The Creation Project

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Creation Podcast, where we
discuss the science that confirm scripture. I'm your host, Renee,
and you're listening to the third episode of a four
part series on building a new theory. We're often told
that science is objective. But if that's true, then how
can two intelligent, rational people look at the same pieces

(00:27):
of evidence and yet come up with completely different explanations
and not just different, but mutually exclusive. What causes this
divide and is there anything we can do about it?
In the previous episodes, we look not only at the
power and purpose of theory, but we discussed how selectionism,
the current reigning theory, is purposely crafted to be anti design.

(00:48):
In this episode, we're going to take action and changing
Darwinian thinking and reversing it to create a theory of
biological design that actually works. Joining me again, is I
see our president, doctor Randy Gluza, Doctor g welcome back
to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Well, so good to be again with you, Renee. Thank you,
Thank you for all you're doing the prep these things.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Well, thank you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation
today because really what ICR is doing is totally new
in the realms of biology and just science in general.
And we've looked at what a theory is, the purpose
it serves, and how it can be influential, not just
in science, but in our worldview. We've also looked at
how selectionism is purposely designed to be anti design, if

(01:29):
you will. And today we're actually going to turn evolutionary
thinking on its head to create a whole new theory
of biological design, which is really exciting. But before we
do that, I would love to actually look back a
little bit on how we got here, not just simply
here in this room, but how Darwin got to the
place of creating the evolutionary theory he created, and actually

(01:51):
go back and look at the history of that. So
as far as the history of evolution, what happened there?
How did Darwin get to create a theory that was
so influential today.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, he said it perfectly when you said he designed
a theory to be anti designed, that that indicates that
it was purposeful, and it was purposeful in a way
that was just the exact opposite of how people were
thinking at the beginning. So how he got there is
he was a good student. He was a good student
of people who believed in intelligent design at the time,

(02:22):
particularly William Paley. In fact, he said he had almost
memorized all of Paley's work, so he knew Paley's main arguments,
he knew the concepts that Paley was referring to, he
knew his reasoning, and when he went to build his theory,
he could take those main concepts of Paley and just
invert the cause. Invert the cause, invert the cause. He

(02:44):
doesn't always dispute by any means Paley's observations. So Paley
observed that organisms looked exquisitely designed, and therefore he believed
that there was a designer who did that. Darwin could
have taken the tack and said, no, no, organisms, they
don't look desig at all. They look pretty, they look
pretty shoddy. They look like they're just cobbled together, and

(03:05):
things like that, which some evolutionists do today. But Darwin
thought that was foolish because people look at creatures they
see they look incredibly designed. And two to say something
is broken or doesn't have a function, that leaves you
to be made foolish when future research shows that it
isn't broken or there was a purpose for it. So

(03:25):
he just said I'll concede creatures do look incredibly designed,
but I'll come up with another mechanism to explain that origin,
and it'll be like the exact opposite of what you're saying.
So you think things are done purposefully, I'm going to
argue that they were done randomly. And he built this
whole theory of explaining why creatures look so incredibly engineered

(03:51):
but without the need of an engineer.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Wow. And that's really sneaky because I feel like a
lot of people will say, well, evolutionists believe that, you know,
there is no side of design in creatures, and there
are some, as you mentioned in your article, that believe that,
you know, we actually don't see design in creatures because
they're just haphazardly put together. There are organs that aren't
supposed to be there. But really Darwin understood that, no,

(04:13):
we're seeing design, but he completely flipped it on its head.
And I think that's news for a lot of people.
And actually, you know Stephen J. Gould, who I know
you're very familiar with. He was the leading evolutionary theorist
of his time, Harvard biologist, and he says that Darwin
holds that this order the very basis of Paley's inference

(04:33):
about the nature of God arises as a side consequence
of a causal principle of entirely opposite import Can any
argument be more subversive? One accepts the conventional observation, but
then offers an explanation that not only inverts orthodoxy but
seems to mock the standard interpretation. This more radical version
lies at the core of Darwin's argument for natural selection.

(04:56):
So he's even acknowledging that Darwin really did understand the
argument for design.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
You're exactly right, and he inverted the cause. Just as
Gould points out, there not just the cause of how
it's happening, but even the underlying premise. And so before Darwin,
when people would look at creatures, they would see birds
fitting in the air, and they would also see organisms
working together very very well. And they thought that this

(05:21):
was evidence not only of a God who was omniscient
and powerful, but they thought it was evidence of a
God who was loving and caring and providentially took care
of his creatures, either directly or set up processes which
would do that for him in those areas. So they
saw good things about their creator. And Darwin came along

(05:45):
and said, well that design not only is not done
by God, it can be done by random natural processes.
He said, but it's really not showing goodness either, because
in order for organisms to advance, they have to do
it at the expense of other organisms, that one group
has to drive another group into extinction. And as he

(06:06):
ends his book, he with describing the war of nature
and one group dominating over another group. He said, so
you know, it's really not the outworking of a good
loving God. It's just the outworking of the selfish self
expression of one creature at the expense of another. And

(06:28):
so there isn't even really any goodness that you can
actually see in nature itself. So he's he's pushing back
to creation, but he's also mocking, as Gould says, this
whole idea that you can even see the hand of
a good loving God.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
So we know, of course, Scripture says about people who
mock God that God will not be mocked, and he
will not tolerate that. And you know, it's really interesting
because you know, we see a lot of positive evidence
for design, and we see of course even evolutionists admitting
that creatures look engineered. And so if even evolutionists admit

(07:07):
that we see this design and creatures. Why isn't this enough?
Why do we need a theory to actually establish the
engineering of the organisms we see?

Speaker 2 (07:15):
We need more than just negative evidence, as we discussed
in one of our earlier podcasts, in other words, pointing
out all the problems with evolutionary theory and all the
predictions that they made that have been proven wrong of
vestigial organs that didn't turn out to be vestigial and
things like that, where they're just easy to knock out.
All of these outrageous claims that evolutionists made that have

(07:37):
been proven totally wrong. So negative evidence is good, but
it doesn't dislodge the theory obviously because it's still here.
So then some people think, well, why don't we just
find the positive evidences? You look at how you need
all these elements in a system together at the right place,
at the right time, and the right amount in order
for it to work, and there's no way it's going

(07:59):
to come about through a slow iterative process that's called
irreducible complexity. Maybe that's a good positive evidence and that
will affirm people to believe in intelligent design. Or you
need things to be specified in the right amount that
can happen by chance or by natural laws, and maybe
that's a good evidence for design or just the sheer

(08:20):
complexity that we see in creatures, an eye and all
of the systems. Well, that doesn't dislodge evolutionary theory either.
That's not super effective because Darwin came up with a mechanism,
the natural selector, which acts like an agent, which, as
some evolutionists have said, can see the best traits, select

(08:43):
the best traits, save the best traits, and build with
the best traits. So when you have a mechanism, when
you have a view or a concept which can act
like a real designer the natural selector, but then there's
nothing too complex for it to actually accomplish. So they
would say, sure that, I it is incredibly complex, but

(09:07):
given the power of the force of natural selection and
coupled with the time to do it, nothing is impossible
for that to overcome. And it may be cobbled together initially,
but over a long period of time, it's going to
be incredibly refined by these by this constant struggle to survive,

(09:28):
to where you will end up with almost perfect organs
in organisms.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
So somehow you're getting perfection out of these imperfect processes,
which you know sounds crazy whenever you say that, you know,
as you've equently described, whenever you describe how it's a
death driven process that somehow is creating these beautiful traits
and creatures, it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
And yet we've allowed this infiltrate our society for so long.

(09:55):
But you said in your most recent article that even
counterintuitive theories can that can barely tread water scientifically, will
continue to do so until an alternative theory arises. And
so that's exactly what we're doing. We're building that alternative theory.
And so transitioning now into what a theory of biological
design actually does, would you be able to explain the
purpose of what we're accomplishing and creating this new theory.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, the theory, as we discussed earlier, is a narrative.
It's an explanatory narrative that hopefully has the force of
some scientific observations behind it to make it robust, to
make it valuable in interpreting what we see, to give
us the ability to make predictions and hypotheses and run tests.
That's what a theory is. Supposed to do. It's not

(10:39):
just a guess, so it's supposed to have some scientific
backing behind it. But all theories, all theories aren't just narratives.
They're a way of looking at the world, the way
of understanding things and thinking about them. They're like the
filters that we see, or as we said in one
of our earlier ones, the cubby holes, and we put
labels on in our mind that we interpret the world

(11:00):
around us there, and they're always based on assumptions. There
are some certain assumptions about the world, and we could
go into a whole additional podcast about all of the
assumptions of materialism and things like this. So let's just
focus in on some assumptions of a theory of biological design.

(11:21):
And one assumption will be that the engineering process is
not just good in biology for developing applications and applications.
I mean, you discover something in biology and you find
a way to turn it into technology. You find it
in a way to develop some biomechanical thing, which it's

(11:43):
used for a lot, and so people generally think engineering
is good. It's good for the applications, but pure biologists
they're the ones who do the basic research of understanding
how biology operates. Well, that's really a myth, and it's
been a myth for a long time. For one reason.
Biologists themselves, who are not engineers, a lot of them

(12:06):
do a lot of applications. And you don't have to
be an engineer to come up with biological applications and
vice versa. You don't have to be a molecular biologist
per se, to study to do basic biological research. A
lot of engineers do basic biological research, and they're forced

(12:27):
to because they want to come up with applications, so
they're driven to do some basic biological research. So engineers
and biologists are both doing applications and they're both doing
basic biological research. And I would suggest that research, regardless
of whether it's for applications or the basic stuff, it all,

(12:49):
it all can come under the realm of engineering, all
of it. In other words, biology, This is a radically
new way of thinking about it. Biology is like a
discipline of engineering, and I'm talking about studying biological functions, which.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
I think is a completely new perspective for a lot
of people. And even I think you've mentioned before that
you know, as far as the secular models in geology
or other fields of science. Just taking geology for instance,
we have the flood model that you know, counters a
lot of the secular thinking in that area. But there's
really nothing in biology as far as a theory at

(13:27):
the moment that would be able to counter the Darwinian
thinking that we see. And this engineering theory of design
is really turning it on its head, which is so exciting.
And so as far as the tenants of a theory
of biological design, what would you say are the major
tenants of this new theory.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Well, there's the one we were just discussing, which is
like a tenant is almost an assumption of this that
both basic research and applications fall within the realm of engineering.
And when you think about it, biologists have been engineers
from the beginning. They don't see themselves as engineers because
they all of them may not be doing applications, and

(14:05):
therefore they're equating engineering with applications. But what they are
actually doing when they study living things is they're methodically
taking apart, taking them apart piece by piece, and it
starts at the organism level. Then they start to go
into the systems of those organisms and they take the
systems apart and they find the elements, and then they

(14:27):
can take those elements apart and they find the basic
components of the elements all the way down to the
molecular level. So as biologists have been doing this now
for decades, taking organisms apart, piece by piece, very methodically,
and figuring out what each piece does and how they
all fit together. There's a name for that, and that's

(14:48):
called reverse engineering. And so biologists have been and will
continue to be reverse engineers right from the very beginning.
And they're doing the exact same thing with someone who
wants to steal an idea from another company, and so
therefore they buy their product and they start to take
it apart to figure out how it works so that

(15:09):
they can copy it or try to copy it in
some way on that and so that's what reverse engineering is.
In the industrial realm. You take things apart. If you
didn't build them yourself, you take them apart to figure
out how they were building, what the thinking of them
was to build them. That's a biologists have been doing.
And the fact that they can do it, and they

(15:30):
can do it so methodically, and when they take them apart,
they can actually reassemble things back together. Is strong evidence
that these organisms are not cobbled together, they're not the
product of tinkering, that they are the product of engineering,
and therefore you can do that. I mean, there is
a hope for biomechanical engineers to build robotic things, to

(15:54):
build robotic hands for people who have lost a hand,
for instance, that can be controlled by their thoughts, and
that they will be able to move that, and that
they will be able to put sensors in the fingers
of that robotic hans that they'll be able to sense
in their own brain and in their own mind, so
these things can be fit together. There's a hope that

(16:15):
we'll be able to make a type of synthetic blood
for people who need a transfusion rapidly and there isn't
enough blood supply, that you can build a type of
synthetic blood that will keep them alive. So that you
can engineer things that can be used in creatures. So
it's very reasonable to conclude that these creatures were highly engineered.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, And as we talked about in a previous episode,
even looking at the example of birds and airplanes, you know,
and we see an airplane and that can be taken apart,
we can separate it into its parts and know, well,
this didn't haphazardly come together. And it's the same thing
with birds, the same thing with any other organism, you know,
from which we get inspiration to create our own prosthetic,

(16:58):
you know, human parts or whatever we're building. We can
clearly see the design in those robotic features, and how
much more in those creatures themselves. And so it's really
interesting to know that even evolutionists acknowledge that, and yet
here we are having to create a new theory because
they just are so stubborn about what they believe in evolution.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah, and that's a great segue to another major tenet
of biology is that you know, when you look at
wings on an aeroplane, you look at wings on a bird.
They operate by the same engineering principles, and they function
in according to natural laws the same way, and they
operate by the exact same engineering principles. So a major

(17:41):
tenet of a theory biological design, doesn't conclude that the
best explanation for the design we see in creatures is
due to an intelligent designer. It hypothesizes, which is very different.
A hypothesize that the reason why organisms look so highly
engineered is because they are highly engineered, so this would

(18:04):
be something I could test. I'm not drawing it as
a conclusion. I'm holding it up as a test. I
think they look engineered. Therefore, I'm going to look for
tests for the engineers for engineering principles behind them. And
therefore I'm going to assume. I'm going to assume that
the best explanation for how their biological functions operate is

(18:28):
going to be due to engineering principles. And I'm going
to assume that you can only really come to correct
cause and effect explanations, in other words, your causes. You
can only come to correct causes if you explain the
operation by engineering principles. And I'm going to assume the
moment you get out of the realm of engineering. Of course,

(18:50):
this could be proved wrong, that you're going to be
off on the wrong course towards explanations. You're going to
be dabbling in something which we're going to get to
in a second of called mysticism. But that my assumption
that they look engineered, because they are my hypothesis, I
can test that, and I'm going to assume that unless

(19:10):
proven otherwise, engineering principles will be absolutely necessary to come
up with correct scientific explanations for the operations of biological functions.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, and you even mentioned in this third article as
well that from there you're able to make predictions about
what creatures are going to do moving forward because of
those engineering principles, that we can have explanations for why
they do what they do and then also know how
they're going to respond to stimuli moving forward. And so
with that, we've talked about, of course, the need for
a theory of biological design. We've talked about how Darwin

(19:47):
knew the design playbook and he was able to invert
it or try to invert it to create his theory
of evolution. So now i'd love to transition to the
primary goal of this theory. Would you be able to
expand on that a little bit.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well, the goal we need to do is revert some
basic tenets that Darwinists advanced. They have a lot, but
in my article I had to limit it to just five.
I had to kind of pick the five biggest ones
that I thought need to be reversed. So the thinking
is this, people before Darwin held that organisms look engineered

(20:18):
because they were engineered and they had some concepts. Darwin
knew what those concepts where he built an alternative theory
which reversed the explanation for most of those concepts. And
now to get back the future is back in the
way the future is to go back and reverse the

(20:39):
things that Darwin reversed back to how they were prior
to Darwin and built on what we now know subsequent
to Darwin. For those things so prior to Darwin and
what we now know, we can add additionally after Darwin.
So we need to go through and at least five
of these we need to flip them on their head.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yes, absolutely, Well, let's dive right into those steps. The
first one I have is reverse life emerges from biological
operations to life is what enables ongoing biological operations? And
so how is this concept of life related to biology?

Speaker 2 (21:15):
Well, what we need to do right off of the
bat is kind of define. When we're talking about a
theory of biological design and I'm arguing that biology is
a realm of engineering. We need to answer the objection
that's going to pop up right away. But wait a second. Here,
this table isn't alive, but you are alive. There's something
fundamentally different about you than this table. And what's different

(21:38):
about you is that you have life, and you have consciousness,
and you have volition, and you have these things which
are really really hard to describe and to define. And
so evolutionists, because of their worldview, they say that, well, life,

(21:58):
this consciousness that you have, it's just an emergent property.
It just emerges from the operation of your neurons in
your brain. Your consciousness arises from that in some way. Yeah,
it does make sense, it doesn't. And not only does
it not make sense, it's really really hard and it's
very very difficult to demonstrate scientifically. So it boils down

(22:20):
to a belief and not just your consciousness arises from
your neurons, but you this life arises somehow from the
operation of all of your biological functions. And we would
argue wrong, totally wrong on both accounts. And this theory
of biological design isn't even dealing with life. We would argue, one,

(22:44):
you can't demonstrate that life arises from the operation of
biological principles. In fact, we would say you can't even
really measure life. So if I were to say, renee
hand me a beaker of life, because no, but nobody
can hand me a beaker of life, hand me a
cubic foot of life, you know, give me a cup

(23:06):
of your thoughts. These things can't be quantified like this.
And in fact, we've had this whole conversation with the
people listening to this podcast, and we've taken thoughts from
our mind, developed them, spoken them, gone out over the airways.
People have heard them and they've come back to their mind,
and so we've transferred thought to thought in someone's mind,

(23:27):
but their mind hasn't gotten any heavier. You can't weigh
it now after we've spoken to them, and it's like, oh,
here's some more thoughts, here's some more information. Because as
far as we know, your thoughts is im material, your
life is im material. So when we're talking about a
theory of biological design, and this is very important even

(23:49):
for creationists who are listening to us, we're not talking.
We are not talking. I'm pounding this down. We are
not talking about life it's self. I'm not saying that
consciousness will be explained by engineering principles. I'm not saying
that life will be explained by engineering principles. And I'm
also saying that consciousness and life are not explained by

(24:11):
biological functions. What I am saying is that the biological
functions of growth, reproduction, adaptation, metabolism, things that all creatures do,
those functions will be best explained. How those functions work
will be best explained by engineering principles, and not my

(24:32):
consciousness and not my life. As far as I know,
that is immaterial. Nobody's going to be explained, nobody's going
to be testing. The real renee is not a product
of your biological functions. The real renee is immaterial. And
when your biological functions cease, you don't cease. Renee doesn't cease.

(24:53):
Renee continues, Your body stops, you're linked to this world
through your physical body is broken, but the real renee
keeps ongoing. Wow.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
And if that doesn't point to creator, I mean because
there's that element of what we can see and what
we know about biology, and yet there's still this part
of us that is eternal. And of course we read
about that and God's word and Ecclesiastes that there's eternity
in our hearts. We know that there's more beyond this,
beyond just what's physically here. What we can study and
so as far as this reversion goes, how does this

(25:27):
influence how we do research as well as how we
interpret that research.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Well, One, it points out that you're kind of kind
of foolish or oh, it's going to be fruitless to
try to study chemistry and believe that you're going to
create life or that you're going to explain life due
to the basic laws of chemistry or physics or those
kinds of things. It's just not going to pop out

(25:52):
of that whatsoever. And two, in terms of a theory
of biological design, everybody should know that we're here to
explain the material operation of your biological functions. We want
to frame how you take resources from your environment and
use them to build up a body that can be

(26:12):
explained by engineering principles. We want to explain how you
gather resources from your environment and you convert those to energy.
Those can be explained by engineering principles. We want to
look at how you adapt to different things in your
environment that can be explained by injuring principles. And even conceptually,

(26:34):
you could explain a creature being able to take in
enough resources and have enough programming that it could even
make a copy of itself that could even reproduce. It
could produce a copy of itself. And that thing could
produce a copy of itself. From a physical standpoint, that's
not conceptually out of the question. We could conceive of
doing it. It would be an incredibly complicated, well engineered machine

(26:59):
to be able to do such a thing like that,
But it can be explained by engineering principles. So we're saying, One,
organisms don't get their life from their own biological functions.
Organisms don't get life from engineering principles. It's separate from them. Two,
we're saying organisms are not machines because even if we

(27:22):
could build a machine that could reproduce itself and could grow,
there would still be something fundamentally different about the machine
that you and I built that could do that than
your dog. Your dog has life. This machine, even though
it could reproduce, does not have life. So we're saying,

(27:44):
don't look to creatures as machines, but don't look to
the principles to explain it. Life is an immaterial thing.
It's not going to be explained through scientific research on
this planet. But how their biological functions operate on that
I hope I've made this very clear that can be

(28:04):
explained by engineering principles.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
Absolutely, and I think that's such an important point, just
as far as you know, there is something fundamentally different
about you know, our dogs that we know and love
and have life in them, versus like if we were
to make a robotic version of those, we know that
that doesn't have that aspect of life that only can
be made by a creator. And so with our second
point I have here, reverse nature is like a human

(28:28):
breeder who favors selected entities to engineering causality, eliminates mystical
steps and causal explanations. I know you've already mentioned a
little bit about that mysticism behind evolutions, So would you
be able to expand on that a little bit.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
This is really really important. It's probably one of the
hardest ones for people to kind of flip in their mind,
but it's vitally important. Darwin needed an agent. When you
look at creatures, it looks like they are the product
of an agent. They're design. You look at this table like,
here's an agent in a built this thing. It's got purpose,
it's got function, and creatures look that way as well.

(29:06):
In addition to that, creatures exercise agency. Your dog exercises agency.
Your dog wants to do things. Your dog wants to
go when you say do you want to go? It
has agency. So you have organisms with agency that look
like they were built by an agent. So this whole
idea of agency in some way needs to be addressed.

(29:29):
Darwin did it very cleverly by projecting, and you'll have
to go back to our previous podcast to get an
in depth explanation of this. By projecting onto nature a
type of agency. He projected on it the ability to select.
And when he does that, he projects onto it intelligence
and volition. So he has a type of agency which
is operative and as we said already, that can see, select, safe,

(29:52):
and build creatures in time. So evolutionists they have this
worldview or nature operates as an agent, and in their
mind they're envisioning all kinds of real operating things, but
they're only happening in their mind, and and they inject
a lot of mystical concepts into biology. Mystical concept one

(30:18):
is that nature can select. It's totally mystical. Nature doesn't
have a brain. Nature is full of living things, but
it's not alive, and some people believe it is.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Of course, there's no mother nature, though of course some
people would argue with us on that.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Well, nature, they would say, does have a type of
life quality to it, and they would argue that it
does operate as if it's alive. But we know that
this that nature isn't alive. It isn't thinking, it isn't operating,
So to project selective abilities onto it in any way

(30:53):
is mystical. But that ability to act, see, select, and
say is fundamental to operation of evolutionary thinking. They think
that certain traits are selected for, though evolutionists argue a
lot over what the unit of selection is. Is it
a population, is it an individual organism? Is it the genes?

(31:16):
Is that? Whatever it is, can systems be selected. So
the reason why they argue over what's being selected is
because nothing is being selected. There is no selection event,
and there's another one in unobserved selection events, unidentifiable units
of selection. Their view sees forces of nature driving creatures

(31:40):
along through time. They're called selective pressures, but that's just
another concept which exists in their mind because nobody can
quantify a selection pressure, and they see a war of nature.
They see a constant struggle of creature against struggling against
creature and competition of one eliminating another on that. But

(32:04):
this competition, this war of nature, it's only existing in
their minds. When you look at the world around you,
you're not seeing a war of nature. Sure you see
animals will eat another animal, but you're not seeing unrelenting competition.
And in fact, when you actually study ecosystems and how
organisms are really working together, you see a lot of

(32:27):
cooperative relationships. You see a lot of beneficial things where
one organism provides a product to another and vice versa.
You see things working together. So they envision because they
need it for their concept to work. This competition, this extinction,
this struggle for life, and along with their selection pressures,

(32:49):
their selection events. They envision all of this stuff, and
once they envisioned it, they write it up in their
scientific papers as if they were really real. Write eight,
the competition drove out this creature, even though they don't
know that. They write about this war in nature, even
though they can't be demonstrated. They write that certain genetic

(33:13):
changes were random mutations, even though they can't demonstrate that
they were random at all. But in their mind it's
as real as real can be. That this was random,
this competition is real, and so they write their papers
as if these are real, observable things. When no one's
ever identified selection what's being selected, or or seen a

(33:37):
selection event, or quantified a selection pressure. None of these
things are real, and so engineering will help liberate biology
from that.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Wow, and that's so crazy to think that these are
all mystical elements that these evolutionists are visioning, and yet
they end up in our textbooks, they end up in
our conversations and in our worldview ultimately.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
As real things, real things. And what's valuable about engineering
is you don't when engineers explain how something happens, they
don't insert mystical steps or mystical causes. They don't insert
these things. Everything is very objective and precise. So if

(34:21):
you were the head engineer in charge of the space shuttle,
for instance, and you know that one of the space
shuttles broke up on re entry into the atmosphere and
all the astronauts died, but many other space shuttles made
it through and landed fine. And if I was your
boss and I were to say to you, Renee, tell
me why did that one space shuttle break up? In

(34:42):
the atmosphere, but the other one made it through. And
if you, as an engineer, were to come to me
and say, well, the atmosphere selected against that space shuttle
or that space shuttle wasn't favored, you would lose your
job because engineers don't think like that. The biologists say
selected against, selected for, and that pretty much ends their explanation.

(35:06):
It's over. But engineers don't put in magical selection events.
They don't see environments as favoring or disfavoring. Environmental conditions
are what they are. And as an engineer, what you
would do is you would look at that space shuttle.
You would find out what was wrong with that space shuttle. Oh,
in this case a tile came off. Why did the

(35:27):
tile come off? And you would start digging down to
all of the problems of what led that space shuttle
to fail, and they would all be real, they'd all
be identifiable, they'd all be tangible. You would have no
magical selection events, you would not appealing to any selective
pressures by the atmosphere. You would not be referring to

(35:49):
any magical things. And so what engineering can bring to
biology is the clarity that it would bring to the
operation of space shuttles. It brings the precision of language
and thought to biology that you find in every other area.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
I love that space shuttle analogy because I think it
can be so easy for a lot of people who
and Christians to say, well, natural selection makes sense, you know,
survival of the fittest, all of that. But then whenever
you put it in those terms, you realize just how
crazy that sounds. Of course, it's not that atmosphere that's
breaking the space shuttle apart. And so I think that's
a really important point there. And so even with this

(36:29):
third point that we have as far as just the
purposefulness of design and what we see in creatures, I
have reverse pointless random genetic mutations, purposeful goal oriented actions
indicative of top down planning. So can you describe a
little bit about the purpose that we are putting back
into this theory of biological design?

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Sure, let me explain what you just mentioned there about
top down planning. Top down planning, and that's a phrase
that engineers use. So if we were the engineer and
we were tasked to build something, we would first ask, well,
what do you want it to do? We would ask
what's its purpose? What do you want this system to do?
What do you want this thing to do? And we

(37:12):
would be asking about the purpose because in engineering, purpose
always drives the design, and designs are meant to fulfill
a particular purpose. So purpose and design go hand in hand,
they work with each other. So we're going to be
asking the purpose. So top downs starts with the purpose,

(37:33):
what do we want it to do? And then we
start identifying all the capabilities that it's going to have
to have and all of the features that it's going
to have to have in order to make it work
to fulfill that purpose. And it'll get more subdivided, subdivided, subdivided,
And that's top down planning. You'll let the purpose drive it.

(37:56):
Evolutionists see life the exact opposite, and they see it
as bottom up. They see no purpose in anything. There
was no overriding goal, There was no purpose for how
anything happened. It just functions. And so when two things
happen to work and they enable it to survive better,

(38:17):
it functions. But it wasn't it wasn't created for a purpose.
It just functions enabling you to survive better. And then
the next thing that happens to come along that could
be built onto it happens to enable to survive better.
And so their view is bottom up, no goal, no purpose,

(38:37):
nothing there. It's all being built from the bottom up.
And of course that doesn't make much sense either. But
if your view is to explain things without a designer,
then you're forced to see things as being built from
the bottom up and not top down. And so their
bottom up assumptions, their bottom up beliefs, which are going

(38:59):
to include purpose altogether excludes the whole idea of an intentionality. Therefore,
when an environment changes and an organism changes, and let's
say they can identify a change in the DNA, that's
all there is. That you've just identified a change in
the DNA. You could call that a genetic change. But

(39:23):
their worldview, their way of looking at things, constrains them
to identify it as a mistake. They would call it
a random mutation. And they're going to say, well, it's
a copying error. It's going to be something that was
introduced by the environment which broke the DNA. Because genetic
changes that would happen toward a particular end would sound

(39:48):
very purposeful, and that would sound very designed. And so
even though all you have is a genetic change, and
you don't. There's no reason why you have to characterize
it in one way or another. They're forced to characterize
it as a random, broken thing because in their worldview,
it's bottom up. We're saying, let's dump that thinking.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, And I think that is such an important point
because I've heard even in Christian circles a lot of
people saying, well, God directs those mutations. What if it's
a genetic change that God purposely programmed into these organisms,
like you were saying, to allow them to adapt, not
simply a random, pointless happening, that is somehow shaping these
organisms into more highly evolved creatures. And I think that's

(40:34):
such an important takeaway. And so with that, that kind
of leads into our fourth point, reverse passive organisms shaped
by active external conditions to active organisms engineered with the
innate capacity to shape themselves. So would you be able
to expand a little bit on that point as far
as how creatures are adapting.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yes, it builds on the last thing that we were
talking about. And you know, when you were just talking
about how maybe God, when he was designing creatures, what
if he built into them mechanisms that could actually change
DNA on purpose and purposefully and for a direction on that.

(41:18):
What if he built those things in. What if he
built epigenetic mechanisms. What if he built and this is
I think it's mostly there, and I think research is
going to bear this out. What if he built mechanisms
that were able to take information that organisms sense from
their environment and bring it in and lead to the
purposeful change of DNA and those kinds of things which

(41:41):
would lead to purposeful changes of their traits along those lines.
What if that is actually there? What if that's just
one of many ways which the Lord has built into
creatures which allow for purposeful or directional change rather than
random change. And so evolutionists because they see things as

(42:03):
purposeless and from the bottom up. Therefore, as organisms relate
to their environment, they will hedge on the side of
the environment, driving organisms through time, driving changes of the
traits of organisms through time. Organisms relate to the environment.

(42:24):
So when the environment changes and organism changes, they see
the environment as driving that. That is something really new
that Darwin introduced and we talked about it our last
podcast called Externalism, and Stephen J. Gould mentioned that Darwin
was the first, the first to see this externalistic view. Well,
not just Stephen J. Gould, but other researchers have obviously

(42:47):
embraced Darwin's in externalism, and therefore they see organisms primarily
as modeling clay over time, and the environment is molding
and shaping and organisms and organisms are relatively passive in
this view of things. So the externalistic view sees the

(43:08):
environment shaping a population of organisms and driving it through time.
So now that people are listening to our podcast, I
will be challenging them. As you read scientific papers, as
you read headlines, look for the words like climate drives
a population of organisms, Geology drives things, geology shapes, and

(43:29):
geology will mold these things. You'll begin to see this
operative view that nature is the driving factor on that,
and we're saying that's totally wrong, totally wrong. Engineers build things.
The operative end is in the thing you built. So
if you want that space shuttle to go through the atmosphere,

(43:51):
the operative end isn't the atmosphere. It's the features that
you build into the thing. That's what you can change.
If the space shuttle breaks, that's what you will modify.
That's what you will fix. Everything engineers know is that
what we build into the entity, and any capabilities that

(44:12):
the entity we will ever build will ever have that
we build, we build into it. Even the capability to learn,
like an artificial intelligence. We build that capability into it upfront,
and if you don't build the capability in it will
never have that capability. So you must always focus on

(44:35):
the organism. And so as organisms relate to their environment,
when the environment changes, maybe one, maybe there's enough variability
within this population that they can change and solve that
problem themselves. Or maybe two, there's a way for them
to modify and express their traits differently that will solve

(44:58):
that problem. And we can we can give dozens of
examples of how this happens. So rather than seeing organisms
as being driven passively, maybe organisms are driving themselves. Maybe
organisms are solving those problems, and we should see the
challenges in an environment as being solved by the organisms.

(45:18):
Organisms solve those problems one way or another. There's many
ways they can solve them, but they will solve those problems.
And when they solve those problems, they're unable to live
in that niche. And so because the Lord gives organisms
this problem solving ability, they're able to be fruitful multiply

(45:40):
and fill the earth with that ability. And so, just
like in an engineering company where someone has a problem
and engineers come up with solutions, potential solutions to solve
that problem. Maybe five engineers come up with five different
potential solutions. One of them solves it better than the
others one. Nobody would have ever say the problems selected

(46:01):
that solution. Yeah, they wouldn't say the problem selected the solution.
That from an engineering standpoint, that makes no sense. It
shouldn't make any sense in biology, it's silly. You would
say this solution successfully solved the problem, and if it
was the best solution, then you would expect it to
become the dominant solution within that company, and maybe other

(46:22):
companies they would take over the population as the best
solution to that problem. Either way, it's this thing, it's
this solution. It's this ability of the entity to solve
the problems, which is what you need to focus on.
Active problem solving creatures which can take on challenges, solve
those challenges, and fill those niches. Complete opposite of seeing

(46:47):
passive modeling clay being shaped by the environment.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Complete opposite, as we were saying earlier, of the mother
nature that supposedly acts has godlike agency over these creatures
versus you know, infinitely intelligent designer who's able to shape
these creatures to respond to what's around them. And how
gracious of our creator to do that.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
And you know, there's another thing which we really have
to emphasize for the listeners. It's really important organisms relate
to their environment. So, as you mentioned, they respond to stimuli.
That's something that we really need to just explain here
very very quickly. So you have an environmental condition and
it's a stimulus for this organism. You say, well, this
environment stimulated the organism, isn't it driving it? No, that,

(47:30):
and we need to understand what and why something is
a stimulus when it's in the environment. So all of
the people who are listening to this podcast right now
are being bombarded by AM radio waves. You are, I
am everybody who's there, because they're just pervasive. But nobody here,

(47:51):
at least I hope not, is hearing AM radio in
their head. That's because even though you're being bombarded by
the radio waves, they're not a stimulus. Therefore, not everything
in your environment is a stimulus to you. In fact,
most things in your environment, most conditions in your environment

(48:11):
are not a stimulus or a queue or a driver
or whatever word you want to use. They're not that
Why aren't they? That's because for something to be a stimulus,
the engineer must specify the condition to be a stimulus.

(48:32):
Conditions just aren't stimulus. The entity defines for itself what
will be its stimulus, and it defines, Oh, light will
be a stimulus, and how does it define it. One
it will have a sensor for light, and two it
will have programming to do something with that light once

(48:54):
it is detective, so that it can respond. So the
engineer specifies for an entity. All entities specify for themselves
what will be their stimuli and what won't be them
and how they process it. Something in and of itself
in the environment isn't a stimulus. It's always the entity
which does it, and mere exposure to things doesn't make

(49:15):
them stimuli. Mars and Earth are being bombarded by the
same light from the sun, but as far as we know,
on Mars there's no stimuli, but on Earth there are.
Because living things specify light to be a stimulus, and
we could go on and on. Organisms specify what will

(49:38):
be their favorable conditions. Organisms specify what is a stimulus.
So it's clear though you relate to your environment, you
relate because your designer gave you the capability to do
that and relate to it.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Wow, that is such a mindset shift, because I think
for me, I've always pictured well the stimuli what you
know causes, what is causing the actual organism to change,
versus the controls within the organism innately to be able
to determine what it responds to and how it responds
and turn to that exactly, I think it's gonna be
mind blowing for a lot of our listeners. I know
it definitely is for me. And so that leads us

(50:15):
into our last point, reverse mystical forces controlling interrelated biological
operations to organisms are discrete operative elements of the whole ecosystem.
So that relates to what we were just talking about,
but taking it into the big picture of the ecosystem itself.
So would you be able to just expand a little
bit on.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
That list right right? This is an expansion you know,
as I said, organisms relate to their environment, which means
organisms relate to or other organisms and organisms relate to
other conditions. And this is really a fascinating realm of
research because you have to look at it not from
each individual organism perspective, but you study it from above,

(50:57):
like you're looking at two from above too. Organisms work together,
and therefore you see, oh, how they work together. But
on an organism basis, these organisms may have no clue
that they are actually working together by any means, or
that they need this plant, or they need this sunlighter,
they need this pollen. They don't know that, and so

(51:21):
you only see how they work together by looking at
it from what I would call the god's eye view.
You look from above, and you see you see dozens
of things, and they all seem to be relating, of
which none of them may know that individually that they're
doing it. So every individual still is studied as that

(51:42):
an individual. Renee is an individual. Renee has a distinct boundary.
I know where renee stops and renee begins. And so
if we want to know how renee works, we study renee.
And if we want to know how we're renee relates
to Randy, we have to come up and find out

(52:03):
how that happens. How is it that renee can relate
to Randy? How's that renee can relate to any other thing.
And you must know from an engineering perspective that no
two organisms in and of themselves will just automatically work together.
You can't get two things to automatically cooperate with each other.

(52:25):
You can't get two things automatically function together. They have
to be connected in some way, and engineers will design
a way to connect them, which is an interface, an
interface which has specific design elements to them, protocols and
a common medium and things like this, which are absolutely

(52:46):
necessary for an interface to work. But unless you enable
a way for these two organisms to relate, that is,
either communicate or work together, they will never do it.
You just can't say, now do it. You have to
give each of them capabilities in order to do that.
But they never lose their individual identity. They're still separate elements.

(53:12):
And evolutionists lose sight of this because two organisms can
be engineered to work together incredibly close to what engineers
might even call a seamless operation, and evolution is sometimes
say they're absorbed into the whole, or they become a
supra organism, or they're part of a collective on that,

(53:32):
but that's not true. There's always a scene on that
you have these distinct separate enemy. You have these you
have these distinct separate elements, but they're working together as
part of a larger, larger system. And if you want
to know how that works, you have to study each
of these elements separately, and you have to study the

(53:55):
interfaces which enable them to work together, some of which
can be incredibly elaborate there. But what this is really
pointing to is a mind which can understand almost everything
about every creature. Because engineers who build interfaces have to
know how this creature operates, or this thing operates, and

(54:17):
this and they have to know how both of them
operate so they can build something that can tie them together,
that will let them to work together. So whoever built
all of these ecosystems we see knows how this creature works,
and knows how this creature works, and knows how this
one and this one and this one and this one,
and has ways to tie them all together. It sounds
like this person who built this knows everything about the

(54:39):
whole system.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Yeah, I know, it sure sounds like it. And you
know it's interesting because as you're talking, I was thinking
about example you used in your article just with flowers
and bees, and how evolutionists might say, well, flowers evolve
this strategy for you know, a lurning bees to them
or however you know that works. But actually the bees
are the ones that are adapt and are able to

(55:01):
track their environment. And so it's just interesting how the
Lord has designed these creatures to work together even whenever
they may not consciously, of course understand what's going on,
or that they realize what's happening. And so I think
that's such an important point you make.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, and don't you think that's kind of mystical on
their part? Two? And you know, this is where engineering
eliminates this mysticism. And I took that phrase right from
engineering from evolutionary literature. The flowers or the bees evolved
a strategy too on that and that's because they're forced.
They see that the bees and the flowers work together

(55:33):
so well, but their bottom up, therefore, they have to
believe they co evolved with each other. And in their
mind that coevolution is as real as sunrise. In their mind,
those bees evolving a strategy to do something is as
real as water. It's real to them. They see it,

(55:56):
and it's in their mind it's absolutely real, and they
write it up in their papers as if it's absolutely real.
But anybody, particularly coming from an engineering perspective, immediately spots oh,
when you say they strategized to do this, You've had
just injected a mystical explanation, mister evolutionists, into your causality,

(56:18):
which is supposed to be completely non mystical because you're
saying we're the mystical ones. But you inject these mystical
selection events, mystical strategies, mystical competition. You inject all of
this mystical coevolution and there which you can't demonstrate to
prove on there. And so engineering will help to push
all of this out, and you'll even be able to

(56:39):
understand ecosystems better because you'll see organisms as individual elements
working together.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Wow, well, we just covered a lot with even just
those five points, as far as you know, what we
need to do in order to reverse Darwinian thinking in
the field of biology, and so as far as I
see our go, we are starting to do quite a
bit of research in pioneering this new theory. So I
would love for you to just talk a little bit
about what that looks like, what is ICR doing as

(57:10):
we're beginning to create a brand new theory biological design.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Well, we could have pioneered into a lot of areas,
but one of the major icons of evolution is cayfish,
the blind cayfish. It's used as an example of natural
selections segregating outfish which had eyes and we're living in rivers,
segregating them through a trial and error process when they
get swept into caves, so eventually they become hyperpigmented and blind.

(57:38):
And nobody's actually seen this happen, So this is a
kind of a mystery. We just know that we have
these fish that are pigmented and with eyes that have
in streams, the cavefish. We know that they can mate together,
we know there are the same species, but how did
they get to that? How did they get to that state?
And the evolutionary scenario is through trial and air, hit

(58:00):
and miss, random genetic mutations, breaking the genes for the eyes,
breaking the genes for the pigmentation and stuff like this,
eventually segregating out and leading to these blind cavefish. Well,
the whole story is pretty suspect. First of all, all
the mystical things that are in it like I just
mentioned that you can identify. In addition, these fish change

(58:22):
in so many additional ways other than just eyes and pigmentation.
Their metabolism changes, their blood cells, change how they mon
handle oxygen and acidic conditions and low conductivity, and how
they eat and mate, and I mean, there's just so
many things that have to change for these fish to

(58:43):
live in these caves that it kind of becomes completely
unreasonable to think that random mutations are going to be
making all these changes and doing it so quickly that
they could actually live in these caves. On that, so
we predict that these cave that these fish were designed
to live in caves when they need to colonize a cave,

(59:05):
and therefore we will predict that these eyes can be
turned off purposely. We will predict that, rather than having
broken genes for pigmentation, for instance, that pigmentation could be
a trait that can be modulated down if you're in
a cave, and maybe modulated back up if you go

(59:25):
from a cave back to a river. It's not due
to broken genes, it's due to a modulatable process. On that,
that is a major difference in prediction broken genes, which
I could show you in a half a dozen papers
by evolutionists that these genes they say were the target
of evolution, and they were broken on multiple occasions, and

(59:46):
we would say no, modulata will trait. Well, we can
test that. You can take caveish, you can put them
back and simulated river conditions. If they've got broken genes,
they're going to stay hypopigmented. If it's modulated, don't regain
their pigmentation. Oh, in less than a month, these fish
regain their pigmentation. They're is pigmented as a surface fish

(01:00:08):
in less than a month. So clearly these are not
broken genes. Clearly this is a process of which can
be turned up and turned down. Can you take a
surface fish and have it lose its pigmentation? Yes, you
can take the surface fish, you can put it in
simulated cave water conditions and within days the pigmentation starts
to go away. You can observe it, you can see it.

(01:00:30):
We predicted this would happen, We predicted this would be modulatable.
And we have other predictions for other traits as well.
So one for evolution to say, you don't do the research,
you don't make predictions wrong. But What this is really
demonstrating is the power of actually coming up with a theory.
We're not just throwing stones at evolutionary theory. We said,

(01:00:52):
we believe these fish do what they're doing. Do what
they're doing because they were engineered to do that. We
predict if we expose them to this, this will happen.
We predict if we expose them to something different, something
different will happen. And you're able to test it. And
that's just the beginning of the research that we're doing.

(01:01:13):
People who are listening to podcast will have to stay
along with us. Keep listening, we will give them updates
on it. Keep reading Acts and Fax magazine. We will
give you updates in Action Fax Magazine on this research.
But there's power in a theory to expose all the
mysticism and evolutionary theory. There's power in a theory to

(01:01:35):
set a research program where you can make predictions and
actually test those.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Yeah. And what's so exciting is people can even come
here and see our research for themselves. I mean, we
have the Cafish right here in Dallas, and we're doing
this research in real time, and it is a very
exciting time to be ICR and to be pioneering this new,
new theory, and so it has been a joy to
get to talk about it with you today. As we
wrap up, I would just love to put it back

(01:02:03):
to you as far as is there anything that we
haven't covered that you'd like to talk about a little
bit more as we close.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
While after three podcasts, we have really covered a lot
of material, and this one was even pretty dense. I
hope we've explained that somebody can understand it. Theory matters,
the narrative matters. The way you view how creatures operate
really matters, listener, creationist or idea advocate. It's not just
enough to have evidence against evolution. It's not even enough

(01:02:30):
to just have positive evidence for why things look designed
or complicated or some type of complicated specified complexity. It's
not enough to have that they have a mechanism which
they believe can explain all of that. You need to
replace the selectionist explanation. And there's power in an engineering based,

(01:02:54):
organism focused theory of biological design. There's power in it
to set a research agenda, as we just mentioned, and
there's power in it to expose why evolutionary selectionism, why
Darwinian selectionism is just a mystical mental construct. It is
not a description of reality. It's a mental construct by

(01:03:17):
which they interpret the world. It's their interpretive framework. In
other words, it's just verbage, Renee, it's just words. It's
just verbage that they use to interpret and it. They've
invented a whole bevy of jargon and vocabulary that fits it,
and once they put it together in their mind, it
takes on a life of its own and it becomes

(01:03:38):
real to them, and that's how they see it. It's
very hard to just get rid of that by criticizing it,
replace it with something which explains cavefish better, for instance,
and will make a lot more progress.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Yeah, we're shining new light on that verbage and it
is really really neat to see. And I have absolutely
loved being to talk with you on this podcast, sector G,
and thank you so much for coming on and sharing
with us, and to all of our listeners and viewers,
thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode
of the Creation Podcast. If you would like to learn
more about icr's new theory of biological design, be sure

(01:04:13):
to check out doctor G's AX and fax articles on
ICR dot org. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure
to like, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends,
because we really want to be able to get the
creation message out to as many people as possible. If
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(01:04:34):
you can click the link in the description to become
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in and we'll see you next time.