An Iconoclast of Evolution– A Tribute to Jonathan Wells

Other than Scripture, Darwin’s magnum opus, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, might be the most significant literary work in history. light of the unprecedented impact of Darwinian dogma, it would be reasonable to expect it to be solidly rooted in truth. In reality, evolution is rooted in metaphysical contentions and mythological tales. However, as you will hear on today’s encore presentation of the Hank Unplugged podcast, the foundations of the great cosmogenic myth of evolutionary naturalism are crumbling.
 
A short while ago we received news that the great iconoclast of evolution, Jonathan Wells, had departed this life on his 82nd birthday. His death led us to listen to the last conversation with him on the Hank Unplugged podcast—a podcast devoted to his last book, Zombie Science which was a follow-up to the classic volume titled Icons of Evolution.
 
We could not help but think that our podcast discussion with Jonathan Wells provides one of the most concise and compelling refutations of the evolutionary paradigm we’ve ever heard. With two earned doctorates, Jonathan Wells was not only a brilliant scientific mind, but he was also incredibly brave in the face of the brazen attacks that await anyone who dares disagree with the so-called scientific consensus on evolution. His work brought to light the errors of the evolutionary paradigm, exposing especially the false icons that for decades have been passed off as settled science to unsuspecting young minds.

 
Just as Wells was an iconoclastic force when it came to evolution, he was likewise an icon of the Intelligent Design movement. His influence will long outlast his life on earth and his heavenly reward will undoubtedly reflect his efforts that did so much to reveal the truth and beauty there is to be found in studying the resplendent handiwork of the Creator of the cosmos.  
 
We hope that you enjoy this encore presentation of Zombie Science as much as we did.
 
*This Hank Unplugged Podcast was originally aired in January of 2018*
 

Topics discussed include: Hank pays tribute to the great iconoclast of evolution—Jonathan Wells (0:30) what is zombie science? (13:00); the price to pay for taking stands against the status quo of materialism and Darwinian evolution in the scientific arena (22:00); examining various icons of evolution like Darwin’s tree of life (26:00); why has the war on Intelligent Design become so ferocious? (31:30); the miracle of metamorphosis (40:00); the strong scientific commitment to materialism (50:40); what is the myth of junk DNA? (54:15); the unnecessary idolization of Charles Darwin (58:15); the problem with making DNA the answer to everything (59:50); examples of zombie science (1:02:30); the threat to religion presented when materialism is masquerading as empirical science (1:08:30).




For further information on the resources of  Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, Icons of Evolution DVD, and Memorable Keys to the F-A-R-C-E of Evolution, please click here.  https://www.equip.org/product/zombie-science-more-icons-of-evolution-icons-of-evolution-dvd-and-memorable-keys-to-the-f-a-r-c-e-of-evolution/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Well, welcome to another edition of the hand gun Plug Podcast,
a podcast that is committed to bringing the most interesting
and formative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. In
today's edition of the handcum Plug Podcast, I want to
begin by saying something that you've probably heard me say before,

(00:48):
which is that, other than the scriptures, Darwin's magnum Opus,
obviously titled The Origin a Species by Means of Natural
select might well be the most significant literary work in
the annals of recorded history. And that's a mouthful, Sir

(01:14):
Julian Huxley actually called the evolutionary dogma. It spawned the
most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever
arisen on earthed. Harvard scientist Ernst Meyer said that the

(01:34):
Darwinian Revolution of eighteen fifty nine was perhaps the most
fundamental of all intellectual revolutions in the entire history of mankind,
and in like fashioned biologist Michael Denton once said that
the far reaching effects of the Darwinian dogma ignited well

(01:58):
an intellectual more significant than the Copernican and the Newtonian
revolutions combined. Indeed, neither the twentieth nor the twenty first
centuries can be comprehended apart from the intellectual revolution the
theory has produced, So in light of the unprecedented impact

(02:23):
of Darwinian dogma, it would be reasonable to expect it
to be well solidly rooted in truth. In reality, however,
evolution is rooted well. It's rooted in metaphysical contensions and
mythological tales. Denton actually summed up that sentiment profoundly when

(02:48):
he termed the Darwinian theory of evolution the great cosmogenic
myth of the twentieth century. Reaching consequences of this cosmogenic
myth can be felt in almost every field, including all

(03:09):
areas of academia and every professional domain. The most significant consequence, however,
is that it undermines the very foundation of Christianity. If indeed,
evolution is reflective of the laws of science, well, then

(03:32):
genesis must be reflective of the flaws of scripture. And
if the foundation of Christianity is flawed, the superstructure is
destined to fall. However, as you'll hear on today's encore
presentation of the Hank un Plug Podcast, it is not

(03:53):
Christianity but the great cosmogenic myth of the evolutionary naturalistic
paradigm whose foundations are crumbling. A short while ago, I
received the sad news that the great iconoclast, the great

(04:13):
destroyer of the icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells, had departed
this life on his eighty second birthday. His death induced
me to go back and listen to my last interview
with him on Hank Unplugged. This podcast devoted to his

(04:35):
last book, a book titled Zombie Science, which incidentally was
a follow up to the classic volume titled Icons of Evolution.
So as I listened, I couldn't help but think that
in our discussion, Jonathan Wells provides one of the most
concise and compelling refutations of the evolutionary paradigm that I've

(05:01):
ever listened to. And on a personal note, we're listening
to this podcast that originated back in twenty seventeen was
will a sobering experience. It reminded me that I did
this podcast interview not long after being diagnosed with stage

(05:22):
four mental sellomphoma. Now seven years later, my lafoma is gone,
and so is doctor Wells. He's absent from the body,
but you and I we're still here. We're here to

(05:45):
make a difference for time and for eternity. And I'm
also reminded something I say over and over again, Only
one life soon twill be passed. Only what's done for
Christ will last. Well. With two earned doctorates, Jonathan Wells

(06:08):
was not only a brilliant scientific mind, but he was
also incredibly brave in the face of the brazen attacks
that await anyone who dares disagree with the so called
scientific consensus. Of course, I'm talking about the scientific consensus

(06:31):
on evolution.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
His work brought to.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Light the errors of the evolutionary paradigm. It exposed over
and over again the false icons that for decades have
been used as the argument, icons that have been passed

(06:55):
off as settled science to unsuspecting young minds.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Just as Jonathan Wells was an iconoclastic force when it
came to evolution, he was likewise an icon of the
intelligent design movement. I have so long appreciated his work
as well as our conversations, conversations that span a good

(07:22):
number of years. His influence will long outlast his life
on Earth. And I should also say his heavenly reward
will undoubtedly reflect his efforts, efforts that did so much
to reveal the truth and beauty that can be found

(07:44):
in studying the resplendent handiwork of the creator of the Cosmos.
I sincerely hope you enjoyed this encore presentation of zombie
Science as I did, and again I just listen through
it and I thought, Wow, this is one of the

(08:04):
not only earliest, but one of the best Hank Unplugged
podcasts ever and again best because doctor Jonathan Wells was interesting,
informative and inspirational.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
And by the way, if you enjoy.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
The podcast, please subscribe, rate review. It helps a lot,
and do remember of that doctor Jonathan Wells works. His
books are available on the web at equipped dot org.
You can also write me at PO box eighty five hundred, Charlotte,

(08:42):
North carolinasz IF code two eight two seven to one.
And now enjoy the podcast and then welcome to another
edition of Hank Unplugged, the podcast that's bringing to you
some of the most interesting, inspirational, formative people on the
planet and in this case some of the funniest or

(09:05):
one of the funniest. I mean, this is going to
be a podcast that has some lines in it that
are side slapping hilarious. In fact, The book that I
want to talk a little bit about during this podcast
is a book titled Zombie Science More Icons of Evolution,
and the cover itself is side slapping funny, but a

(09:29):
lot of other things we're going to talk about. My
podcast today is with Jonathan Wells, the senior Fellow with
a Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
He holds a PhD in molecular and sell biology from
the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a PhD
in Religious studies from Yale University. His books include Icons

(09:51):
of Evolution, one of my all time favorite books. I
think this book is must reading for every single person
on the planet, and certainly for every single Christian on
the planet. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,
which came out in two thousand and six, The Myth
of Junk DNA. But this book, this book. I read

(10:15):
this book last night. I had perused the book before,
I'd never really read the book before. Zombie Science More
Icons of Evolution is a book that if you do
not have this book, you've got to get this book,
and while you're at it, buy a bunch of copies.
You can give away. I've often said how one views
their origins will ultimately determine how they live their life.

(10:36):
If you think that you're a function of random chance,
that you arose from the primordial slime, you're going to
live your life by a different standard than if you
know you're created, created by an intelligent designer, an uncaused
first cause. So I am just delighted, Jonathan Wells to
have you on the podcast. I've been waiting for this
moment for a long time, and we're finally doing it.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
I'm delighted to be here, Hank.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
You've got so many great lines in this book, and
I want to talk about it during the podcast. But
one of the funniest things about this book, quite frankly,
and this is quintessential Jonathan Wells, is that you have
a diagram in the book for how to make a
cover out of a brown paper bag, so that if

(11:22):
you're reading the book in polite spaces, no one will
know what you're reading.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
Yes, because reading it on a college campus, for example,
could actually be dangerous to someone's career.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
I mean, that's in itself. It's funny.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
On the one hand, the brown paper bag story and
the diagram but on the other it's kind of sad
because if you want to be tenured in the academic
universities around the world, you better not be reading or
distributing this kind of information.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
That's right. It is said you.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Titled the Book of Zombie Science, and you have an
icon on the cover of the book. And obviously no
one can see the cover of the book unless they
go to the web, and they ought to go to
the web and see that. You can see at equipp
dot org. It's worth going to equip dot org just
to see the icon. Explain the icon for us. I mean,
obviously the icon has become the argument in this case.

(12:21):
You've taken the icon and exposed the icon for just
how bad an argument it really is.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Well, the cover shows an icon that's been around for
a long time of an ape like, stooped over ape
like creature gradually morphing into a modern human being. And
what's different about the book cover, of course, is that
the modern human being turns out to be a zombie

(12:49):
holding a page from Darwin's Origin of Species, and that.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
Is the whole idea behind the book Zombie Science. More
icons of evolution will talk about those in a little bit,
But tell us what zombie science is. I think you're
explaining it as materialistic science masquerading is empirical science, Yes.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
That's exactly true.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
For me.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Good science is empirical science. That is, we formulate a
hypothesis and we test it against the evidence. If it
fits the evidence, we keep it. If it doesn't, we
throw it away or modify it. That's empirical science, and
that's how science should be done. But there are other
meanings of the word science. One is consensus science, which

(13:37):
is just the majority opinion of current practicing scientists, which
often turns out to be wrong if you look back
at the history of science. But a third and more
disturbing definition is the search for natural explanations for everything. Now,
it's okay to search for natural explanations, but if you

(13:58):
insist that everything has a materialistic or naturalistic explanation, it's
basically applied materialistic philosophy rather than empirical science. And by
zombie science, I mean the practice of telling materialistic stories

(14:18):
even though they're empirically dead they don't fit the evidence,
telling those stories and making it look as though they're
empirical science. So they're empirically dead, but they keep stalking
the halls of science and education.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
So for empirical science, the highest value is the truth.
For a materialistic science, the highest value and I think
this is kind of a clever turn of phrase as well.
In the context in which it's used, the highest value
becomes survival of the fittest.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
So you've got in the book, and.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
I think it's important. Maybe you can expand on this
a little bit. You've already touched on it. You've got
zombie science, materialistic science masquerading as empirical science. You have
empirical science that's testing that is consistent with the evidence.
You have consensus science, which you just described. And then
you have technological science advances in medicine and technology and

(15:20):
the like. So there are different kinds of sciences. And
I suppose that begs the question, isn't it really important
for us when we use terms, that we define the terms,
because it really has to do not necessarily with the word,
but the meaning you pour into the word.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Absolutely. So, for example, the march, the so called March
for Science back in April, was really a march for
consensus science, not a march for empirical science. It was
a march to pressure lawmakers and taxpayers into supporting the

(15:57):
current consensus on things like climate change and evolution. That
empirical science is quite different. It's much more fluid. It
changes as the evidence accumulates, and it's not the same
as consensus science or materialistic science.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
When you talk about things like evolution, you're talking about
something that is a dogma so entrenched, particularly in the
American psyche, that if you go against this, I mean,
you are going against the weight of all academia. The

(16:37):
same thing is true with respect to climate change. I
know as president of the Christian Research Institute, I'm oftentimes
told by people inside and outside the organization, let's lay
off the whole issue of climate change, because the moment
you even begin to question consensus science, you're seen as
someone that well is an obscure that lost your brain

(17:01):
somewhere in the narthex.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Of a church.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
That's true. Now, you brought up evolution, Actually I brought
up evolution. Like the word science, the word evolution can
have many meanings. So it can mean simply change over time,
and I've never met anyone who denies that things change
over time. It could mean minor changes within existing species. Again,

(17:27):
I don't know anyone who denies that. We can see
it in our own families. It can mean that there's
a history to life on Earth. So there used to
be things around that aren't with us anymore, and some
things like human beings are here that weren't always here.
So in those senses, evolution is not controversial. But Charles

(17:50):
Darwin proposed an explanation for all those changes. It was
purely materialistic. He denied that there was any design. He
said it's all chance, and his theory actually won out,
not because of evidence, but because it fits the materialistic

(18:12):
temper of the times. And in that sense, evolution is controversial,
and in fact it's a zombie science.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
Yeah. You point out that Darwin's theory was that microevolution
plus time equals macro evolution, and that that is a
hypothesis that is starving for evidence, and the evidence wasn't
good in Darwin's time and certainly is even worse today.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
That's quite true. Darwin had actually no evidence for his
theory that macro evolution, that is, large scale changes come
from small changes given enough time. He had no evidence
for natural selection. He was completely wrong about the nature
of heredity. He didn't know anything about genetics, and basically

(19:05):
it was materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
You've been accused, particularly when you wrote Icons of Evolution,
of being like a petulant child that's throwing a tantrum,
that's cherry picking earnest errors out of these tones that
are credible in and of themselves. But you're finding this
little nit picky mistake that's made analogous to a cartoon

(19:34):
having Superman with a green cape as opposed to a
red cape on and you've made a cottage industry out
of these nitpicky errors, and therefore you shouldn't be taken seriously.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
How do you respond to that?

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Well, if the things that I point out were textbook errors,
they would have been corrected, and there are many examples
in the history of textbook writing of errors that have
been corrected. But in the case of the icons of evolution,
the evidence for Darwin's theory, they're not corrected. They're still there.

(20:11):
In fact, I wrote icons in two thousand and now
all of those icons are still with us and more.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, exactly, the title of your book Zombie Science more
icons of evolution, so as not as though they've jettisoned
the icons that are demonstratably false. They just kept shuffling
forth more icons out of the dust bins of people's imaginations.
I want to talk about some of those icons again,

(20:41):
the book Icons of Evolution. It was, I mean, I
always promoting books. I love books. Was one of my
all time favorites, very very readable, and this one is
in the exact same category, very very readable. But when
you get through with this book, you're in the state
of saying, how could anyone in the world buy into

(21:05):
evolution in the twenty first century. It might have been
one thing to buy into it in nineteenth century science
or in the twentieth century, but how can anyone buy
this particular, outdated, completely false premise. And obviously we're talking
about evolution in the sense of macro evolution. How in

(21:27):
the world can people buy into this theory in the
twenty first century.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Well, it seems to me it's a commitment to materialism
that amounts to a religion, and it's you know, it's
a belief that refuses to consider the evidence. And so
when someone attacks the evidence for evolution, for Darwinian evolution,

(21:51):
it's as though they're attacking a religion, and the people
who prop up that religion respond quite nastily sometimes.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah. So, I mean this is the difficulty.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
And I know you've already touched on this, but I
think we have to really knock this one out of
the park. Any time you talk about evolution, and again
we're talking about evolution in the sense of blind materialistic processes,
anytime you talk about this in a pejorative sense, in
a negative sense, people will say, look, you've got to

(22:28):
be out of touch with reality. Prominent politicians, presidents, pundits,
people in all walks of life who are smart people
by this theory, lock Stock and Barrel. How in the
world can you swim against that tide.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Well, it's quite a challenge because, as you say, there
are powerful forces and powerful people lined up on the
side of unguided evolution. But in science we're supposed to
look at the evidence, and so I encourage people to
look at the evidence for themselves and question the claims

(23:13):
that these people who are insisting that unguided evolution is
a fact. It just doesn't fit the evidence.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
So talk about the price you pay when you take
the position that you've taken. Obviously, you've written some books
they're are very popular, but what is the price you pay,
or someone like you pays for swimming upstream?

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Well, in my case, I've been fortunate enough to be
affiliated with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, so I have
a job. In many cases, sad to say people have
lost their jobs for doing what I do. If they
don't lose their jobs, they suffer grievously at their job.

(23:55):
They're stripped of funding, they lose the respect of their colleagues,
they're shunned, they may have no students or research facilities
available to them, and whether it's them or me, there's
always a steady drumbeat of insult and ridicule.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
So you have a very difficult task. If you stand
with the Jonathan Wells, you have the difficult position of
standing against the very people who control the research funding,
who control what gets into scientific journals, faculty appointments. There's

(24:42):
a resistance to all who dare challenge the paradigm. And
I think that even beyond that, and maybe you can
comment on this, For us, it's the old adage that
paradigms only allow us to see what paradigms are allow
us to see, which is to say that we don't

(25:03):
think as much about our paradigms as we think with
our paradigm. So once we're in the water, the macro
evolutionary waters, it's very very difficult to see clearly or
to see that. Yeah. I mean, you're in this water
and you can't think outside the lens of this particular paradigm.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yes. And the guy who first pointed that out at
least clearly was Thomas Kohon back in the nineteen sixties,
who wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
and he pointed out that paradigms exert a very strong
influence over how people think and how they behave, and

(25:47):
they're very difficult to change. And it's not always a
matter of evidence. It's more a matter of politics and
money and power.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
And I think your humor goes a long ways to
getting people to con the absurdity of their paradigms. I
want to talk about some of the examples of zombie science.
The icon, as I said, becomes the argument, and this
is certainly the case when it comes to Darwin's Tree
of Life, which was not only uprooted by the Chimbrian explosion,

(26:17):
but I've writing about this as well the fossil record
shows no evidence of the origin of species, but means
of common descent and natural selection. And yet you see
Darwin's Tree of Life everywhere. In fact, you see it
on the cover of your book. You have the zombie
carrying a copy of Darwin's Tree of Life.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yes, it's actually the only illustration in Darwin's Origin of Species.
And it's a branching tree diagram which starts with a
single species at the bottom and then branches over time
into more and more species as we approach the modern day.

(26:56):
And it's a very powerful image. And you're right, hammering explosion,
which is the sudden appearance of all the major or
most of the major types of animals about five hundred
and fifty million years ago. That posed a problem for Darwin.
He knew about it, but he sort of said, well,
we just don't have enough fossils yet. But the more

(27:17):
fossils people have collected, the clearer it has become that
this branching tree pattern doesn't fit the fossil record. But
people who have this in their minds, who have this paradigm,
look at the fossil record and they see a tree,
and it's very hard to dislodge that illusion, no matter

(27:40):
how much evidence we accumulate.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
I mean, it really works for the uninitiated. I mean,
if you don't really know the arguments and you don't
know the backstory, the icons are so powerful. Another one
is the Ape to Man icon. And you did double
duty on the cover of the book because you have
daristry of life there the icon, and then you have
the Ape to Man icon. But what did Darwin say,

(28:04):
at some future period not very distant, is measured by centuries,
the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and
replace the savage races. I memorized that a long long
time ago, and written about that over the years. But

(28:25):
the hell of it, as it were, is that in
Darwin's ranking, and a lot of people argue about this,
but if you read The Descent of Man, there's no
argument whatsoever. And what I'm quoting is from descent. In
Darwin's ranking, the Caucasian is on the top. Then down
at the bottom, dangling at the edge of humanity, you

(28:50):
have what he wrote about as the Negro or the Australian,
and they're just a hair's breadth away from the most
human like apes. So here you have Darwin very clearly
taking the whole idea, the evolutionary idea, to its logical

(29:11):
extension with the crowning jewels of God's creation humankind.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Absolutely, and I think that was an underwriting purpose of
his theory, was to make humans a little more than
highly evolved animals. So there's nothing special about human beings. Certainly,
we're not created in the image of God for Darwin.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
So you have people like Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, who tries
to absolve his hero Darwin from this kind of racism.
But this is pure and simple racism, I mean, and
when you extend it to humanity, you're saying that you've
got to get rid of the unfit because if the

(29:56):
unfit survive indefinitely, they're going to infect the fit with
their unfit genes, and then evolution is not going to
be possible. So you have a whole eugenics movement that's
closely linked, inextricably linked, I should say, to the evolutionary paradigm.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
That's true. And you know, we spoke a few minutes
ago about the scientific consensus. One hundred years ago, the
scientific consensus in America, the scientific establishment was very pro eugenics,
and thousands of people were forcibly sterilized because of it.
So there's one example of the consensus being you know,

(30:36):
overturned eventually.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Thank goodness, Thank goodness.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, you know you've brought this up in your books,
But I think this is one of the icons that
we got to talk about for a few minutes at least.
That's Derwinius Massili. I love the name Missilly, also nicknamed Ida,
the closest thing to a direct ancestor, the Mona Lisa,
the eighth one.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Of the world.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
The hyperbole that was used with respect to Ida or
Derwinius Vasili was quite over the top. But you know,
you have these icons trotted out, and then after a
while you don't hear about them anymore. They sort of
fade into the recesses of our memory. And just about
the time we're starting to think maybe this was all

(31:22):
a big hoax to start with, another icon shuffles out.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Quite right, Well, that's that's zombie science for you. There's
a story to be told. The story is that we
evolved by unguided natural processes from earlier forms of life,
and so periodically someone trots out a new fossil, a
newly discovered fossil of what they think was that ancestor,

(31:49):
and that's what happened with Ida. It turned out to
be actually a lemur, not anything like a human being
at all. But that's that's zombie science at work.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Zombie science.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
And part of the narrative with respect of zombie science
is the hippo like animals evolving into wales. And this
actually had its genesis with Darwin himself. At the time
people thought it was kind of funny, But in his
time it was bears evolving into wales. But as you
point out in your book, I mean the idea of

(32:22):
a hippo like animal evolving into a whale.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
It's a whale of a tail, that's the bottom line
it is.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
Again, it's a story in search of examples, and so
examples were found. Darwin didn't have any. He had an
imaginary story of a bear swimming with its mouth open
and eventually evolving into a whale. That in the nineteen eighties,

(32:50):
scientists began finding fossils of creatures that they called walking
whales that they said were intermediate between land animals and whales. Well,
the walking whales, it turns out, are a lot like
sea otters or sea lions. You know, they walked on land,

(33:13):
they spent a lot of time in the water probably,
but they were a far cry from whales. Whales live
their entire lives in the water, and they're actually very
different from sea lions and sea otters, And so in
the fossil record, the zombie science storytellers want it to

(33:33):
look like there's a smooth transition from these land animals
to fully aquatic whales, when in fact there's a sharp
break between them. But the story goes on anyway.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, so talked about that a little bit more because
I think this bears elaboration. You know, how in the
world can a hippo like animal evolve into a whale?
We start to think of out sonar in blow holes
and skin that's impermeable to water, and these kinds of things.

(34:07):
I mean, this enormous, enormous leap of faith once you
get into the minutia, well, it is an enormous.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Leap of faith. And again it's the story that takes
the highest priority. In fact, we don't know a mechanism
that could do the sort of things that it would
take to turn a land animal into a whale. They'd
be enormously difficult, and rather than provide the mechanisms, people

(34:38):
just repeat the story. Every now and then they'll come
up with some gene, some stretch of DNA that they
think might be involved, But in every case the ones
that they have come up with turned out to be
basically irrelevant.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
So it seems to me that the narrative that Christians
have faith and scientists have facts is really misguided in
the sense that what scientists really have, at least scientists
that are promoting this narrative, is they've got stories.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
That's true. I mean their faith. I've heard people say,
you know, it takes more faith to believe in unguided
evolution than to believe in God, because you know, the
evidence is so against it, and it's true, it takes
a large measure of faith. I heard a friend say
a few years ago, a Christian friend, that faith is

(35:33):
a belief in things for which we have no evidence,
and I disagreed with her. I said, I don't think
that's true. I think faith is as the classic theological
tradition says, faith is belief in things unseen, but that
doesn't mean we don't have evidence. My faith in God

(35:56):
is based on what I consider to be evidence. The
evolutionists belief in unguided macroevolution is more based on a
faith in materialism than it is on evidence.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
And the fact that something can't be seen obviously doesn't
mean that it doesn't exist. I mean, there's lots of
clear evidence for that. You can't see the love of gravity.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
For example, right archaeoptrics.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Talk about archaeoptrics, You know, archaeoptrics for a long time
was supposed to be a missing link turns out to
be a full fledged bird. And there are a lot
of evolutionists. Stephen J. Gould is no longer with us,
but I mean he actually conceded that before he died.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yes, archaeoptrics was discovered right around the time of Darwin
and seen to provide a missing link between reptiles and birds.
And it's no longer considered that by people who study it,
but it's still portrayed that way in many textbooks, so

(36:58):
the icon is still out there. It's just too good
to give up. But in fact, however, birds evolved, if
they evolved, it was not from archaeopterics, and.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
The very notion.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
I mean, think about this and maybe you can expand
on a little bit. But I mean, you think about
the notion of a scale, reptilian scale becoming a feather.
Unless you start thinking about the intricacies of feathers, you
might buy the story. But the moment you start thinking
about how a feather is constructed, you can't possibly imagine

(37:40):
a scale becoming a feather.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
That's true again, it takes quite a large leap of
faith to think that a scale could turn into a feather,
which is, you know, radically different from a scale.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
And then you have Darwin's finches. I mean, was.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Darwin actually in inspired by the finches to formulate the
theory of evolution, as the narrative of the story goes,
or is this just another story?

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Well, the textbooks still portray it that way, They say Darwin,
when Darwin visited the Galopagos Islands in the eighteen thirties,
he was inspired by these finches to formulate his theory. Well,
nothing could be further from the truth. He actually paid
very little attention to the finches. They weren't named Darwin's
finches until a century later, and only then because they

(38:33):
appeared to be a good example of an ancient ancestor
a bird arriving from the mainland, say, evolving by divergence
into separate species to populate the islands. So it's called
the technical term is adaptive radiation. So the original ancestors

(38:58):
supposedly split into these different speedspecies because of different foods
or environmental pressures or something like that, and so that's
the standard view of Darwin's finches. In the nineteen seventies,
some very courageous biologists camped out on one of the
islands and there was a severe drought that killed about

(39:22):
eighty five percent of the birds on that island. And
the birds that survived had on average slightly larger beaks
so they could crack the harder seeds that were left.
And at the time the biologists predicted that with a
drought every twenty years, this could produce a new species

(39:42):
in less than two centuries. The problem is, when the
rains came back, everything went back to normal. There was
no net evolution, so this sort of one line extrapolation
into a new species never happened.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Why has the war on intelligent design become so ferocious?
I mean, it seems like it was fairly tepid at
the time that people were spouting in the Christian world.
This idea of young Earth creationism didn't seem like the
war was ferocious as it was when the intelligent design

(40:24):
movement came along and said, look, all we're trying to
do is follow the truth wherever it leads.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
Well, you're quite right. When I studied the nineteenth century
Darwinian controversies at Yale, I was surprised to find that
the age of the Earth actually played very little role
back then, because most Christians had accepted the idea that
the first few chapters of Genesis had some metaphorical praises

(40:54):
in them, and that actually there was a long, long
period of time involved. The crux of the matter back
then and now I would say is design. Darwin abolished design,
and that's what produced the most controversy back in the
nineteenth century. And that's the heart of the matter. Now,

(41:18):
the intelligent design movement is threatening the very foundation of
Darwin's materialistic philosophy.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
I mean, is it going to fall like the Berlin
Wall in your estimation?

Speaker 3 (41:32):
I think it will. I had hoped it would be
happening now, but it hasn't happened yet. But I predict
in zombie science that the naturalistic science that masquerades as
empirical science is so full of holes right now empirically

(41:53):
that it will eventually collapse. And probably the mainstream media
will not see it coming, as they didn't see the
wall collapse coming. But it's going to collapse because it
just can't persist in the face of all this counter evidence.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
But there's a lot of counter evidence against intelligent design,
at least supposed counter evidence. I mean, you take your eyes,
for example. You read the literature and you find out
that the eye is a case of ill designed optics
and therefore proof against the whole notion of intelligent design.
So the narrative continues not only in terms of forwarding

(42:35):
Darwinian evolution, but also Ian trying to somehow or other
caste dispersions on the whole idea of intelligent design. And again,
the eye is a classic case in point. You hear
it over and over again, on nauseum, on infinitum. I
is ill designed. If you're going to design an eye properly,

(42:55):
it wouldn't design it the way our eyes are designed.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
I'm glad you brought that up. That's actually one of
the additional icons that I discussed in zombie science, and
I guess it was. The nineteen seventies, Richard Dawkins argued
that the eye is badly designed because the cells that
detect light in our eyes point away from the light

(43:22):
for the back of the eye, and he argued that
no intelligent designer would ever do it that way, and
others have followed suit to textbook writer Kenneth Miller and
various other Darwinian biologists have likewise argued that the eye
is badly designed. Well, it turns out that in the

(43:44):
human eye, in fact, they the eyes of all vertebrates
animals with backbones, the light sensing cells have very high
metabolic requirements. They need a lot of blood and oxygen
and nutrients, and so there's a thick layer of blood
cells of blood vessels rather at the back of the

(44:05):
eye that nourish these light sensing cells. If the eye
were constructed the way Dawkins and other Darwinists say it
should be, the blood would be between the light and
the light sensing cells, and since blood is opaque, we
would be blind. So it's just utter nonsense to say

(44:25):
that the eye is badly designed. And what's more interesting
to me is that the evidence of the good design
of the eye had all been published before Dawkins and
the others started their argument. They just didn't bother to
check the scientific literature. But it's long been known that
the eye functions as well as it does because it

(44:47):
is so well designed.

Speaker 1 (44:49):
And you think about design with respect to the eye
a kind of an interesting question that I'm not sure
exactly how to cash out. But if you think about
common descent on the one hand, and then you think
about metamorphosis on the other, you have a caterpillar becoming
a butterfly, and so it's constituent parts devolve into a
mysterious molecular mixture, and out of that comes the butterfly.

(45:13):
And the butterfly has a field of vision and color
acuity that exceeds even that of a human being. So
you have this metamorphosis from the caterpillar that can only
distinguish between black and white, and then you have the
butterfly that has well eyes that have a sophistication that

(45:34):
either matches or exceeds that of a human being.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Well, it is amazing. It's a metamorphosis is a remarkable phenomenon,
one that totally lacks a Darwinian explanation where the caterpillar
basically dissolves into this pool of cells and chemicals and
from that emerges a fully grown butterfly. No nobody understands

(45:59):
that it's and it happens, you know, constantly all around us,
and it's just, you know, Darwinism has no explanation for it.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
You have another icon, and I'm particularly interested in this
one is the first time I read it when I
was reading your book yesterday, and that is the Darwinian
medicine icon. I don't know if it's called that exactly
in the book, but that's what I recall, the Darwinian medicine.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Again.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
I'm particularly interested in this because it has to do
with cancer, and I happen to have cancer. But how
did antibiotic resistance in cancer surface an icon of evolution
or icons of evolution, when in reality they're properly casts
icons of materialistic storytelling.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
Oh, it's a good question. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria
are exposed to something that poisons them. Two of the
bacterial cells can resist the poison and they survive and divide.
And it's a medical problem obviously, because if I take

(47:10):
an antibiotic to kill the bacteria infecting me. I wanted
to kill them all and not just to produce antibiotic
resistance bacteria. That's been used as an icon of evolution
because it shows survival of the fittest, but it's really
an icon of microevolution. The species doesn't change if the

(47:35):
antibiotic is removed. Typically the bacteria go back to the
way they were. T tuberculosis bacteria remained tuberculosis bacteria no
matter what, and so it's not really an icon of
the origin the species or anything like that. Cancer has

(47:56):
recently been used as an icon of evolution because cancer
cells divide autonomously, you know, they escape the controls of
the body and sort of live their own lives, and
they undergo mutations and various changes, and some people have
pointed this out as an icon of evolution, which is

(48:20):
kind of ironic in a sense. The icon for a
theory is something that actually destroys life rather than produces it.
It's sort of the opposite of what Darwinian theory would need.
But putting all these things together has been something called

(48:42):
Darwinian medicine. And according to the advocates of Darwinian medicine,
since nothing in biology makes sense in the except in
the light of evolution. Nothing in medicine makes sense except
in the light of evolution either. The problem is I
don't agree with the first statement. I think most things
in life do make sense without any need for referring

(49:06):
to evolution. But in the case of medicine, evolutionary biology
has actually contributed nothing. It's advocates really just use it
as a way of telling evolutionary stories for how we
got here and why the body gets sick and things
like that. It hasn't actually contributed anything to improving health

(49:32):
or overcoming disease. It's just a storytelling enterprise, and.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
The storytelling goes on and on and on. I mean,
you sort of alluded to this, but there's a sleight
of hand or a sleight of mind that's used because
people in the evolutionary community will be talking about micro
evolution in place of macro evolution, or as though the
micro evolution somehow or other had morphed into macro evolution.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
Yes, which was actually Darwin's idea that you know, microevolution
does eventually become macro evolution, but nobody's ever seen that.
It's still just a hypothesis. And when evolutionists conflate the
two words. They're actually just confusing the issue. It's like

(50:24):
confusing empirical science and naturalistic science. They're two very different things.
And one way to win an argument is it's called equivocation.
You change the meaning of a word in the middle
of the argument, and it sounds like you've proven something
when you haven't.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
So what's behind all of this? I mean, we're having
this discussion. You can get into the weeds, but what's
behind all of this? You have these hypotheses in empirical science,
you're supposed to test it, and if the hypothesis continues
to fail, you abandon it and you get on another bandwagon.
But in this case, nobody wants to get off this bandwagon.

(51:02):
And it seems to me that it has to do
with we cannot allow any room any place for an
intelligent designer. We cannot allow room for God. And that's
where the virulence comes in.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Yes, I quite agree. Twenty years ago, Harvard evolutionary biologist
Richard Lewinson wrote with remarkable clarity about this. He said,
we scientists have a prior commitment to materialism, and that
commitment is absolute because we cannot afford to let a

(51:40):
divine foot in the door.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Another icon you know we had a touch on. Your
book is just full of great examples homology and vertebrate limbs.
Similarities in limb bones used as evidence that vertebrates animals
with backbones as you would describe, did earlier on that
they were descended from a common ancestor. But as you

(52:04):
point out in the book, homologous structures are defined as
those structures that descended from a common ancestor. And therefore,
at the end of the day, what you have as
a circular argument.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Yes, way back when in Darwin's time, homology referred to
similarity of structure and position. So the bones in our hands,
for example, have similar structure and position to the bones
in a porpoise flipper or a bird's wing and so on.

(52:42):
But in order for that to work for a theory
of evolution, we had to have a mechanism that produces somology.
You know, the bones are not in the egg, the
fertilized egg. They developed later, So two mechanisms were proposed. Eventually,
one was similar developmental pathways, So homologous features, according to

(53:07):
that idea, come from the same place in the egg,
the same cells in the egg, in the different vertebrates.
Another theory was that the homologous structures were produced by
similar genes similar stretches of DNA. Well, both of those
ideas turn out not to fit the evidence, So we

(53:28):
don't have a mechanism for producing homologies. So to sort of,
you know, shortcut things, Darwin's followers redefined homology to mean
similarity due to common ancestry. Well, okay, but once you
do that, you can't say that homology is evidence for

(53:49):
common ancestry for evolution, because it's like saying, Okay, A
is homologous to be. Why is A homologous to be?
Because A and B come from a common ancestor. Okay,
then therefore A and B proved that they come from

(54:11):
a common ancestor. You're just sort of repeating yourself. That's
the circular argument.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
He also wrote about a book that was the myth
of junk DNA? What is junk DNA? What's the significance?

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Well and James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure
of DNA in the early nineteen fifties. The idea was
that DNA carries the genes that were, you know, in
being talked about for decades before that, and this produces

(54:46):
the features of the organism.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Well.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
DNA works, as Watson and Krick pointed out, by encoding proteins.
Yet by nineteen seventy it was clear that most of
our DNA does not code for protein. In fact, about
ninety eight percent of it does not. So Richard Dawkins
and others proposed that this means that the non protein

(55:14):
coding DNA is like a parasite, a junk piece of junk.
It just sort of hitched a ride on the good
DNA in the course of evolution. So it's put there,
you know, by molecular accidents, and really does nothing except
ride along. And this was used as an argument for evolution,

(55:37):
this ninety eight percent of non protein coding DNA. In fact,
in the two thousand and sixth book by Francis Collins,
The Language of God, this junk DNA was part of
his main argument for why we evolved by unguided mechanisms.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Hopefully is let that go?

Speaker 3 (55:57):
He did? He did, to his credit. A year later
or so, he said, I no longer use the term
because he knew very well by that time that most
of that so called junk. DNA is not junk at all.
Although it does not code for proteins, it performs other
functions in the cell. And so there's a huge battle

(56:17):
going on right now between scientists who study the DNA
and conclude that most of it is functional and other
scientists who come from an evolutionary perspective who argue that, no,
most of it has to be junk because evolutionary theory
tells us so. And so it's a very interesting battle

(56:39):
between evidence based science and zombie science.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
So get into a little bit of the psychology here,
if you had. It was a little speculative, But I
often wonder about people like Fransis Collins. Francis Collins, I mean,
is obviously very bright, and he seems very credible to
be on a lot of different levels. And you know,
as you just pointed out, to his credit, he buys
into a theory, throws away the theory when the theory

(57:06):
is demonstratably false. It seems to me that someone in
his position would have enough information, enough air addition to
throughout the whole thing, the whole evolutionary paradigm, and give
up on theistic evolution.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
Well, I don't know Francis Collins. I've never met him,
and so I hesitate to speculate on his motives. But
I do know people like him who, in spite of
the fact that they see the evidential problems, they don't
give up on the idea. And again I'm not referring

(57:47):
to Francis Collins himself, but in some other cases, people
I know really don't want to be disrespected by their colleagues.
They have good positions in academ they enjoy the respect
of their colleagues, all of whom are strongly pro Darwin,
and to question the idea of evolution seriously for them

(58:13):
would be a professional sacrifice, and a lot of them
don't want to make it.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
When you say pro Darwin. It seems to me.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
That Darwin was not only an overt racist by any standards,
but certainly by today's standards.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
But he was an overt sexist.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
I mean he said that a woman can never attain
to the acuity of a man in various skills.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
I mean he was an overt sexist.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
I mean, you read Descentive Man and you don't ever
want to burn that book. You want to make sure
people read that book. And yet somehow or other he's
still lauded. I mean we talk about ripping down statues.
I mean his bust ought to be broken.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Well, you won't get an argument for me that. I
think Darwin is highly overrated. The only thing I could
say in his defense is that in his time those
feelings of racism and sexism were very widespread, and so
he was just sort of part of the stream. But

(59:20):
his modern followers tried to distance him and his theory
from those ideas. And the truth is, I don't think
it's so easy to do that. The ideas are there.
The theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest
certainly is friendly to racism, if it doesn't positively advocate it.

(59:46):
So I think he's unnecessarily idolized, and I think it's
because of this commitment to materialism.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
Yes, so you're just talking about DNA, and I want
to get back to that subject. You know some of
the silly manifestations of DNA centrism, you know, the gay gene,
the god gene, the gambling gene.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
Yes, it's paradoxical. I mean that the same people who
want to say that most of our DNA is junk
also like to argue that DNA contains the secret of
life and controls our anatomy, physiology, and even behavior, and
it's simply not true. I mean, there has long been

(01:00:27):
evidence that there's a lot more going on in our
bodies than what's programmed in the DNA, which is one
reason why we can mutate the DNA of an organism,
and we've done it in fruitflies and mice and worms
and fish. We can mutate the DNA as much as
we like, and it never produces a new species. You

(01:00:51):
can mutate a fruitfly embryo and all you can get
is a normal fruit fly if the embryo overcomes mutations
where you can get a defective fruit fly, or you
can get a dead fruit fly, and that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
This is hilarious. That is I got to tell you
what I was reading your book. It's just hilarious. It's
a matter of what you do to the DNA off
a fruitfly embryo. You only have three possible outcomes, the
normal fruit fly, the defective fruit fly, or a dead
fruit fly. Not even a horse fly, much less a horse.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Right, that's right, not even a different species of fruit fly.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Yeah, exactly. Vestigial organs.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
In other words, of a stigial organ cannot be explained
by intelligent design, and therefore must by default be proof
positive for common descent.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
That's an argument.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
And you know, some of these arguments I actually have
practical implications because I remember years ago. I'm old enough
to remember. When you'd have some kind of an operation
and you're in the region of the appendix, you might as.

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
Well take it out, because it's just a fastigial.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Organ, quite right. Vestigial organs are supposedly useless, so a
designer would not have put them there, presumably, but in
every case they turn out eventually to be useful in
some respect. So when I was a child, I had
my tonsils removed because I got a sore throat in
the standard procedure was to remove the tonsils because they're

(01:02:16):
ves digital organs. Well they're not. They're part of our
immune system, just like the appendix. So of course there
are times when the appendix has to be removed for
medical reasons, but by and large it's not useless at all.
It helps us fight off infections.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
It's also a safe haven for beneficial bacteria, as you
point out. And then there's this illustration somewhere in the
middle of your book. It's almost obscene, to be honest
with you, where you see a little baby with a tail.
It's humorous, it's obscene, it's everything wrapped into one. What
about human tales you point out in the book. I
mean you actually include a picture of a newborn has

(01:02:58):
the tail, and then you have a physicist, Carl Gibberson.
I guess who uses that photoshop fake in a debate?
Is evidence for revolution?

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
Yes, that really was a funny incident. The image of
the baby with a monkey like tale is in fact
a photoshopped fake, and it was used as evidence for
revolution in a televised debate. In fact, a small percentage
of human babies are born with protrusions at the base

(01:03:31):
of the spine. In every case though they are birth defects,
often birth defects that have to be surgically corrected. In
no case are they throwbacks to an earlier period in
our history where we were monkeys.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
So, in your view, and I think this ought to
be stated really clearly for every single person listening to
this podcast, evolution is a science stopper. But in the
narrative it's id that's a science stopper.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
Yes, unguided evolution. Darwinian evolution is a science stopper, among
other reasons, because at points it claims that certain things
are junk, and if you say something is junk, I
kind of discouraged his research upon it. And these things
turn out not to be junk. So in that sense
it is a science stopper. Intelligent design, on the other hand,

(01:04:32):
leads to proofful research. If you think something has a purpose,
you're more inclined to study the function of it and discovered.
A friend of mine once pointed out that Francis Crick,
the co discoverer of the structure of DNA, was at
his best when he thought like a design person, that is,
an engineer. That's when he discovered things about the functioning

(01:04:57):
of DNA that nobody had known before. But then at
other times he thought like an evolutionist, and in those
cases he was dead wrong. For example, he defended the
notion of JUNKNA, so designed for Crick was fruitful and
evolution was a dead end.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
He had some great lines in the book. One of
my favorites is evolutionary thinking is like reverse alchemy. It
turns gold into lead exactly. Another one that I love
is Henry G. I guess the editor of Nature. I
don't know if he still is, but he was a
long time ago who was pointing out that it's effectively

(01:05:36):
impossible to link fossils into chains have caused and effect
in a valid way, and concludes that to take a
line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage
is not scientific hypothesis that can be tested. It's an
assertion that carries about the same validity as a bedtime story. Amusing,
perhaps instructive, but certainly not scientific.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
Right. Yes, he did right that years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
But there are some things that are not so funny.
The Enlightenment is now. And I don't know if you
coined this word or where this came from, but I
saw it in your book. I love the word. I'm
going to use a lot of times. The Enlightenment is
now the Endarkenment.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
Yes, in the book, I'm quoting someone who claims that
intelligent design represents the Endarkenment. But I and many of
my colleagues would say it's the other way around. That
the so called Enlightenment, I mean, which did produce some
good fruit, was actually the Endarkenment in the sense that

(01:06:35):
had tried to replace religious faith with reason totally, and reason,
of course is valuable, there's nothing wrong with it. But
when you may get the king and relegate openness to
religious phenomena to the imagination, and you actually the u

(01:07:01):
turned toward the darkness seated argument, you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
Know that this whole book is fantastic zombie science, more
icons of evolution. And as I said earlier on, I
hope people will not only get a copy of the
book for themselves. You absolutely have to read it. It's informative,
it's entertaining, but it's also really chilling at points. And
I found the most chilling chapter in this whole book

(01:07:25):
to be Zombie Apocalypse. And what I mean by that
is you have this clergy letter project that was chilling
to me, the solicitation of signatures to a letter stating
that the undersigned Christian clergy believe that the theory of
evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood

(01:07:48):
up to rigorous scrutinies. So now you're taking this theory
of macro evolution and the theory has now become proliferated,
pompularized by the clergy, and by a clergy letter that
to me is chilling.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
Yes, I agree if I think if the clergy did
their job instead of just going along with the academic consensus,
we wouldn't be in the fix that we're in now.
It's pretty sad that rather than looking at the evidence
or questioning things, they just sort of sign on to

(01:08:31):
the bandwagon. And that does us all a disservice, I.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Believe, yeah, because the clergy are supposed to protect the flock,
not bring the wolf into the hen house or the
fox or the hen house. Eugenie Scott, director of the
National Center of Science Education, says that she found that
the most effective allies for evolution again, we're talking about
macroevolutionary people of the faith community.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
One clergy with.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
A backward caller is worth two biologists at a school
board meeting. And you actually talk about the bully tactic
to convince Christians that they are not entitled to say
anything about objective reality is actually a bully tactic, and
that bully tactic is now being used within perishes, within churches,

(01:09:22):
within synagogues.

Speaker 3 (01:09:24):
Yes, it's the idea that religion is about our personal
beliefs and cannot say anything about the real world. The
real world is the province of science which is defined
to mean naturalistic or materialistic science. And so basically it's
a surrender.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
It is a surrender. And now we have Evolutions Sunday,
celebrated each year on the Sunday closest to Darwin's birthday.
I mean it absolutely incredibles around February twelfth. Evolution Sunday
encourages clergy congregations to immerse themselves in materialistic evolution. I mean,

(01:10:04):
this is hardly the role of the church, but that's
what we've devolved to.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
Yes, very sad. I'm sorry to say that the denomination.
I attend a church in the Presbyterian Church USA PCUSA,
which recently endorsed the Clergy Letter Project. Very sad. Fortunately,
our pastor doesn't endorse it, but the denomination does.

Speaker 1 (01:10:32):
It's not only the PCUSA, I mean, yeah, the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of America passing a resolution endorsing Zimmerman's Clergy
Letter Project as a whole. Yes, I mean, you really
have a big issue here when this is more from
the Ivory Tower into the public square. You have sloppy

(01:10:52):
journalism which takes the information and then doesn't really fully
understands the information and rejiggers the information and then puts
it out for popular consumption. Now you've got this stuff inside.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
The church.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Being promoted. It's not just innocent school kids anymore. Now
it's the parents, it's the Sunday school teachers. They're buying
in to the skin of the truth, stuffed with a
great big lie. And I think this is your quote
from the book. I don't remember, but I remember the words.
With so many clergy drinking Darwin's universal acid, it is

(01:11:33):
no wonder that religion in America is declining. And I
think that's the heart of the issue. And I hope
you can expand on that just a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:11:41):
I mean, here, you have a.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
Great recession that's happening within Christianity. Kids are leaving the
church in droves. And I as the father of twelve children,
nine natural children, we've got three children. I can tell
you all of my kids in Christian education. They go
off the university and if they are.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
Not forewarned and fore armed.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
My kids tell me that they're peers. They just leave
the Christian faith because they have this idea that you
can uproot the first few chapters of Genesis. And once
you've uprooted that. I mean everything else falls as well.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Yes, especially when you deny that there's a designer, that
we're here for a purpose. I mean, what's left of
faith after that? The polls have shown that many people
are leaving the church. Of course, there's lots of reasons
for that, but one reason given is science, because people

(01:12:44):
are taught that science is true, and science tells us
that religion is falls or at least imaginary. Well, of
course that's naturalistic science, not empirical science. We have nothing
to fear from empirical science, but materialism, asperating as empirical science,
is a threat to religion. And so people are affected

(01:13:05):
by that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Very said, yeah, really affected by that. And science journalists
Paul Wuzen said that science today is riven with perverse incentives,
most of them financial, and the result is, in the
words of biologist Eric Vang, that science is increasingly populated
by predators. I mean, think about that phrase, science being

(01:13:30):
increasingly populated by predators. And you alluded to this earlier,
and the financial motive is huge.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
If you want to get.

Speaker 1 (01:13:39):
Anywhere in academia today, you better drink at this stream
of universal acid.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
Unfortunately, yes, and for me, one of the saddest parts
of this whole story is that that money comes from us,
from you and me, from taxpayers, and yet we have
actually very little say over how it's spent.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):
I could continue on with this discussion forever, but we're
going to wrap it up, bring it to a conclusion.
But I want you to tell everybody listening in how
significant this issue of origins is, this issue of macro
evolution the consequences. From your perspective, this is not something

(01:14:22):
that's inconsequential. It's not just another one of those issues
that we have to deal with. But this is a
macro issue.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
Yes, it's a huge issue. Where we come from says
a lot about where we're going. If we evolved by
unguided material processes from lower forms of life without any
purpose or direction, then why should we look for purpose
or direction. If, on the other hand, we were created

(01:14:54):
in the image of God with a purpose, then we
look to God for that purpose. Otherwise we look back
to the slime, and you know, the whole direction of
life changes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
And some people in the evolutionary community bite this bullet.
I mean, they say, look, if we're merely material beings
living in a material world, our choices are not free.
They're fatalistically determined. It's all a function of brain chemistry
and genetics. There's no right or wrong, there's no good
or bad. There's no purpose to history, and that's got

(01:15:28):
to affect how people live. And we wonder why there's
this big uproar about predators, sexual predators and so forth,
because if you really bite the bullet and you bind
the evolutionary paradigm, there really is no right or wrong
to begin with.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
That's true. It's survival of the fittest, and the fittest
just means the strongest, So it's power and money are
the ruling values.

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
Well, Jonathan Wells, I want to just thank you from
the bottom line. You've had a great impact on my life.
My own writing is my own thinking. Sometimes. I know,
when you're writing a book, it's kind of a lonely
enterprise where you're impacting the lives of a lot of people,
and God has given you a gift. It's the way
in which you write books that are so compelling, and

(01:16:17):
particularly on this subject, because this subject, even if you're
on the right side of the issue, can be very
dry and dusty and kind of a boring subject. But
you really infuse it with life, and for that you
have my gratitude.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
Well, thank you, Hank. I'm flattered deeply. I mean really,
I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
I appreciate you, and I appreciate you taking so much
time to share your wisdom and your insights with our audience.
And I want to talk to our audience for just
a moment. If you like the podcast, make sure you
go to iTunes and rate, because when you rate, you
end up expanding our reach. We will to make sure

(01:16:58):
that we continue in impacting thousands and thousands of people.

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):
All around the world, and the only way that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:06):
Becomes possible is if you take an action step, and
that action step is to go to iTunes and rate. Obviously,
you can consume these podcasts a lot of different places,
but go to iTunes and right give us a five
star rating. Some of the people get to listen to
people like Jonathan Wells, who is informative, inspirational, and intelligent

(01:17:30):
and someone that everybody needs to listen to. So Jonathan Wells,
thank you so much for your time and for your expertise.
I appreciate you, and I don't know how else I
can tell you, but keep on doing it well.

Speaker 3 (01:17:44):
It's a pleasure, Hank, and thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
You got it and again, if you like the podcast,
make sure you go to iTunes and rate the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
Give it a five star rating, expand our reach. Thanks
for tuning in to Hank Unplugged. We'll see next time
with the next An Unplugged episode.