That I think is a 286.
I started my doctoral dissertation on a 286 machine.
- Is that right? -
Yeah.
You did your doctorate in philosophy of science, correct?
Yeah, in evolutionary theory.
And the early chapters were written on a machine like that.
Well, that's interesting,
because you studied the whole notion of evolutionary theory,
and yet a lot of people will use that word in terms
of what has happened in this explosion
of computer technology
that they refer to it as evolution.
If you use evolution in that sense,
it's really a misnomer,
because biological evolution is driven,
fundamentally, by randomness, mistakes in DNA mutations.
This is driven by intellect, by mind,
by creative intelligence.
so really you're taking the same word,
but you're applying it to two fundamentally
different processes.
- Oh, this is a Cray supercomputer.
-
Wow.
Seymour Cray is the engineer, the designer who did all this.
He was just - he was an amazing guy.
That's why they've got his picture everywhere here.
Look at that wiring.
Wow.
I think there were like 60 miles of wire in that thing.
Oh, I could believe it.
- I mean, he designed all of these.
I guess -
he's the -
He's really the father of what we call supercomputers.
None of this would exist without his creative intelligence.
And look at that.
I mean, it's almost beautiful, the - the wiring.
You know, in a strange way - or maybe not a strange way,
it brings to mind the circuitry we have up here.
Oh yeah.
The density of connections.
And his genius, part of it,
was to figure out a way to cool all
that so that it could function.
Meaning, this has to be cooled as well.
That's exactly right, yeah.
Same principles,
although at this level, vastly more sophisticated.
The supercomputers
really weren't super from the standpoint of like,
we think, a Superman, they can do all kinds of stuff.
Basically, the supercomputer was after speed.
Right.
- It does the same simple computations
that any other computer does, it just does them at a very,
very rapid pace.
I think the Cray was somewhere up around 160 Megaflops.
You know, it's a million floating
point operations per second.
I mean that's really, really fast.
And the faster you went, the more you need the cooling.
Yeah, but, you know,
while I admire the engineering that goes into it, really,
in essence, it's still a calculator, right? -
Exactly.
- It's calculating.
You compare these machines to a cell?
A cell's calculating.
But a cell is maintaining itself
out of equilibrium with its environment
by converting raw materials into products it can use.
It's storing and transferring information.
It's selectively transporting across its barrier
between itself and the rest of the environment.
It's making copies of itself.
So here's your engineering challenge.
Build me a supercomputer that has a compartment
where it builds supercomputers,
okay, you'd be at that task a long time.
So if you're thinking about relative degrees of complexity,
and engineering prowess,
I would put a single ecoli bacterial cell up
against anything in this room,
and e-coli would come out the clear winner.
In real time,
it is assessing its environment, taking in raw materials,
putting out waste,
doing things that these machines, as elegant
and powerful as they are,
they're basically souped up calculators, right?
And without a power supply, they're props.
They're sitting here -
That's exactly right.
I think the original Cray required like
115 kilowatts of power.
Like, that's power for a hundred homes.
And yeah, what you're saying is that Cray,
I think the original memory was like 32 megabytes.
Yeah.
-
And remember we had - we had 32 gigabytes.
So that original Cray supercomputer is nothing.
And yet, you're saying all of that is almost
infinitesimally small compared to the biological systems
that we have.
Tell you what.
Give me a flask with a nutrient medium.
There's some sugars and things like that.
I'll put in one ecoli cell.
Boom.
On a 20-minute cycle, I'll come back in a day,
there'll be millions of cells in that solution,
because they're doing something
that nothing in this room can do,
and that's reproduction.
A process of such sophistication
and engineering that we will be working a long time,
maybe never to build something, you know -
That's similar to that.
So again, I admire what went into building these machines,
but we need to recognize
that what we have in living things is
many orders of magnitude more sophisticated, elegant,
and powerful,
than what clearly took genius to build.
Yes.
Paul, obviously when we look at these supercomputers,
there is an exquisite design there.
Right.
And there's a lot of order there.
And it points us back to an obvious intelligent designer,
and the intelligent design
is that aspect of the historic Genesis paradigm.
And you spent a lot of time looking at that.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
What does that look like?
Well, you think about what we have in this room.
We have devices for calculating very, very fast.
But that is a tiny part of physical reality.
Imagine you have to design a planet.
A functioning planet
that's going to be populated with millions of diverse species
that will need to enter relate.
And as you begin to sort of total up
your engineering parameters,
if you will,
you're going to need an intellect able to
visualize all kinds of constraints and demands
that would have to be jointly satisfied to have
a functioning planet at all.
So scale up the problem.
As we scale up from supercomputer to cell,
from cell to species, from species to ecosystem,
from ecosystem to planetary system,
the number of parameters begins to explode,
and you can see that the cause
that you need would have to be a super intelligence of an order
that we really can't even begin to grasp.
We just know it needs to be a mind.
It needs to be an intelligence.
So, basic rationality, I think,
underwrites the inference that
a paradigm that's going to explain the origin of the planet
that we inhabit, and all of its life,
in a solar system
where the position of the earth is just
where it needs to be to have water,
for instance, in all three phases,
given our distance from the Sun and so forth.
That's going to be an engineering task
of the first order.
And your paradigm
that's intending to answer that question
of origins is going to have to handle more than just,
where did the planet come from?
Or, you know, how was the Sun formed?
No, you're going to have to deal with the information
in every living thing.
What was the origin of that -
that incompressible DNA code where you can't get it
from an algorithm.
If you want the DNA sequence for a single protein,
you need the whole sequence.
That's a lot of information.
And for any functioning cell that we know,
you're going to have to have in the order
of 350 separate proteins, a whole lot of RNA,
and so forth.
The problem just explodes.
But you never want to let go of rationality.
You want to hang on to that,
and I think the rational thing to infer from everything
that we observe in the living world is,
whatever the cause was had to be a mind,
and a powerful, omniscient mind.
That sounds a lot like God.
That brings us back
to the comparison we were doing in the beginning,
about these two paradigms.
And the conventional paradigm is one
that says that all of this grew out slowly.
It developed slowly, over a long period of time.
Well I know enough to say that that Cray would not work
until everything was brought together.
Not only from the hardware standpoint.
If you just have the hardware and no software,
it's just a piece of metal.
You have to have the development of the software,
the development of all the hardware,
and bring them together, and they have to work together.
That's what we're talking
about in the historical Genesis paradigm,
were we not?
That things have to be fully functional?
You know, you're right.
And in fact,
you can see this in an experiment
that was done recently by Craig Venter,
who was synthesizing,
from scratch, a DNA molecule to bootstrap a cell into existence.
And they inserted this DNA strand
about a million base pairs long into a membrane,
and it wouldn't work.
So they went back and checked.
There was a single mistake.
so 999,999 base pairs were right,
one was wrong.
It was in an essential protein and the cells wouldn't function.
They were dead as a doornail.
So you can be arbitrarily close to a functioning cell,
and yet it's dead until everything is right.
What that tells you is that for a single cell,
you've got to have all the components necessary
for function jointly present,
but a cell doesn't exist on its own.
You think about an ecosystem,
it has multiple interrelated components,
all of them necessary
for that ecosystem as a whole to function,
and again, take that out to the scale of a planet,
it seems to me you can make a powerful case
that to have a functioning planet at all,
a functioning planet that can sustain life,
there are countless independent components
that need to be present jointly,
at the same slice in time,
and that to me would require, really, simultaneous design,
bringing the whole thing together in a state
where it works.
That brings us to the notion
that a paradigm is not just a small little picture of reality.
It's a paradigm of all of reality,
and it seems it needs to explain all of reality,
at least to a great extent.
Is that true?
Yes, if you're dealing
with the historical question of the origin of the universe,
and the origin of everything in the universe,
including life, and you,
and me, that's an ambitious program.
And you're going to need a model,
an account, a paradigm,
that deals with every single detail.
If it's implausible to look around this room,
or this whole museum, and say
that this could have come about without intelligence,
how much more would that be the case for the planet
that we inhabit,
and the living things that populate this planet?
Basic rationality guides you,
in fact it leads you to that inference,
to that conclusion of intelligent design,
and that would be, really,
the only rational answer were it not that we have this competing,
what's called conventional, paradigm that says no,
you've got to explain with strictly physical processing.
Paul, what you're saying is
that the entire universe appears to be exquisitely engineered
and designed for the purpose of life.
Right.
And what that means,
then, is the task of science is to understand that engineering.
How does it work?
How are all the parts interrelated?
Nothing in this building would make any sense
without the creative intelligence that went
into building these machines.
I want to bring people
to a microscope to see a single bacterial cell
and have them apply the same logic.
Paul, when we look at these two paradigms
and we see how radically different they are,
yet we know
that there are some people who will take one of these aspects
of the conventional paradigm, evolution,
for example, and try to fit it in to a Genesis paradigm.
How do you see that?
Well, if I can paraphrase Scripture,
no one can serve two masters.
If you really understand evolutionary theory as
its taught today,
it has an essential element of randomness.
It's built right into the theory.
So an evolutionary biologist will say,
when life first began, no one could have expected
that three and a half billion years later,
Homo sapiens would appear on this planet.
The Bible tells us God knows every hair on our heads.
He knows when we're going to be born,
what we're going to be like, our destiny,
and so forth.
So you're taking a process of essential randomness,
and trying to marry it
to a God who knows every event beforehand.
Really, these ideas don't want to live together,
because at their base,
they are essentially different views of the universe,
different views of reality.
But I know
that there are people who hold these positions.
And I think they would say,
but science has proven that evolution is true.
Therefore I have to hang on to that
under my view of Scripture.
Right.
Well, my understanding of that is quite different.
I think science,
far from having shown that evolution is true,
in fact it's actually revealed many of its shortcomings,
and I see no reason to marry the Christian worldview,
or theism, to a failing scientific theory.
Get a better theory.
Work with a better theory,
a better theory that incorporates
the reality of design.
The attempt to try to synthesize fundamentally incompatible ideas
is doomed to failure,
and what happens in practice, I have found,
is that the evolutionary,
or conventional paradigm, comes to dominate,
and gradually extinguishes
every theistic aspect of the creation,
or Genesis paradigm.
But Paul, you actually think
that the conventional paradigm is dying to some extent.
Would you say it's a shift going on?
Well, I think the conventional paradigm really
has run its course.
From Darwin's day to the present,
the number of puzzles
that have accumulated just within biology,
which is the science I know best,
have really forced evolution to a point of crisis.
What keeps it in place,
in terms of the culture at large, isn't so much
the power of the theory as its philosophical foundation.
So from your perspective,
you're saying that the increased scientific evidence
that's coming in is not leaning towards a conventional paradigm.
No, I think the evidence
that we have today calls for intelligent design.
Let me give you a specific example.
At the time of Darwin,
cells were thought to be little bags
of protoplasm, right?
This kind of living jelly.
In fact, the term protoplasm was coined at about the time
of Darwin's Origin of Species.
And Darwin thought,
you know, get some elements under the right circumstances,
in what he called a warm little pond,
zap it with energy, a cell might form.
Okay, that's the middle of the 19th century.
What's happened since then
is unassisted chemistry has been kind of bouncing
along here or where it was in the 19th century,
but the target to be explained,
an actual cell is out of sight in a different universe.
The complexity of a single cell is nowhere in the neighborhood
of unassisted chemistry.
What's happened?
A hundred and fifty years of accumulating knowledge
about cell biology,
about information about what it means to be alive,
means that the target
of explanation is now way out of sight.
In a situation like that,
you have to change how you think about the world.
Science doesn't stand still.
We know a great deal more today,
and what we know indicates if you want a cell,
if you want a living thing at all,
you're going to need the kind of cause
that can give you information,
multiple integrated systems, all at the same moment in time.
That looks a lot like a designing creative mind.
It seems to me
that what we're saying, then, is that the Genesis paradigm,
the historical Genesis paradigm,
that uses the history
plus the science is now proving to be a much better paradigm.
I think it's more adequate to the task,
it's more powerful,
and it - frankly it gives you greater freedom,
greater freedom to investigate the world in light of everything
that could have happened.
And if the evidence calls for a cause
that can bring a planet
into existence already populated with organisms,
a functioning biota, a functioning global ecosphere,
which I think you need.
I think the evidence indicates you need
that for any life at all.
You've got the freedom to call on that kind of cause.
That's not going to be a physical process.
That's going to be a transcendent,
powerful intellect with creativity and humor.
I mean the cause
that made the panda bear has got a sense of humor.
Let's be honest.
Paul, it's obvious that this excites you.
This whole area in invigorates you.
Why?
Well, I think that science is a tool that God has given us
to understand his world,
to control it for our own benefit.
and I think that it certainly does that.
But really, it is the servant of our worldviews.
And it's beautiful,
it's powerful, but it's only one aspect of reality,
and I'll be honest with you,
if I had a single book to take with me to a desert island,
it wouldn't be a biology textbook.
Biology is something we do for ourselves.
I cannot, for myself, come up with Psalm 23,
or Psalm 104,
which is really a hymn
of praise to God's creative power and majesty,
or the last four chapters of Job,
where, you know, God sort of -
he levels with Job, he says look,
you're not in the universe making business, alright,
that's what I do.
Job says alright, alright, I shut up.
You know.
So, science is beautiful,
it's powerful, it's filled with creativity,
it's something wonderful,
but it needs to take its place in the full range
of human understanding as just part of what we know,
just part of what we know.