August 13, 2025 • 28 mins
On today’s Bible Answer Man broadcast (08/13/25), we pick up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank is talking with Dr. Paul Gould, associate professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of A Good and True Story: Eleven Clues to Understanding Our Universe and Your Place in It. Hank and Paul discuss if the immensity of the universe should inspire belief in God, the nature of life, how we know that life is valuable, how the Cambrian explosion uprooted Darwin’s Tree of Life, the current revolutions and shifts in evolutionary theory, if the modern world suffers from a nature deficit, if materialism can account for consciousness, and what best explains morality.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From the Christian Research Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. This
is the Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Canigraph. We're
on the air because truth matters, Life matters. More On
today's special edition of the Bible answer Man, we pick
up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present
more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank
(00:30):
is talking with doctor Paul Gould, Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of a Good
and True Story eleven Clues to Understanding our Universe and
your place in it. Let's now join Hank Cantigraph and
Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Sometimes you hear the argument the immensity of the universe
makes us meaningless. But in reality, I think that if
we only for seventy eighty years, being around for a
short period of time in an immense universe may point
to our meaninglessness. But the fact is we were created
(01:12):
for eternity. We're not just exploring this universe for a
short period of time but forever. I think, just as
we never come to an end of exploring the immensity
of God, so we'd never come to an end of
exploring the immensity of the universe which he created, and
he's going to recreate the universe now, Paul says, groans
(01:34):
and prevail, awaiting its liberation from decay, and this is
going to be restored, and we're going to spend an
eternity exploring God and God's created handiwork.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah, yeah, I've actually got a lot of sympathy for that.
That sounds about right to me. Right, these are some
of the great questions that we all have, right, what
will we be doing in the new heavens and the
new Earth? But there is this proposal atually one of
the books I edited, the Story of the Cosmos, Gonzalo.
I can't say his name without looking at all, but
there you go, Geramo Gonzalez. He wrote a chapter on
(02:10):
the exoplanets, and you know, the question of our there
other planets that are Earth like where we could find
possible life. But in there he actually ran that proposal
that what we will be doing in the Esketon is
interstellar travel, which will have plenty of time, right and
exploring the universe around us. And I resonate with that.
I mean, obviously we're speculating, but there's something that seems
(02:30):
profoundly right about that when you ask questions like why
this universe, and why is the universe the way it is,
and why is it so immense that we don't even
have We have all these distinctions that we need to make, right.
We have the observable universe and the unobservable universe. Now
astronomers are talking about the affectable universe. Right, even if
we can observe it, we can't affect all of it
(02:51):
from where we sit today on Earth given current technology.
But who knows.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
In the esketon, let's talk about life, a very important
care and signpost in your book. I think that it
probably does us well to consider the fact that in
the non religious story, there's this idea that nothing creates everything,
(03:17):
that life comes from non life, and that the life
that comes from non life produces metaphysical realities. In the
religious story, we say we have to ask a question,
and that question is what is life and what constitutes life?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Right? I mean, life itself is an amazing feature of
the world, right, And again it's something that we only
are aware of in one place, in a very humdrum
galaxy in the middle of you know, the cluster of
galaxies in some corner of the universe, And so there
is this question what is so special about this place
that life number one arose? And it does, of course
(04:00):
beg this preliminary question what is life? And actually, in
all of the chapters in this book, because of this,
you know Aristotle's thought that we must ask the right
preliminary questions In every chapter, I usually begin with, you know,
what is the nature of the thing and question that
we're looking at? And so I spend a great bit
of time in the beginning here what is the nature
of life?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Is it what biology tells us?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
You know?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And kind of look at some of that and kind
of arrive at a philosophical definition That seems helpful because
in getting to the nature of life, it actually gives
us a clue I think about how life came about.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So yeah, so how did life begin? What's the problem
for the view that life comes from non life? Oh?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, I mean, so you know, you're right if the
non religious story and all those kind of philosophical presuppositions
that I mentioned earlier is true. Somehow you got to
get life from non life with natural processes, and that
has a number of hurdles it's so interesting in the
literature on this. You have kind of dueling confidence, right.
You have those from a non religious perspective that are
(04:59):
very confident that it's just sort of a math problem
and that we're eventually going to figure out how we
get life from non life. And then you have others
like Jim tor who's one of the leading you know,
synthetic chemistry in the world, who's saying, you're all lying.
Nobody knows how life can come from non life. You know,
it's an incredibly intractable problem, and so it's hard for
like the non scientists to kind of know what to
do with that. But there's at least three problems that
(05:20):
are really seeming intractable for the purely naturalistic explanation on
the non religious story, and that would be like the
location question, like where did life begin? Right again, we
only know one location that has life, and that's the Earth,
And so there's all these postulations where would Darwin's little
warm pond be? And there's a number about eight to
(05:40):
ten earthly suggestions, and then some punt to outer space.
Maybe it came from outer space or asteroids or things
like that. So that's a problem though nobody really knows
number one. But number two, there's what I call in
the book the ingredients problem. Right, how do we get
the basic building blocks for life from purely naturalistic processes? Right?
We need pro we need genetic material, we need lipids,
(06:02):
we need all these sort of subparts of these macro molecules.
And no Origin of Life experiment has been able to
produce any of the macro molecules at all. They've been
able to get some of the subparts, but the way
that they set up the experiments there weren't you know,
realistic with respect to early Earth atmosphere and early Earth conditions.
So you had the location problem, the ingredients problem, and
(06:22):
then even if you were to get these ingredients, you
have the assembly problem because, as we know now right,
the more we learn from science, the cell, which you know,
the first living organism was a single cell. Cells are
incredibly complex machines. Many times people who use the metaphor
of a factory to explain the cell. And so you
(06:43):
have all these problems with how do you assemble the
cell even if you had all the basic parts, And
when you run the numbers on these things just seems
intractable given purely naturalistic and blind processes.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah. So if you were to summarize this Cairn, this
sign post, what would you say, what's the significance of
the life issue? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I think that we had this intuition that life is
something incredibly valuable. We even would use the word sacred,
you know, when we're pre apart from being told by
some you know view out there, are just our intuition,
our pre philosophical intuition is that there's something very special,
even sacred about life, that it ought to be protected.
You can run thought experiments about this, right, Imagine a
(07:24):
world just like ours, except that we eradicate all living beings, right,
I think the intuition is fairly clear that that would
be a world of lesser value.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
And so here we have something that have incredible value
that is easy to destroy, but we have no idea
how to produce it, how it came about. And so
given the sacredness of this phenomena, again, it cries out
for explanation. Right, that's what's so significant about life? I think?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, And that leads me to the third Karen, or
the third sign post, which is species. Darwin wrote a
book The Origins of Species. Here you have a chapter
which points out that Darwin's Tree of Life is uprooted
by the Camberan radiation or the Cambrian explosion. So you
have biologies big bang that's very important to the religious story,
(08:18):
just like cosmologies big bang is right.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, and this was an interesting chapter. You know, in
some circles it's become really hard to talk about evolution
and to do it sort of, you know, charitably and
with sort of intellectual humility. But if you kind of
set that aside for a minute and just think about
the sheer diversity of life. So we talked about life
and this intuition that it's something of great value when
(08:43):
you add to that the fact that the diversity of
life that we've had on Earth is incredible. In fact,
like this really sobering statistic as I was researching for
this chapter was ninety nine percent of all species that
have existed have become extinct. Right, And that's that's again
mind boggling, how much diversity this world has seen since
life began. Yeah, So to your question, we have one
(09:06):
of the lines of evidence that's often debated when it
comes to what explains the diversity of life, right, is
it evolution? And Darwin or neo Darwinian accounts, or is
there some sort of like a need for God to
infuse information in the causal joints to get the species.
One of the pieces of evidence has been the fossil
record because of as you just talked about biology's Big Bang,
(09:26):
we have this period in time where you have this
sudden appearance of many, many life forms fully formed, without
any appearance of transitional forms that you know would help
the evolutionary story. And so this becomes something that's again
what best explains the data, right, And so I didn't
Actually I had a section in the book on the
fossil record and kind of walking through the different options,
(09:47):
and I took it out at the last moment because
it was getting too technical. I mean, I just wanted
to focus on the microbiology and the genetics kind of
lines of evidence. But when it comes to the fossil record,
you have you know, when Darwin wrote in eighteen fifty
nine and he continued to revise the origin of species,
he says, you know, right now the fossil record is
substantially incomplete and it doesn't reveal any transitional forms. But
(10:11):
if in some future date when we do have the
full or complete fossil record, and we still don't have
those transitional forms that would cause problems for my theory, right,
He basically says this, Well, now fast forward one hundred
and fifty plus years, and we basically have a pretty
good fossil record. You know, I think we've discovered not everything,
I'm sure, but you know, we have a good idea
of what it is, and we still see stasis. And
(10:33):
you know the fact that we don't have these sort
of transitional forms. So we have these fully formed creatures
without any obvious genetic link. And so I actually think
that the best explanation for that is the sudden appearance that,
you know, something like a special creationist would argue that
God basically infused at different times in history new body plans,
new information, and created new species.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Don't go away. In just a few moments, we'll rejoin
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A Good and True Story, Philosopher Paul Gould guide you
on a rewarding journey to discover the true story of
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holds the most satisfying answers to life's biggest questions. A
(11:21):
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Speaker 4 (12:01):
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Speaker 3 (15:14):
We basically have a pretty good fossil record, and we
still see stasis, and we don't have these transitional forms.
So we have these fully formed creatures without any obvious
genetic link. And so I actually think that the best
explanation for that is the sudden appearance that you know,
something like a special creationist would argue that God basically
(15:35):
infused at different times in history new body plans new
information and create a new species. I don't know the
details on that, but it seems that that's the best
explanation for some of these big causal joints.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah, so we have transitions within the kinds, but not
from one kind to another. Fossil record simply does not
bear out Darwin's hypothesis. There's a great quote you use
in the book by Hugo Devrees, a Dutchman. I think
I think he was writing in nineteen oh five something
like that, but he said, natural selection may explain the
(16:07):
survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival
of the fittest. That's a good little turn of phrase
to get in your head.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
That's right, and that seems right if you look at
the contemporary intelligent design movement. There. While you're right, that
was nineteen oh four, nineteen oh five that dere said that,
that's still the same kind of idea that's driving much
of the idea movement. And the question is like, how
much can the natural selection that mechanism, that naturalistic mechanism
how much can that really do? And I think the consensus,
(16:39):
at least a consensus, is that it can improve existing kinds,
but it can't get you new information, right, And that's
why there's this sort of revolution and evolution. You do
have neo Darwinians, but you also have non Darwinian versions
of evolution where they're looking for other mechanisms besides natural
selection that can account for the rapid increase in information
that you see in the fossil records. And that's just
kind of an interesting shift. Right In a couple of
(17:02):
years ago there was a meeting in the Royal Society
of London where you know, biologists are basically admitting that
neo Darwinian mechanisms just can't get you the kind of
information we need and evolution and you'd think, like that's
a good thing. Oh maybe they'll all look to God.
But that wasn't what happened, right, because that would be irrational,
that would be unscientific, is what we're told. So what
they did is it just began to look for other
(17:23):
naturalistic mechanisms. And so now you've got a whole menu,
you know, fifteen to twenty naturalistic mechanisms and individually or together.
Those are the mechanisms on the non Darwinian approaches to
evolution that can get us the new information anyway. Intelligent
design folks, I think have done a really good job
exploring those and their argument, which seems plausible to me,
(17:45):
is that those additional mechanisms also come up short.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
One of the things you point out in the book,
and I think it's something that's worth expanding on, is
that we suffer in the modern world from nature deathicis,
or from maybe we could call it light pollution, where
we're stuck in an environment where we really don't see nature,
(18:10):
the very lady nature that points us towards a supreme designer.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Right, Yeah, this is this idea that we continue to
buffer ourselves and further remove ourselves from reality. And you
might think that, like, what's the problem with that? Right,
is an air conditioning and a good thing, and of
course it is. But what happens is that we're so
much of modern life, we're mediating our lives through technology,
and we're living in comfortable homes. I mean, I'm talking
(18:37):
to you today from my house here. And what happens, though,
is we no longer see the world properly, right, and
if part of our job is Christians now is to
help others see the world as it is so that
they can rightly see the creator behind the world, it's
just going to make our job more difficult. Yeah, And
so that was what's going on there is we're just
(18:59):
we don't given the fact that you know, even this
statistic about how many creatures have become extinct, even what
we do see in the world is just a mere
fraction of the amazing reality that is the world that
God created. And so, yeah, I wanted to help people
see things freshly, and we have to jar them a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
To Yeah, you have to kind of open your eyes
and see that we live in an amazing universe on
an amazing planet. With respect to human beings. In chapter four,
you asked the question can materialism account for the human mind?
And I think that's a sillient question. The mind and
the brain substance dualism, which I hold to. We say
that the mind and the brain are not identical. Would
(19:38):
you agree with that?
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, they're correlated, they're tightly integrated, but they're not the
same thing.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
That's right. Yeah, So in golf, oftentimes I say the
mind is so incredibly significant because the mind causes the
physical synapses of the brain to fire. So where your
mind is really has a big impact on how well
you play a sport, for sample. But yeah, substance dualism,
I think is a really important point. But Daniel Dennett,
(20:05):
he said this, if naturalism is true, then there are
no conscious minds. Naturalism is true, therefore there are no
conscious minds. So he would say everything's molecules in motion.
There is no such thing as a metaphysical reality like
the mind.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Right, So you know, I picked Dennett. He's not the
only he's one strand of the non religious.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He's an easy target in.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Some ways, he's an easier target, but he's also a
prominent voice and a prominent view. What's so interesting even
you know, this book just came out, but there's a
kind of movement in philosophy of mind to what you
would call mind first views of reality because they're realizing
like the denets of the world, the atheists sort of
old guard atheists right like Russell would be in the
(20:53):
stream Bertrand Russell and Daniel Dennet's part of maybe the
what for a time, we're called the new atheists that
are very you know, hold to a scientism and materialism
or physicalism and all those things. That's kind of shifting
in the academy, kind of my sense of it, because
of the very argument that you read there. It just
seems obviously false, right, that consciousness is an illusion.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
And if the first premise that you read there was
if naturalism is true, there are no conscious minds, right,
and then premise too naturalism is true, right, Well, then
I would just say there are conscious minds, therefore it's
not the case that naturalism is true. Right. That seems
like more plausible given the fact that I think we
have good reasons to think that I am and you are,
(21:36):
and we are conscious agents. So yeah, I wanted to
look at Dennett. But there is an interesting shift that's
taking place in the Academy because they realize how hard
it is to get minds from purely physical things. David Chalmers,
who's a leading philosopher of mind, coined the problem of
the consciousness as the really hard problem, right, how do
you get mental creatures from material things? And that's the
(22:00):
real hard problem. And Dennett, of course is tackling that
by denying the phenomena, and that just seems crazy to me.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
I had a guest on a few weeks ago, and
one of the things he kept pressing is that we
should never let anyone try to talk us out of
our deep seated intuitions. And you know, this is one
of those intuitions. You kind of know we have conscious minds,
and conscious minds point us to a conscious creator.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, or at least it's yeah. It seems like a
better fit, right, because on theism, it's mind first, right
before there was the physical universe, there was capital R reason,
as List puts in his book on Miracles, or you know,
there's capital M mind right, mind is prior to matter.
On the theistic view, on the naturalistic story, it's you know,
(22:48):
in the beginning there was matter, and then somehow minds
are laid in local is. I love this phrase. Thomas
Nagel wrote a book in twenty twelve called Mining Cosmos.
He used this wonderful phrase, you know, eventually the universe
woke up, right, Eventually this universe was such that mind's evolved,
and he's right, like, where did minds come from? And Nagel,
even in his book Minding Cosmo says you can't get
(23:10):
minds from a purely naturalistic Darwinian universe, and that's why
Nagel and many others are moving to this middle view.
That's some mind first view of reality that says, at
the fundamental level of physics, these bbis whatever they are,
whatever the fundamental particles turn out to be, are bits
of mental things, right, because you can't get mental things
(23:31):
from physical things, so you need to build the mental
things into the foundation of reality itself. So you have
this huge shift now because of the really hard problem
I think is so intractable. So that's kind of an
interesting move that's taking place in the academy right now.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Another sign post is morality. Quick question, is there a
moral order? Is the moral order that is objective?
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Yeah? That was one of the questions that I think
is important to explore, and I think in the answer
that I arrive at, yes, there is an objective moral order.
And I think you can see that by the pure
light of reason that you just mentioned. You know your
guests who says, don't let people talking out of your
deeply held intuitions. I think Lewis wonderfully said in his
book Miracles, we can see by the light of reason
that we ought to love our neighbor. Right, We don't
(24:15):
need a syllogism or somebody to teach us that, And
I think that's true. We can just see by the
light of reason that there is objective moral values and
that there are objective moral duties in the universe.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
And in the book, I've run through a bunch of
what are sometimes called intuition pumps or thought experiments that
you can give to see this. But yeah, I think
it's pretty clear that there is objective morality. So then
the question becomes what best explains it? And that's kind
of where I took it in that chapter.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, can atheism account for the guilt that we feel
when we do something wrong?
Speaker 3 (24:48):
That's right. I think that you know, the three or
four options that I considered in the book for what
best explains or grounds objective morality are the universe, nothing,
or God. Actually, so I guess it was three, And
I think I think that if I were not a theist,
if I didn't think that theism offered the best explanation,
I would probably go with nothing. What explains objective morality?
Nothing does is just a brute fact. This is Eric
(25:11):
Weilenberg's view. He adopts a view. That's sometimes called platonic atheism.
Sometimes it's called brute fact atheism. And I think I
would just go there, right. What explains it? Nothing does.
It's just a part of the furniture of the world, right,
and there's no explanation for it. I think that's the
best thing. But notice what that doesn't account for one
of these fundamental features of the moral life that you
(25:32):
just brought up, the fact that we feel guilt when
we do wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
We'll have to stop here for today's special edition of
the Bible answer Man Broadcast. Join us again next time
when we'll continue Hank Hanagraft's conversation with philosopher Paul Gould.
Our firm commitment here at the Christian Research Institute is
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(26:00):
An appreciation for your vital gift to help strengthen and
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Speaker 4 (27:01):
For decades, Hank hannigrafh has shared the truth of the
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From the Christian Research Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. This
is the Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Canigraph. We're
on the air because truth matters, Life matters. More On
today's special edition of the Bible answer Man, we pick
up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present
more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank
(00:30):
is talking with doctor Paul Gould, Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of a Good
and True Story eleven Clues to Understanding our Universe and
your place in it. Let's now join Hank Cantigraph and
Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Sometimes you hear the argument the immensity of the universe
makes us meaningless. But in reality, I think that if
we only for seventy eighty years, being around for a
short period of time in an immense universe may point
to our meaninglessness. But the fact is we were created
(01:12):
for eternity. We're not just exploring this universe for a
short period of time but forever. I think, just as
we never come to an end of exploring the immensity
of God, so we'd never come to an end of
exploring the immensity of the universe which he created, and
he's going to recreate the universe now, Paul says, groans
(01:34):
and prevail, awaiting its liberation from decay, and this is
going to be restored, and we're going to spend an
eternity exploring God and God's created handiwork.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah, yeah, I've actually got a lot of sympathy for that.
That sounds about right to me. Right, these are some
of the great questions that we all have, right, what
will we be doing in the new heavens and the
new Earth? But there is this proposal atually one of
the books I edited, the Story of the Cosmos, Gonzalo.
I can't say his name without looking at all, but
there you go, Geramo Gonzalez. He wrote a chapter on
(02:10):
the exoplanets, and you know, the question of our there
other planets that are Earth like where we could find
possible life. But in there he actually ran that proposal
that what we will be doing in the Esketon is
interstellar travel, which will have plenty of time, right and
exploring the universe around us. And I resonate with that.
I mean, obviously we're speculating, but there's something that seems
(02:30):
profoundly right about that when you ask questions like why
this universe, and why is the universe the way it is,
and why is it so immense that we don't even
have We have all these distinctions that we need to make, right.
We have the observable universe and the unobservable universe. Now
astronomers are talking about the affectable universe. Right, even if
we can observe it, we can't affect all of it
(02:51):
from where we sit today on Earth given current technology.
But who knows.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
In the esketon, let's talk about life, a very important
care and signpost in your book. I think that it
probably does us well to consider the fact that in
the non religious story, there's this idea that nothing creates everything,
(03:17):
that life comes from non life, and that the life
that comes from non life produces metaphysical realities. In the
religious story, we say we have to ask a question,
and that question is what is life and what constitutes life?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Right? I mean, life itself is an amazing feature of
the world, right, And again it's something that we only
are aware of in one place, in a very humdrum
galaxy in the middle of you know, the cluster of
galaxies in some corner of the universe, And so there
is this question what is so special about this place
that life number one arose? And it does, of course
(04:00):
beg this preliminary question what is life? And actually, in
all of the chapters in this book, because of this,
you know Aristotle's thought that we must ask the right
preliminary questions In every chapter, I usually begin with, you know,
what is the nature of the thing and question that
we're looking at? And so I spend a great bit
of time in the beginning here what is the nature
of life?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Is it what biology tells us?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
You know?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And kind of look at some of that and kind
of arrive at a philosophical definition That seems helpful because
in getting to the nature of life, it actually gives
us a clue I think about how life came about.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So yeah, so how did life begin? What's the problem
for the view that life comes from non life? Oh?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, I mean, so you know, you're right if the
non religious story and all those kind of philosophical presuppositions
that I mentioned earlier is true. Somehow you got to
get life from non life with natural processes, and that
has a number of hurdles it's so interesting in the
literature on this. You have kind of dueling confidence, right.
You have those from a non religious perspective that are
(04:59):
very confident that it's just sort of a math problem
and that we're eventually going to figure out how we
get life from non life. And then you have others
like Jim tor who's one of the leading you know,
synthetic chemistry in the world, who's saying, you're all lying.
Nobody knows how life can come from non life. You know,
it's an incredibly intractable problem, and so it's hard for
like the non scientists to kind of know what to
do with that. But there's at least three problems that
(05:20):
are really seeming intractable for the purely naturalistic explanation on
the non religious story, and that would be like the
location question, like where did life begin? Right again, we
only know one location that has life, and that's the Earth,
And so there's all these postulations where would Darwin's little
warm pond be? And there's a number about eight to
(05:40):
ten earthly suggestions, and then some punt to outer space.
Maybe it came from outer space or asteroids or things
like that. So that's a problem though nobody really knows
number one. But number two, there's what I call in
the book the ingredients problem. Right, how do we get
the basic building blocks for life from purely naturalistic processes? Right?
We need pro we need genetic material, we need lipids,
(06:02):
we need all these sort of subparts of these macro molecules.
And no Origin of Life experiment has been able to
produce any of the macro molecules at all. They've been
able to get some of the subparts, but the way
that they set up the experiments there weren't you know,
realistic with respect to early Earth atmosphere and early Earth conditions.
So you had the location problem, the ingredients problem, and
(06:22):
then even if you were to get these ingredients, you
have the assembly problem because, as we know now right,
the more we learn from science, the cell, which you know,
the first living organism was a single cell. Cells are
incredibly complex machines. Many times people who use the metaphor
of a factory to explain the cell. And so you
(06:43):
have all these problems with how do you assemble the
cell even if you had all the basic parts, And
when you run the numbers on these things just seems
intractable given purely naturalistic and blind processes.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah. So if you were to summarize this Cairn, this
sign post, what would you say, what's the significance of
the life issue? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
I think that we had this intuition that life is
something incredibly valuable. We even would use the word sacred,
you know, when we're pre apart from being told by
some you know view out there, are just our intuition,
our pre philosophical intuition is that there's something very special,
even sacred about life, that it ought to be protected.
You can run thought experiments about this, right, Imagine a
(07:24):
world just like ours, except that we eradicate all living beings, right,
I think the intuition is fairly clear that that would
be a world of lesser value.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
And so here we have something that have incredible value
that is easy to destroy, but we have no idea
how to produce it, how it came about. And so
given the sacredness of this phenomena, again, it cries out
for explanation. Right, that's what's so significant about life? I think?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, And that leads me to the third Karen, or
the third sign post, which is species. Darwin wrote a
book The Origins of Species. Here you have a chapter
which points out that Darwin's Tree of Life is uprooted
by the Camberan radiation or the Cambrian explosion. So you
have biologies big bang that's very important to the religious story,
(08:18):
just like cosmologies big bang is right.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, and this was an interesting chapter. You know, in
some circles it's become really hard to talk about evolution
and to do it sort of, you know, charitably and
with sort of intellectual humility. But if you kind of
set that aside for a minute and just think about
the sheer diversity of life. So we talked about life
and this intuition that it's something of great value when
(08:43):
you add to that the fact that the diversity of
life that we've had on Earth is incredible. In fact,
like this really sobering statistic as I was researching for
this chapter was ninety nine percent of all species that
have existed have become extinct. Right, And that's that's again
mind boggling, how much diversity this world has seen since
life began. Yeah, So to your question, we have one
(09:06):
of the lines of evidence that's often debated when it
comes to what explains the diversity of life, right, is
it evolution? And Darwin or neo Darwinian accounts, or is
there some sort of like a need for God to
infuse information in the causal joints to get the species.
One of the pieces of evidence has been the fossil
record because of as you just talked about biology's Big Bang,
(09:26):
we have this period in time where you have this
sudden appearance of many, many life forms fully formed, without
any appearance of transitional forms that you know would help
the evolutionary story. And so this becomes something that's again
what best explains the data, right, And so I didn't
Actually I had a section in the book on the
fossil record and kind of walking through the different options,
(09:47):
and I took it out at the last moment because
it was getting too technical. I mean, I just wanted
to focus on the microbiology and the genetics kind of
lines of evidence. But when it comes to the fossil record,
you have you know, when Darwin wrote in eighteen fifty
nine and he continued to revise the origin of species,
he says, you know, right now the fossil record is
substantially incomplete and it doesn't reveal any transitional forms. But
(10:11):
if in some future date when we do have the
full or complete fossil record, and we still don't have
those transitional forms that would cause problems for my theory, right,
He basically says this, Well, now fast forward one hundred
and fifty plus years, and we basically have a pretty
good fossil record. You know, I think we've discovered not everything,
I'm sure, but you know, we have a good idea
of what it is, and we still see stasis. And
(10:33):
you know the fact that we don't have these sort
of transitional forms. So we have these fully formed creatures
without any obvious genetic link. And so I actually think
that the best explanation for that is the sudden appearance that,
you know, something like a special creationist would argue that
God basically infused at different times in history new body plans,
new information, and created new species.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Don't go away. In just a few moments, we'll rejoin
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(11:21):
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Speaker 4 (12:01):
Truth Matters, Life Matters More by Hank Hannigraph is essentially
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In Part two, Hank explains why life matters more and
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(14:08):
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(14:31):
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(14:53):
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Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We basically have a pretty good fossil record, and we
still see stasis, and we don't have these transitional forms.
So we have these fully formed creatures without any obvious
genetic link. And so I actually think that the best
explanation for that is the sudden appearance that you know,
something like a special creationist would argue that God basically
(15:35):
infused at different times in history new body plans new
information and create a new species. I don't know the
details on that, but it seems that that's the best
explanation for some of these big causal joints.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah, so we have transitions within the kinds, but not
from one kind to another. Fossil record simply does not
bear out Darwin's hypothesis. There's a great quote you use
in the book by Hugo Devrees, a Dutchman. I think
I think he was writing in nineteen oh five something
like that, but he said, natural selection may explain the
(16:07):
survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival
of the fittest. That's a good little turn of phrase
to get in your head.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
That's right, and that seems right if you look at
the contemporary intelligent design movement. There. While you're right, that
was nineteen oh four, nineteen oh five that dere said that,
that's still the same kind of idea that's driving much
of the idea movement. And the question is like, how
much can the natural selection that mechanism, that naturalistic mechanism
how much can that really do? And I think the consensus,
(16:39):
at least a consensus, is that it can improve existing kinds,
but it can't get you new information, right, And that's
why there's this sort of revolution and evolution. You do
have neo Darwinians, but you also have non Darwinian versions
of evolution where they're looking for other mechanisms besides natural
selection that can account for the rapid increase in information
that you see in the fossil records. And that's just
kind of an interesting shift. Right In a couple of
(17:02):
years ago there was a meeting in the Royal Society
of London where you know, biologists are basically admitting that
neo Darwinian mechanisms just can't get you the kind of
information we need and evolution and you'd think, like that's
a good thing. Oh maybe they'll all look to God.
But that wasn't what happened, right, because that would be irrational,
that would be unscientific, is what we're told. So what
they did is it just began to look for other
(17:23):
naturalistic mechanisms. And so now you've got a whole menu,
you know, fifteen to twenty naturalistic mechanisms and individually or together.
Those are the mechanisms on the non Darwinian approaches to
evolution that can get us the new information anyway. Intelligent
design folks, I think have done a really good job
exploring those and their argument, which seems plausible to me,
(17:45):
is that those additional mechanisms also come up short.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
One of the things you point out in the book,
and I think it's something that's worth expanding on, is
that we suffer in the modern world from nature deathicis,
or from maybe we could call it light pollution, where
we're stuck in an environment where we really don't see nature,
(18:10):
the very lady nature that points us towards a supreme designer.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Right, Yeah, this is this idea that we continue to
buffer ourselves and further remove ourselves from reality. And you
might think that, like, what's the problem with that? Right,
is an air conditioning and a good thing, and of
course it is. But what happens is that we're so
much of modern life, we're mediating our lives through technology,
and we're living in comfortable homes. I mean, I'm talking
(18:37):
to you today from my house here. And what happens, though,
is we no longer see the world properly, right, and
if part of our job is Christians now is to
help others see the world as it is so that
they can rightly see the creator behind the world, it's
just going to make our job more difficult. Yeah, And
so that was what's going on there is we're just
(18:59):
we don't given the fact that you know, even this
statistic about how many creatures have become extinct, even what
we do see in the world is just a mere
fraction of the amazing reality that is the world that
God created. And so, yeah, I wanted to help people
see things freshly, and we have to jar them a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
To Yeah, you have to kind of open your eyes
and see that we live in an amazing universe on
an amazing planet. With respect to human beings. In chapter four,
you asked the question can materialism account for the human mind?
And I think that's a sillient question. The mind and
the brain substance dualism, which I hold to. We say
that the mind and the brain are not identical. Would
(19:38):
you agree with that?
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, they're correlated, they're tightly integrated, but they're not the
same thing.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
That's right. Yeah, So in golf, oftentimes I say the
mind is so incredibly significant because the mind causes the
physical synapses of the brain to fire. So where your
mind is really has a big impact on how well
you play a sport, for sample. But yeah, substance dualism,
I think is a really important point. But Daniel Dennett,
(20:05):
he said this, if naturalism is true, then there are
no conscious minds. Naturalism is true, therefore there are no
conscious minds. So he would say everything's molecules in motion.
There is no such thing as a metaphysical reality like
the mind.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Right, So you know, I picked Dennett. He's not the
only he's one strand of the non religious.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He's an easy target in.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Some ways, he's an easier target, but he's also a
prominent voice and a prominent view. What's so interesting even
you know, this book just came out, but there's a
kind of movement in philosophy of mind to what you
would call mind first views of reality because they're realizing
like the denets of the world, the atheists sort of
old guard atheists right like Russell would be in the
(20:53):
stream Bertrand Russell and Daniel Dennet's part of maybe the
what for a time, we're called the new atheists that
are very you know, hold to a scientism and materialism
or physicalism and all those things. That's kind of shifting
in the academy, kind of my sense of it, because
of the very argument that you read there. It just
seems obviously false, right, that consciousness is an illusion.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
And if the first premise that you read there was
if naturalism is true, there are no conscious minds, right,
and then premise too naturalism is true, right, Well, then
I would just say there are conscious minds, therefore it's
not the case that naturalism is true. Right. That seems
like more plausible given the fact that I think we
have good reasons to think that I am and you are,
(21:36):
and we are conscious agents. So yeah, I wanted to
look at Dennett. But there is an interesting shift that's
taking place in the Academy because they realize how hard
it is to get minds from purely physical things. David Chalmers,
who's a leading philosopher of mind, coined the problem of
the consciousness as the really hard problem, right, how do
you get mental creatures from material things? And that's the
(22:00):
real hard problem. And Dennett, of course is tackling that
by denying the phenomena, and that just seems crazy to me.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
I had a guest on a few weeks ago, and
one of the things he kept pressing is that we
should never let anyone try to talk us out of
our deep seated intuitions. And you know, this is one
of those intuitions. You kind of know we have conscious minds,
and conscious minds point us to a conscious creator.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, or at least it's yeah. It seems like a
better fit, right, because on theism, it's mind first, right
before there was the physical universe, there was capital R reason,
as List puts in his book on Miracles, or you know,
there's capital M mind right, mind is prior to matter.
On the theistic view, on the naturalistic story, it's you know,
(22:48):
in the beginning there was matter, and then somehow minds
are laid in local is. I love this phrase. Thomas
Nagel wrote a book in twenty twelve called Mining Cosmos.
He used this wonderful phrase, you know, eventually the universe
woke up, right, Eventually this universe was such that mind's evolved,
and he's right, like, where did minds come from? And Nagel,
even in his book Minding Cosmo says you can't get
(23:10):
minds from a purely naturalistic Darwinian universe, and that's why
Nagel and many others are moving to this middle view.
That's some mind first view of reality that says, at
the fundamental level of physics, these bbis whatever they are,
whatever the fundamental particles turn out to be, are bits
of mental things, right, because you can't get mental things
(23:31):
from physical things, so you need to build the mental
things into the foundation of reality itself. So you have
this huge shift now because of the really hard problem
I think is so intractable. So that's kind of an
interesting move that's taking place in the academy right now.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Another sign post is morality. Quick question, is there a
moral order? Is the moral order that is objective?
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Yeah? That was one of the questions that I think
is important to explore, and I think in the answer
that I arrive at, yes, there is an objective moral order.
And I think you can see that by the pure
light of reason that you just mentioned. You know your
guests who says, don't let people talking out of your
deeply held intuitions. I think Lewis wonderfully said in his
book Miracles, we can see by the light of reason
that we ought to love our neighbor. Right, We don't
(24:15):
need a syllogism or somebody to teach us that, And
I think that's true. We can just see by the
light of reason that there is objective moral values and
that there are objective moral duties in the universe.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
And in the book, I've run through a bunch of
what are sometimes called intuition pumps or thought experiments that
you can give to see this. But yeah, I think
it's pretty clear that there is objective morality. So then
the question becomes what best explains it? And that's kind
of where I took it in that chapter.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, can atheism account for the guilt that we feel
when we do something wrong?
Speaker 3 (24:48):
That's right. I think that you know, the three or
four options that I considered in the book for what
best explains or grounds objective morality are the universe, nothing,
or God. Actually, so I guess it was three, And
I think I think that if I were not a theist,
if I didn't think that theism offered the best explanation,
I would probably go with nothing. What explains objective morality?
Nothing does is just a brute fact. This is Eric
(25:11):
Weilenberg's view. He adopts a view. That's sometimes called platonic atheism.
Sometimes it's called brute fact atheism. And I think I
would just go there, right. What explains it? Nothing does.
It's just a part of the furniture of the world, right,
and there's no explanation for it. I think that's the
best thing. But notice what that doesn't account for one
of these fundamental features of the moral life that you
(25:32):
just brought up, the fact that we feel guilt when
we do wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
We'll have to stop here for today's special edition of
the Bible answer Man Broadcast. Join us again next time
when we'll continue Hank Hanagraft's conversation with philosopher Paul Gould.
Our firm commitment here at the Christian Research Institute is
to defend the faith once for all, delivered to the Saints,
and equip believers to become true disciples of Jesus Christ.
(26:00):
An appreciation for your vital gift to help strengthen and
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(26:43):
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Speaker 4 (27:01):
For decades, Hank hannigrafh has shared the truth of the
historic Christian faith by answering questions over the radio, defending
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