June 11, 2025 • 10 mins
George Noory and biology professor Douglas Axe explore his belief that the universe did not evolve naturally but was created by an intelligent God, if he has faced any criticism in the academic world for promoting his theory, and if the universe is real or if we are actually living in a computer simulation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Douglas axback with US professor of Computational Biology and a
faculty advisor to the AI Lab at Biola University in
southern California. After earning his PhD at Caltech, Douglas conducted
post doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and the
(00:25):
Cambridge Medical Research Console Center. His work, focusing on protein
evolution and the stability of genetic information, has been featured
in leading journals. His latest book is called Undeniable. How
biology confirms our intuition that life is designed. Douglas, welcome
back to the show. Have you been.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I've been very well. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Looking forward to this. Your book came out last year.
It's been a great hit.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Well, no, see Undeniable. My most recent book is actually
on the COVID pandemic. It's the Price of Panic. Undeniable
came out in twenty sixteen, and you and I talked
sometime in late twenty sixteen, I think it was, so
there's been a lot happening since then. But the book
actually is about nine years out.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Now, I thought you updated it.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
No, there's no, there isn't an update. It's come out
in lots of different languages, but it's the same book.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Things have changed, though, haven't they.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
They have changed.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
What have you been doing since?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Well when we last book, I was up in Seattle
running a nonprofit there. I have now taken a faculty
position down here in La County where all the action
that we were talking about a minute ago is happening.
I'll try to avoid the curfew. I actually don't have
to try it that way on the way home. So
I'm a professor now at Biola University, at Christian University
(01:47):
in Los Angeles County. I'm doing research a big time,
but I'm doing it with undergraduate students. I'm used to
having like postdocs and older, more experienced researchers, so having
to learn and how you do research with undergraduates and
I'm loving that experience.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Doug, it appears that Undeniable really pushes the possibility that
there is indeed a God. Did you suffer any animosities
from your colleagues because of that? Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Sure, as you do it. Yeah, But I think the
approach that I took with the book was well. As
I was researching the book, a quote I came across
that really stuck with me and I use it a
lot is by UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gothlink. She said,
(02:37):
by elementary school age children start to invoke and ultimate
godlike designer to explain the complexity of the world around them,
even children brought up as an atheist. And what she
was saying there, based on research by other psychologists, is
there's something innate in us that from an early age.
(02:58):
You're four years old, you're in the in the back
garden and you see a butterfly, and you know it
was made by a godlike designer, even if your parents
have never spoken about God, or even if your parents
have spoken negatively about God. So that's something that I
kind of inspired me as I was writing the book
to take an approach where I'm speaking to people who
aren't scientists, who will never be, who will never be
(03:21):
trained scientists, and yet showing that this thing that the
Fourield is doing does have a scientific component to it,
and you land at the right answer.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
When we talk about intelligent design, in your opinion, what
does that mean?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
It's so I think The term as it's used currently
was coined probably in the late eighties or early nineties,
and it's the idea that the actions of intelligences can
be detected by the things that they produce. And that's
(03:59):
really not controversial. So SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
is in non controversial. I mean, people differ as to
whether they think there's intelligence out there to be found,
but they don't differ as to whether, in principle, if
there is high level inte intelligence out there, it could
produce signals that we would see and we know came
(04:21):
from an intelligence. That's what the that's what the movies
that are talking about this are are are talking about.
Where it does get controversial is if you say that
that principle can be applied to living systems, that you
look at life as we see it here on Earth
and you can infer in the same way that you
might infer from extraterrestrial signals that life was in fact
(04:47):
created by an intelligent designer. That gets controversial because, of course,
biologists for ever since Darwin have wanted to say that
this is the exception. Things that look like they're engineered
and the product of intelligence. But aren't really the product
of intelligence. And that's that's how you get pushed back
on a book.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Well with Professor Douglas as his book is called Undeniable,
how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed in
your opinion, give me your definition of God, Doug.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, I'm a Christian, so i'll give what I consider
God to be is the ultimate, the base reality. He
and I believe in a trying God, so father, son,
and Holy Spirit. He is that from which everything else comes.
So nothing else exists apart from what He has created.
And He has, for his own reasons, created us as
(05:39):
smaller creators. So we have lots of the attributes of God,
but not all of them. But one of them that
we have is that we are creators, and so we
do things that mirror in some respects the fact that
we are created by a God who creates.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
In my mind, I'm still baffled though. How did God start?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, he didn't, So there has to be in any worldview,
there has to be what's called a first cause, which
means an uncaused cause. And some people would say, if
you're a materialist and you reject God and you think
that you know the physical universe is the base reality. Well,
(06:21):
you're in trouble when you realize that there was a
Big Bang and that was the start to the physical universe.
So if you're committed to rejecting God as the origin
of the universe, you might go the multiverse route and say, well,
there's some other context, some other physical context in which
universes get produced. But in any case, you have to
(06:42):
ultimately land on a first cause, and in a theistic
world view, God is the first cause. He's the uncaused cause.
Someone who believes in an infinite multiverse might say, well,
there's some sort of quantum structured multiverse that's the unc cause.
But you always have to have an uncovered.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Is any of this real? Dog do you think? Or
are we living in some kind of matrix.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Anything? Any of this real what we're experiencing in this universe.
I think it's totally real, and I reject the multiverse.
So I reject the claims and they're made by some
very smart people like Elon Mosk Neil deGrasse Tyson say
we're living in a simulation, and they have the reasons
for saying that. I think you can show that that's
wrong and that what we're thinking in here is the
(07:30):
real thing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
You deal with a lot of college age younger people.
Where do you think their mindset is with this kind
of subject matter.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Well, it's an interesting it's an interesting thing because when
I was college age, you didn't have social media. You
didn't really you didn't have the Internet, you didn't have
the Web, and you sure they didn't have AI. So
you have all these components of technology that are deeply
affecting the way young people grow up today. And as
(08:02):
a professor, I'm teaching people who are eighteen to twenty
two year olds who have grown up with technology that
certainly didn't exist when I was their age, and it
does change the way they grapple with truth. I could
be in a lecture and saying something and be pretty
sure that if people are skeptical of what I said,
they're googling it or asking chat GPT in real time
(08:25):
while I'm speaking. That certainly wasn't an option when I
was sitting in their place. So it brings with gen
Z come challenges for professors, but also opportunities because I
think this is a rising generation that has unprecedented access
(08:46):
to information. But that brings the challenge of sorting all
the information.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Out, Doug, do you think science will ever admit there
is a God.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I think it's folly if sciences don't, because science is
definitely pushing in that direction. So if you examine scientific
if you look at cosmology, this whole press for with
the advent of Big Bang theory, came the end of
(09:18):
the steady state universe. It used to be up until
about the midway in the twentieth century that cosmologists thought
the universe had always been pretty much the way it is.
Big Bang cosmology brought the end of that and pointed
to God. People who aren't comfortable with that come up
with multiverse versions of cosmology. Similarly, in biology, time and
(09:40):
time again we find things that are marvels and intricately
engineered things inside living beings, inside the cell, and all
of those things are screaming that someone did this, someone
brilliant did this. And yet you have this tendency, at
least in this sort of official establishment science circles to
(10:05):
deny that and come up with some alternative explanation. So
whether that will fully turn or not, I don't know.
But this new generation, I think is me a hope
because I think it's this rising generation of students, the
Gen Z students I think are less committed to establishment.
They're more willing to question things, and maybe growing up
(10:26):
with the Internet has been part of that. They can
they have access to all kinds of opinions, so why
should they tow the line on the official opinion.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Listen to more Coast to Coast Am every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Douglas axback with US professor of Computational Biology and a
faculty advisor to the AI Lab at Biola University in
southern California. After earning his PhD at Caltech, Douglas conducted
post doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and the
(00:25):
Cambridge Medical Research Console Center. His work, focusing on protein
evolution and the stability of genetic information, has been featured
in leading journals. His latest book is called Undeniable. How
biology confirms our intuition that life is designed. Douglas, welcome
back to the show. Have you been.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I've been very well. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Looking forward to this. Your book came out last year.
It's been a great hit.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Well, no, see Undeniable. My most recent book is actually
on the COVID pandemic. It's the Price of Panic. Undeniable
came out in twenty sixteen, and you and I talked
sometime in late twenty sixteen, I think it was, so
there's been a lot happening since then. But the book
actually is about nine years out.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Now, I thought you updated it.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
No, there's no, there isn't an update. It's come out
in lots of different languages, but it's the same book.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Things have changed, though, haven't they.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
They have changed.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
What have you been doing since?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Well when we last book, I was up in Seattle
running a nonprofit there. I have now taken a faculty
position down here in La County where all the action
that we were talking about a minute ago is happening.
I'll try to avoid the curfew. I actually don't have
to try it that way on the way home. So
I'm a professor now at Biola University, at Christian University
(01:47):
in Los Angeles County. I'm doing research a big time,
but I'm doing it with undergraduate students. I'm used to
having like postdocs and older, more experienced researchers, so having
to learn and how you do research with undergraduates and
I'm loving that experience.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Doug, it appears that Undeniable really pushes the possibility that
there is indeed a God. Did you suffer any animosities
from your colleagues because of that? Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Sure, as you do it. Yeah, But I think the
approach that I took with the book was well. As
I was researching the book, a quote I came across
that really stuck with me and I use it a
lot is by UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gothlink. She said,
(02:37):
by elementary school age children start to invoke and ultimate
godlike designer to explain the complexity of the world around them,
even children brought up as an atheist. And what she
was saying there, based on research by other psychologists, is
there's something innate in us that from an early age.
(02:58):
You're four years old, you're in the in the back
garden and you see a butterfly, and you know it
was made by a godlike designer, even if your parents
have never spoken about God, or even if your parents
have spoken negatively about God. So that's something that I
kind of inspired me as I was writing the book
to take an approach where I'm speaking to people who
aren't scientists, who will never be, who will never be
(03:21):
trained scientists, and yet showing that this thing that the
Fourield is doing does have a scientific component to it,
and you land at the right answer.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
When we talk about intelligent design, in your opinion, what
does that mean?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
It's so I think The term as it's used currently
was coined probably in the late eighties or early nineties,
and it's the idea that the actions of intelligences can
be detected by the things that they produce. And that's
(03:59):
really not controversial. So SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
is in non controversial. I mean, people differ as to
whether they think there's intelligence out there to be found,
but they don't differ as to whether, in principle, if
there is high level inte intelligence out there, it could
produce signals that we would see and we know came
(04:21):
from an intelligence. That's what the that's what the movies
that are talking about this are are are talking about.
Where it does get controversial is if you say that
that principle can be applied to living systems, that you
look at life as we see it here on Earth
and you can infer in the same way that you
might infer from extraterrestrial signals that life was in fact
(04:47):
created by an intelligent designer. That gets controversial because, of course,
biologists for ever since Darwin have wanted to say that
this is the exception. Things that look like they're engineered
and the product of intelligence. But aren't really the product
of intelligence. And that's that's how you get pushed back
on a book.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Well with Professor Douglas as his book is called Undeniable,
how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed in
your opinion, give me your definition of God, Doug.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, I'm a Christian, so i'll give what I consider
God to be is the ultimate, the base reality. He
and I believe in a trying God, so father, son,
and Holy Spirit. He is that from which everything else comes.
So nothing else exists apart from what He has created.
And He has, for his own reasons, created us as
(05:39):
smaller creators. So we have lots of the attributes of God,
but not all of them. But one of them that
we have is that we are creators, and so we
do things that mirror in some respects the fact that
we are created by a God who creates.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
In my mind, I'm still baffled though. How did God start?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, he didn't, So there has to be in any worldview,
there has to be what's called a first cause, which
means an uncaused cause. And some people would say, if
you're a materialist and you reject God and you think
that you know the physical universe is the base reality. Well,
(06:21):
you're in trouble when you realize that there was a
Big Bang and that was the start to the physical universe.
So if you're committed to rejecting God as the origin
of the universe, you might go the multiverse route and say, well,
there's some other context, some other physical context in which
universes get produced. But in any case, you have to
(06:42):
ultimately land on a first cause, and in a theistic
world view, God is the first cause. He's the uncaused cause.
Someone who believes in an infinite multiverse might say, well,
there's some sort of quantum structured multiverse that's the unc cause.
But you always have to have an uncovered.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Is any of this real? Dog do you think? Or
are we living in some kind of matrix.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Anything? Any of this real what we're experiencing in this universe.
I think it's totally real, and I reject the multiverse.
So I reject the claims and they're made by some
very smart people like Elon Mosk Neil deGrasse Tyson say
we're living in a simulation, and they have the reasons
for saying that. I think you can show that that's
wrong and that what we're thinking in here is the
(07:30):
real thing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
You deal with a lot of college age younger people.
Where do you think their mindset is with this kind
of subject matter.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Well, it's an interesting it's an interesting thing because when
I was college age, you didn't have social media. You
didn't really you didn't have the Internet, you didn't have
the Web, and you sure they didn't have AI. So
you have all these components of technology that are deeply
affecting the way young people grow up today. And as
(08:02):
a professor, I'm teaching people who are eighteen to twenty
two year olds who have grown up with technology that
certainly didn't exist when I was their age, and it
does change the way they grapple with truth. I could
be in a lecture and saying something and be pretty
sure that if people are skeptical of what I said,
they're googling it or asking chat GPT in real time
(08:25):
while I'm speaking. That certainly wasn't an option when I
was sitting in their place. So it brings with gen
Z come challenges for professors, but also opportunities because I
think this is a rising generation that has unprecedented access
(08:46):
to information. But that brings the challenge of sorting all
the information.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Out, Doug, do you think science will ever admit there
is a God.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I think it's folly if sciences don't, because science is
definitely pushing in that direction. So if you examine scientific
if you look at cosmology, this whole press for with
the advent of Big Bang theory, came the end of
(09:18):
the steady state universe. It used to be up until
about the midway in the twentieth century that cosmologists thought
the universe had always been pretty much the way it is.
Big Bang cosmology brought the end of that and pointed
to God. People who aren't comfortable with that come up
with multiverse versions of cosmology. Similarly, in biology, time and
(09:40):
time again we find things that are marvels and intricately
engineered things inside living beings, inside the cell, and all
of those things are screaming that someone did this, someone
brilliant did this. And yet you have this tendency, at
least in this sort of official establishment science circles to
(10:05):
deny that and come up with some alternative explanation. So
whether that will fully turn or not, I don't know.
But this new generation, I think is me a hope
because I think it's this rising generation of students, the
Gen Z students I think are less committed to establishment.
They're more willing to question things, and maybe growing up
(10:26):
with the Internet has been part of that. They can
they have access to all kinds of opinions, so why
should they tow the line on the official opinion.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Listen to more Coast to Coast Am every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
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