One type of person is a person of faith, who kind of believes things blindly, they just sort of accept what they grew up with. And there's people of science who are rational, they look at the evidence, they pursued truth with a ruthless determination. And obviously, I was a person of science, so that was really problematic.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our official, unofficial Accident Work podcast, where we are launching lifelong kingdom workers from every cause town. I'm Stephen. I'm Isaiah. And today, we are joined by Dr. Brian Miller. It is such a pleasure. It is so good to have you. Thank you for making the time.

It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our viewers who might not know who you are. And so maybe you could just tell us a little bit of who you are, where you're at right now, what do you do?

But yeah, I think we're just very privileged to have a guest like you on our podcast. So go for it. Oh, sure. I'm originally from Clearwater, Florida. So I moved there when I was four years old. I moved from Michigan. So all I really remember of Michigan is being like waist high in snow.

And then I went to school in Boston. So I really love the Northeast area. It's a place very special in my heart. And I studied physics with engineering as a minor, then went to PhD work, doing a PhD in physics. And then afterwards, I worked in various facets of the public sector.

I did some consulting. I did teaching. But then about 10, 15 years ago, I was asked to help write the book, God's Not Dead. So I was actually the technical consultant behind God's Not Dead. And I helped with that book, a lot of the technical parts. Is that the one that's associated with the movie?

Well, what happened was the book was a standalone book. It actually was inspired by the song, God's Not Dead. Oh. And then someone said, you know, we really need to write a book on apologetics. And eventually, Bryce Brooks was asked to be the main writer for that book. So then he asked me to help with some of the technical background.

And then it was the book that actually inspired the movie. So some movie producers read about the book. So they did the movie, which was a theatrical movie that wasn't deep into the apologetics. So it did kind of allude to some of the arguments. So there's sort of a tangential connection there.

Got it. Got it. Got it. And you, I think I remember hearing that you did your undergrad at MIT. Is that right? And then your- That's correct. So I did my undergrad at MIT. And for all you MIT people out there, everything is in numbers. I did course 8A, which was physics with engineering and computer science.

And then did my PhD at Duke University, where I finished my PhD in complex systems physics. Got it. So then about eight years ago, after I'd helped Bryce Brooks with many of his projects, I then went to Discovery Institute's summer seminar program, which was a week-long training and the evidence to design in nature and how that leads to research.

And I'm like, wow, I want to be on the front lines of the science. Because for me, this whole issue of faith and science was originally important because of my faith. But then as I started to learn more about the science, I realized that it's just exciting how the very foundations of science are shifting now.

We're in this amazing, what I would argue, the next great scientific revolution. I wanted to be on the front lines. So now I work for Discovery Institute as the research coordinator, where I help to oversee a lot of our research projects that are around the world. And then I also am a senior fellow where I do my own research.

So I've been doing that for the last eight years, and it's been an absolutely amazing experience. Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. I think you represent a very unique combination of faith and science. I could tell you're passionate. You love science. And we're going to geek out about all that, but also the faith side as well.

And so maybe we could dive into that a little bit first. Did you grow up in a Christian home? How did you become Christian? What was your faith journey like? What happened was I grew up in church. So for me, I was just raised in a Christian church. And for me, it was somewhat of a backdrop.

Like, you know, I was raised Christian. You just, you're Christian. And I grew up in Florida at a time where most people were religious. So it's just like growing up Irish. It's just something you are. And then what happened is I read through the New Testament the summer of my senior year, because I had been accepted to MIT.

I knew that my future looked very bright. I probably did a good job. But then I started to ask really deep questions like, what's the meaning of life? What's the purpose? We're all going to die. And I read through the New Testament. And it was really remarkable because I had heard the stories.

I had heard the ideas, but suddenly an all coalesced. And I'm like, wow, this is incredible. God has called us to be his child. He's called us to be part of his kingdom. And I'm like, I am all in. But what happened was I wasn't really prepared for the challenges I'd faced in my faith.

So when I went to MIT, I took a class on the Bible taught by an agnostic or an atheist. He wasn't a bad person. He was a very nice man. He had no chip. He had no, I mean, he wasn't trying to destroy people's faith, but he was just looking at the Bible through the lens of the secular worldview, which I'll get into later.

He just sort of assumed God wasn't real. He assumed the Bible was just mythology. And he presented these ideas and I'd never confronted them before. And I started to really question my faith. And then I read Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. And most, I'm sure your listeners know about Richard Dawkins.

He's one of the patron saints of atheism. He wrote the book, The God Delusion. You don't really have to explain the book. The title speaks for itself. But The Blind Watchmaker was considered one of his best books because he was arguing that when you look at nature, everything you see in the world, life, our planet, everything is simply a product of blind, undirected processes.

He said things like nature is pitilessly indifferent. And I became pretty convinced he was right. And I remember thinking to myself, it seems like there are different types of people in the world. One type of person is a person of faith who kind of believes things blindly. They just sort of accept what they grew up with.

And there's people of science who are rational. They looked at the evidence. They pursued truth with a ruthless determination. And obviously, I was a person of science. So that was really problematic. And I realized, though, that if God didn't exist, if I'm just an ax in nature, life has no purpose.

There's no meaning to life. And I remember when I was a freshman in college, just looking at the ceiling in depression, just thinking, what's true? What's the purpose of life? And I had a little heart-to-heart talk with God. And I said, God, I don't know if you exist, but if you do exist, you have to prove it to me because I'm a scientist.

I just can't do this blindly. And I didn't know if that was against the rules, if that was just something you're not supposed to do. But that's the way it had to be for me. And I said, I said, but God, if you prove to me that you're true, if you show me the truth, I will follow you with all of my heart and serve you all of the days of my life.

And he really responded to my prayer. I could see how providentially he brought my life into contact with some of the top thinkers in terms of the evidence for the resurrection, the historicity of the New Testament. Who are some of those, who are some of those top thinkers? Craig Keener.

I don't know if you've heard of Craig Keener. Yeah. So he wrote the Bible background commentary. He wrote a four volume series on Acts. I mean, it's like this thick. Oh, sorry. It's a massively thick when you put all four volumes together. And he is, he spent, he told me he spent like 10 hours a day for six years or something studying the historical and cultural background of the New Testament.

Wow. In the original languages. And he really wrote some amazing articles and books on how, if you look at the New Testament from the eyes of a historian, what you conclude is that people like Luke, the author of Luke and Acts is one of the, one of the best historians of all of history.

And if you look at the gospels and you just, you don't even look at it from the lens of faith. You just treat them like historical documents. The conclusion is, if you're being fair, that there's some of the most reliable history in antiquity. So if you question the history described by the gospels in terms of who Jesus was, you have to virtually throw out all of history because of the skeptical hermeneutic you have to use.

So that's what people do. Like if you hear people like a Bart Ehrman, what he does is he looks at the documents with a level of skepticism that if you apply that to other ancient documents, we have virtually no history before the modern era. So that was, that was really encouraging.

And then also there is the issue of science. So I became acquainted with people like Hugh Ross and he talked about the evidence of design and the laws of physics. And you look at physics and it looks like everything was designed for the purpose of life. And he had other arguments like that.

I read a book called Eternity in Their Hearts, which talked about how, if you look at ancient cultures, the seed of the gospel seems to be in most ancient cultures. have the sense of a judgment, the sense of, of, of, of a, of a God. But then even some cultures talk about how they turned away from that God.

So you see in, in history, if you go far back, far enough that you see these resonances of the Christian story that goes all the way back. I read books on comparative religions, books on, obviously lots of books on science. I met a man named Philip Johnson. He was a Berkeley professor.

So I actually called him up. He wrote a book called Darwin on trial. I flew out and met him and he connected me with some top level scientists. I read a book called, uh, evolution of theory and crisis by Michael Denton. And then later was able to be a colleague of his, which was amazing, but it wasn't, it really wasn't just the knowledge that made the difference because I became part of a very nice church network, very much like your network, actually.

Uh, and I have to do a shout out to my, my pastor, Ron Lewis, who was my pastor back in North Carolina at Kings Park international church in, in the research triangle park. Um, and of course he was close colleagues with people like rice Brooks. There's people, I mean, there's so many people I could list that they lived out of faith.

That was so powerful and so real. It just showed that God was real because what I found is that a lot of my challenges to faith weren't simply these intellectual challenges, but it was like, I didn't see the reality of God in many Christians lives. It's like many Christians, they would go to Bible studies, they go to church and they turn their Christian mind on.

But then when they would leave the religious setting, they'd turn their Christian mind off and turn their secular mind on and go about their work, go about their days if God didn't exist. And I said, if that's how it works, I don't really think the truth, the faith could be true.

But when I met people that the totality of their life centered around Christ, and I saw extraordinary answers to prayer, people being healed of sickness in Jesus' name, people who saw extraordinary answers to prayer in terms of reaching unreached people groups, people that lived out the faith fully. I saw that if you fully give yourself completely to God in every area of your life, God proves himself true.

So it was both the intellectual journey and seeing the reality of God both in my life and other people's lives that brought me back to faith. Wow, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that sounds amazing because, yeah, you pray that prayer to God and what's on your mind is like this intellectual journey.

But God knows that there's so much more to us than that. And He provides so much more than just intellectual answers. He provides people, community, real and without faith. And that's really awesome. I love that it was in college too, because, you know, we're all about college ministry and our network.

That's our heartbeat. That's our core. And so it's just always amazing to hear that kind of turning point in your faith journey in college, the time where you have time to do stuff like that, to read as many books as you've read. And so that's one takeaway I have is read books while you're in college.

You know, I think that's huge. I'm just curious because you got into MIT. So you must have had some kind of scientific engineering mind, you know, growing up. And I'm just wondering if that, well, first of all, just a Bible course in MIT, I wouldn't have thought that that would be, that that would have happened.

But like, was that the first time you encountered the conflict between faith and science, the perceived conflict, let's say? Or did you have that even before college? What was quite striking in my faith journey is I just, I just didn't even think about it. I just was Christian. I never thought about it too much.

It's just, you go to church, it was sort of on autopilot. I remember the first time I met an atheist in high school and I was shocked. I mean, what? You don't believe in God? How does that work? I don't get it. And then when I went to MIT, I met lots and lots of atheists and agnostics and who knows what else?

Some people that really believed they were God, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I remember really being confronted with these issues of faith and science for the first time ever. I never thought about them that much. And it really, it really shook me to my core because so many people will say there's this conflict between faith and science.

I'll say that the evidence shows were accidents of nature and that, that destroyed my faith. I mean, I wanted to be a Christian, but I thought I couldn't do it intellectually. So a lot of my intellectual journey has been this question of faith and science. And, and there's a famous quote that you may have heard that talks about how a little science will take a person away from God, but a lot of science brings them back.

And that's so true because what you find is people have this cultural narrative that faith and science are in conflict and they see these superficial tensions. But the more you dig, the more you realize that if a little science takes you away from God, a lot of science brings you right back.

Because if you look at the early founders of modern physics, people like Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, what you find is they weren't just Christians. They were very devout Christians. And it was their faith that really allowed them to do science. Because if you think the world is just an accident, why would you expect there to be order that we could understand?

But if you believe that God created the world according to an orderly pattern, then you would expect that we could understand that pattern. And if God created us in his image and God called us to, to be stewards of creation, then that's, that's, that's, that's a, that's a mandate for us to study the world with the expectation that we'll understand the order God created.

So it really was the Christian faith that created the fertile soil that allowed science to flourish. So you don't have to be a Christian to do science, but you have to borrow Christian assumptions. And then the more I looked at physics, at astronomy, every field, what you see is there's order in design everywhere from the laws of physics to life, to our planet, that there's purpose everywhere, that you see a coherent pattern pointed into a single mind.

So that's one of the most encouraging things that brought me back to faith. Wow. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Yeah. I think, I think just hearing, um, that, that part of your story and how, um, like faith and science, the perceived conflict is what shakes you. But then that, that quote is, is so good that, that a lot of science brings people back.

So, um, just diving a little more into your story. So, so you're diving into the science is bringing you back to God. And, and did, did life just work out after that? Like suddenly everything's working and fine and dandy. You're just like doing your PhD at Duke and, or was there like, what kind of challenges did you face?

Oh yeah. I remember the day that became morally perfect and a perfect relationship with God. And then I hadn't any problem. No, no, no, no, no. Actually it's been, it was really challenging because what happened was when I was finishing my PhD, I really loved science, but then I really felt this calling to serve others going through challenges.

I felt this desire to help Christians struggling with their faith, particularly college students to, um, to see the evidence for God, to understand why God is real. And, but they're really back in that time period, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for that. So I tried different things. I even tried to go into ministry for a while, but every step I took, there was like a wall blockage and it was, it was really disheartening.

I became, because I, faith is hard for me because I'm a scientist. It really is hard. Uh, and God has shown me a lot of mercy and I really just gave up. I said, look, I'm trying to serve you God, but nothing's working out. And I just, I just give up.

And it was hard because I had a PhD in science and I had left the science track to try a different venue. And it was hard to get back in the science track. It's hard to get a job because I was either other overqualified with my PhD or underqualified, not knowing certain technical skills.

And I just, I was just doing all sorts of odd jobs to, to, to make ends meet. And I really felt abandoned by God. It was really hard. And I remember, uh, attending in this church, uh, in, in, uh, Nashville at the time. And I just said, look, you know, I feel like all my dreams, my calling, it's, it's all this sort of dumpster fire over there.

So I just said, you know, is there anything in this church that you need, whatever it is? And I said, well, we need people in children's ministry. That's a common need for children, I imagine. I said, fine. I remember going into the interview and I shared this during my talk and, uh, at, at your conference.

And they said, why do you feel called the children's ministry? I said, I really don't. I said, why do you feel you've got the skillset for it? I said, I really don't. But you know, if you need my help, I'll help. You know, I didn't know what to do with kids.

And I was very fortunate because they put me with, with a man who was a really expert at children's ministry. So I learned from him. And then after three years, as I mentioned, I worked my, my way up to being really mediocre at it. And I was really proud of myself.

Like, like I am just, you know, your extra person you need for kids ministry. I'm there for you. So, and, and, um, and then I did these really random jobs. Like I remember I was doing consulting ones, business consulting, funny enough, I actually helped. There's like this homelessness project in, uh, in Nashville.

So I actually did research on homelessness and helped to create a strategic plan for it. That was, that was a strange thing to happen. And then I w I remember teaching in this college where the students didn't really want to be there. They didn't want to learn. So I had to really work to try to justify why they want to learn science.

And it was, it was hard. And I remember even once I shared this story at the conference of, of, I was helping someone start a business of carrying luggage at the, at the airport. And I helped to carry luggage at the airport. And it was sort of this really demoralizing situation where my friends would see me carrying luggage to the airport and they go, wow, what, what a loser.

He had a PhD, but now he's carrying luggage. And, um, you know, they give me an extra nice tip to be nice, but that was even more humiliating. But, um, but it was, it was really, I remember this day distinctly, cause I was studying to actually be an actuary just, just to find, you know, a job that I could make ends meet.

I remember at an interview, I got this conviction, this deep conviction that this is not the job I'm supposed to have. And then that moment I got a phone call from Rice Brooks and he said, I need your help to do a book. And that changed my life. It sort of put me out back on the trajectory that I thought I was meant to be on.

And then working for discovery, the strangest thing was that all these weird random experiences were the perfect background to prepare me to teach science. Cause what I do is I had to take very technical ideas like quantum cosmology and string theory and, and epigenetic information and explain it at times to high school students.

So it was my experiences teaching children and my experiences. Uh, teachings, uh, students didn't want to be there, which were valuable in and of themselves because just, you know, serving God in whatever way is valuable and God honors it. But, but even beyond that, it was those experiences that prepared me to do what I'm doing today, even to help manage projects that experience in business consulting.

So I can see my life almost like this movie where you see all these things in the past, every closed door, every disappointment, every failed promise was essential for me to get on the right path to be where I'm meant to be. So that's been my experience. It's amazing.

Wow. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. It's awesome to hear that. I mean, I think, um, I think one thing that, uh, as you were sharing that I was thinking about was, um, well, one, it's, it's a little hard to imagine that you were hitting all these closed doors. I mean, given your credentials and, and I guess I just, I grew up in a time where I think apologetics was going through like a Renaissance, you know, and, and, um, and, and it just kind of exploded, you know?

So it's, it's hard to imagine a time where YouTube was not a wash and, you know, apologetic videos and things like that. Um, and so, um, and then, and then, yeah, you go through that tough period where you're just like, what, what is life? What is happening? Um, and yet God was preparing you, you know?

So I think about, um, like, I don't know, like Saul of Tarsus, you know, going off and just, you don't hear about him for several chapters and acts and he's just sort of like through this preparation. Right. Um, so that's, that's, that's really cool to hear that. Um, so how, um, how did you get involved with the Discovery Institute?

Like what happened there? And, um, did, did that come with like, um, what, what I guess opportunities, like, like did that open up and what costs did you, did you have to pay to getting involved with the Discovery Institute? Maybe for our listeners, you could explain what the Discovery Institute is.

Right. And, and Discovery Institute is, uh, it started, uh, several decades ago and it was more of just a think tank. I mean, they did policy issues. Like they talked about homelessness. They talked about education. They talked about education, transportation. And then what happened is, uh, Stephen Meyer is a scholar who, who's very, really one of the, probably the most well-known face in the intelligent design movement.

And, uh, he wrote articles about this idea that, you know, if you look at nature, you see design. I mean, and, uh, people in Discovery Institute were like, well, that's really interesting. So they invited him over and they realized that they, they had a commonality and it's not an obvious commonality, but, uh, in the Discovery Institute, they, they recognize that there's issues with the free market.

There's injustices, but nevertheless, the free market, uh, in entrepreneurship really does help to lift nations out of poverty. And it's a philosophy where information can come to a person and that information can then create wealth. So many people have this idea. It's sort of a zero net game. So you have to take from some to give to others.

And there's some of that may, may have to be the case in different contexts, but what happens is if you believe in inspiration and entrepreneurship, then this information is something that's beyond just the resources you currently have that can create change in the same way in biology, there's a perspective that you've got just random chance and time and, um, that, you know, we'll, we'll develop organisms to a certain extent, but in the design framework, there's information coming from the outside and, um, the intelligent design community is very broad.

So some will think that information for life might be aliens, or they might think it might be platonic forms, but for those of us who are Christian or Jewish or, or another monotheistic faith, believe that God puts information into our world at different times to create something new, something beautiful, something dramatic.

So this idea of information, creating wealth, creating life is something that's central. So, so Discovery Institute started to work with design and biology. And if you're curious about the economic side, that's more like a George Gilder or, uh, or someone like all those lines, but, um, but Steve Meyer became part of the Discovery Institute.

He was working with a person named John West. He was part of the Discovery Institute. And eventually we started to network with other people that were interested in the idea of design. And one of the forerunners of course was, was someone named, uh, Philip Johnson. And Philip Johnson was a lawyer and he was looking at the Darwinian framework.

He read Richard Dawkins and he goes, this is all circular reasoning. I mean, this, this is all fluff. So he wrote this book called Darwin on trial, which really flustered people because he was showing how this entire framework is, is, is built on nothing of substance. And what happened was he then was invited to Harvard to debate people like Stephen Jay Gould.

And Stephen Jay Gould was a Titan in the field of evolutionary biology. Like he's one of the most famous people out there. And so Stephen Jay Gould is debating this lawyer. And what happens is after the, this, this exchange and Stephen Jay Gould was very gracious. He's a, he's a very gracious man.

He's deceased, but he's a decent, he's a very good human being. But what happened was Stephen Jay Gould was kind of sweating because, you know, he realized that this random person in a different field was exposing these tensions of what's taking place. And, and Stephen Jay Gould was interesting because he realized that there was an enormous tension in paleontology, the fossil record, because people were saying that if you look at fossils or the history of life, you should see this gradual development, this tree with branches.

And he realized that the truth was the opposite, that you see things are pretty much always the same when they suddenly appear out of nowhere. So he came up with this idea called punctuated equilibrium with Niles, Niles Eldridge. And he was getting some flack for that too. So I think he was feeling this tension and Steve and, and Philip Johnson didn't help the situation because he was this upstart pointing out these problems.

Well, I met Philip Johnson and he, he started to network with different scientists because what happens in every field of biology, people assume that the other fields have the goods when it comes to evolutionary theory. So if you're not a paleontologist, you think the fossil records got the goods, but paleontologists know that it really doesn't, it doesn't fit pattern at all.

So I think, well, maybe the embryologists have got the goods, but then the embryologists know, well, there's some serious issues here, but maybe the molecular biologists have it. And the molecular biologists are like, yeah, there's tensions here, but maybe, so you see how that works. Wow. Yeah. So Philip Johnson was bringing people together in all these fields.

People like Jonathan Weld's that studied embryology. People like Doug Axe that studied proteins and how hard it is to evolve proteins. Obviously Stephen Meyer, people like Bill Dembsky and Bill Dembsky was a mathematician philosopher who basically talked about how you can scientifically detect design. There's a sort of methodology looking at things like specified complexity.

And he's saying, if you apply this method, and he wrote this book called The Design Inference, and it was praised. It was published out of Cambridge, University of Press, top level experts said, this is great. But he made a fatal mistake. He said, you can apply these ideas to biology and it looks like biology is designed.

And then suddenly he became persona non grata. There were smear campaigns launched against him. So he became part of this company of ne'er-do-wells and misfits. And that kind of started the intelligent design movement. And what happened is there were other people, like you have the traditional creationists who were doing some very good research in many ways, looking at design and biology.

And they're the real forerunners. And you have like your young earth creationists, like Institute of Creation Research, Answers in Genesis. You got your old earth creationists, like Reasons to Believe. And I respect what they're doing, but what happened, and this wasn't their fault, but people marginalized them and says, well, because they're looking at the Bible, it's all a religious thing.

And now what happened is people are saying, if you just look at the science, it doesn't matter how you interpret scripture, you see design. And that was a threat because now we were going to their territory. So they couldn't marginalize us. So what happened is then you started to have books being published, like Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell.

You have books like Icons of Evolution, where Jonathan Wells showed that pretty much all the major arguments, the icons of evolution, were highly sketchy. Like the idea of, you may have seen, you may not have seen this, but if you go like 20 years ago, if you look at your evolutionary textbook, they talk about Heckel's embryos.

It's the idea that if you look at the early embryos of vertebrates, they're very similar. That's all faked. That was faked. Are you really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you look at the earliest embryos, they're completely different. Dude, I remember those in my science textbooks. What? That's crazy. And then, of course, you've got the Miller-Urey experiment where you shock these producing gases and you get amino acids.

Like, well, this is amazing. Well, as it turns out, it's all a bunch of nonsense because if you look at these mixtures, yes, you do get some amino acids, but they're always in this incredibly complex mixture with tars or some would call it asphalts with gazillions of other molecules.

So there's simply no way a natural process is going to pick out the amino acids, then string them together in these proteins. That's a theoretical impossibility. So the fact that's presented as a win is just not honest at all. You have stories of things like how the eye is badly designed.

Did you ever hear the eye is badly designed because the photoreceptors face forwards? Nonsense, because if the photoreceptors face forwards, they would burn out and stop working. They have to face backwards so they're embedded in tissue to get the nutrients to cleave off the burned out disks, et cetera, et cetera.

So again, you see virtually every common argument people make for the truth of evolution is inaccurate. Or the whale series. Here's one of my favorites. Oh, I remember the whale one. Yeah. If you look at the fossil record, it shows things appear suddenly and don't change. If you look at way back 550 plus odd million years ago, you see the first appearance of many of the major animal types appear suddenly and then don't change.

And what happened is this was a huge problem. So people said, oh, gosh, we've got to we've got to understand how this evidence fits. So they cherry picked a few pieces of data and they would artificially put animals in a series to create the illusion that you've got this evolutionary process taking place.

And the whale series is sort of the iconic example where you see like Pachycetus or some bland animal. And then you have these various intermediate stages. And eventually you've got a fully aquatic whale. And people said, hey, you look at this gradual progression, but it's smoke and mirrors because each of those animals is very different from each other.

They're not believed to be on an ancestor descendant series. And they're not even in the right order. Wow. Because you've got like Pachycetus, which is early. But what people found is that a fully aquatic whale is way back here, close to Pachycetus, as well as other intermediates. And then the quote unquote other intermediates are after this fully aquatic whale.

Now, what I'm not saying is that people are being deliberately deceptive. That's not the case. Evolution is true. I was just about to ask, like, why are they doing this? Like they're not being deliberately deceptive because if you assume evolution is true and that's your lens, then whenever you see similarities, you'll assume those similarities imply common ancestry.

So if you see what looks like a progression, you'll assume that kind of points out this plausible path evolution could take. But the problem is, why do we have series like the whale series? Well, there are millions and millions of fossils. And these creatures have dozens and dozens of traits.

So inevitably, once in a while, a series will come together that looks like a progression. I mean, the analogy I used at the conference is one of my favorite analogies is if you imagine the movie WALL-E, where you have the people left the earth and you have this robot stacking garbage into piles.

If aliens came, they might notice these beautiful series. You have like a unicycle, a bicycle, a motorcycle, a convertible car, a car and a bus. And they might think, what an incredible picture of evolutionary processes in action. But again, it's completely artificial. If you look at all the data, what you see is a clear pattern that things appear suddenly and then don't change significantly.

So that's just kind of the examples of what Jonathan Wells was dealing with. You've got other people like Stephen Meyer that talked about the origin of life, how it's a theoretical impossibility for simple chemicals to turn into a cell. And you also see indisputable evidence of design because like a cell is a nanotechnology vessel with energy production, information processing, air correction, selective gateways, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it looks designed so clearly that to deny it, you just have to choose to suppress the evidence. And then there's many other people that came together that formed this movement. Well, that was great. But what happened is started, people started to take notice. There was articles in the New York Times, there was interviews.

And then the scientific establishment, which is controlled essentially by a materialist worldview, which I'll get into, said this is enough. So enormous amounts of money and effort was put in place to launch smear campaigns against the people involved in this movement. They would review books where they would grossly misrepresent the content.

They would spread misinformation. In fact, if you talk to a large percentage, even of Christians, everything they would know about the Discovery Institute is misinformation, things they would read off Wikipedia, which is disappointing. So that's what I stepped into. So I was actually using their material, talking about it, speaking in different countries about the evidence of design.

They didn't even know who I was. But then when I went to their summer seminar, it was perfect timing because Casey Luskin, who's one of the leaders of the intelligent design movement. Sorry, what year was this? He went to South Africa that you got involved? This was 2016, late 2016.

Okay. So I was in the summer seminar 2016. Casey Luskin, who's been involved with this movement forever, he went to South Africa to finish a PhD in geology. And it was perfect timing because I just stepped in, said, I'm here. How can I help? He had stepped out. So I took his position, which was the research coordinator, that he was able to come back after he finished his PhD.

So for me, the cost has been minor. So like for me, because they pay my salary, no one's going to fire me. No one's going to try to prevent me from getting a job, except because I'm not applying to a secular university. So for me, all I get is obviously people will spread rumors about me.

They'll spread propaganda about me. There may be an atheist doing a whole special session with a smear campaign against me, but you know, that's just normal. It's not a big deal. So for me, it's been really minor. I mean, even friends of mine who I went to college with, they kind of see me as a ne'er-do-well and as a kind of an instigator and, you know, sort of a malevolent force in society.

And that happens. But for me, it's minor. Other people, it's been much more serious. Like Rick Sternberg is a scientist who works with this brilliant guy. He was at the Smithsonian, and he was doing just amazing research in mathematics and biology. And I could speak hours about that. But what happened is he was the editor for a magazine at the Smithsonian, and he published an article by Stephen Meyer.

So Stephen Meyer did this beautiful article about the Cambrian explosion, about explosions of information. And then they sent it out for peer review. It went through all the processes and got published. But as soon as the Smithsonian published an article that by this individual that had the audacity not to bow down before the altar of scientific materialism, not to commit to suppressing the evidence of design and nature, when they published that, Well, I have to quote from Lord of the Rings and the Two Towers, where Gandalf is saying Sauron's wrath will be swift.

And that's kind of what happened to Rick Sternberg. He was locked out of his office. There was a smear campaign launched against him. He was driven out of the field. He completely lost his career. There's other people like Gunter Beckley, who is a paleontologist. And Gunter Beckley was, I think he was just an atheist in Germany, who was at the Stuttgart Museum.

And he mocked us. Like he said, this is ridiculous. And then someone said, before you, you know, you criticize these guys, why don't you actually read their books? And he made one of the worst mistakes of his life. He read the books. And then when he realized that this evidence of design was really compelling, and he realized that the criticisms he heard of the intelligence design community were completely false.

It was all misinformation. Because people can't respond to the arguments, so they present caricatures of the arguments that they can usually sweep down. And then he put on Facebook that he thought this design idea made sense. And then he was called into his office, and they said, well, you have to leave because you no longer share our worldview.

So he was driven out of the field, and then we picked him up. There's people like Eric Kadeen. And Eric Kadeen was a professor at Ball State. Maybe he was a physicist, but he taught a volunteer class called the Boundaries of Science. And he talked about this idea of design in nature, and there's limits to what we can know.

And then an atheist, a very prominent atheist, organized his minions to try to pressure the university to have him fired. And fortunately, he did not lose his job, but he was not allowed to teach his class. So people, when we have scientists around the world that contact us, and we have to say, you have to be very, very careful.

Because if you're public about your views, very bad things can happen. And there's people that weren't given PhDs. There are people that weren't given tenure. So that's sort of the situation we deal with. So we have this very tight balance where we try to present the research we do.

We talk about the people that support us. We're trying to protect people's careers. So that's the dilemma we always face. You know, it's interesting. So that kind of lines up with my experience of the intelligence design movement, which I remember there was sort of like a heyday where it felt like a lot of people were talking about this.

So I remember watching some of like the Discovery Institute films, like, you know, The Privileged Planet, I think, came out of that. And I think there was one called Icons of Evolution 2, I don't quite remember, but as a kid. And then I remember in my high school days, like, it was a topic at, I don't know if you're familiar with JSA.

It's like a debate thing, Junior Statesman of America. And one of the topics was should intelligent design be taught in school? And so I feel like there was a period where it was really like getting talked about. And then it seems like there was kind of this backlash that you're describing.

And so I guess I'm wondering, like, what is sort of the state of things today? Because I remember that like feeling of, oh, wow, Discovery Institute, they're doing good work, but they're really under fire. And I was kind of wondering, like, are they going to survive this? And clearly they have.

I mean, you guys were around. So, like, where would you say the state of things is? Is it, like, still kind of at peak persecution or, like, how are things these days? Well, what happened was there was a famous trial called the Dover Trial, which is really interesting because Discovery Institute doesn't want to teach intelligent design in high schools.

Because, one, it's just politically problematic. But, two, it probably would be taught really badly. It's like people that teach religion in high schools. That's not necessarily a good thing if they don't know what they're talking about. So, our desire is simply to teach good science, like teach all of the evidence, even things like the Cameron Explosion, you know, teach the challenges.

So, teach more science, not less, about evolution. And don't worry about teaching intelligent design. But you still, universities shouldn't have smear campaigns against the professors. That's not a good thing. But then this Dover Trial took place, and Discovery Institute had said to these people, Please don't make a law to force people to teach intelligent design, or even to allow it.

This is going to be a problem. We weren't listened to. They had this court case. They invited Mike Behe to come in to do testimony. And what happened is the judge basically watched this movie called Inherit the Wind and just basically gave verbatim propaganda written by atheists against us and said, well, I don't think intelligent design is science.

It shouldn't be taught. And then that was the excuse people made used to say, well, you see, it's been disproven. It's been discredited. Now, to say that a judge discredited an entire scientific movement is ridiculous. But people were just looking for any excuse they could find to shut this down.

And then there was increased persecution against people that supported it, people that if there was a grad student that showed sympathies or said, you need to stop talking about this. You're not going to you're not going to afford the career. And people started like the Rick Sternbergs, just their lives are destroyed.

So it's a lot like the church in China. In China, when Mao came along, it became very dangerous to be a Christian. So the Chinese went under the Chinese Christians went underground and people in the West thought they had vanished. But what happened is the church was growing and growing.

And then once China was more open and there was better communication, people were like, whoa, there's there's like hundreds of millions of Christians. What happened? What's happened is we've gone largely underground. So our network of scientists are very quiet about their views. We work behind the scenes. We train future scientists.

We write our books. We do our thing. There's there's very few people like me. Like I'm perfectly comfortable being like the clown at the dunking booth at the fair. People want to throw rocks at me. I don't care. I'm just I'm real thick, thick. But there's very few of us that have put ourselves in that position.

Then we just support the people doing the research behind the scenes. So in terms of the public perspective, the persecution, if anything, has increased. So and also it's been very effective because a lot of people have invested a lot of money influencing Christian leaders. So you'll have people with very, very deep financial pockets that will hold conferences where the only people invited are Christians that embrace evolution.

Then those Christians will gain enormous rewards. Like if you're a Christian that denounces intelligent design, if you say Christian should just uncritically embrace the materialist framework, the world will be at your footstep. I mean, you will be blessed beyond imagination. You'll get top level positions at universities and government.

You name it. So the cost of questioning the status quo is enormous. And the rewards for promoting the status quo in the church are enormous. So what's happened is there's been very coordinated smear campaigns in churches against Discovery Institute. There's been enormous pressure on Christians just to embrace the evolutionary framework.

They're told if you don't embrace evolution, you threaten the existence of the church. If you don't embrace evolution, then you are against science. So theologians were basically said, you've got to make scripture, theology, church history compatible with evolution. So there's essentially a rewriting of church history. There's a reinterpretation of scripture.

There was a reinterpretation of church leaders like Aquinas to conform to the evolutionary framework. So that's been the challenge we face. So again, most of the opposition against us is from misinformation. And what you'll find is we'll write a book like Stephen Meyer wrote, write a book like Signature in the Cell or Darwin's Doubt or you have Bill Dembski who just wrote a new edition of the design inference.

And what will happen is you'll have people that will review the book, but they'll give caricatures of what's in the book. They'll look at some trivial detail and say, aha, because this detail isn't right. You can ignore everything in the book. Don't read the book. Just trust us. We'll tell you what's in it.

And that's the challenge. And what's happened is Christians have not been encouraged to think deeply, to research. It's sort of a YouTube world where they want sound bites. So people are scared to even talk about it. And very, very few people. I have never met a critic of ours that has seriously studied our literature with the intent of honestly pursuing the truth.

In almost every case, they assume it's false. They'll grasp at any straw, no matter how flimsy, any scholarship, no matter how sloppy, to justify ignoring the evidence. That's the situation we're in. So can I ask, what do you say to people who – because I think the move that I've seen for a lot of Christians is I feel like we used to fight the evolution battle a lot more.

Like, yeah, and I think a lot of that was due to Discovery Institute. And I feel like more and more I'm hearing like, let's just not fight the evolution battle. Like, you know, you can be a Christian who believes in evolution or not, you know, as long as God had a hand in it.

And it seems like that does seem to be – so what do you say to people who are like, yeah, why fight this battle? Like, why die on this hill? We can just say, I don't know if evolution is true or not, but that doesn't mean God doesn't exist and that doesn't, you know, preclude the possibility of, you know, theism also being true.

Well, I must not have gotten out of sleep. I feel like I'm in a cantankerous mood. So you have to – I apologize. I'm usually much nicer if I don't. We welcome. But in the beginning, beginning of the book, If God's Not Dead, Rice Brooks had a very powerful quote.

I can't remember the exact quote. It may have been from Wilberforce, but – and I think it might have been from Wilberforce. If not, I'm just making up a quote, but it will make my point really nicely. And this is kind of exactly what Christians are always told. Like, think about back in the Old Testament where you have Ahab and Jezebel saying, why fight this debate about Baal and Asheropos?

Let's just bow down to them. You know, we'll be accepted by the culture. There'll be less tension. I mean, why are these cantankerous people like Elijah just stirring up problems? They're not being peacemakers. They're not promoting unity in Israel. You have people in the first century that you've got the emperor saying, everyone needs to bow down and worship the emperor.

And many Christians are like, yeah, let's do it. Why be offensive to the culture? Why put Christians in a bad light? Let's just be peacemakers. Let's just bow down to the emperor. Or slavery is a great example. When you have Wilberforce who's saying that we should challenge slavery because it's not good.

In the United States, you have the abolitionists. And people said, you know, you're just creating division in the church. You're just giving Christians a bad name. Why do this? I mean, just bow down to the culture. And Wilberforce had this famous quote that may be him. I might be making this up.

But he says, whenever Christians decide not to defend the truths that are under attack in their time, they're not being true to the gospel. And a central doctrine of the Christian faith is that we are created by God as a deliberate act of his will in his image. We are not unintended accidents.

So what happens is people say, well, you know, let's just maybe God did it. Well, that's not what evolution teaches. There was, there was a, I think it was a New York Times article. There was an article that was signed by multiple experts in evolutionary theory. And they want to make it very clear.

What we're teaching is that there is no purpose, no direction, no guidance, no end goals. Everything is an accident. That's what the theory teaches. And what happens is a part of it really is understandable. Like you have like the, the quote unquote culture wars. You had like the evolution versus creation debates and people, you know, that was pretty cantankerous and people weren't happy about that.

So there's, there's good reasons. And in fact, there's even Christians who grew up in churches and they're told, if you believe in evolution, you're going to hell. And that's very traumatic. Yeah. So, so, so I'm, I'm sensitive to that. Like I'll be very cautious when I talk about these issues because I don't want to trigger painful memories.

So I try to create space for that. But the reality is, if you look at the theory, it states that we're unintended accidents. If you're really honest. In fact, if you read the big books, people like Ken Miller's book, his book about reconciling evolution and Christianity, finding Darwin's God.

If you look at the book language of God, lots of these books where Christians are saying, we can, we can reconcile it. What do they say in these books? What they say in these books is we know evolution's true because life looks so badly designed so often. They'll say, well, you know, the, the, the appendix doesn't work.

Yeah. I've heard that like design flaws. Yeah. Yeah. And none of it's true actually, or, or my favorite that was junk DNA. If you look at, you know, the 1990s, early 2000s, people said half of our genomes don't function. It's just junk DNA. So obviously, if that's the case, we just evolved.

And that makes perfect sense. But intelligent design proponents for decades said, no, we predict that quote unquote junk DNA will actually work. Well, guess what happened? They now know it's not junk DNA. It actually works like because of the ENCODE project. But before you'll have Christians saying, because if you, if you describe DNA as a language, then the language of DNA looks less often, less like the edicts of an omnipotent creator than the incoherent babblings of a severely intoxicated alcoholic.

So what's happened is Christians, that's like the movie Inception. Inception, if you've seen that movie, it's the idea if you plant an idea in a person's mind, it takes root. Well, when you tell a Christian that the science suggests that they are at least to a large extent unintended accidents, that's an idea that will spread like a virus.

And many of them will lose their faith. And others of them may not lose their faith, but the tension will cause them to live a schizophrenic faith where they'll compartmentalize their faith. Well, I'll be a Christian on Sunday, but deep in my heart, I know there's all these tensions with my face with the real world.

So I'll kind of turn my faith off when I go to work or when I'm in public. So that's the challenge. There's a hidden cost that people have. Now, if a Christian, there's lots of very sincere Christians that believe evolution very sincerely. They love God. I have no desire to cause them stress.

I respect them. If it works for them, it doesn't harm their faith. Hey, let's be at peace. Let's be peacemakers. That's fine. But the problem is so often what happens is the theistic evolutionists say, this is the only opinion you're allowed to have. And they use tactics of emotional manipulation, intellectual bullying.

They say you're against science if you don't believe this. So they're forcing all Christians to essentially bow down to the altar of Darwin to confess the secular scientific establishment of Lord of their lives. And they can still have Jesus as part of their life as long as it's privatized.

Now, that's being a little extreme, but at times that's what Christians are pressured to do. And that's a serious problem. So if I'm hearing you right, it's not valuable. I'm usually a lot nicer. I apologize. I had no idea. I mean, it's fascinating because like Isaiah, I remember kind of experiencing maybe the being on the user end maybe of all these things.

I remember the discovery end, like all this stuff coming out. And then I remember like suddenly like, you know, Religious came out and there was like movie and documentary after documentary. There was that one, the guy who does the clear eyes commercials. Like he did a whole like expose on like the ID, like intelligent design, being like scientists getting discredited because they were sympathetic to the movement and stuff.

And so to hear it all strung together, one is, is it's, it's kind of a shock, to be honest. Like, like I'm a little like, whoa, like I'm, I feel like I'm hearing that the full story, it's, I'm a little bit taken aback. And so that, that's me being someone who kind of experienced parts of it, you know, but for someone who's, who wasn't part of it, who just kind of finds himself on the end, I imagine hearing all this almost feels like what?

Like it's feels sinister, you know, feels almost like, like a conspiracy theory ish, you know, like what would you say to someone like that? Like, oh, we're like, it's really true. Like, we're going to find like, you know, like this wasn't reported anywhere. Like, you know, it's, it's just, it's just crazy to hear this.

Like, uh, yes. Well, I want to reemphasize this point. I want to reemphasize this over and over that many, many Christians are very, very sincere and wanting to promote evolution. They're, they have the best motivations. They're good people. It's honestly, it's only a few wolves and sheep's clothing. There's been a handful of people that have grossly misrepresented us that have been responsible for the misinformation, but most people are just decent people wanting to do what's right.

So there's just a handful of people. And I've gone after some of those people pretty harshly. So most people like Stephen Meyer and Mike Behear are super nice. They just take the abuse and the mistreatment. They're always greatest. I'm not. I've been in the church world. So I know the danger of wolves and sheep's clothing.

So I will go after people. And interestingly enough, they don't go after me. They don't misrepresent me so much. It's funny how that works. But anyway, but most Christians are very sincere. They want to do what's right. And they just feel that if you challenge evolution, it discredits the church.

I get it. I get it. So I want there to be peace. I don't want to create turmoil. All I want is for the people that want to hear the truth, the opportunity to hear the truth. That's what I want. Because what you'll find, in fact, there is one of our colleagues, I think it was Alistair McKittredge, did a PhD thesis where he looked at, or a doctoral ministry thesis, what is the outcomes of teaching intelligent design?

And what he found is when Christians are taught the evidence for design, it has extremely positive outcomes with their faith. They're able to integrate their faith more fully. They have much more confidence to share their faith. There's a huge difference. And that's not rocket science. If you tell Christians that the science suggests you're an accident, that isn't going to help.

I mean, that's something that many Christians are just bewildered by, but I assure you, it's not going to help. But if you tell them the truth about how the evidence shows that they're designed, that's going to empower them to not just be confident in their faith, but actually to share their faith.

So that's sort of the situation. Yeah, that's a really good implication for, like, discipleship in the church, given we're in. And I think that the fact that, you know, it's just a few people who are creating this, I don't know, this impression of, you know, the smear campaign, all that stuff makes sense in a day and age where people are used to that.

Like, we understand that that's a phenomenon of the internet, where, like, a minority of people propagate these things. And then, like, so I think that helps to understand, oh, okay, like, that's what's going on. So, like, and I appreciate what you said earlier, too, about, like, you know, on the other hand, there's been people who've been told, like, if you believe in evolution, you go to hell.

You know, I remember I had friends in college who would ask me, like, can I be Christian and believe in evolution, you know? And to me, I was like, where is this question coming from, you know? And clearly it came from some, you know, someone who told them that, you know.

So, so if you were to, like, like, the scientific field today, like, you know, I've always, it always comes up around, and I Google the number every now and then. I always, like, what percentage of scientists are Christian and which ones are not, stuff like that. But it doesn't even seem like that's actually the question I should be asking.

The question is more like, do, how many, what percentage of, of scientists, like, have a materialistic, you know, random view versus what those who kind of like, oh, there's got to be something. So it's more like, is there a God or not, right? That's the more important and telling question.

Do you have an idea of, of, like, yeah. Does my question make sense? It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. Do you have any idea of the state of, like, scientific communities' belief in all that today? I don't think there's ever been a survey like that done. Huh.

Because, I mean, there's lots of surveys that lots of Christians, lots of scientists believe in God. That's common. Physicists particularly, because you look at nature, it looks ordered. There seems to be a crater. Like, people would talk about God in my PhD classes as kind of an offhanded comment.

So that's not a big deal. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, physics, not a problem. I mean, I mean, it could be if you're in a very hostile environment. Sure. There's lots of scientists who are, like, if you go to, like, a graduate fellowship at a university, you're going to find a heck of a lot more PhDs in physics than you will English majors.

Okay. Or film students. I mean, it's just, that's, that's not an issue. That is really surprising. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, physicists, there's a very strong Christian networks. Now, again, this gets into this bigger picture, though, because, and you have to ask, where? Are we talking in Kenya?

Are we talking about Europe? Because one thing I talked about in my talk for your conference is this debate goes back to, like, ancient Greece. So, way back, 500 B.C., people debated, is everything explainable by natural processes? Matter in motion, chance in time. In fact, the ancient Greeks even had ideas of evolution that were very similar to Darwin's.

There was even a poet named Macretius in the first century B.C. that had an idea of natural selection. So, when Paul was talking about, in Romans 1, how when you look at the world, you see the fingerprint of God, he was dealing with the same debate we're dealing with.

And the people that he was supporting were people like the Stoics, who were descendants of people like Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, particularly Plato, who believed that you see evidence of design in biology, particularly humans. This is an ancient debate. What happened during the Middle Ages is the pendulum swang very strongly towards design, very strongly.

The materialist view of the world, materialism meaning that everything is explained by matter in motion, physics, and chemistry, that died out, largely. But then, as modern science was birthed, that materialist view became more plausible, largely because so much of nature can be explained by simple equations, like Newton's equations, Kepler's equations of planets going around suns.

But what happened, though, is people still thought biology showed clear evidence of design. People like William Paley had the famous watch argument, where you look at a watch, there's so many pieces that are perfectly interconnected for purpose. You see a watchmaker. In the same way you look at life, you see all these different pieces put together for purpose.

Right. But what happened with Darwin is Darwin changed everything. And people think Darwin's ideas came in a vacuum, but they didn't, because Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, and he actually read Lucretius. And he wrote a book, a poem called Temple of Nature, where he was bringing back this materialist view of biology.

So Darwin was influenced by him. Darwin had entered societies with free thinkers who were very much shaped by materialist philosophers. So Darwin's philosophical lens was very materialistic. And he portrayed himself in his biography, his autobiography, as very open to evidence, just seeking the truth. But that's not the way he portrayed himself in his private letters.

But he wanted to, because it's a very Christian culture, he had to give God language to his ideas. But what was interesting is he took Paley's arguments, his examples, and even the cadence, and Stephen J. Gold talks about this, but changed, replaced God with natural selection. So natural selection became like a demigod with limitless creative power that allowed you to remove God from creation and follow in the tradition of the materialists back to Democritus.

So what happened at the same time in society is you've got skeptical philosophers, people like Voltaire, people like Hume, people like Spinoza, who were rethinking society from the perspective that either God doesn't exist or he's not involved. And what happened, it was those philosophical tailwinds of the skeptical materialist philosophy that helped to propel the evolutionary narrative to the forefront.

And it was the evolutionary narrative that helped to empower and legitimate these secular philosophies. In fact, you have people like Aldous Huxley, who was the grandchild of Thomas Huxley, who was one of the most vocal defenders of Darwin, who basically said that a lot of the philosophers liked the idea that we weren't created by God because then we wouldn't have a purpose, and we could choose our own purpose.

We could decide for ourselves how to live. So you see that there's these very deep philosophical motivations that help to propel the theory. Now, the theory people embraced on its own merits. It was a very powerful theory. It was very unifying. So there are certainly very rational reasons to accept it.

But it was elevated from a theory into a sacred creation narrative, the foundation of Western culture. So it took on a life of its own beyond the science. So then it became something you could not question. It was a sacred story that had to be passed on from generation to generation.

And if you look at the arguments that people give, there's sort of these classic arguments for why evolution is true. You could go to Berkeley's website on the evidence for evolution. It's basically the same as you'd see any place. And Christians just sort of repeat the same faith tradition.

But every argument you find in the last 20 years has been severely weakened, completely overturned, or is supported almost entirely by cherry-picking evidence and circular reasoning. And the scientific challenges to the theory are now enormous. In fact, the challenges are so severe. There was a conference held in 2016 called the Royal Society of London.

They had new trends in evolutionary biology, where upper echelon evolutionary theorists came together saying the standard evolutionary model doesn't work. It can explain small changes, but it can't explain large changes. And they were coming up with different ideas of how to fill in the gaps. But there was no evidence presented that there's any theory that could possibly justify natural processes mimicking the abilities of a talented engineer.

That's kind of the way the situation is. Wow. What is the secular alternative to evolution? Because it's almost like—I kind of feel like probably some people are thinking, like, we have to stick to this, because otherwise, like, how can we not acknowledge there's a god out there, you know?

Like, is there, like, a prevailing secular alternative to evolution out there? There has been kind of very fringe theories. Like, you had Goldschmidt, who said you have hopeful monsters, that you might have an organism that gives birth to something radically, radically different. So there's certain crazy ideas out there, but there's really nothing that people take seriously.

In fact, there's what's called the third—what's that? It sounds like the X-Men theory. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Literally, literally, that's what it is. I mean, that's just a good description of it. Oh, by the—as a side note, that's why the evolutionary theory seems so plausible, because it permeates our culture.

You see X-Men, you watch TV specials. It's kind of the backdrop of our culture. It's like if you were in Saudi Arabia, you would constantly hear the Koran being quoted. You'd hear calls to prayer. You would permeate every area of society. That's kind of like evolution in Western society.

It's sort of that sacred narrative that we keep repeating. But you have, like, the third wave of evolutionists, people like Jim Shapiro, people like Gerd Mueller, people like Dennis Noble, very thoughtful. And they've actually often been very gracious towards us. Like, they're very thoughtful. But they've said, we've got to come up with something, or else if we don't, we've got to embrace this idea of design, and we don't want to do that.

In fact, there was another famous philosopher I quoted from during my presentation. It was Richard Levant, and he was a professor of biology at Harvard. He basically said that what you have to understand about the debate between science and the supernatural is scientists will accept a natural explanation no matter how implausible, no matter how counterintuitive, because we're not willing to allow a divine foot in the door.

So evolution really is the only idea that people have of how you can create these brilliant engineering designs. And they're looking beyond natural selection. They're looking to things like niche construction, things like phenotypic plasticity, lots of other, you know, lots of additions. But there's really nothing on the table that can help, because if you look at the mathematical timescales, you look at lack of mutations that create logical changes, you look at the fossil record, everything points to the idea of one of two possibilities.

Either God directly created things from scratch, or he took something that existed and radically altered it in a very short period of time. And I mention that because there is some evidence for common ancestry. People will talk about things like the Gulo pseudogene. So there are some pieces of evidence that could very reasonably be interpreted as common ancestry.

So I'm not critical of that. But all the evidence suggests that it's impossible for an undirected process to create these large scale changes in the time available. And all of the evidence shows that a mind designed things in advance. That's where we're in. That's very helpful, because I think what people often hearing all this will say is stuff like, well, eventually we'll find a theory, or eventually something will come up, and it'll explain all this data.

You know, we just haven't found it yet. But what you're saying is, no, no, the data is pointing in a direction. But then because of, because, oh, Isaiah, I think your theory is going on. Yeah, my theory did something funny. Sorry. No worries. But so because, so all the evidence is pointing in one direction, but because of this materialistic, and I like the way you put it, the tailwinds, you know, there was this historical moment where suddenly like the perfect storm of like all these different things happened.

And then like, it really turned the tide on the society and culture and the whole thought around that. That's why, like, people are holding on to this, this theory that no longer works, you know? And so, gosh, have you ever seen, what does it take, I guess, for a scientist who like was totally willing to concede God, but then somehow, even with that is like materialism, like, like it's still, like, like, what does it take for someone to see that that doesn't fit and change their mind?

Yeah. Right. Great question. Well, I, I like to use the analogy of the matrix. You have to disrupt the matrix and they have to be willing to consider a completely new lens. Like Gunter Beckley was like that, like Gunter Beckley. And I find that people train in philosophy have the ability much more easily than those that don't.

Oh, interesting. So most scientists are incredibly naive scientifically about, there's incredibly naive about philosophy. In fact, they don't even like philosophy. They just like the way the world is. But Gunter Beckley had more of a philosophical mind. He was able to step outside of his assumptions and look at the data from a different set of assumptions.

And that allowed him to break free from the matrix of materialism and see the design evidence. But that, but you have to want to see the truth. Most people don't want to see the truth. Like I've, I've so, I've talked to so many people and as soon as they're starting to see the strength of what I'm saying, they're like, they back off.

Like, I don't really want to talk about this anymore because people know if you embrace what I embrace, you could destroy your career. You could lose your reputation. Bad things will happen. So that's a big challenge, but it's also a spiritual battle because again, in like Paul talks about, I think it was a second Corinthians chapter 10, one through four talks about how we don't wage war against flesh and blood, but we wage war with supernatural weapons against the principalities and powers.

But then he talks about casting down arguments. So you see this weird connection between the spiritual realm and the intellectual realm. And I find some amazing things happen that I remember talking to a freshman at Duke and she was an atheist and she really didn't want to change her atheism.

And we were going to, we got into a conversation. You're going to do a conversation where you kind of dig in and you know, it's going to be just a long conversation. Well, in two minutes, she goes, well, everything you said makes sense. I'm like, what? Wait, what just happened there?

And she became a Christian. Wow. Literally the Holy Spirit opened her eyes and she could see the truth. Wow. It was, it was shocking. I remember speaking to freshman Duke and the student became, and I was talking about design and nature and the student became a Christian like the next week.

I'm like, well, what happened? Wow. He said, well, you showed me what I believed about science was wrong. So maybe everything I believe is wrong. Wow. So you have these, you have these kinds of situations, but the key is that a person has to be willing to step outside their philosophical assumptions and see the world from a new lens.

Like if you have a pair of glasses and your glasses are the wrong prescription, things are going to look really fuzzy. Things aren't going to make sense. But if you put on the right, the right prescription, everything that makes is much clearer and evolutionists know that there's issues. They know it, but they're just not willing to look from the lens of design because they know that there'd be consequences if they did that.

That's the situation. Do you tell people that? I'm hearing a couple things there. Sorry. Yeah. Do you tell people that, like the whole thing about you need to step outside your framework? Because I feel like I run into that a lot. People who are like, no matter what, religious explanations are the least likely explanations.

So just by definition, I can't believe them. Like, so do you give them that spiel that you just gave us? Oh, I love that spiel. Yeah. I'll talk about that. That's why I love the matrix or the Truman show or ready player one. And I'm sorry, what was that recent movie with Free Guy?

Things like that. I love those sorts of movies. Yeah, yeah. Because, and that's why I always talk about the history beforehand. Because I want people to understand that the way they see the world is not just the way the world is. It's a philosophical tradition that you inherited. So I'll invite people.

I say, I'll invite you to take off your lenses and see the world from my narrative and just see if it makes more sense. That's what I often will do. Yeah. And that's respectful. People appreciate that. And if they're willing to do that, it can gain a lot of traction.

So I always start with those philosophical assumptions that people have. Yeah, that's neat. The historical approach. I feel like I don't pursue that often. I think what it sounds like. Yeah. And I recently read Rebecca McLaughlin's Confronting Christianity. A lot of what she does in each chapter actually is kind of like just trace the history of some of these questions that she's addressing.

It's a very, I think, a different approach than I've experienced in like classic apologetics where it's a lot more philosophical. But it almost makes sense because it's sort of like because the science is so imbued with this materialistic thing, you have to kind of reach into these and begin to reach into these other fields to sort of round out the perspective and the knowledge and the data.

And I also, another thing I heard was, you know, you mentioned two of the cases you mentioned were college students, right? And college students don't yet, they're not yet invested in the same way that someone whose career is on the line, you know? And so to, I might take that quote, you know, like a little bit of science takes you away from God.

I might be like a little bit of philosophy takes you away from God. A lot of philosophy brings you right back. You know, like 100% of people. My favorite quote related to philosophy is, philosophy is a great servant, but a terrible master. Yeah. I also like the, there's one preacher who said, you should not be allowed to take a semester in philosophy.

You only take one semester, you're messed up. You're messed up. You need to take more. Like, there's only so much philosophy you should take. But I found that quote from Wilberforce that you mentioned. You know, we can fact check this later, but it says something like, Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers' arguments were deeply flawed.

Is that the one that? It's a different one, but that's the next one. Okay, cool. Well, hopefully we'll be able to find the right one and put in show notes or something like that, because that's awesome to hear Wilberforce say something like that. So, man, I think we need to, you know, close soon.

But there was so much you talked about that has implications on evangelism and discipleship. But maybe one thing I wanted to ask is, like, you do a lot of talking on college campuses, which is neat. And, you know, you know our church is all about the college campus. What are some things that you're seeing, some shifts you're seeing?

And, you know, maybe you could share a few more stories about that. And out of those experiences and those shifts you're seeing, what are some must-dos that churches need to do today for reaching the next generation? Great question. Great question. And, again, I'm sure there's sociologists that can know this a lot more than I do.

But what I am seeing is people want to have deep conversations. I mean, I was at MIT. I think pastors from one of your Boston-area churches were there. And it was really shocking because I was with Rice Brooks. We're talking about these ideas of faith. And this student was not religious, but he said at the end of the presentation, how can I come to know more about God?

People want to have the conversations. I mean, I've been shocked that I've been at these elite meeting of scientists. And I will just allude in the most subtle way to my faith background. And people will come up to me and say, can I talk with you? I've got questions about faith.

Wow. And you'll see them come up and make comments about conversations they had with their parents. I mean, it's really striking. So Christians need to learn how to have the conversations because people want to help, want to have those conversations. Christians need to learn how to listen. Like Rice Brooks came up with this idea called salt.

Start a conversation, ask questions, listen, then tell the story. Most people, he would say, are much more like talk. You talk, tell the story, you argue, you get louder, and then you keep going. That's kind of what's happening. I like that. So Christians need to be courageous because the problem is that Christians are afraid.

They're afraid to have the conversation. They're trapped by the matrix. They're concerned about their careers. And once you start talking to people about faith, it gets easier and easier and easier. And you say, God, give me opportunity to talk about faith. I will talk about God will give you opportunity.

Also, the idea of worldview, the idea of these narratives is so important to understand the true Christian story, its entirety, and then understand the false stories, and then know how to challenge the false stories, the false assumptions, and talk about how the Christian story makes more sense of reality, more sense of science, more sense of philosophy, more sense of medicine, and even teach Christians how to apply the Christian story in whatever their vocation is, whatever their interest is.

And also in discipleship, you've got to understand that discipleship isn't just, you know, isn't just sin management. It's not just stop being naughty. It's not just being theology. It's helping people step out of a false narrative into the real story, encouraging Christians to change the patterns of their life where they're not addicted to YouTube or video games or caffeine or whatever, but they learn to just meditate on Scripture.

They learn the full Christian story. And the story of God is not just this abstract ideas. It's about our life. It's like allowing God to step into our hurts, our wounds, the lies we believed as children, and allowing God to rewrite the story from the ground up. We learn to forgive.

We learn to show mercy. We learn to accept the truths of who we are. So the totality of that story in all of our lives is really important. That's helpful. Yeah, that's super helpful. Man, is there anything that, I mean, you mentioned these experiences where you just make an illusion.

There seems to be this renewed spiritual hunger that's just under the surface for people. Anything else makes you hopeful or can encourage scared Christians to either get equipped or get trained in defending their faith or like being, it just, is the tide shifting? Is that, I guess, is, yeah.

There is, and again, I kind of focus on my specialty, but I think there is definitely a sense of tide of shifting. If you read people like Justin Briley, he wrote a book about this. Yeah. There's a sense. This podcast is awesome. There's a greater openness. Yeah. Yeah. There's a greater openness to truth, to God.

But I think the science is incredibly important. It's sort of a secret weapon that's been dormant for a long time. And if you use it wisely, because for some people, they'll get triggered if you talk about these issues. But if you use it at the right time with the right person, it can make a huge difference in seeing that they're not an accident nature, but they're created by God in his image.

And the science is really, the Discovery Institute is just getting warmed up. We've talked about the evidence of design, but now we have teams of engineers and biologists who are thinking about how do you rethink biology from the ground up from an engineering perspective. And what happens is everything about life is the opposite of what you'd expect from a blind, undirected process.

And it's exactly what you'd expect from engineering, because you see that life is not like some randomly thrown together parts that come together to do something useful by chance. But you see the same engineering logic, the same design principles, the same top-down design where mine planned everything in advance, where it's like an open field, it's the Wild West.

We've published several papers in the last year really showing how engineering principles make sense of life. So that is an incredible encouragement, both on the science front, but then as people hear the truth about the science, it'll create an openness to God and to breaking free from the materialist narrative.

That's what I see, which is really encouraging. Wow. That's cool. That's great. How can we get more plugged into getting ourselves equipped or more in tune with what the Discovery Institute is doing? How can someone, a Christian who's like, I want to learn more. How do I do this?

What can we do? Well, what I do is I sent you a nice Word document, a few pages, and that Word document I have, like, our main resources. Like, if you go to intelligentdesign.org, that's a clearinghouse of articles, of videos. You have great videos. It doesn't matter if you know nothing about science or math.

We have beautiful videos that illustrate molecular machines. We've got long story short videos for the lay public. We've got other issues, other videos on science. We've got articles for the basic, intermediate, advanced. Also, Discovery Institute is sort of the hub of the research. People can sign up on our email list.

I have a link for that. We've got Evolution News, which are our articles. I have a lot of articles on that. And, of course, we've got our summer seminar. So for people who are like, man, I want to be at the forefront. The summer seminar, we have two tracks, one for science, one for people that want to know about the cultural implications, are designed for people that want to be at the forefront of this conversation, even doing research.

So if you go to Discovery Institute summer seminars, that's a great way to get trained. And, of course, if there are listeners and you're like, man, I've got to talk more, there's things I disagreed with, I need to ask about this, I'd be happy to meet with your leaders, your congregants later and do more Zoom conversations so we can make that happen.

That's awesome. That's so kind of you. And, yeah, we are definitely going to put that we're talking into the show notes so that we can dig into those resources. And, man, Isaiah, do you have any further questions? I think just the final one, because I think going back to what we were talking about earlier, like evolution versus ID, I think people do want to know, like Christians, they want to know, like, should I be fighting this battle?

Like, what's true? If there's, like, one book you'd recommend, like, hey, this is how to get your feet wet, what would you recommend to people trying to figure that out for themselves? It depends on your level of expertise. Like, if you go to Darwin's Doubt, it's a really nice summary of the different arguments.

If you're more of a layperson, interestingly enough, there is a cold case detective, J. Warner Wallace, who wrote a book called God's Crime Scene. Oh. And that's a super lay-level, interesting introduction to it. That's a really, really nice book. Huh. And then on the word document I created, there's, like, what's that?

Oh, I didn't know he covered it. Oh, we didn't know that. I know of his historical case, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, it was a great book. It was really well done. And then on that document, there's, like, one-page or two-page articles you could read to get introduced to it.

So I gave a lot of resources that are just quick and dirty. You go in, you get the basics. And then other, I have, like, specific topics to go in more depth. But that document should be helpful for moving forward. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. And I want to just leave it open for any last comments, remarks, encouragements, anything that you feel like you want to read in.

We have a church full of a lot of scientists and STEM people. What would you want to say to them? I said I had an amazing time at your conference. It's incredibly encouraging to see a network of churches that value academics, but they value giving your life fully to God, that care about students.

I just, I just, I just commend where you're headed. I just encourage any scientists that are listening or in the network, don't underestimate how God can use you to transform lives and how God could help use you to bring about the next great scientific revolution. So that's my encouragement.

But in all things, give your heart fully to God. Trust him with all your heart. Allow him to transform the core of your being. Because what God really wants is a relationship with us. And make that foundation, your relationship with God, and then allow the science to be just a aspect of your worship to him is what I'd encourage you to do.

Wow. And I think it means a lot knowing your story, to hear that from you and how you've applied that. And we've been a blessing. Oh, we've been blessed by you because of what you've done in your life, you know, to give God everything, make him the Lord of your life.

And like you said, make science part of that mission and that worship. So thank you so much. I'm glad you're there with Discovery Institute to kind of pull out the heavy guns and shoot back a little bit. Because I do feel like they're a little too nice. So I'm grateful you're there.

Thank you so much for your time again. Tune in to future episodes. Like, subscribe, everyone, for more of this. And yeah, if you guys want to see Dr. Miller again on one of these Zoom calls, please hit us up. Let us know. All right. All right. Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. - Sure.