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April 25, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BLAME THE PROFESSORS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep819
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Welcome to my show!
And finally, a new indictment in Arizona against Republicans, again for supposedly conspiring to overturn in that state the results of the 2020 election.
And evolutionary biologist Colin Wright joins me.
We're going to talk about some really interesting topics, what we know and don't know about evolution, but also whether evolution is compatible with belief in a creator God.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Today's podcast is a bit of a special edition because I invited the evolutionary biologist Colin Wright to come on the podcast to talk about evolution and God and morality.
So this is a topic that has been kicked off on X. I think Tucker Carlson made some Sardonic, maybe disbelieving comments about evolution that's caused a lot of people to weigh in.
And I thought, well, let's bring on a scientist.
And in fact, a scientist who has different views than I do.
A scientist approaching this from a naturalistic or atheist point of view to discuss with me what is known and what is not known about this issue and how we can intelligently think about it.
What I want to do in my opening segment here is cover three separate topics that I'm going to cover just briefly.
The first one, I've been thinking about these anti-Semitic activists on campus and try to think to myself, who is...
Who is putting them up to it?
Who is really to blame here?
Is it the students? I saw an interesting video of a student at NYU, and she seemed to be an NYU student, but when she was probed about it, it was quite obvious that she was not.
I think she was a Columbia student, and she had come over to NYU because she had heard, oh, the protests are intensifying at NYU. And the interviewer was asking her, like, what...
What do you want Israel to do?
And she's like, I don't really know.
And then seizing his opportunity, well, what are you then protesting about?
What is this protest for?
And she's like, I don't really know.
And then she turns to her friend, she goes, what are we protesting?
And, you know, I think that there's a lot more of this than we think.
Because we hear these students, and sometimes they say, they robotically say, from the river to the sea, or, you know, we need 100 October 7ths.
And we think, oh my gosh, these students have just thrown in with the terrorists.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is I think a lot of it is these are ideas implanted in these students by their professors.
So the The real culprits, the instigators are the professors, not the students.
Now, this is a little counterintuitive because the students all think that they are independent thinkers, they're making up their own mind, they're not being indoctrinated or brainwashed.
But if you think about students, particularly on elite campuses, one of the things they want most to do is to conform.
They want most to be thought of as intelligent, as smart, and they use their professors as the models of intelligence.
And this is, of course, encouraged in the classroom.
Your professor is going to help you think about a particular topic.
What do I think about this math problem?
What do I think about Hamlet?
And so students become imitators, if you will, of not only the mode of thinking and talking and perhaps even dressing, but also they absorb the ideological convictions and prejudices of their teachers.
That's the first point I want to make. I also want to talk about the Jack Smith case because in the Jack Smith case in Florida, this is on the classified documents, for a long time Jack Smith has been trying to block access to information.
He doesn't want things to be revealed in discovery.
And this has been a source of tension between him and the judge, Eileen Cannon.
And finally, the judge says, no, you gotta reveal these materials.
And the materials are now coming out.
And now we see why Jack Smith wanted to hide them.
So I want to highlight four important findings that have come out from these materials.
One... The National Archives was working hand in hand with the Biden White House.
There were constant communication back and forth between them about bringing charges against Trump.
In other words, this was a collusion between the people at the archives who hated Trump and the incoming Biden administration.
How do we get this guy?
Number two... When Attorney General Merrick Garland said that this was an independent investigation, that this did not involve the White House, this was the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to go out on his own and look at this.
No. The Biden White House was looped in from the beginning.
They were part of the deliberations.
They were part of the consultations.
And this is something that Jack Smith was very eager to conceal.
Three. Biden's DOJ instructed the National Archives about how to cover up the coordination.
In other words, there was an effort to suggest to the archives, let's not put all this stuff out there.
Yes, we are collaborating, but let's kind of keep that on the down low.
And four, the Department of Energy, this is Biden's Department of Energy, discovered that Trump had an active security clearance even after he was indicted.
And so they retroactively terminated it.
Think about this. They realized Trump still has a clearance.
So, in other words, he is authorized to have access to all this information.
But if we're going to criminally charge him, we have to act like he didn't.
And so they went and retroactively...
Ended Trump's access.
So now they could say that in the period after Trump left the White House, his access to this information was unauthorized.
He should not have had access to this classified information.
So I think this is all very incriminating and also helpful to Trump.
I also want to talk briefly about something that's new, and that is that a new indictment has come down in Arizona against a whole bunch of Trump attorneys as well as prominent Republican figures in Arizona, and they are being charged with conspiracy to challenge the 2020 election in Arizona.
They're supposedly guilty of fraud, they're supposedly guilty of trying to overturn the election in Arizona, and as far as I can tell, all of this is based on a quite nonsensical premise.
Now who are we talking about?
Who are the people indicted?
One is a friend of mine, Kelly Ward, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Another guy I know, Tyler Boyer.
He's with Turning Point Action, kind of a sidekick of Charlie Kirk at Turning Point.
There are a number of Trump attorneys and recognizable figures.
Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Christina Bob, Trump's attorney, Mike Roman.
So the idea here is, what do these people actually do?
What is their conspiracy?
What do they do?
Well, supposedly what they did is they had a group of, quote, fake electors.
Except there's nothing fake about it.
In other words, the Republicans said Arizona is being challenged.
The outcome in Arizona is disputed.
Now, when an election is disputed, you cannot just go through the process and then if you win later, say, okay, now it's time for us to put some electors together.
You are required to have those electors already in place.
The electors have to create a record of their existence, and then if you win your case, those electors become the actual electors.
Now, this group of people in Arizona were following a precedent that was set up in 1960 in the Kennedy, JFK, Nixon election.
What happened in that election was Hawaii was really closely contested, and it was being disputed And Nixon was said to have won Hawaii very narrowly, but it was so close and a recount was underway, and so Democrats assembled their own electors.
They submitted their votes to D.C. to be counted, while the state worked out the contest in the courts.
And the most important point is it actually worked.
The recount showed that Kennedy won the state of Hawaii by just 150 votes.
So it was Kennedy, not Nixon.
And so the state's governor retracted the Nixon certification, submitted a new one in favor of Kennedy.
But the point is that the Kennedy votes were only counted because the Kennedy electors were already in place beforehand, before the courts had ruled.
So the guys in Arizona knew this and they're like, look, we are going to put together a slate of electors and we're not doing this secretly, conspiratorially.
They put out a press release saying we're doing this and we're doing this to preserve a record.
And yet now Chris Mays, the Attorney General in Arizona, has indicted them.
So what is this? It is lawfare.
It is essentially criminalizing political differences.
By the way, Chris Mays herself might have won her election by fraud.
She was, by the way, elected by just 280 votes.
And there were many other uncounted votes that the Republicans wanted to be counted for.
Chris Mays went to court essentially to block or thwart the effort to have those votes counted.
So you've got this dubiously elected attorney general.
Now, going after prominent figures in the Republican Party, it's kind of a way of showing you that this lawfare is not confined to Trump.
It sweeps across...
It's not just Trump. It's not just January 6th.
It's not just people now who pray at abortion clinics, but it's also Republican legislators around the country.
So Republicans better realize that this is a dirty game that the Democrats are playing.
And if you don't want to be constantly victimized by this kind of thing, which could happen to anyone, could happen to you, could happen to me, then we've got to realize that we need effective ways to fight back.
And there's no more effective way to fight back than to recognize that we need to hold these guys to account.
We need to start doing some of the same stuff that they are doing to us, to them.
We're taking a look at our gold portfolio.
And hey, looking very good.
There's a very common sense reason, well, reasons why gold is pushing right now to all-time highs.
Number one, inflation. The cost of goods continues to rise despite interest rate controls by the Fed.
Since January 2021, cost of living is up 17.9%.
Number two, the national debt, out of control, continues to skyrocket.
Now over $34 trillion causes a lot of people to wonder, when is this house of cards going to come crashing down?
And three, a presidential election, so much uncertainty and turbulence, massive implications for the future of the country.
So all of this is adding up to instability, to uncertainty and this is why a lot of Americans are turning to gold and specifically to Birch Gold Group.
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You need to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. Guys, I'd like to welcome back to the podcast Dr.
Colin Wright.
He is an evolutionary biologist who got his PhD in biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018.
He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He's been writing a good bit about the biological differences between men and women.
His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Newsweek.
He's also been a guest on some big podcasts, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Trigonometry, Timcast, and so on.
His website, drdrcolinwright.com, and you can follow him on X at Swype Right, W-R-I-G-H-T.
Hey, Colin, welcome.
Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
We're actually here not to talk about a topic you've been talking about a lot, which is biological differences between the sexes.
But we want to talk today about the issue of evolution.
Now, this is not normally a topic kind of in the current news, but it has exploded on X. And I don't know if it was because of some skeptical comments about evolution that Tucker Carlson made, but in any event, you've got people posting about the subject.
And I thought it'd be interesting to probe it, and probe it from the point of view of people who still have Anxieties, concerns, objections to evolution that I think in the end are not rooted so much in science as they are rooted in theological concerns, moral concerns, and this is what I want to talk to you about.
But let's begin. People sometimes will say of evolution, hey, it's A theory.
And in common parlance, when people talk about a theory, they mean like it's a speculation.
Like, I got a theory about why you, you know, always wear the same shirt every time I see you.
But that is not what the term theory means in science.
So can you start by clarifying what in science is meant by a theory?
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good place to start.
Because as you mentioned, there is sort of this common way that we talk about theories.
It's very colloquial in our everyday speech.
But when we're talking about theories and science, it's not just like a hunch.
It's not merely a hypothesis or an educated guess.
It really is this well-tested system of interconnected facts that explains a bunch of different lines of evidence in a way that sort of builds a huge case for something being true.
You can also look at it in terms of differentiating theories from facts themselves.
You can have like observations of the universe of different facts.
And then theories are also ways to sort of combine all these facts into a framework to explain something in a mechanistic sense.
So we have, you know, for instance, the fact of gravity, that massive objects pull each other towards one another.
But then when we talk about gravitational theory...
We're talking about, you know, bent space-time that can explain all these observations that we're making out there.
So evolution is similar in that there's a fact component of that life forms have changed through time.
That is, you can see, you know, through biogeography, the fossil record, DNA sequences, And then there's sort of the evolutionary theory, which asks, how did this happen?
How did this occur? And then we have ideas of genetics and mutation and selection and so on.
So I think that's a good way to split it up.
Would you agree, Colin, that when we use the term theory in science...
There are theories that are more or less accepted and valid.
And I say this because if we look, for example, at the world of physics, you have, you know, Newton's theory of gravitation, of course, was as close to a true theory as could be imagined at the time.
And in fact, the whole Industrial Revolution was kind of based upon an application of precisely those theories of Newtonian mechanics and so on.
But if I use the term theory of relativity, and then I use the term string theory, it seems to me that the theory of relativity, Einstein's theory, has huge amounts of support, confirmation, testing.
But string theory, on the other hand, while it is a theory and it is an attempt to explain facts, is far more tentative, more speculative, less well-established.
So would you agree with that distinction?
And second of all, of those, where does evolution fit in terms of the degree of confidence that you as a biologist would have in it?
Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of people, a lot of people in the scientific community are upset with string theorists because it's, I think it's more of a catchy term that they use for their idea, which a lot of even physicists, I know Lawrence Krauss believes that they should still be calling it the string hypothesis because it doesn't have that level of empirical support that we have for other things like the germ theory of disease,
evolution by natural selection, and things like General relativity, where it's been verified by looking at the way that light bends coming across gravitational bodies, things like that.
And I'd also say that what Newton did, I wouldn't really call what he did a theory either.
that would be more in terms of just establishing a law, which is sort of observing relationships between certain phenomena and sort of putting it down into a theorem, basically. But he didn't really have an idea of why, sort of the mechanistic underpinnings of these phenomena. He just sort of wrote down the relationship that he observed. I think evolution Thank you for your attention.
It's very high among things like general relativity and the germ theory of disease, just given the number of lines of evidence that are mutually corroborating that didn't have to be true and how subsequent discoveries of the genome have all just fit right into this framework nice and snug in ways that they didn't have to be if evolution wasn't true.
So, yeah, I think that there's Plenty of evidence that evolution is a fact in the sense that it occurs.
Life forms have changed over time.
But certainly there's a lot to still explore about, you know, the nature of where mutations are coming from, the nature of selection, the directions of selection, how strong it can be at different times.
And we don't claim to know everything about the mechanisms for evolution.
That's still, you know, a vibrant area of research in the sciences.
I want to ask you what you think is the...
If you had to give, in layman's terms, the single argument that is strongest for evolution.
Well, I mean, I'll kind of give you mine and have you sort of react to it and also kind of give your own.
And mine is just this, that fossils can, by and large, be quite accurately dated.
And according to evolution, there has been a sort of...
A kind of a movement, if you will, through time from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms, in a sense a development toward greater complexity, obviously later consciousness, forms of life, and then human beings being latecomers in evolution, and in fact more complex in terms of awareness of evolution, awareness of the world, and so on.
So This is the evolutionary, let's call it, story.
And if you took all the fossils in the world and laid them on a very large table, you would actually observe this development from single cell to multicellular organisms.
And then the question arises, are there fossils out of place?
In other words, if you could find, for example, the fossil of a mammal...
That existed and can be dated to the same time as the dinosaurs, then kaboom!
That would be the end of evolution because it would be a decisive refutation of the entire evolutionary pattern, and yet we don't have any such...
So to me, that is a pretty convincing account that, in fact, this development did take place in this way.
What do you think of that idea?
And also, what would be your kind of knock-down, single-step argument for why you really can't disbelieve, at least flat-out, in evolution?
Yeah, I think what you brought up is definitely a major point, if it can be just one point, in favor of evolution.
That sort of nested hierarchy that you're mentioning of relationships and how, you know, the life form starts simple, they get more complex.
And really, when you step back, it forms what we can see at a more short-term level as a family tree.
You know, we see our families, we have parents, Parents, grandparents, and that forms a sort of nested hierarchy.
And when you zoom out even more, we can look at species in the same way.
So that's, I think, a tremendous amount of evidence for evolution.
It's hard to say, like, what is the one knockdown, because the strength is through mutually corroborated lines of independent evidence, that being one of them.
Another being, I think, the fact that we looked at, you know, mapped so many genomes and have found that the The informational aspect of evolutionary biology, how this information is stored from one generation to the next.
And looking at these genomes, you can statistically create these family trees as well.
And this didn't have to be the case.
We didn't know what genomes were composed of for that long.
Darwin had no idea what genes were.
And it just so happened to fit perfectly within the evolutionary framework.
And then there's other lines such as evidence from biogeography, just the distribution of animals on the planet.
And you know, we can get into sort of volcanic islands versus continental islands.
And there's just so many different lines of evidence we could talk about for evolution.
So they're really all mutually reinforcing.
And I think taking all of them at the same time really makes the case that it's evolution very, I think, pretty impossible to deny if you're looking at it soberly.
When we come back, let's explore some questions about what evolution perhaps exists.
Does not explain or does not even try to explain.
And then I want to get into, to me, the heart of the matter, which is the compatibility of evolution with people's sort of foundational ideas about God and about morality.
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I'm back with evolutionary biologist, Dr.
Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Follow him on X at SwipeWright, W-R-I-G-H-T. We're talking about evolution.
And Colin, let me...
Let me raise with you three things that, at least in my view, evolution does not explain.
I'm not even sure it tries to explain these things, but I want to see if you agree with me that evolution doesn't really get there.
The first one, of course, is the origin of life.
In other words, that evolution is not trying to account for how we got life at all.
Darwin begins with life forms, and evolution is really an explanation of how life forms are transformed, the one to the other.
But it doesn't attempt to explain the starting point.
Number two, the consciousness.
And by consciousness, what I mean is that we are material beings made up of neurons and cells and so on.
And yet, we seem to have this other thing that is not objective but is subjective.
And in fact, it's very sort of difficult to account for in purely material terms because we don't experience it in a material way, our awareness of the world.
And the third phenomenon I want you to comment on is simply morality.
And by morality, what I mean, I don't just mean human kind of cooperative ventures or kind of tit-for-tat ventures where you help me out, I'll help you out.
I'm actually just talking about the moral voice inside of us where when we want to do something, somehow seems to say internally, don't do that.
And this moral voice is, I mean, pretty much every human being has it, right?
If you don't have it, we call you a sociopath or a psychopath.
And it is very authoritative.
It is very real because it's hard to imagine life without it.
And yet, to me, it doesn't fit neatly inside the evolutionary framework.
So I'd like you to just comment on your thoughts about evolution and the beginning of life, evolution and consciousness, and then evolution and human morality.
Yeah, those are great big topics to dive into.
Thank you. I think there is a slight difference among some of those.
So, as you mentioned, the beginning of life, what scientists might call the field of abiogenesis, the creation of life from non-life.
You're correct. That is not something that evolutionary biology is concerned with.
I mean... I would like to know how it happened.
It's a very interesting topic to many evolutionary biologists, but it is not in the purview of evolutionary biology specifically.
That's a whole other branch of chemistry, and there's interesting ideas going over there, but we don't know how life started.
It might be impossible to know how it actually happened because it happened once on Earth a very, very long time ago.
So even if we were to recreate it, there's no saying that that's the way it happened in the lab in the world four and a half billion years ago or Three and a half for life.
The other two, consciousness and morality, it's not so much that evolution isn't concerned with these.
They're outside the purview. They're just, I would say, big mysteries of evolution.
We don't understand how they came about.
Given, you know, for consciousness, it is such a complex emergent property of You know, billions of neurons in a brain.
It's hard to measure the levels of consciousness in other creatures, even our closest common ancestors.
So it's really hard to create a really robust evolutionary framework looking at variation in consciousness because it's just something that's almost impenetrable to measure and test.
That's not to say that It's not compatible that it couldn't have potentially evolved.
I think there probably is different levels of conscious experience for different animals.
But it's just something we're not privy to.
We can't peek into the brains of other animals in a rigorous way to really test it.
So it could continue as being this area of ongoing research where we're not making a whole lot of progress because it's just such a difficult question.
And then similar for morality...
I think there's good evidence that other animals, our closest ancestors, chimps and things, have sort of rudimentary ideas of right and wrong.
The anthropologist Franz de Waal did a lot of these sort of experiments and And, you know, it's impossible to say whether they have sort of this internal moral voice, as you talked about, saying, don't do this.
This is wrong. You know, this is your brother.
Why would you deprive them of food or something like that?
But I don't think that morality is something that evolution...
Can't explain in principle and that it necessarily must be explained through some outside supernatural entity or something like that.
So, yeah, there's certain things that are outside the purview of evolution and there's just certain things that are just extremely complex that we don't really understand too well.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that evolution, that they didn't evolve or that we won't ever have more information about these certain topics.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think with regard to morality, what I'm getting at is just this, that the underlying driver of evolution, as I understand it, is essentially self-perpetuation or survival, right? In other words, this was the thesis with some modification in Dawkins as the selfish gene.
The gene wants to sort of make copies of itself and perpetuate itself and multiply.
And so self-interest, in that sense, is a driving force of evolution.
And even in evolutionary attempts to talk about morality, they, by and large, devolve back into self-interest.
In other words, you know, how do you explain the fact that the mom ran into the burning car, you know, to save her children?
Well, the answer is her children share her genes.
And... And so we are driven to help others in part because of things that, you know, partly they might be related to us, but the other reason is if I help you, you might help me later.
In other words, it's like the business guy who says, I got to be nice to my customers, not because I'm a really nice guy, but I certainly want the guy to come back.
And so the morality here is seen as a extension of self-interest, at least in the broadest sense.
But I guess what I'm saying is that there is a good deal of morality that isn't like that.
There's no self-interest involved, and yet there's a little voice that's kind of telling you to do that.
So let's say I'm walking on the riverbank and I see a little girl screaming in the pond and she's drowning, right?
And I'm a horrible swimmer, so it's not in my interest to jump in.
She's nothing to me.
I don't know her from Adam.
And yet, on the other hand, let's just say I don't.
I just keep walking. And I'm not obliged to jump in, of course, or, you know, legally or something.
But nevertheless, I'm going to feel really bad.
I'm going to think about that all day.
And a little voice inside of me was like, you know, Dinesh, you really should have done more.
Maybe you shouldn't have jumped in, but you should have, you know, put out a stick and tried to pull her to the...
So, and this is unavoidable.
I mean, this is how we are wired.
Uh... So, what I'm getting at is, do you agree that there seems to be aspects of morality that flagrantly violate the idea of self-interest?
And so, I'm not saying there's no physical explanation for them.
It just, to me, doesn't sit all that comfortably with the idea of evolution based upon natural selection and self-interest.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
And I agree that there are certain aspects like the one you highlighted of, you know, why would you sacrifice yourself to save a perfectly, you know, distant stranger that likely doesn't share many genes with you?
You know, there are certain ways that evolutionary biologists try to explain these things.
You know, there's I know Richard Dawkins has brought up this could be sort of a misfiring because in the history when we lived in small community tribes, anyone you run into is more likely to have a higher proportion of your genes than somebody else.
So we just sort of have this algorithm that encourages you to save those that are near you, even if in reality they don't share these genes with you.
And you brought up sort of Hamilton's rule about we are interested in saving our offspring and a little less so our cousins and a little less so our more distant cousins because of the types of genes that we share with them.
I think these are powerful models, especially when we're looking at behavior of animals and they can sort of explain how the process sort of gets in motion, how it begins, sort of how it primes the pump for the evolution of moral sentiment.
But I don't think that necessarily you can distill everything down to Hamilton's rule and sort of this autistic literal sense of this is all that there is.
Evolution and consciousness, they're incredibly complex things.
And I would say that We need to leave the door open to finding more mechanisms that are explaining these complex traits, especially something as complex as morality.
I don't necessarily think that we need to all agree that there are certainly truly altruistic traits.
It could be the case that there is some evolutionary motive that is at its root somewhat selfish.
But I don't know if that's necessary or not.
I just think we need to sort of wait for the evidence to come in.
The way that we behave in the world, based on whether or not it turns out that it's true that saving that little girl is rooted to some degree in a selfish motive, I think we should probably still just behave as we would and trust our moral sentiments as we go along.
We'll be back for a final segment with Dr.
Colin Wright, and I want to talk specifically about evolution, God, and the Bible.
I'm back with evolutionary biologist, Dr.
Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Follow him on X at SwipeWrite.
By the way, the website, drdrcolinwright, W-R-I-G-H-T dot com.
We're talking about evolution.
And I want to turn, Colin, to the...
Topic of evolution, God, and the Bible.
You put out, I think, a very provocative and interesting tweet where you said that evolution is not It's incompatible with theism or with a belief in God.
But as you see it, it is incompatible with the story of Adam and Eve.
It is incompatible with Noah's Ark.
There's kind of a lot here, so let's take it in parts.
Let's start with the compatibility of evolution and theism.
I think it's interesting you say this, and I think here you are in full agreement with Darwin himself, because although Darwin in later life, at times he called himself an agnostic, I think perhaps Darwin was an atheist.
But interestingly, I've read a few biographies of Darwin.
It doesn't look like his atheism came out of evolution.
It looks like it came out of other reasons.
He lost a daughter at a vulnerable age.
I think he looked around at a bunch of his friends.
At one point, he makes an offhand comment saying something like, you know, the people that I've been hanging out with are really nice people.
They're wonderful people. And yet, if Christianity is true, most if not all of them are going to hell.
And then Darwin goes, I can't accept a theology that would send essentially my best friends into the flames.
So Darwin was an interesting character, but it seems to me that Darwin was...
Did not believe that evolution was a kind of refutation of theism.
So talk for a moment, if you will, about why you say evolution is compatible with theism.
As you know, there are both evolutionary biologists on the one side, people like Dawkins, perhaps.
And on the other side, there are Christians who would both flatly say that evolution and theism are incompatible.
You've got to pick one or the other.
You can't have both. I would say it entirely depends on what your definition of theism and the specific beliefs that are entailed within your theism.
So there's plenty of people who call themselves Christians, who are definitely believing in the stories of Jesus and things like that, who would say that...
They fully accept evolutionary biology.
They think that their concept of God is one where, well, maybe God started the first, you know, breath of life, whether it was that single-celled organism back in the Precambrian, got life started, that type of thing.
And then they can accept evolution as it's said in the science textbooks and things like that.
Like, if that's your version of Christianity and your vision of God, then yeah, evolution certainly does not conflict with that system of belief.
But if your version of theism entails sort of this really strict, literal interpretation of a lot of biblical stories, such as Adam and Eve, you know, that basically...
Life started as special creation.
Every organism was in their current form.
Humans didn't have any precursors.
They didn't evolve from other apes and other organisms, for instance.
Then, yeah, there are certain claims that overtly tread on evolution and that are completely incompatible with the belief.
So if you're of the latter type of Christian, then yeah, evolution does pose a threat to your worldview if your worldview requires you to believe stories like Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark.
But if your version of Christianity isn't so literally focused on those stories and interprets them in ways that I think benefits religion and science both, you know, that it's sort of the meaning behind these stories, the allegory, the symbols that they communicate, then there's really no conflict.
I think you can accept these stories for what I think they are and the value that is truly there.
And you can also be fully in line with the way modern science views the relationship between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
You stated a kind of view of Christianity, which actually I don't hold myself.
In other words, the idea of God as sort of the guy who put things in motion, almost a sort of a deist conception of God.
Well, let me give you kind of my own conception and see where the incompatibility of any arises.
Because it seems to me that when I look at the world of physics, for example, The Big Bang, let's just say.
The universe had a beginning five billion, you know, roughly years ago.
And I say to myself, look, the Bible isn't a science book.
The Bible gives you the idea that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
So there is some implication of a beginning.
The earth wasn't here forever.
It wasn't here eternally.
There was a beginning. But the Bible makes no attempt to tell you the mechanisms of that.
And there's no problem in describing those mechanisms in purely physical terms, while at the same time saying that there's a compatibility with the biblical account of creation.
And similarly, with regard to how life forms and all their fantastic multiplicity appeared, and how one life form gives rise to another, the Bible doesn't really get into the details of it.
It basically attributes it to God.
But it's not just a god who sort of begins the process, but it's a god that is sort of transcendentally, you may say, overseeing the process, that the process is in some mystical way dependent upon the creator that put...
This whole mechanism into place.
So I think that is mainstream Christianity as I understand it.
And it seems to me that is fully compatible with evolution.
Now, admittedly, you know, when evolution first came about, just as when the Big Bang first came about, you're like, whoa, I didn't think it would happen that way, just based upon a reading of the Bible.
But then upon reflection, you realize, wait a minute.
I don't really see the two as clashing with each other at all.
In other words, it would be pretty impressive for God to make every creature independently.
It is equally impressive of God to create, you may call it, a factory for making living beings, all of whom share the same genetic material, so that the one transforms over time through the other.
I mean, there's a kind of beautiful kind of...
Beautiful symmetry, if you will, to the whole process that Darwin himself commented on, the kind of wonder of evolution.
Yeah, I would say there's not necessarily a conflict there.
If you want to say that...
So if your idea of the complexities of the process of evolution, the DNA, the systems of inheritance, you and a lot of people would say that that was the product of an intelligent mind or something like that.
That's an idea.
It's not a belief that I myself hold.
I think that in principle, we could potentially explain these with naturalistic causes, but purely the idea, the notion that perhaps the system was designed in some way by a supernatural agent or a mind doesn't necessarily conflict with the fact that, well, however it got here, naturalistic or through an intelligent being, this is what we have. This is what the system is.
This is, these are the facts of the matter. This is how evolution proceeds. These are what genes are. This is how transcription happens. And you can believe or accept all the ideas of evolution and look at the way things evolved and the relationships between organisms. And you can take that at face value too.
So I don't think there's necessarily a conflict there.
I would just, as a scientist, maintain sort of a level of agnosticism towards, you know, the types of...
Origin that created the system of evolution, the rules per se.
But I don't think they're necessarily incompatible, if that's what you're asking.
Let me push you even further on this and talk briefly about Adam and Eve.
Because my view about Adam and Eve is sort of this.
And that is that there is an attempt here to account for just what we talked about a few minutes ago, which is...
How does morality fit into the human picture?
Because you've got this sort of uncomfortable reality of our nature that is built into us, and it needs to have some kind of account.
As you said, evolution itself is struggling to give a full account of morality.
So the story of Adam and Eve is an attempt to do that.
It's sort of like, okay, you've got some ape-like creature that is transitioning over time to Homo sapiens.
And obviously at some point that transition occurs, right?
And you have man in the modern sense, so we understand man, with a moral faculty.
And the distinguishing feature of this moral faculty is that on the one hand it is a very powerful voice, but on the other hand it is a voice that we are sort of in rebellion against, right?
In other words, we don't want to do it.
We wouldn't need the voice if our nature was such that we always conformed automatically to moral strictures.
And so the Adam and Eve story accounts for this in terms of God saying that Adam and Eve is kind of the first human, whether an actual human, a hypothetical human.
I mean, I think that's not the important thing.
The important thing is that there is a moral instruction.
Don't do this.
And it is in the nature of man to go, yeah, but I need to do it my own way.
Apple looks good.
It's very tasty. It's very appealing.
So, in other words, human desire is going to pull in a direction different from moral command.
And to me, this is a kind of very vivid...
It's an illustration of not just the origin of man, but something that we kind of all live with every day, namely this kind of incompatibility between the moral voice within us and human desire, you know, pulling like wild horses in many different directions.
Is that a way of framing the story that makes you as a biologist uncomfortable or is it not incompatible with anything we've been talking about?
comfortable with anything you said. I think that's probably the best way to interpret these types of stories as just being imbued with a lot of wisdom of our species, of the knowledge that we've accumulated through experience. They tell an interesting story that can be interpreted in many different ways, but I think that there are ways to interpret them that are very deep, that are very beneficial, that are extremely wise.
And this is the realm that I think that religion should be trying to analyze these types of biblical stories.
Because I think it does both science and religion dirty when you take this autistic, literal approach to, you know...
God created two humans in the past, and those literally gave rise to all of humans through what would have been a tremendous amount of inbreeding.
That wouldn't be the way I would want to interpret these stories.
And just the way you wouldn't interpret a lot of Aesop's fables or something, we wouldn't want to interpret something like the scorpion and the frog story as a literal story.
A series of events that happened.
This is something that is a simple story that is imbued with so much meaning and it can interpret it different ways at different times and it says real things.
It's imbued with a lot of real wisdom about our species that require us to reflect upon them and think about them very deeply.
So I think that's the realm that these types of stories need to be couched in.
I think you had it almost exactly right, the way we should be looking at these stories.
Colin, we've only begun to scratch the surface on a huge topic, but we'll leave it here for now.
Thank you so much for joining me, guys.
I've been talking to Dr. Colin Wright, Manhattan Institute Fellow.
Really interesting discussion on evolution and also the relationship of evolution to theism and to morality.
Colin, a great pleasure.
Thank you so much. A lot of fun.
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