened in two of the jars. Here's the point that points to contingency. It only happened in two of the jars, not all 12 of them. And that actually is precisely the point. I think what you see is a paradox or tension with some parts of evolution might seem to be predetermined, but some parts are also sort of in my contingency. And it's really the both of those things kind of collaborating together. You're an expert in this area too, Nathan. How would you add to that? So, you know, actually Charles Cackell wrote a book last year, two years ago, that really clarified this in my mind a lot. So it's called The Equations of Life. And what he argues is that a lot of these things that I always assumed were arbitrary are actually anything but, because nature tinkers around so much. I mean, you have to realize that there are trillions and trillions of trials taking place right now with very, with all kinds of tinkering, and that the same solutions come up again and again and again because there's so much more efficient, for example, or more advantageous. And he talked about the spots that ladybugs have on their wings and the spots that Dalmatians have. And we know that those events were no way connected in terms of evolution, but actually the gene expression network that leads to the creation of spots and those two are almost identical. The players involved are different because they don't have a common ancestry, but the way that this gene, and you have a gradient and it hits a threshold and then it shuts this gene off is almost identical. And he maps that onto the evolution of the digestive tract. The fact that we ended up with DNA with four bases. All of these things actually biochemically, they were so advantageous that we were bound to end up with those solutions that when those solutions finally did appear, they had so much advantage to them that they would take over. He even, it takes, people have theorized about the chemistry of life be totally different on other planets. And he argues that, no, it will be very recognizable to us because you cannot substitute carbon with even silicon and get any of the kinds of molecules that we make right now. Even though silicon is so similar to carbon in terms of the valence shell and everything else that should participate in all the same chemical reactions, but the density would be different enough that you could not build proteins, you could not build DNA with the silicon-based chemistry and that you can't substitute atoms in any other arrangement to get anything, anything even conceivable. So actually the way that life played out on earth is probably gonna be fairly similar to how it played off another. You're probably gonna get cephalization, meaning one end of the body will have a concentration of the nervous system and sensation perception will grow out of that. There's probably a lot of, there's only so many ways that that can work. Well, thanks so much for the, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, that's fine. Thanks so much for those interesting explanations. We have a $10 Super Chat from Stupid Horror Energy. She calls herself that. Sarah says, sometimes there's a simple answer as to why there's, something is badly designed like Rubisco. It is difficult to evolve an efficient distinguisher between CO2 and O2. It doesn't really have anybody, if you guys wanna comment on that quickly, or if there's- No, that's exactly right. Rubisco is- You're basically, see that's not actually about, it's difficult to evolve. I think even if you're gonna take a de novo creation point of view, it might be difficult to design it in that sense too, just because of the fundamental laws of physics. Like, I mean, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be hard to build a biological nuclear reactor. Right, right, but that's the point. So ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase, that's Rubisco, is the enzyme, the most abundant enzyme on the planet. And its job is to take carbon dioxide and fix it into organic molecules using, basically NADPH, the chemical energy that we harvested originally from the sun. To build, it's kind of amazing that that molecule ever emerged. However, if you had an infinite number of trials, you could think about much more efficient ways to do that. That actually don't cause near as much loss of chemical energy. However, it's not conceivable how you would get to build that through step-wise building from smaller constituents. And that's the different, that's why we say that life looks like it is not designed when you really look, it looks like it's designed from the outside, from the, from, you zoom out. But when you zoom in, there's no way that you could get a Rubisco molecule that was as efficient as we could build in the lab without those steps that were insurmountable in terms of how unlikely they were. However, we can build a nuclear reactor. We can design an enzyme that does it better if we do it from scratch. Very interesting. That was a very perceptive response. Sarah, thanks so much for that. We've got just a few more and we're running out of time here. If we could, these last few, if we could just do some quick responses to them. We've got, Sambo says so, says, at conversation tender, ask Dr. Swamadas, why is it that design, the design of God in biology is so concordant with phylogeny as evolution would be, e.g., no traits out of place like animal cells with cellulose walls. Oh, well, first of all, the reason why is because I affirm common descent for goodness sakes. But to be clear, what you just said is actually technically false. There are things that are out of place. They're called homily places. And when you actually say there's nothing out of place, first of all, that's not true to the evidence. It's trivially shown to be false. And it's just a bad argument. The reality is that everything seems like what we would expect by evolution, which means that some things are occasionally out of place. Yeah, Dr. Linz, did you want to add to that? That's what we're saying. And the reason why is because I affirm common descent. Another example is incomplete lineage sorting. That's another example where you see the systematic and large-scale violations of a tree-like structure. And once again, that's not a problem for evolution. It's actually predicted by evolutionary theory. So you shouldn't say that why is it that everything is perfectly following a phylogeny with nothing out of place? That's just trivially false. Okay, thanks so much for that. You're good at anything. Yeah, I do. I would just argue that when we do find the things that seem out of place phylogenetically, that's where a really interesting science. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So that's where it's kind of, I mean, it's a common argument that I hear by people who are either being lazy in their scientific arguments to scientists in the public or they're not actually aware of the underlying science. And so it's just too much of a cartoon of what we're actually saying. What we see shows this general pattern, which is a very strong signal for a tree. But there are violations of the tree and it's exactly what we expect if common descent is true. Okay, thanks so much for that. We have a question from Slam R.N. Susan says, question for both. Wouldn't losing the ability to make vitamin C be devolution or devolution? Darwin devolves. Well, I mean, okay, the thing about it is that devolution does not actually have a technical meaning. So yes, of course it can be devolution, but that means whatever the heck you want it to mean. So, I mean, I actually showed how you could evolve irreducibly complex structures by devolution. So I mean, it's just, it ends up becoming constructive devolution to make irreducibly complex structures because it's such a flexible term to talk about the loss of a function of something. In fact, the change of a function is technically the loss of a function. It's a loss of the function I had before to get to have a different one. So, by definition, any change is devolution. So yes, that is devolution. Does it have any meaning for the conversation? I have no idea what the scientific meaning is. Do you, Nathan? It's not a scientific term at all. I'd never even really heard the term. I'm not an evolutionary biology circles or anyone talking about devolution or, it doesn't make any sense. And it's worse than not making sense. It also implies that there's such a thing as progress and forward motion and this is better than that. Everything's a trade-off. It's all meandering. Evolution can favor simplicity over complexity. I mean, the bacteria that live in our large intestine have become so streamlined by that hyper-competitive environment, they've lost lots of things along the way so that they're better compete in the environment they're in. That's not devolution, that's evolution. They've just maximized their success in that one niche by losing functionality elsewhere. So, all evolutionary change is a trade-off. Well, I mean, we actually really tried to work this out also with Bihile. It was actually almost exactly a year ago. Almost exactly a year ago, Nathan, our article in Science Came Out reviewing Michael Bihile's book, Darwin Devolves. And we hashed it out with like over a course, probably like 30 different articles back and forth with them, trying to clarify what the heck they meant by devolution and... Awesome. Thanks so much for that. That's a good resource there. We've got one more super chat and then two more questions, if you guys are fine with that. Caramel Cronk says, thank you so much for your $10 super chats, very generous. She says, tell Dr. Swamados that I'm enjoying his book and thank him for me. Sure will. Thank you so much for that. Oh, thanks. Yeah, I really hope it serves you. And to be clear, that book isn't just for Christians. A lot of non-Christians have read it and it really tries to engage like these larger questions. Like, hey, Nathan's been here doing theology with me. And that's actually the fun of it all, is that we don't have to agree to understand and be able to approach these grand questions of what it means to be human. So even if you're not a Christian, check it out. All right, and I'm sorry. We actually have two more super chats and then one more question. Okay, so I'm gonna get to these quick because we do got to wrap up. Stupid Horn Energy, thank you so much for your $5 super chats. Says, do you Boyles agree that ectopic pregnancies is the polar opposite of the watchmaker analogy? So let me go first, because Josh is an MD so he'll be able to tell you more about this. But ectopic pregnancy, again, it's one of these things that, knowing what we know about embryology, it's an unfortunate but predictable consequence. And... Well, it's not predictable to be clear. Tubal pregnancy. So a pregnancy that begins in the globing tubes, but you can actually have this in the abdomen. You can have a pregnancy that begins in the peritoneum. And if you're a Christian, Josh, you believe that there's a soul associated with this fetus that begins to grow and eventually becomes calcified and threatening the life of the mother. And I don't think it's an argument for or against God. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying it's an example of all the things that can go wrong in a body that is not perfect and has never been perfected and could never be perfected even theoretically. But Josh, why don't you have more to say about it? Yeah, I mean, I would say it's not predictable to be clear. I mean, we can't predict when it's gonna happen. No, no, I mean predictable that it would happen. I mean, I don't have to look into that. And I mean, it's surprising that it happens and we don't have a good handle on it. But that's beside the point. Maybe we will eventually be able to predict it. And I don't, we could say that. Pushing is connected to a watchmaker God. Well, what I would say is that I agree with is that science certainly gives a lot of plausibility the idea of the idea, it's actually a theological concept, right? Ideas that maybe God created everything kind of stepped away. You kind of look at things like that. That just seems to be not like God's intervening and pushing this thing into the wrong spot, the plan plan, but rather there's this thing that's supposed to operate on its own in the proper way, but occasionally it malfunctions. This is one of those malfunctions. And if all I had was science, I would probably either be a deist or an atheist. The reason why I'm a Christian isn't really because of that. It's really because I encountered Jesus and what I saw of the evidence for the resurrection. That's the part that really tips me to thinking there's actually God that's involved in the world. It's not actually that, you know, things like this, which I do actually think make a lot of sense in atheism and in deism. And I actually struggle with if all I had was theism, but when I encounter Jesus, I actually think it makes sense in light of Jesus, even though it is actually, I would say, a problem for theism or generic theism. All right, thanks so much for that. So we have one more super chat. Jesse Camping, thank you so much for your $2 super chat says great chat. And we'll move on to our last question here. Travis Lee says, question for Dr. Swamadas. What is the most compelling evidence for God in your view? And Dr. Lentz, if you have an answer as well, like if you find one particularly better than the other gods, what is the most compelling evidence for God in your view? For God, for God or against God? For God, in your view, he's asking, what's your most compelling piece of evidence? Well, yeah, I just said it. I mean, I think my most compelling evidence, I would say is, I mean, if you're curious why I'm a Christian, just look at the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Look at who he says and who he said what he was. And I think you'll find a person who's good, not just a person who had power, but a person who was good and good enough not even to access his power when he could to do even things that maybe I wouldn't do. And I think, and also you see a person, a God that exists that also wants to be known. And also I'd say that the type of way in which Jesus enters the sin and the suffering of this world actually makes more sense of the world that I see it. It shows that if God exists and we know Him through Jesus that there's actually something more valuable than the suffering that we're seeing in the world that makes the suffering worth it. That's, I think, the Christian answer to suffering in a very profound way. Now, I don't think it actually makes very much sense from a theistic point of view, a generic theism point of view that doesn't include Jesus. And so, I mean, this is one place maybe I depart from a lot of Christians. I'm not really convinced that these arguments for a generic God, are that convincing or that good? Cause maybe I end up with a view of thinking that God exists but it's hard to believe that a God who exists is good or involved or would care about us. So I'm either gonna be thinking that God's evil or he's disconnected from us before I think anything that remotely resembles a Christian God. And that's why I really think that Jesus is the most compelling evidence. And Dr. Lintz, I actually, if you wanna say something about that, you're able to but actually I had one more question that I missed that they just made me aware of. So maybe you can just give you a brief explanation of this and it'll be your last question is. Slam R.N. said, is Nathan a determinist? That's a really hard question. So the existence of free will and old... I'm just kidding. That's really tough. And it's tough to even just answer what I think on it. I think that there's a reason why determinism and especially even belief that free will doesn't really exist and that it's an illusion. There's a reason that that's gotten popular in the sense that there's a lack of evidence of anything supernatural going on in the brain. And so if it really is just the movement of molecules and the movement of molecules are predictable and deterministic, then is it really all come down to that? I also think though that there's at least enough room right now to hold out belief that that determinism isn't correct and that free will can exist in the sense that there's so much that's undetermined about the movement of molecules, quantum states, quantum flux and there's enough uncertainty that we could imagine that. However, and actually the person who writes very well on this is Ken Miller's new book. I don't know if you saw it, The Human Instinct. That's like, well, it's now two years old. He finds that there's enough evidence to say that we're not sure and that it's plausible either way. But as of right now, I would say I'm not a hard determinist. However, I am probably softly on the side that free will is an illusion. It's a useful illusion, but I would say softly in the sense that I haven't lost a lot of sleep over this either way, but yeah, I would say I'm not a full determinist, not a hard determinist because chaos theory even can, without any supernatural information, chaos theory even allows for a non-deterministic future. However, I don't see a lot of evidence that free will has a grounding in materialism and I am a materialist. Well, thanks so much for that explanation. And I know that would probably be a good conversation in its own. I'm sure Dr. Srominoff probably wants to say something about that. Well, yeah, I think that self-evident that we have free will, I'd say that's a grounding reality and you're right. So, which is one reason that we should be wondering if materialism is really all there is. So that'll make for a great part too. But I don't have the grounding on that one. So, with that, I'll watch. Yeah. Hey, Nathan, I'm gonna tell you, this isn't really been that much of a debate. I really like talking to you. I think you're a great guy. Yeah. I appreciate it. I think we all enjoyed it. And everybody that's in the chat, please hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't already. The last thing I wanna do before we go, both of their links are in the description, but is there anything you guys wanted to plug before you go, a website or anything like that? Well, we're both, we both hang out at Peaceful Science. So, come find us on the forums there. We're trying to find a better way forward on these really contentious areas. Not just origins, not just design, but even more difficult things, like sex and sexuality and just, how can we actually be scientists that are engaging you and the public in a way that's more trustworthy, that where it is in control, we don't even have to agree. Nathan's a friend of mine and we work together. And we don't agree. He's not even a Christian, right? And that's okay. In fact, we really wanna welcome people of all sorts of beliefs, come and bring your questions. We care about that. Nathan, Dr. Lance, is there anything else you wanna add to that? No, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm also, I run the Human Evolution blog. So, if you just Google the Human Evolution blog, I don't write as often as I should, but I'm found there and you can find stuff about my books there. And I hope to see you at an event one day. Well, thanks so much for that, perfect. All right, and as always, keep sifting the reasonable,