WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:22.400 Hello. Like many of the previous speakers, I want to start by thanking the organizers 00:22.400 --> 00:28.240 for inviting me here. It's been a great couple of days, and the hospitality over the last 00:28.240 --> 00:34.160 couple of days has just been wonderful for me and my wife and our other friends. So my 00:34.160 --> 00:42.160 title of my talk is How Biologists Are Already Using Intelligent Design Principles, and why 00:42.160 --> 00:48.900 their explanations for this are problematic. The word intelligent design has been used 00:48.900 --> 00:56.580 here, and it basically means God's intelligence designing the earth. So imagine that you woke 00:56.580 --> 01:01.580 up one day in the future, and you found that the intelligent design movement had won the 01:01.580 --> 01:08.580 day, and all biology and all biophysics scientists followed the principle that life had been 01:08.580 --> 01:16.500 intelligently designed. What would the world look like? How would people do science differently? 01:16.500 --> 01:20.900 Well let me give you an analogy. To answer how science might look different, let's imagine 01:20.900 --> 01:25.900 that you were an engineer working in a computer company. You're given a chip made by a rival 01:25.900 --> 01:31.900 manufacturer. It works very well. Your job is to see how it works so that you can make improvements 01:31.900 --> 01:37.900 on it and make your company's own version to sell. This is known as reverse engineering. 01:37.900 --> 01:42.900 Now imagine how your work would look different in two different cases. In case one, you were 01:42.900 --> 01:48.900 told that the chip was created by making random circuits and throwing away the ones that didn't 01:48.900 --> 01:54.900 work. And you continue to do this until the chip is found that works. In the second case, 01:54.900 --> 02:01.900 you were told that the chip was designed by a brilliant designer, a master engineer. Now 02:01.900 --> 02:05.900 can you imagine that your work would look differently depending on which one of these stories you believed 02:05.900 --> 02:12.900 about the chip. I would expect that in the first case, I would find a lot of junk. Well 02:12.900 --> 02:18.900 in the second case, even if I found things I didn't understand at first, I would believe 02:18.900 --> 02:23.900 that they had a purpose and so I worked really hard to find out what the purpose was for the 02:23.900 --> 02:29.900 things that I didn't understand. So which one better understands the way biology is being 02:29.900 --> 02:35.900 done today. Well I'm here to tell you that an enormous amount of biology that is being 02:35.900 --> 02:42.900 done today is being done on the second premise. That biological systems are extremely well designed. 02:42.900 --> 02:48.900 It is as if the intelligence design movement had totally won the day already. All kinds of 02:48.900 --> 02:52.900 biological research is being done as reverse engineering in which it is assumed that living 02:52.900 --> 02:57.900 systems are nearly optimally designed. Of course the scientists by and large do not give credit 02:57.900 --> 03:03.900 to God. And I will discuss later in this talk how they explain their findings and give a critique 03:03.900 --> 03:09.900 of that. So a lot of the work that I'm going to be talking about here is in a publication, 03:09.900 --> 03:14.900 this publication available online. And in this article I quote from and cite many articles 03:14.900 --> 03:20.900 from the scientific literature. It's also based on my own experience from going to physics conferences 03:20.900 --> 03:26.900 in the U.S. and sitting in on some very crowded by physics sessions as well as personal 03:26.900 --> 03:33.900 conversations I've had with well-known biophysicists including people like Bill Bialica from Princeton 03:33.900 --> 03:38.900 who does not believe in God as far as I know. A general term for this type of thinking I'm going 03:38.900 --> 03:46.900 to give you is the word teleology. Teleology means looking for a purpose or a goal in something. 03:46.900 --> 03:51.900 In design systems we assume that there is a goal that was set and things were done to reach that goal. 03:51.900 --> 03:58.900 In standard evolution there is no purpose and no goal. So for instance Richard Dawkins titled his book 03:58.900 --> 04:04.900 on evolutionary theory The Blind Watchmaker. No purpose. But the literature on biological systems 04:04.900 --> 04:12.900 now of people actually doing biology is full of terms like teleology and purpose and goals and design. 04:12.900 --> 04:18.900 And so all of these imply the idea of not being blind but actually having a purpose in mind. 04:18.900 --> 04:23.900 So I'm going to give you several quotes here for examples of this. 04:23.900 --> 04:30.900 This one is fairly lengthy but I'm going to read some parts of it at length because this is a famous biologist 04:30.900 --> 04:39.900 writing a review article in a well-known biology journal. And he says that biologists must learn to embrace the idea of teleology. 04:39.900 --> 04:46.900 So he says why is the sky blue? Any scientist will answer this question with a statement of mechanism. 04:46.900 --> 04:52.900 Atmospheric gas scatters some wavelengths of light more than others. To answer with a statement of purpose, 04:52.900 --> 04:58.900 in other words to say the sky is blue to make people happy, would not cross the scientific mind. 04:58.900 --> 05:06.900 Yet in biology we often pose why questions as to the purpose and not just the mechanism that interests us. 05:06.900 --> 05:13.900 So the question, why does the eye have a lens, most often calls for the answer that the lens is there to focus light. 05:13.900 --> 05:20.900 And only rarely the answer that the lens is there because lens cells are induced by the overlying ectoderm. 05:20.900 --> 05:24.900 As a group, molecular biologists shy away from teleological matters, 05:24.900 --> 05:28.900 perhaps because early attitudes in molecular biology were shaped by physicists and chemists. 05:28.900 --> 05:31.900 And I'll come back to that in a little bit. 05:31.900 --> 05:35.900 Geneticists routinely define function not in terms of the useful things that the gene does, 05:35.900 --> 05:37.900 but by what happens when the gene is altered. 05:37.900 --> 05:43.900 Molecular and biology and molecular genetics people continue to dodge teleological issues. 05:43.900 --> 05:48.900 And they would continue that if it were not for their field's remarkable recent successes. 05:48.900 --> 05:54.900 Molecular biologists are forced to wrestle with an overtly teleological question. 05:54.900 --> 05:57.900 What purpose does all this complexity serve? 05:57.900 --> 06:01.900 These elements can be seen as the foundation of a new calculus of purpose. 06:01.900 --> 06:03.900 And let me just say that again. 06:03.900 --> 06:11.900 He's saying that biology has to embrace a new calculus of purpose, of design, in the actual biology. 06:11.900 --> 06:17.900 Enabling biologists to take on the much neglected teleological side of molecular biology, 06:17.900 --> 06:23.900 what purpose does all this complexity serve, may go from a question few biologists dare to pose 06:23.900 --> 06:24.900 to one on everybody's lips. 06:24.900 --> 06:30.900 This is a well-known biologist writing in a secular biology journal. 06:30.900 --> 06:36.900 Now in these next quotes, I'm not going to read them all, but I'm just going to summarize them. 06:36.900 --> 06:41.900 In this one here, again, these are some quotes from the mainstream literature. 06:41.900 --> 06:48.900 Not only teleology, but explicitly the word design is now accepted and common. 06:48.900 --> 06:57.900 In the first quote of here, a non-causal explanation means one looking at the end of the process, not just the beginning. 06:57.900 --> 07:03.900 Aristotle called such things final causes, which is another way of talking about teleology. 07:03.900 --> 07:09.900 One looks for the purpose and then works backwards to find out what things were needed to find that goal, 07:09.900 --> 07:12.900 or to achieve that goal, just like we did with the computer chip. 07:12.900 --> 07:20.900 So in the literature now, in the article that I did, I did a survey of all of these engineering concepts here, 07:20.900 --> 07:23.900 which are now commonly used in systems biology. 07:23.900 --> 07:27.900 It's not just a language, but it's actually driving the science. 07:27.900 --> 07:34.900 So the following things are all found in biology and are found to be just the same as engineering concepts. 07:34.900 --> 07:37.900 Feedback loops, thresholding and discrimination. 07:37.900 --> 07:40.900 If you're not an engineer, I'm sorry, I don't have time to explain all of these, 07:40.900 --> 07:44.900 but these are all things that are learned in graduate school engineering. 07:44.900 --> 07:51.900 Oscillators and frequency filtering, control and signaling, information storing, timing and synchronization, 07:51.900 --> 08:00.900 addressing and routing, hierarchies of function, redundancy, fail-safes, interactive adaptation, optimization and trade-offs. 08:00.900 --> 08:05.900 And actually, in many cases, engineers are learning good methods of doing things 08:05.900 --> 08:09.900 by looking at biology and learning new methods from them. 08:09.900 --> 08:14.900 Here's another quote, which I again will not read these at length here, 08:14.900 --> 08:19.900 but you can see in them how design is now being used. 08:19.900 --> 08:24.900 And in the first quote, this is a writer who is not a believer as far as I know, 08:24.900 --> 08:29.900 who is going to write an entire paper about design in the living systems 08:29.900 --> 08:37.900 and yet feels compelled for political reasons to say there is no implication of a designer. 08:37.900 --> 08:40.900 Do you see that here? I think I have a laser pointer. 08:40.900 --> 08:47.900 So he fills in the parenthetical remark to say, even though I'm going to talk in this whole paper about design, 08:47.900 --> 08:52.900 nevertheless, don't take me to be talking about God. 08:52.900 --> 08:58.900 In the second quote, there is the term of information science, which is being used 08:58.900 --> 09:01.900 and called the essence of all biology. 09:01.900 --> 09:06.900 Now, in the past decades, the term information was rejected by many people to talk about biology 09:06.900 --> 09:15.900 because information intrinsically implies teleology, gathering knowledge about a system to accomplish a purpose. 09:15.900 --> 09:22.900 In other words, information science is a highly sophisticated type of engineering. 09:22.900 --> 09:30.900 Now, in this next slide, I'm going to show you just one example of the kind of design that we see at the cellular level. 09:30.900 --> 09:34.900 We had a dance just a few minutes ago, a very beautiful dance. 09:34.900 --> 09:43.900 And when we look at these molecules, this is the molecule that is used to reproduce DNA inside of every living cell. 09:43.900 --> 09:47.900 And it is, I would say, a type of dance. 09:47.900 --> 09:52.900 The video I'm going to show is the DNA duplication mechanism. 09:52.900 --> 09:56.900 It's produced by a professional scientific institute in Australia. 09:56.900 --> 10:00.900 And it's based on years of research and computer modeling. 10:00.900 --> 10:02.900 So let me go forward to that now. 10:02.900 --> 10:07.900 And imagine in your mind the dance that God has put into the cell. 10:07.900 --> 10:09.900 And I think this will start. 10:09.900 --> 10:11.900 Oh, let me go back. 10:11.900 --> 10:13.900 So it should start in just a minute. 10:13.900 --> 10:26.900 One more try. 10:26.900 --> 10:32.900 So I'm willing to wait because this is a beautiful video. 10:32.900 --> 10:36.900 So while we're waiting for that, let me just tell you a little bit more about it. 10:36.900 --> 10:40.900 This is a mechanism that is used to copy DNA. 10:40.900 --> 10:51.900 Whenever you have a DNA and a cell divides into two, you have to take the two strands of DNA and copy them. 10:51.900 --> 10:52.900 Okay. 10:52.900 --> 10:58.900 And so now you can see this is the weaving mechanism or the dancing mechanism by which the DNA is copied. 10:58.900 --> 11:05.900 And I want to emphasize that this mechanism has to work before natural selection can work. 11:05.900 --> 11:11.900 Because natural selection is based on the idea of copying the DNA from one generation to the next. 11:11.900 --> 11:15.900 So this whole mechanism has to be there before natural selection can do anything. 11:15.900 --> 11:17.900 Because you have to copy the DNA. 11:17.900 --> 11:19.900 So let's just enjoy it with the music for a minute. 11:19.900 --> 11:24.900 We can turn up the music a little bit. 11:24.900 --> 11:37.900 All of this is necessary for life even to exist, for the DNA to be copied. 11:37.900 --> 11:42.900 And these are all molecules and each one of those dots was a single atom. 11:42.900 --> 11:47.900 So duplicating an information string with billions of sites is not easy. 11:47.900 --> 11:52.900 And this is the kind of mechanism that we need in order for that to work. 11:52.900 --> 11:59.900 So, how do biologists who are not believers in God think about these things? 11:59.900 --> 12:06.900 Essentially, they would argue that this high level of design is to be expected as an outcome of Darwinian evolution. 12:06.900 --> 12:10.900 And the argument is that weak organisms will be killed off. 12:10.900 --> 12:15.900 And therefore, since inefficiency generally makes things weaker, inefficiency will increase. 12:15.900 --> 12:17.900 There's two problems with this. 12:17.900 --> 12:22.900 The first is that's not been historically a prediction of atheistic Darwinism. 12:22.900 --> 12:27.900 Just like we did sort of in our thought exercise at the beginning of my talk, 12:27.900 --> 12:32.900 if we imagined that a device was randomly made, we would expect a lot of junk. 12:32.900 --> 12:37.900 And that's historically how Darwinists have actually argued that there is a lot of junk, 12:37.900 --> 12:40.900 as Vazerana talked about earlier. 12:40.900 --> 12:46.900 Secondly, although this might work as an explanation for some improvement of efficiency, 12:46.900 --> 12:51.900 it does not explain why everything is so exquisitely well done, so nearly perfectly well done. 12:51.900 --> 12:55.900 So, I'm not going to go into great length about the ENCODE project. 12:55.900 --> 13:02.900 We heard from Dr. Rana about all the amazing results from the ENCODE project. 13:02.900 --> 13:04.900 So, I'll just summarize here. 13:04.900 --> 13:12.900 It is still somewhat in debate about how much of the ink, the DNA, really could be considered to be junk. 13:12.900 --> 13:18.900 But I remember, I'm old enough to remember that it was just universal that everyone talked about vestigial organs. 13:18.900 --> 13:25.900 Things like the appendix and the tonsils, which now are known to have function and to be part of our immune system. 13:25.900 --> 13:32.900 There are many arguments that have been made over the years about how biological systems are badly designed. 13:32.900 --> 13:39.900 But as I have said, in general, the field of systems biology is moving rapidly toward an optimal view of things, 13:39.900 --> 13:44.900 in which everything is well designed. 13:44.900 --> 13:54.900 So, when we think about these claims that the design, the efficiency, the optimization of life comes from natural selection, 13:54.900 --> 13:57.900 there are some problems with this. 13:57.900 --> 14:01.900 And I'm not going to go into detail on this paper because it's fairly technical. 14:01.900 --> 14:06.900 But a few years ago, I did some numerical simulations in collaboration with two others 14:06.900 --> 14:12.900 to ask whether it makes sense that natural selection can give optimization to living systems. 14:12.900 --> 14:16.900 People tend to assume this, and even though they assume this, surprisingly, 14:16.900 --> 14:19.900 very little has been done to actually prove that it can happen. 14:19.900 --> 14:25.900 So, just to summarize these results then, I call this the catch-22 problem. 14:25.900 --> 14:31.900 Catch-22 is an English phrase that means a situation in which if you choose one option, you lose, 14:31.900 --> 14:34.900 but if you choose the other option, you also lose. 14:34.900 --> 14:37.900 And this is based on the movie called Catch-22. 14:37.900 --> 14:44.900 If we suppose that living systems can easily add new things, then all kinds of new, non-functioning things will appear, 14:44.900 --> 14:47.900 what sometimes are called vestigial organs. 14:47.900 --> 14:51.900 And this was historically what Darwinists predicted, what they thought was the case. 14:51.900 --> 14:55.900 And they felt that living systems should be full of non-functioning elements. 14:55.900 --> 14:59.900 And that's the argument for junk DNA that we heard earlier from Dr. Rana. 14:59.900 --> 15:05.900 But that doesn't lead to optimization, it leads to creatures carrying around all kinds of useless stuff, 15:05.900 --> 15:08.900 hoping that maybe one day it will have some use. 15:08.900 --> 15:15.900 The new thinking on optimal design in systems biology does not allow a lot of useless stuff. 15:15.900 --> 15:20.900 So to fix this problem, let's suppose that we say natural selection removes such useless stuff, 15:20.900 --> 15:23.900 because the creatures with useless stuff die off. 15:23.900 --> 15:28.900 That's the main argument I've heard from the optimal design people who don't believe in God. 15:28.900 --> 15:32.900 But if that was the case, then evolution could never move forward, 15:32.900 --> 15:38.900 because new things that don't have any function will not remain in the population long enough and will be killed off. 15:38.900 --> 15:40.900 And so again, it's a Catch-22. 15:40.900 --> 15:48.900 If there is rapid generation of these useless things, then you have a body full of vestigial organs, 15:48.900 --> 15:54.900 and if there's killing off of those things, then you never develop anything new. 15:54.900 --> 16:01.900 Now let me just, in my final section here, talk about why teleology was banned from science. 16:01.900 --> 16:06.900 And a very good book on this is by a man named Peter Harrison, 16:06.900 --> 16:13.900 who gave a history of the scientific revolution, which happened around the same time as the Reformation in Europe. 16:13.900 --> 16:18.900 And that was not a coincidence, it was the same kind of thinking that was going on in both spheres. 16:18.900 --> 16:24.900 So if we go way back to ancient times, it was very common for people all around the world 16:24.900 --> 16:32.900 to read science, to read into nature what we might call signs and portents, 16:32.900 --> 16:40.900 looking for things in the natural world or in the Holy Scriptures that would be sort of personal messages to me from God. 16:40.900 --> 16:45.900 And this led to very bad science and bad theology. 16:45.900 --> 16:50.900 Because there was no limit to the speculation and imagination people might have to interpret something. 16:50.900 --> 16:57.900 And so one could say the Reformation in Europe was a revolution of sober or non-superstitious thinking. 16:57.900 --> 17:03.900 Of people saying, let's hold back from wild speculation and interpret things as they are. 17:03.900 --> 17:13.900 And this led to a very straightforward looking at the Bible and it also led to a straightforward look at science. 17:13.900 --> 17:16.900 And that led eventually to the scientific revolution. 17:16.900 --> 17:21.900 After the Reformation, after the scientific revolution, the enlightenment which followed, 17:21.900 --> 17:27.900 which gave rise to what we now call modern secularism, went further to abolish all ideas of purpose. 17:27.900 --> 17:31.900 And to create the idea of a universe as a machine with no soul. 17:31.900 --> 17:37.900 But as I have said, biology and physics are bringing back into our terminology the idea of purpose. 17:37.900 --> 17:39.900 And teleology. 17:39.900 --> 17:44.900 And in the physics world, there's a similar thing going on with what is called fine tuning. 17:44.900 --> 17:50.900 Where not just biology, but the whole universe looks like it is designed and has purpose. 17:50.900 --> 18:00.900 Now, many modern people fear that the intelligent design movement will lead us back to the bad old days of superstition. 18:00.900 --> 18:05.900 And looking for portents and miracles in everything that we see. 18:05.900 --> 18:15.900 But for at least 200 years after the Reformation, many leading scientists, really I would say the majority, 18:15.900 --> 18:18.900 active Christians who saw God's purpose in nature. 18:18.900 --> 18:22.900 Not going on flights of fancy, but being very careful in their science. 18:22.900 --> 18:27.900 So in the following, I'm going to just give you a survey of famous scientists. 18:27.900 --> 18:30.900 And I will not be reading these quotes at length. 18:30.900 --> 18:39.900 I just want to survey them to show, in fact, that belief in design does not imply a return to mysticism and superstition. 18:39.900 --> 18:43.900 So my first example is Isaac Newton. 18:43.900 --> 18:50.900 Many people do not know that Isaac Newton and most of the founders of modern science were Christians who believed in God. 18:50.900 --> 18:52.900 And this was not just a nominal belief. 18:52.900 --> 18:56.900 And when I say nominal, there are many people who would say, I'm a Christian. 18:56.900 --> 19:00.900 And by that, they just mean I was born in a Christian family. 19:00.900 --> 19:01.900 They don't actually believe it. 19:01.900 --> 19:03.900 But Isaac Newton was not that way. 19:03.900 --> 19:10.900 Isaac Newton believed strongly in God and actually wrote two books on science and four books on theology. 19:10.900 --> 19:13.900 He was someone who believed strongly in God. 19:13.900 --> 19:16.900 And he brought his beliefs into his science. 19:16.900 --> 19:21.900 And so, for instance, in these quotes, Newton really is making fun of people who don't believe in God. 19:21.900 --> 19:25.900 Saying, he's really, you could say, dismissing people as foolish. 19:25.900 --> 19:29.900 And he says here, atheism is senseless. 19:29.900 --> 19:36.900 William Harvey is considered by many people the founder of modern medicine. 19:36.900 --> 19:41.900 And he used his belief in God actually to drive his science. 19:41.900 --> 19:48.900 Because when he was looking at the body, he wanted to deduce how the blood system worked. 19:48.900 --> 19:51.900 And he assumed that it was well designed. 19:51.900 --> 19:53.900 And so, when he found something, he didn't know what it was doing. 19:53.900 --> 19:56.900 Namely, the valves in the blood. 19:56.900 --> 19:59.900 He assumed that it was for some good purpose. 19:59.900 --> 20:03.900 And he reverse engineered to find out how the system worked. 20:03.900 --> 20:10.900 And so, he says explicitly in his writing that it could not be that there were so many valves there without design. 20:10.900 --> 20:16.900 So, that drove him to look for the purpose of those valves. 20:16.900 --> 20:20.900 Blaise Pascal, a very famous mathematician. 20:20.900 --> 20:22.900 Also, a very dedicated Christian. 20:22.900 --> 20:25.900 Said, men despise religion. 20:25.900 --> 20:28.900 They hate it and fear it is true. 20:28.900 --> 20:33.900 To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason. 20:33.900 --> 20:37.900 And he wrote many things about his religious faith. 20:37.900 --> 20:42.900 Leibniz, the father of calculus. 20:42.900 --> 20:45.900 Actually, Newton claimed also to be the father. 20:45.900 --> 20:47.900 They had a debate between them. 20:47.900 --> 20:52.900 But Leibniz believed that the observation of nature showed the handiwork of God. 20:52.900 --> 20:58.900 He says, in reflecting on the works, we are able to discover the one who wrought. 20:58.900 --> 21:00.900 The one who made them. 21:00.900 --> 21:05.900 William Thompson, who was raised to be Lord Kelvin. 21:05.900 --> 21:10.900 The father of, considered to be the father of thermodynamics. 21:10.900 --> 21:12.900 Had a very active Christian faith. 21:12.900 --> 21:20.900 And he argued that our existence itself is evidence that nature is not just a fortuitous concourse of atoms. 21:20.900 --> 21:26.900 He says, the fact that the scientist is even thinking about whether there is a creator. 21:26.900 --> 21:33.900 There is evidence that there is not just dead matter, but there are people with brains and souls who are thinking things. 21:33.900 --> 21:35.900 Because we are not blind. 21:35.900 --> 21:37.900 Because we have purpose. 21:37.900 --> 21:40.900 In some sense, it proves that there is purpose in the universe. 21:40.900 --> 21:43.900 Because purpose doesn't just come out of nowhere. 21:43.900 --> 21:46.900 And finally, I think I have one more. 21:46.900 --> 21:50.900 In this present century, or I should say the 20th century. 21:50.900 --> 21:53.900 There has been many more examples. 21:53.900 --> 21:56.900 Werner von Braun, the father of space travel. 21:56.900 --> 22:03.900 Said, finite man cannot begin to comprehend an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite God. 22:03.900 --> 22:12.900 I find it best to accept God through faith as an intelligent will, perfect in goodness and wisdom, and revealing himself through his creation. 22:12.900 --> 22:17.900 So notice, all of these scientists are saying that God can be seen in what is made. 22:17.900 --> 22:20.900 They are not just saying take an irrational leap. 22:20.900 --> 22:24.900 They are saying believe because of what God has made. 22:24.900 --> 22:25.900 And there are many others. 22:25.900 --> 22:32.900 One I know personally is Dr. Bill Phillips, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in cold atoms. 22:32.900 --> 22:40.900 So we see in this short survey that believing in God, and in particular believing that God has designed the creation with purpose in a good way, 22:40.900 --> 22:42.900 did not stop people from doing good science. 22:42.900 --> 22:45.900 Quite the opposite, it led these people to do very good science. 22:45.900 --> 22:50.900 So let me finish up then with my conclusions. 22:50.900 --> 22:59.900 In this brief survey I have tried to show that in fact biology and biophysics are moving rapidly toward a view of a good design of things, 22:59.900 --> 23:06.900 of living systems in particular, which is to say teleology, the idea that things are designed with a purpose. 23:06.900 --> 23:13.900 Many types of biology, such as systems biology, very little reference is actually made to evolution. 23:13.900 --> 23:20.900 Oftentimes in the first paragraph they will say, well of course evolution led to this, but then they immediately go on to talk about all the design. 23:20.900 --> 23:27.900 And the emphasis is on reverse engineering of what we see in living systems with the assumption that it is very well made. 23:27.900 --> 23:33.900 These scientists do not by and large acknowledge the existence of God, but attribute this good design to years of blind evolution. 23:33.900 --> 23:44.900 But as I have discussed, no one has showed how that is possible, and by my own numerical simulations, it would indicate that it's a very difficult problem to make it happen purely through natural selection. 23:44.900 --> 23:47.900 So there's still debate about these things. 23:47.900 --> 23:59.900 A lot of it, I would say, is driven by fear that people have that embracing a role for God in our scientific thinking will lead to a return to mysticism and superstition. 23:59.900 --> 24:00.900 But that is not necessary. 24:00.900 --> 24:09.900 In fact the scientific revolution itself came from people who were religious Christians thinking rationally about their faith and the world that God had made. 24:09.900 --> 24:14.900 Belief in teleology can lead to good reverse engineering. 24:14.900 --> 24:15.900 And so I'll finish with that. 24:15.900 --> 24:16.900 Thank you.