In August 2026, the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act started to enforce transparency rules. These rules damage how large language models generate text. Article 50(2) requires AIs that produce synthetic text (and also audios, images, and videos) to mark outputs in a machine-readable format that can be reliably detected as artificially generated or manipulated. The technical solutions must be effective, interoperable, robust, and reliable “as far as this is technically feasible,” taking into account the specific features of different content types and the state of current technology. Official guidance and the associated EU Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content permit statistical watermarking of the kind pioneered by Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text.

Consequently, several major AI companies have begun embedding invisible signals directly into the word choices their models make. The most widely publicized and documented case is Anthropic’s Claude. According to the company’s own support documentation and technical explanation, models launched on or after 2 August 2026 weave an imperceptible watermark into generated text by altering the source of randomness used when selecting among near-equiprobable tokens. The method is a version of Google’s SynthID-Text. Google’s Gemini also uses this method.

Other Code of Practice signatories—OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and roughly 190 organisations in total—have committed to meeting the marking obligation, though their exact technical choices for free-form text remain less fully disclosed or are still being worked out. xAI’s Grok is an outlier among major frontier labs: it declined to sign the voluntary Code and has stated that its text outputs carry no watermarks, fingerprints, or tracking signals, relying instead on non-embedded alternatives such as server-side hashing.

The distinction between watermarking and non-watermarking is critical to writers because text watermarking is not a neutral intervention. It operates inside the AI generation process itself. Language models produce text by repeatedly sampling the next token from a probability distribution conditioned on the preceding context. In many positions, several tokens are deemed almost (but not exactly) equally likely—“overcast” versus “grey,” “however” versus “nevertheless,” “precise” versus “exact.”

A watermark, even if advertised and intended to be non-distortionary, skews the randomness that decides among such candidates. Moreover, it does this according to a secret key that is inaccessible to the writers. Across many samples, the marginal distribution can be preserved, so average quality scores and large-scale human preference ratings may show little or no difference (though if everything is watermarked, how could anyone tell the difference?). For any individually generated text, however, the choice is constrained. The model is steered toward the key-determined continuation rather than the unconstrained best draw from its own distribution.

This is a point critics rightly emphasize and that AI providers can try to rationalize away but cannot rebut. No two near-synonyms are perfectly interchangeable in every context. Tiny differences in connotation, rhythm, or precision may accumulate across a text, especially as text increases in length. What begins as a statistically invisible nudge can become a systematic bias in style, creativity, or exactness. Average human raters in controlled studies may not notice the difference. But sophisticated readers, professional writers, and high-stakes technical users (as in drafting legal agreements) may not only notice the difference but see it impact their bottom line. An AI generator tasked with watermarking is no longer exploring the full possibility space the model was trained to represent. It is exploring a keyed subset of that space. The quality that results is therefore the best available within the constrained set, not the best the model can produce.

Detection of these watermarks itself is problematic because they are not publicly accessible—there’s no FOIA to which writers can appeal. Instead, these watermarks are like vipers in a closed box waiting to be unleashed and strike. What happens if ten years down the line text proven to be generated by Claude on account of watermarking is part of some legal process? Where does liability in such cases begin and end?

Because a secret key held by the provider seeds the watermark, independent verification is impossible without access to that key or to a detector the AI provider authorizes. Unlike C2PA cryptographic provenance on images—which anyone can check against public keys—the text mark is not publicly auditable. Users must submit text to the provider’s tool and accept the result. The signal itself is fragile: short passages, heavy editing, paraphrasing, or translation quickly degrade detectability. Anthropic has admitted these limits. But does that mean that to stay safe, text generated by Claude needs to be submitted to “watermarking removal software”? Is that the next growth industry in the AI detection arms race? It’s bad enough that we now have “humanizers” that claim to take AI generated text and make its AI origins undetectable, as with Undetectable.ai.

Is the cost of these watermarks worth the benefit? Society is said to gain a statistical signal that can help platforms, educators, and investigators identify AI-generated material when the mark survives. In exchange, the generative process itself is altered for every user, worldwide in the case of Claude’s global rollout. Open-weight models largely escape the constraint because operators can choose whether to apply any watermarking layer during inference time when a model is responding to a prompt. AI systems that have implemented token-level watermarking do not offer that choice. Grok’s refusal to embed such marks keeps its text outputs in the unconstrained regime. ChatGPT, as of late August 2026, still ships no production text watermark even though OpenAI signed the EU Code of Practice and has a watermarking internal prototype.

Whether cost to AI outputted quality is large or small should be an empirical question. It may be partly answered as watermarked models are used at scale for demanding tasks. Better yet would be for unwatermarked versions of models to be directly comparable with their watermarked versions so that they could be compared in controlled experiments. In that case, the quality cost would be an empirical question. But having an unwatermarked version of a model available would circumvent the EU Act.

In all this, trust is easily lost. Are we to believe an AI provider if they inform us that they themselves have (secretly) tested watermarked versus unwatermarked models and found them to be comparable in quality? How would we know that without independent verification. But independent verification seems to require unwatermarked models. And who would choose to use a watermarked model when writing quality is at a premium and an unwatermarked model is available?

What is clear is that the range of text output by these watermarked models is being diminished, which in turn can only diminish the quality of output. The EU Act is pushing AI providers toward deliberately restricting the sampling distribution of LLMs. The result is output drawn from a narrower set of possibilities than the underlying model is capable of producing. For users who value maximum precision, stylistic range, and creative latitude, that narrowing is the most important downside of the new rules. The immediate impact for me personally, as a professional writer who uses AI extensively, is to treat Claude from here on in with suspicion and favor ChatGPT and Grok, knowing that they are not compromising quality of output in the name of imposing watermarks.

Earlier this August marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Michael Behe’s intelligent design classic, Darwin’s Black Box. It created a sensation at the time, selling hundreds of thousands of copies (huge for popular science books), and also eliciting widespread criticism from Darwinian naturalists, who did their best to pretend that there was nothing to see here—move on.

And yet, Behe and his book struck a nerve. Over time, many materialistic biologists have taken the firm policy not to engage with his challenge to Darwinian evolution. Ignore it. If asked, act as though it has long been discredited. If pressed, suggest that the person asking the questions is a creationist and fundamentalist. And if that doesn’t work, walk away.

One group of Darwinian naturalists, however, that has not been able to walk away is Mike’s fellow biologists on the faculty at Lehigh University. Here is Mike, a full professor teaching without hindrance and doing his work to advance intelligent design. But silence from fellow biology faculty would here be interpreted as complicity with intelligent design by the wider biological world. And so, to this day you will find the following disclaimer about intelligent design—and specifically mentioning Mike—on the Lehigh University biology website:

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

Frankly, the embarrassment here is not that Lehigh continues to employ Mike but in the disclaimer itself—genuflecting to Darwin, like offering incense to Caesar, being part of what it means to be a biologist in good standing.

When I was on the faculty of Baylor, my presence there inspired similar reactions. Thus, seven scientists at the school addressed a letter to the US Congress declaring intelligent design not to be science, which was read into the Congressional Record. Today, Baylor’s biology department issues a statement pro evolution, but it is careful to avoid reference to intelligent design or to any individual. The list of readings it uses to justify this statement, in light Baylor’s claim to be a Christian university, is instructive (it’s all theistic and non-theistic evolution).

I first got to know Mike at a 1992 SMU symposium that placed Darwinists and design theorists in dialogue (out-of-print proceedings here, but a new edition is coming out with Inkwell soon). At that symposium, I also got to meet for the first time Steve Meyer and Phil Johnson. Already at that symposium, Mike addressed the sorts of biochemical criticisms of Darwinism for which he would become famous. His key talk at that symposium was titled “Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to Be Highly Isolated from Each Other.”

By 2004, Douglas Axe would publish the definitive empirical study, in the Journal of Molecular Biology, on protein isolation. Presently, I’m aware of one Discovery Institute researcher who is publishing on the underlying mathematics of this isolatedness of proteins in amino-acid sequence space (I’m keeping his identity confidential to shield him from reprisals). Just to be clear, if proteins are highly isolated, it makes it that much harder to evolve among them because protein evolution, on Darwinian principles, must traverse continuous paths and thus cannot simply materialize from one place in the space to another. The more isolation, the harder it is to form such continuous paths.

Mike’s key concept of irreducible complexity and its application to molecular machines would come a year later, at least that’s how I remember it. Conferences and meetings of intelligent design’s original A-team (Phil Johnson, Mike Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, Paul Nelson, Doug Axe, and myself) ramped up in 1993 and the following years.

I recall at least two meetings with Mike in 1993, one at a private meeting in Pajaro Dunes, south of San Francisco, that June; and then a full-fledged American Scientific Affiliation conference later that summer at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). As I remember it, Mike was already making his irreducible complexity arguments in his talks at these events. I also remember stopping by at Mike’s dorm room at the SPU conference only to find that he was not taking part in the usual conference banter and diversions because he was working on a book—the book that became Darwin’s Black Box. I remember an intensity about Mike as he was writing the book—it was as though he was on a mission to get it out.

When the book did appear in August of 1996, I was already well aware of the key arguments, so it took me a bit to see just how big an impact it was going to have. Familiarity on my part in a sense lulled me to its wider impact. “Sure, Mike’s book destroys molecular Darwinism; I’ve known that for three years now.” I was already a convert, but I didn’t know how many converts his book might make. But as events unfolded, Darwin’s Black Box proved to be a big big deal.

Phil had rekindled well-informed criticism of Darwinism with his book Darwin on Trial (1991). But he was a law professor, not a biologist, and his focus was on the internal contradictions of Darwinism and how it required dubious philosophical presuppositions to keep it afloat. Earlier, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen had critiqued materialistic origin-of-life studies in The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), but they had merely raised design/intelligence as a possible way to redress life’s information problem—they didn’t press the point too hard. The other key work in the lead-up to Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), had broached the discontinuity in living forms on which Mike Behe focused, but without the full concept of irreducible complexity.

Mike found that certain biochemical machines, such as the bacterial flagellum, had the property of irreducible complexity, which is to say, they consisted of multiple well-matched parts all of which were necessary for the primary function of the machine, and where the elimination of any part destroyed the function. Given that such systems existed in actual living cells, Mike asked how they could have evolved through a process of gradual molecular Darwinian evolution. All the parts were necessary, so how could they have come together gradually? If Darwin was right, there had to be a gradual molecular path to these systems. And yet, these systems seemed to defy the gradual evolution required of them.

Critics were swift to try to shut this argument down. Mike had claimed that there were no detailed Darwinian accounts of such systems. Ken Miller, the Brown University biologist, replied in Finding Darwin’s God that he could produce “four glittering examples” of Darwinian evolution producing irreducibly complex systems. Yet examination of these papers revealed that the systems Miller identified were not in fact irreducibly complex (see my response in No Free Lunch, p. 269).

But to really refute Mike, Miller then went further to claim that none of the biochemical systems Mike himself considered, such as the bacterial flagellum, was in fact irreducibly complex. Miller justified this outrageous claim by redefining irreducible complexity. Miller claimed they were not irreducibly complex because all these systems could lose parts and then still serve some other function (thus, by Miller’s redefinition, they were in fact reducibly complex). But that was, of course, Mike’s point—that these systems couldn’t lose parts and still perform their original function. I can, for instance, remove the spring, hammer, holding bar, and catch from a conventional mousetrap and then use the remaining wooden base as a doorstop. But what’s left won’t any longer catch mice.

Honest biologists, who nonetheless were not fans of Mike’s conclusions, admitted that he had offered a serious challenge to molecular evolution. James Shapiro, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, wrote: “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject—evolution—with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity” (National Review, 16 September 1996). A few years later cell biologist Franklin Harold wrote a book for Oxford University Press titled The Way of the Cell (2003). In virtually identical language, he noted: “There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

The challenge of irreducible complexity to the evolution of biochemical machines remains as disconcerting today (if anything, the challenge in the intervening years has become even more painful for Darwinists) as it did in the decade following the publication of Darwin’s Black Box. With the bacterial flagellum, the biochemical machine to get the most attention in Mike’s work, critics pointed to the type 3 secretory system (T3SS) as a system embedded in the bacterial flagellum that could perform its own function, and thus serve as a possible evolutionary precursor to the flagellum. But the flagellum consists of at least 10 more protein parts. So what was the path from the T3SS to the flagellum? How did those additional parts gradually get folded into an evolving T3SS to form the flagellum?

A little bit of autobiography may be illuminating at this juncture. When I saw such arguments from Darwinists for the evolution of the flagellum, I couldn’t at first believe that they took this approach to the evolution of such systems seriously. As a result, in some of my initial responses defending Mike’s book, I didn’t address the co-option argument to which Darwinists were, and always have been, committed in explaining away systems like the flagellum.

According to this co-option argument, systems like the flagellum can evolve from the T3SS by a kind of ratcheting effect in which structures and functions change step by small incremental evolutionary step. It would be like evolving kitchen appliances as follows: start with a toaster, add a part, and now you have a microwave oven; add another part, and now you have a regular oven; add another part, and now you have a dishwasher; add another part, and now you have a refrigerator; and so on.

I didn’t at first adequately address this co-option criticism of Behe because I couldn’t believe that anyone could take it seriously. But Darwinists did. Thus, they were not just saying that the T3SS is a precursor to the flagellum, but also that there is a whole series of gradual steps in which a new part gets added and the function changes, then another part gets added and the function changes again, and so on until evolution takes us to a full-fledged flagellum.

How implausible is that? The flagellum was considerably more complicated than the T3SS. So there had to be, on evolutionary grounds, a gradual set of intermediates between the two. Citing the T3SS as an evolutionary precursor of the flagellum struck me, to change the metaphor from kitchen appliances to motorcycles, like invoking a motor as a precursor to a motorcycle. A lot of intermediate steps, all functional, would be needed to gradually evolve one into the other, and yet none of these intermediate steps have ever been plausibly identified for irreducibly complex biochemical systems (or for human artifacts for that matter). With the T3SS evolving into the bacterial flagellum, no plausible path was identified when Behe published his book in 1996, and they remain as unidentified today as then.

Interestingly, the bacterial flagellum is a motility device for bacteria to propel them through their watery environments. It therefore makes sense to see flagella as existing since the dawn of bacteria. The T3SS, also known as an injectisome, on the other hand, serves as a poison delivery system for a bacterium to infect and injure an animal host (Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium uses it). Animals have been around for a much shorter duration than bacteria in the standard chronology of life on earth. So, if anything, it makes sense to think that the T3SS didn’t evolve into the bacterial flagellum, but that the bacterial flagellum shed some protein parts to become a T3SS.

It’s always easier to remove things to get something functional than to add new things to something already functional to achieve a new function. The new things added require coordination with the old. Dropping things from the old to form a new simpler system is not so sensitive to this coordination problem. This idea of evolution proceeding from complexity to simplicity became a theme in Mike’s subsequent thought and research, such as in Darwin Devolves (2019) There Mike argued that the primary trajectory of Darwinian evolution has been not from simplicity to complexity, but rather from complexity via evolutionary pruning to simplicity.

It’s been an honor to have been with Mike from the start of his work on irreducible complexity in advancing intelligent design and refuting Darwinism. His is a seminal contribution to biology notwithstanding the continued opposition to his views and argument from Darwinian naturalists. Despite, and in part because of, that opposition, his ideas about irreducible complexity have gained widespread attention. Moreover, he has over the years ably defended his ideas, notably in A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics (2020), a book of over 500 pages that cogently answers all his critics both with grace and steel.

Congratulations Mike on keeping the faith and a job well done!

Matti Leisola’s biography is now out and available at Amazon. The ebook and the paperback are reasonably priced. The hardback is considerably more expensive because it is in color (the paperback is in black and white). I did the foreword, which I reprint here below.

Some lives are better understood not by the offices held, prizes received, papers published, or controversies endured, but by the doors they open. Matti Leisola’s life is such a life. It bears all the visible marks of accomplishment: a distinguished career in biochemistry and bioengineering, leadership in industry and academia, numerous scientific publications and doctoral students, and a long public witness for intelligent design when the price of such witness was considerable.

Yet at the heart of this autobiography is not professional success. At its heart is the faith of a man and his wife Marja who steadfastly refused to be ashamed of the Gospel and in doing so embraced the Christian virtue of hospitality. Hospitality is a matter of making room for others, and this they did, be it at the table, in the home, in conversation, for questions, or about the Word of God.

This book rests on twin pillars. The first is Matti’s personal experience: not experience in some vague autonomous sense, but experience under the good hand of God. The second is his bedrock commitment: the absolute authority of the Bible, the preeminence of the Christian worldview over every rival, and the deep coherence between the book of Scripture and the book of nature.

The story of Matti and Marja is about God drawing people to himself. The instruments were never theatrical: the Word of God, personal witness, prayer, and friendship. One person hears, receives, and then speaks. Another is invited into conversation. A home opens, a Bible is studied, a meal is served, and a skeptical student is taken seriously. This is how the Gospel advanced through the Leisolas.

Hospitality is thus central to the Leisola’s story. It is the visible form taken by their unashamed faith in Christ. Matti and Marja did not open their home because they were carefree people with unlimited energy and money. They opened it because the Gospel had opened them. Students crowded into their apartment for discussions. Young Christians came for Bible study and discipleship. Scholars unsure of faith, or even opposed to it, were received not as enemies but as guests. People from all walks found a place.

Hospitality also shaped Matti’s scientific and apologetic vocation. When A. E. Wilder-Smith came into Matti’s life, Matti did not merely read his work; he made room for his person. Wilder-Smith received from Matti a hearing in Finland, a visible platform from which to challenge prevailing assumptions about evolution and materialism.

Francis Schaeffer was pivotal in helping Matti see that Christianity is not a leap into irrationality but a coherent account of truth, morality, history, and nature, grounding human dignity in the imago Dei. Through Schaeffer, Matti came to see that every system of thought rests on presuppositions. The question is not whether we reason from first principles, but which first principles can bear the weight of reason, science, ethics, and life.

I underscore Wilder-Smith and Schaeffer here not just because they were so central in the life and thought of Matti, but also because they were so central to other key players in the intelligent design movement. For instance, Wilder-Smith crucially influenced Charles Thaxton’s work in The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), arguably the first book of the modern intelligent design movement.

For me personally, Wilder-Smith and Schaeffer were enormously influential. Schaeffer’s example of being willing to mix things up with skeptics and engage them without fear or compromise encouraged me to do the same. Wilder-Smith’s focus on the information problem in biology directed my attentions there and inspired my own research on design inferential reasoning and conservation of information.

My own connection with Matti belongs to the fellowship of scientists and scholars who refuse to treat materialism as the price of admission to serious thought. I’ve never found him to hesitate in advancing the cause of intelligent design. Matti oversaw the translation my book Intelligent Design into Finnish. In looking through my old emails, I see that we first began to correspond in 2001. Over the years, we’ve worked jointly on other projects, most recently on the editorial board of the journal BIO-Complexity.

I have long regarded Matti as one of the courageous European voices pressing the question Darwinism evades: What is the source of the information, organization, and engineering excellence we find in living systems? In Heretic, coauthored with my friend and colleague Jonathan Witt, Matti told the story of his journey from Darwin to design. In this autobiography, we see the deeper story beneath that journey: not merely a scientist discovering inadequacies in neo-Darwinism, but a Christian understanding that all truth is God’s truth.

Matti’s scientific life was never sealed off from discipleship. At the Helsinki University of Technology, at ETH Zurich, at Cultor, and again in university leadership, he inhabited laboratories, classrooms, boardrooms, and lecture halls as places where he could spotlight Christ’s lordship. He asked hard questions about the origin of life, mutation and selection, biological information, and the poverty of materialist accounts of life. He also asked what courage and faithfulness require when doors close and criticism comes from secular academics and ecclesiastics alike. His answers, with no bluster, reflected perseverance under the good hand of God.

That phrase, “the good hand of God,” runs as a leitmotif through this book. It is the language of Ezra and Nehemiah, where providence appears through timing, provision, courage, favor, and endurance. Matti’s road to Switzerland unfolded step by step. The house in Espoo came into being through loyal friends, improbable provisions, timely decisions, and steady trust. Even closed doors proved merciful. Matti once dreamed of becoming a full-time laborer with the Navigators, only to see that dream crushed through dismissal and hidden human conflict. Yet his Shepherd knew better. Had that door remained open, we might have had a lesser Matti: less formed by science, less tested in controversy, less able to witness in universities and laboratories.

The principle of spiritual multiplication is another leitmotif in this book. Second Timothy 2:2 was for Matti not an abstraction. He learned to choose, train, and entrust the Word to faithful people who would teach others also. Paul Lappala’s influence was decisive: he showed Matti that zeal needs form, that discipleship requires time—discipline, Scripture memory, personal attention, and example. Later, Matti prayed at the Biotechnology Institute that God would give him people who would take the Word seriously. This is hospitality at its most strategic: receiving the people God gives and helping them become fruitful servants.

At the base of Matti’s life work stands Scripture. Matti’s confidence in Scripture is not a decorative piety added to an autonomous intellectual life. It is foundational. The Bible gave Matti the frame of reference for understanding human sinfulness, human dignity, family life, money, suffering, work, science, and death.

Accordingly, Matti saw Christianity not as shrinking from but as embracing rational inquiry. Indeed, he saw Christianity makes rational inquiry possible. Psalm 19’s twofold witness—the heavens declaring God’s glory and the law of the Lord reviving the soul—is not an embarrassment to science. It is the condition for science’s deepest coherence.

This book should not be read as an old warrior laying down his arms. Matti is almost eighty, Marja now faces Parkinson’s disease, and their season of life has changed. But the same pattern remains: faith, hospitality, witness, Scripture, and the good hand of God. The table may be quieter and the burdens heavier, but Matti’s care for Marja is part of the same testimony. The man who opened his home to students and scholars now opens his days in love to the wife without whom none of this would have been possible.

I commend Not Ashamed of the Gospel because it shows what intellectual courage looks like when joined to Christian humility, and what hospitality looks like when rooted in the Gospel. Matti Leisola has not been ashamed of Christ in the university, in the laboratory, in print, in controversy, at home, or among friends. His life calls us to see that the defense of truth is not an argument to be won, but rather a table to be set, a door to be opened, a word to be fitly spoken, and a life to be shared.

In their life of hospitality, Matti and Marja exemplify the words of Jesus in John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

William A. Dembski

Aubrey, Texas, USA

May 2026

The man who wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” also wrote the logic textbook Harvard used to examine its students. I’ve restored a (reasonably) clean copy of it, and you can download it for free at the bottom of this post.

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) is remembered for his hymns, and rightly so — some seven hundred fifty of them, including “Joy to the World” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Largely forgotten is that he wrote a logic textbook. He dedicated Logic, or, The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth from London in August 1724 to Sir John Hartopp, the young baronet he had tutored, explaining that a friend’s “repeated importunities” had persuaded him to revise what began as private lesson notes.

The revision led to a book that went through eight editions in his lifetime, was read at Oxford and Cambridge even though its nonconformist author was barred from teaching at either, crossed the Atlantic, and appeared in American classrooms, going through multiple American editions.

Not a book of symbols

Watts’s title might mislead modern readers. Open it expecting truth tables and symbolic logic, and you’ll be disappointed. Watts opens instead with a definition:

LOGIC is the art of using Reason well in our inquiries after truth, and the communication of it to others.

He footnotes the word Reason to make sure nobody can miss its grand sweep: he does not mean merely inferring one thing from another, but “all the intellectual powers of man.” Logic on this account is the discipline of the whole mind — forming clear ideas, judging well, weighing evidence, and arranging what you know so that it can be taught and remembered.

Watts organizes his book around four operations: perception, judgment, argumentation, and disposition. Ideas first, then propositions, then inference, then method. Syllogisms occupy one of those four parts. The other three are about everything that has to go right before and after inference.

Watts is refreshingly hostile to the weaponization of logic as a way of arguing opponents into submission. From the dedication:

True logic is not that noisy thing that deals all in dispute and wrangling, to which former ages had debased and confined it.

And a page later, on the technical vocabulary the educational establishment had built up:

True logic doth not require a long detail of hard words to amuse mankind, and to puff up the mind with empty sounds, and a pride of false learning.

Excluded from elite English education because of his nonconformism, Watts did not see disputation as a game to be played and enjoyed.

The book’s continued relevance

The entire book is worth studying today, and not just as a historical artifact. That said, Part Two, on judgment is especially worth the attention of students today.

There Watts defines a prejudice as a judgment formed about any person or thing before sufficient examination — an assent given before the evidence justifies it, “though the thing itself may happen to be true.” Insufficient for Watts are education, custom, party spirit, personal interest, passion, haste, and deference to authority. He wants the reader to proportion assent to evidence rather than forcing every question into certainty or denial.

His treatment of testimony is also worth engaging today. Since most of what any of us knows rests on somebody else’s word, he asks what makes a witness worth believing: competence, opportunity, sincerity, motive, independence, agreement with other evidence. Every one of those is a live concern on the internet today.

Those unimproved by reason

Right after the dedication, on the very first page of the book proper, and just after defining reason as “the common gift of God to all men,” Watts writes this:

I could even venture to say, that the improvement of reason hath raised the learned and the prudent, in the European world, almost as much above the Hottentots, and other savages of Africa, as those savages are by nature superior to the birds, the beasts, and the fishes.

It is disappointing to see Watts succumb to the limitations of his age, which saw Europeans at the pinnacle of humanity.

Without defending what Watts says here about Hottentots and savages, I think it important to note that Watts is making a point about nurture and not nature. Watts is not saying that the Hottentots cannot, by their nature, be raised to the level of the Europeans — with the right nurture they can. He even acknowledges that in past ages, his forebears were in the same boat, unimproved as they were back then by reason.

This is very different from Charles Darwin, who saw the difference between cultured English gentlemen and savages as a chasm built by nature. Thus, over a century after Watts wrote his Logic, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.... The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Watts saw the savage races as capable of being improved by reason. Darwin saw a chasm as separating the savage races that was essentially unbridgeable.

Why it still bears reading

The formal logic of our day alone cannot tell you whether your premises deserve belief, whether your terms are stable, whether your sources are credible, or whether passion has already decided the question for you. A proof can be impeccable and worthless. Watts keeps inference, language, evidence, testimony, character, and method inside a single account of responsible inquiry, and I don’t know a modern textbook that attempts as much.

This shouldn’t replace a modern course in formal or, for that matter, informal logic (both of which I’ve taught). Rather, Watts should enlarge what you think the right use of reason should be.

The download

The file below is the Sixth American Edition — Boston: West, Richardson & Lord, printed by E. P. Walton at Montpelier, Vermont, 1819. I’ve worked it up from an Internet Archive scan (which I found to be effectively unreadable): the discoloration removed, the text restored and squared up, every page reset on a clean 6 × 9 page, and the whole thing OCRed so it’s fully searchable. Two hundred ninety-four pages.

Take it, read Part Two, and see whether it doesn’t change how you argue. This pdf is far from perfect, and you won’t want to go to a printer and have it turned into a hardcopy. For that, you’ll want to wait for an edition I’m working on of Watts’s Logic, entirely re-typeset and with an extensive introductory guide. Because of the powerful book production technology at Inkwell.net, I hope to get this out to all of you in the next few months.

In the meantime, download Isaac Watts’s classic treatise on logic here:

Watts Logic 1819 6x9 Watermarked

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Introduction: Babel, Nehemiah, and Christian Renewal

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is long — over 40,000 words. Besides addressing artificial intelligence, it devotes quite a lot of space to stage-setting, providing context for AI in Catholic thought, especially in past encyclicals. Because there is much of value in this encyclical relevant to current discussions about AI but that can be summarized more briefly, I’m providing the digest below — shorter quotes from the encyclical for readers without the time to read it through in its entirety.

Magnifica Humanitas frames the challenge of artificial intelligence through two scriptural images: the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls. The encyclical’s title, in English “The Grandeur of Humanity,” refers to a dignity the Pope describes as a gift to be safeguarded rather than an achievement to be defended. Babel represents a mode of technological development driven by self-sufficiency and efficiency, pursued without reference to God or human dignity; Nehemiah represents a less hurried, collaborative rebuilding of common life ordered toward human flourishing. The encyclical does not frame this as a choice between technology and humanity as such — Leo XIV explicitly affirms that technology can heal, connect, educate, and protect. His concern is with what happens when efficiency of performance becomes the standard by which value is measured, since in his account this tends to make human beings something to be processed, classified, or optimized rather than persons encountered as ends in themselves [9–10, 92].

The encyclical describes the “Babel syndrome” [10] as a pattern in which growth in technological power outpaces growth in moral and social responsibility. Later chapters trace several consequences of this imbalance: the weakening of shared truth amid synthetic and manipulated content [132–134], the erosion of work’s dignity through automation pursued primarily for cost reduction [148–152], new dependencies created by attention-capturing digital platforms [170–173], and warfare made more automated and less subject to human deliberation [182–200]. Leo XIV’s proposed alternative, following Nehemiah, is not a rejection of technology but a call for shared responsibility distributed among specific actors — families, workers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, legislators, churches, and civil society — each assigned, as appropriate, a section of the wall to rebuild [8, 13–14]. Read as a whole, the encyclical presents this rebuilding as an ongoing task of Christian renewal rather than a single policy prescription.

Source note: This digest is based on the encyclical by Pope Leo XIV released on May 15, 2026 and titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (click on this hyperlink to access the full encyclical). Quote bullets are excerpted and condensed with ellipses. Bracketed words inside quotations clarify pronoun references. Paragraph numbers from the encyclical appear after the closing quotation mark in square brackets.

1. The Grandeur of the Human Person

• “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” [1]

• “Human persons are called to communion with God and ‘can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving’... their deepest vocation is to enter into the Trinitarian dynamic of love received and shared.” [48]

• “Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation.” [50]

• “Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life... it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.” [50]

• “The value of persons... does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.” [51]

• “Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.” [53]

• “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” [99]

• “Ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.” [15]

• “No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil.” [233]

2. AI as Servant, Not Savior

• “Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as ‘a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.’” [4]

• “Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” [9]

• “Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals.” [83]

• “Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, for they can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion.” [85]

• “In themselves, these innovations can greatly serve integral human development and the care of our common home. Yet precisely because of their power, they can also hasten the expansion of the technocratic paradigm and therefore require a new spiritual, ethical and political framework.” [93]

• “These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence... offering tangible benefits across many fields.” [99]

• “The speed and simplicity with which information, complex analyses, media content and practical assistance can be accessed undoubtedly makes life easier.” [100]

• “Technology can also support this mutual care between people... without undermining human freedom and judgment.” [114]

• “It is certainly desirable for technology to relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.” [152]

3. The Babel Syndrome

• “Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.” [7]

• “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.” [9]

• “We must... avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything... into data and performance.” [10]

• “Technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” [92]

• “More power does not necessarily imply something better... ‘Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well.’” [93]

• “Technological progress... requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues.” [94]

• “We cannot consider AI to be morally neutral... every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.” [104]

• “The pervasive technocratic paradigm... threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control.” [112]

• “If power grows while the heart withers and human bonds fray, then we are faced with a new form of Babel — a construction that is grandiose, yet fundamentally dehumanizing.” [129]

4. Work Worthy of the Person

• “The Magisterium has recognized in work ‘the essential key’ to understanding the entire social question, since it is through their work that individuals develop many dimensions of their existence.” [148]

• “Work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.” [149]

• “The ‘new ways’ of working are not necessarily better... current approaches to technology can paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.” [150]

• “It is necessary to design systems that are centered on the human person and not solely on performance.” [150]

• “Unemployment is a grave evil... a true social calamity... amid the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ this concern is even more acute, as innovation is often pursued solely for reducing costs and increasing profits.” [151]

• “The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good.” [152]

• “Every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers.” [156]

• “More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.” [163]

• “For young people, job insecurity is particularly devastating... many young people find the path to their human and professional fulfilment blocked.” [167]

• “We need a political creativity that will promote ‘work’ and place the family and coming generations at the center; otherwise our economic progress will translate into new forms of insecurity and exclusion.” [168]

5. False Anthropologies: Transhumanism and Posthumanism

• “Certain currents of thought... interpret progress as surpassing the human condition... through a futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’ or ‘human-machine hybrid.’” [115]

• “Transhumanism envisions the enhancement of human beings through technologies — such as biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms — with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities.” [116]

• “Posthumanism, especially in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges anthropocentrism and envisions a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment, even anticipating a threshold where humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.” [116]

• “The key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.” [117]

• “It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’” [117]

• “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.” [118]

• “To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well... to renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid... would no longer be human.” [120]

• “Humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.” [126]

• “The expression ‘more than human’ is not an exclusive domain of technological promise... human beings are not confined by the boundaries of their own nature; rather, they are called to self-transcendence... through their fulfillment in love.” [127]

• “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” [128]

• “What saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.” [128]

• “In the promises of transhumanism and some posthumanist currents of thought, which seek an enhanced and almost disembodied humanity, we recognize... the need for a fuller life... Yet the Incarnation opens a different pathway.” [232]

6. Truth in the Age of Synthetic Reality

• “Tools that could foster dialogue and participation are often used to construct distorted narratives and blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, mixing facts with opinions.” [132]

• “Disinformation did not begin with AI, yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI. The ability to manipulate content, images and videos exposes people to biased or misleading perspectives.” [132]

• “Those who command powerful technological and economic resources... can influence a significant number of people concerning the truth about humanity, the world, the meaning of existence, the family and even God.” [133]

• “This is pure power detached from truth, which subtly or overtly imposes what it wishes others to accept as true.” [133]

• “The search for truth is an essential element of democracy... When questions about what is true lose their appeal... democratic life is weakened.” [134]

• “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism.” [134]

• “Communication ‘is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture.’” [135]

• “Truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence. We must therefore promote an ecology of communication.” [137]

• “Fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home.” [237]

7. Forming Human Hearts in a Digital Age

• “In an era when truth is often distorted in order to serve particular interests and communication strategies, the field of education assumes decisive importance.” [139]

• “The pervasiveness of digital media fosters a culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation, which gives rise to fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth.” [139]

• “Education... is a long journey requiring patience, and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances.” [140]

• “Educating people about the use of AI... involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used.” [140]

• “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time.” [140]

• “Having a personal mobile device at too early an age and using it without adult supervision can exacerbate young people’s vulnerabilities, foster addiction and expose them to isolation, bullying and cyberbullying, as well as to pressures to share intimate images or sensitive information.” [141]

• “It is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.” [142]

• “School is the place where new generations can learn to seek and love the truth, to reflect on the meaning of life and to recognize the dignity of every person.” [143]

• “It is necessary to support the ongoing formation of teachers... helping students to use [new technologies] responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence.” [145]

• “As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.” [146]

• “Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” [147]

• “The family is a primary social good... the first environment in which all persons develop their potential, become aware of their dignity and learn the earliest forms of truth and goodness, internalizing the habits that prepare them for life in society.” [165]

• “Let us invest in education, beginning with ourselves!... Today, accompanying children and young people in using technology for developing responsible relationships, helping them to recognize the risks and choose what fosters inner freedom, is a concrete form of charity and will safeguard their dignity.” [238]

8. Nehemiah’s Wall: Rebuilding the Common Good

• “The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part.” [8]

• “All are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities.” [13]

• “Let us establish standards for discernment — the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace.” [14]

• “The recent Magisterium has insisted that social justice begins with the least among us. Saint John Paul II spoke of a preferential option for the poor... that must guide both personal and societal choices.” [78]

• “Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.” [67]

• “When these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few... a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.” [67]

• “In the digital revolution... major economic and technological actors... define conditions for access, rules of visibility, forms of interaction, and even economic opportunities.” [71]

• “We cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.” [72]

• “To speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI.” [109]

• “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern... To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” [110]

• “In this era of digital transformation, I see in [Nehemiah] a striking parable of our own vocation... to enter the construction sites of history... in order to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.” [241]

9. Freedom Under Pressure: Addiction, Surveillance, and the Digital Attention Economy

• “The subtler forms of addiction linked to the ‘digital attention economy’ should not be underestimated, since platforms and services are often designed to capture users’ time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom.” [170]

• “When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end; those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be ignored.” [170]

• “A further risk... is that of social control made possible by the massive collection of data and use of algorithmic systems.” [171]

• “When every action — movements, purchases, relationships and preferences — leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it.” [171]

• “Technology will remain at the service of the human person and not become a form of control over consciences.” [171]

• “At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit.” [172]

• “Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical... a significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people... such as data labeling, model training and content moderation.” [173]

• “If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.” [173]

• “Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.” [178]

• “Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance.” [178]

• “The digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction; yet, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness.” [239]

10. From Babel to Nehemiah: Peace Against the Machine of War

• “Here the question is not merely the efficiency of new tools, but also the risk that technology, detached from ethics and responsibility, will render decisions about life and death more rapid and impersonal, and will present the use of force as an immediate and viable option.” [182]

• “AI acts as an accelerating factor... what is created for defense can be rapidly repurposed for offense, and the fine line between protection and aggression becomes blurred.” [183]

• “While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians, it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to ‘collateral damage.’” [183]

• “On the one hand, there is the temptation of constructing the Tower of Babel, relying on power and pride. On the other hand, patience is required in order to rebuild Jerusalem ‘piece by piece,’ as in the time of Nehemiah, by safeguarding humanity and the common good.” [184]

• “It is not enough for artificial intelligence to make us more efficient or connected; it must also serve to build a universal human family, with shared rights and duties, where digital proximity becomes a real opportunity for encounter and mutual care.” [187]

• “Communication networks, fragmented information environments and algorithms that reward conflict can magnify polarization and resentment, increase propaganda and make shared discernment more difficult.” [192]

• “The development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms.” [197]

• “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.” [198]

• “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data.” [198]

• “The decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, but must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control.” [200]

• “Peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war; instead, it is always possible as the fruit of justice and charity.” [205]

• “War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must be silenced, for they do not resolve problems but only increase them.” [222]

• “Cyberspace too has become a battleground. Cyberattacks, data manipulation and campaigns of influence, orchestrated with the help of AI, can destabilize entire countries even before open armed conflict erupts.” [225]

Conclusion: Hope at Nehemiah’s Construction Site

The encyclical ends not with a technical program but with a spiritual summons: remain human, rebuild together, pray, and hope.

• “Let us not grow weary of being human! We must not lose our ability to recognize ourselves as creatures: limited, wounded, in need of one another and called to communion.” [236]

• “Let us rediscover the joy of being human, because our humanity is the place where the Word became flesh and where the Holy Spirit continues to dwell.” [236]

• “Let us invest in education, beginning with ourselves! We all need to learn how to engage with the digital world in a human way, as an integral part of our education in the faith and in a life lived according to the Gospel.” [238]

• “Let us cultivate relationships! In an era that favors speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness.” [239]

• “Let us love justice and peace!... Every technical or economic decision should include spiritual discernment and be an opportunity for assessing whether the advances in AI are promoting justice and participation or concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a select few.” [240]

• “Like Nehemiah, we too are called to unite listening and courage, prayer and responsibility, so that... the human city may become a more fitting place to live.” [241]

• “With the same faith as Mary, let us become ‘weavers of hope’ in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape.” [245]

• “In the humble fidelity of daily life, even the era of AI can become a time in which the Holy Spirit brings about the civilization of love in our lives.” [245]

To sum up: Nehemiah’s construction site is already open, and every one of us has a section of the wall to rebuild. Whether as parents, teachers, workers, policymakers, citizens or believers, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical calls us to rebuild in hope: not because technology can save us, but because God is already at work in human efforts ordered to truth, justice, communion, and love.

The Story of Everything, a terrific documentary based on Stephen Meyer’s terrific book The Return of the God Hypothesis, appeared in theaters in late April/early May of this year. This documentary presented a powerful case for intelligent design from cosmology and biology, and is now available for streaming at Amazon.

I was interviewed in the documentary and as a result was invited to attend two theater viewings of it in which I took questions from the audience afterwards and also got to talk informally with people about the documentary. It became clear to me that the documentary made a powerful impression favorable to intelligent design on viewers. At the same time, I came away with the sense that the documentary, by being pitched at a high level, was not reaching a younger audience with the impact it might otherwise have had.

I therefore decided to take the content of this documentary as well as related work on intelligent design (especially Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis), and recast is as a dialogue between a scientific naturalist/atheist named Carl and an intelligent design proponent/theist named Phil (truth be told, I was thinking of Carl as Carl Sagan and Phil as Phil Johnson). For narration, I looked to a character named Barb (no special significance for that name). To pull this off, I enlisted the help of AI—ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, and Gemini (in decreasing order of priority).

Below is the dialogue. Because of the need to provide context and explanation, especially for younger students without much background in intelligent design or the science-religion discussion, this dialogue is much longer in word-count than the original documentary. The advantage is that a younger audience will now find the dialogue below readily accessible.

Dialogues are educationally useful, and it’s no accident that in the ancient world they were so widely deployed for pedagogical purposes. Plato and Cicero stand out here. Of course, this dialogue doesn’t aspire to their level of excellence. The hope is simply that younger students will find this dialogue helpful, with the key ideas in the debate over intelligent design becoming accessible and clear through it. Note that there are many resources in this dialogue, such as a glossary of terms, suggested videos (all conveniently at YouTube), and suggested readings (broken into pro-intelligent design and pro-scientific naturalism). For convenience, I’m therefore making a pdf of it available here as well.

Is There A Mind Behind The Universe V19 Bw

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This dialogue available for free to anyone using it for non-commercial purposes, including reposting it and turning it into audio or video, provided that a link to this Substack post is given. Anyone wanting to take commercial advantage of this dialogue will need to contact me privately.

Is There a Mind Behind the Universe? A Dialogue for Students

A Classroom-Ready Eighth-Grade Dialogue About the Universe, Life, Design, God, and the Multiverse

Dramatis Personae

Barb: the narrator and guide. She explains the background, slows down difficult ideas, and keeps the conversation on track.

Carl: a scientific naturalist. He thinks nature is all there is, and that science should explain everything by matter, energy, laws, and chance.

Phil: an intelligent design theorist. He thinks some features of the universe and life are best explained by a designing mind.

Author’s Note

This dialogue is an original educational adaptation. It is based on the main scientific topics and arguments in the documentary transcript and on the background arguments developed in Stephen C. Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis and Signature in the Cell. It does not quote or paraphrase the documentary line by line. The wording, scenes, order of exchanges, and explanatory examples have been rewritten for younger readers.

The dialogue has three speakers. Barb is the narrator and teacher. Carl represents a scientific naturalist or materialist point of view. Phil represents an intelligent design point of view. Carl is not meant to be foolish, and Phil is not meant to be a preacher. They are meant to show how thoughtful people might argue about the same evidence.

The reading level has been simplified for students around eighth grade. Difficult words are explained when they appear. The goal is not to remove the seriousness of the subject, but to make the subject clear. The dialogue asks a large question: Do the discoveries of modern science fit better with a universe that comes from blind matter, or with a universe that comes from mind?

A final point is important. Intelligent design, considered strictly as a scientific argument, does not begin by naming the designer. It asks whether certain features of nature are best explained by intelligence. But the evidence discussed here also has religious and philosophical importance. The documentary openly raises the question of a creator, and this revised dialogue does so as well.

This version also aims to be useful as an educational resource. It does not claim that all scientists agree with Phil. Many scientists remain convinced by Carl’s position, and scientific consensus deserves serious attention. At the same time, students should learn to evaluate arguments on their merits, not only by counting who agrees with them. The purpose is to let students see how two thoughtful people can argue about the same evidence, and to help them ask which explanation is strongest.

How to Use This Dialogue

This dialogue works well if it is read aloud. One student can read Carl, another can read Phil, and a third can read Barb. Carl should not sound foolish. Phil should not sound preachy. Both should sound serious.

Each major part begins with a short guide called “What to Watch For.” These guides tell you the main question before the argument begins.

At several stopping points, I ask review questions. These are not trick questions. They are meant to help readers slow down, remember the evidence, and decide whether Carl or Phil has given the better explanation.

A few sections are marked Advanced Question. Those sections are still written in plain language, but they ask harder questions about philosophy of science, probability, and cosmology. Younger readers can read them slowly, discuss them with a teacher, or skip them on a first pass and return later.

The main path through the dialogue is simple: What best explains the beginning of the universe, the life-friendly structure of the universe, and the information-rich systems inside living cells? The advanced sections add depth, but they are not needed to follow the basic story.

Student Guide: A Roadmap for First Reading

This dialogue is long, but the main path is simple: three discoveries, two interpretations. The three discoveries are the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and the information-rich structure of living cells. Carl and Phil disagree about what those discoveries mean.

For a shorter first reading, follow the main path: Chapters 1, 4-8, 11-15, 18-23, 28-29, 35-39, and 45-46. These chapters carry the main argument from the universe, to fine-tuning, to life, to evolution, and finally to the larger meaning.

Advanced sections are marked “Advanced Question.” You can read them slowly, discuss them with a teacher, or skip them on a first pass and return later.

Do not worry if you do not understand every detail the first time through. The goal is to follow the big question: Do the discoveries of modern science fit better with a universe that comes from blind matter, or with a universe that comes from mind?

PART ONE

THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

What to Watch For

Barb: In Part One, watch how the dialogue begins with two rival stories of reality and then turns to the beginning of the universe. The main question is whether space, time, matter, and energy are self-explaining, or whether their beginning points beyond the physical universe.

Chapter 1

The Question Behind the Questions

Barb: Suppose you look up on a clear night. You see stars scattered across the sky. Behind them are galaxies, and behind those are more galaxies than anyone can count by eye. Now suppose you look the other way, down through a microscope. Inside a living cell you find tiny machines, coded instructions, and systems that copy, read, repair, and use information. Both directions lead to wonder.

1. IMAGE LINK: Hubble Ultra Deep Field, cosmic scale and billions of galaxies

Carl: Wonder is fine. But wonder is not an argument.

Phil: True. Wonder by itself does not prove anything. But wonder often starts good questions. Why is there a universe at all? Why does it have laws? Why are those laws so well suited for life? Why does life depend on coded information?

Barb: Carl and Phil are going to debate two very different stories about reality. In the first story, matter and energy are basic. They have no purpose. They follow laws, mix with chance, and eventually produce stars, planets, life, animals, and human minds. In the second story, mind is basic. The universe comes from intelligence, and life shows signs of purpose.

Carl: I will state my side clearly. Nature is all there is. Matter, energy, laws, and chance are enough. We may not know all the details yet, but science has a long history of finding natural explanations. I see no need to add a designer. Some scientists put this even more bluntly. They say that the things we care about most, including our own existence, are finally the result of cosmic accident. That may sound cold, but I think it is more honest than inventing purpose where science has not found it.

2. IMAGE LINK: Richard Dawkins portrait, Darwinian explanation and scientific naturalism

Phil: I will state my side clearly too. I accept real science. I accept evidence. I accept natural causes where natural causes explain the facts. But I do not think blind matter explains everything. Some things in nature look like the kind of things that minds produce.

Carl: That already sounds like religion trying to wear a lab coat.

Phil: It could be misused that way. But that is not the argument I am making. If an archaeologist finds marks on a stone tablet that form a language, she does not say, “Wind and rain must have done it because science can only talk about wind and rain.” She asks what cause best explains the pattern. Sometimes the best explanation is intelligence.

Barb: This is called an inference to the best explanation. It means looking at the evidence and asking which cause has the power to produce it. A detective uses this kind of reasoning. So does an archaeologist. So does a scientist studying events from the past.

Carl: But you are not talking about a human being making a tool or writing a note. You are talking about a designer of the universe. That is a very large step.

Phil: It is large. But the evidence is large too. We are not talking about one odd rock or one strange fossil. We are talking about the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and the information inside living cells.

Barb: A worldview is a big picture of reality. It tells us what we think is most basic. Carl’s worldview says matter comes first and mind comes late. Phil’s worldview says mind comes first and matter is the product of mind.

Carl: I also think history supports my side. Long ago people explained thunder by gods. Science explained thunder by natural causes. People blamed disease on spirits. Science found germs. Again and again, science has replaced supernatural explanations with natural ones.

Phil: Sometimes that happened, yes. But the history is not that simple. The founders of modern science often believed in God. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, and many others believed the universe was orderly because it came from a rational creator. They expected nature to be understandable because they believed a rational mind stood behind it.

3. IMAGE LINK: Galileo Galilei portrait, early modern science and belief in a rationally ordered universe

4. IMAGE LINK: Johannes Kepler portrait, mathematical order and the founders of modern science

5. IMAGE LINK: Isaac Newton portrait, universal gravitation and the ordered system of the heavens

6. IMAGE LINK: Robert Boyle portrait, experimental science and belief in created order

Carl: They were great scientists, but they also lived in religious cultures. We should not just copy their beliefs.

Phil: I agree. Their beliefs do not settle the question. But they show that science and belief in a creator were not enemies at the birth of modern science. In fact, belief in a rational creator helped many scientists expect rational laws in nature.

Barb: In the nineteenth century, a different story became powerful. Pierre Laplace tried to explain the solar system by natural law. Charles Darwin offered a natural mechanism for changes in living things. Thomas Henry Huxley defended Darwin and argued for a more materialist picture of life. Over time, many people came to think science had made design unnecessary.

7. IMAGE LINK: Pierre-Simon Laplace portrait, natural law and the rise of scientific materialism

8. IMAGE LINK: Charles Darwin portrait, natural selection and the appearance of design

9. IMAGE LINK: Thomas Henry Huxley portrait, Darwinian naturalism and nineteenth-century biology

Carl: And I think that was progress. If we can explain something by natural law, we should not jump to design.

Phil: Agreed. But materialism went further. It did not merely say, “Use natural explanations where they work.” It said, “Only material explanations can ever be real explanations.” That is no longer just science. That is philosophy.

Barb: Scientific materialism is the belief that matter and energy are all that exist, and that every real explanation must finally be a material explanation. A person can do science without believing that. Science is a method for studying evidence. Materialism is a belief about all of reality.

10. IMAGE LINK: Neil deGrasse Tyson portrait, public scientific skepticism about design

Carl: Fine. But a designer sounds like God. Are we really going there?

Phil: Eventually we have to be honest about that. Intelligent design, strictly stated, asks whether evidence points to intelligence. It does not begin by naming the designer. But if the evidence points to a mind beyond the universe, then yes, that has religious meaning. It fits very naturally with the idea of a creator.

Carl: At least you admit it.

Phil: I admit it because hiding it would be dishonest. But the religious meaning comes after the evidence. I am not saying, “My religion says design, therefore the evidence must show design.” I am saying, “The evidence looks like the work of intelligence, and that conclusion has deep consequences.”

Barb: Those consequences are not small. If Carl is right, human beings are temporary products of blind processes in a universe with no built-in purpose. We may create our own meanings, but the universe did not intend us. If Phil is right, mind and purpose are woven into the deepest level of reality.

Carl: That sounds dramatic.

Barb: It is dramatic. The documentary that inspired this dialogue is not only about facts. It is about the story those facts seem to tell.

Phil: So let us examine the evidence carefully.

Carl: I will keep pressing for natural explanations.

Phil: And I will keep asking whether your natural explanations are supported by evidence or protected by a rule that forbids design from the start.

Barb: We will look at three main discoveries. First, modern cosmology points to a beginning of the universe. Second, physics shows that the universe is finely tuned for life. Third, biology shows that life depends on complex, coded information. These are not small topics. They are clues to the larger story science seems to tell.

Chapter 2

The Rise of the Materialist Story

Barb: To understand why Carl and Phil disagree so strongly, we should look at the history of the materialist story. It did not appear all at once. It grew over time.

Carl: Ancient Greek thinkers already asked whether nature could be explained by matter in motion. Some imagined tiny atoms moving in empty space. That was long before modern science, but it shows that naturalistic thinking is very old.

11. IMAGE LINK: Aristotle bust, ancient questions about whether the universe is eternal or began

12. IMAGE LINK: Epicurus bust, ancient atomism and mindless matter as a rival worldview

13. IMAGE LINK: Lucretius portrait, ancient materialism and nature without divine mind

Phil: And belief in a rational creator is also very old. The important point is that Western culture has long had two rival stories: reality from mind, and reality from matter alone.

Barb: In the scientific revolution, many scientists believed both in nature’s laws and in God. They did not see those ideas as enemies. In fact, they often thought laws pointed to a lawgiver.

Carl: Later, however, science began explaining more and more without direct appeal to God. Newton explained planetary motion by gravity. Laplace imagined the solar system forming by natural processes. Darwin explained adaptation by natural selection.

Phil: Darwin was especially important because living things had long seemed like the clearest examples of design. Eyes, wings, claws, flowers, and instincts looked purposeful. Darwin gave a natural process that could explain many adaptations.

Carl: Natural selection is simple and powerful. Organisms vary. Some variations help survival and reproduction. Those variations get passed on. Over long periods, small changes can add up.

Phil: I accept that natural selection explains some things. But Darwin’s theory starts with living organisms that reproduce. It does not explain the origin of the first life. Nor did Darwin know about DNA, molecular machines, or the information-processing systems inside cells.

Barb: By the late nineteenth century, many thinkers believed science was moving toward a complete materialist story. The universe, life, and human beings would all be explained by matter and energy acting without purpose.

Carl: That story has been fruitful. It made scientists look for natural causes instead of giving up.

Phil: It also tempted people to treat materialism as a settled fact rather than a philosophy. That is a mistake.

Carl: But if natural explanations keep winning, materialism gains support.

Phil: Unless the biggest discoveries point the other way. The beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, and biological information were not predicted by old materialism.

Barb: Another issue is human meaning. Some popular naturalists say the universe has no built-in purpose. Humans are temporary products of blind processes. When we die, our brains stop, and that is the end. Eventually the universe itself may run down.

Carl: That can sound bleak, but truth is not always comforting. Science should not be judged by whether it makes us feel important.

Phil: Agreed. But if the evidence points to purpose, we should not reject it because materialism sounds tougher or more scientific.

Barb: So the emotional issue cuts both ways. Some people may want design to be true because it gives meaning. Others may want naturalism to be true because it frees them from God. Neither desire settles the evidence.

Carl: Evidence should decide. Let me state what I do believe, not only what I doubt. I believe the universe is orderly, beautiful, and knowable. I believe that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology have explained an enormous amount already. I do not think that makes the world less wonderful. To me, it makes science more wonderful. I trust that natural explanations will continue to grow.

Phil: Yes. And that is why the three discoveries matter.

Chapter 3

The Names in the Story

Barb: The documentary mentions many scientists and thinkers. Since younger readers may not know them, let us place a few names.

Carl: Galileo helped show that mathematics and observation could reveal how nature works. Kepler discovered laws of planetary motion. Newton developed laws of motion and universal gravity.

Phil: Boyle helped develop modern chemistry and experimental method. These scientists believed nature had order that human minds could understand.

Barb: Laplace was a French mathematician and scientist. He developed natural explanations for the solar system and is often linked with a more self-contained view of nature.

Carl: Darwin explained how species change over time and how adaptations could arise by natural selection. Huxley defended Darwin and argued strongly for naturalistic science.

Phil: Einstein transformed physics with relativity. Slipher measured redshifts. Hubble showed that many nebulae were galaxies and that the universe was expanding. Lemaitre connected expansion with a cosmic beginning.

Barb: Hoyle resisted the Big Bang and supported the steady state theory. Yet he later helped discover fine-tuning connected with carbon.

Carl: Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background by accident while working with a radio antenna. Dicke’s group understood what such radiation would mean.

Phil: Hawking and Penrose studied singularities. Their work made the beginning question sharper.

Barb: Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, using important data from Rosalind Franklin and others. Crick later proposed that the sequence of bases in DNA carries information for proteins.

Carl: Dean Kenyon developed a self-organization theory of life’s origin, then later rejected it. James Tour is a chemist who has criticized origin-of-life claims. Michael Behe is known for the idea of irreducible complexity.

Phil: These names matter because the argument is not based on one person’s private feeling. It draws on discoveries from many fields: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and information theory.

Carl: But names are not arguments. Even famous scientists can be wrong.

Phil: True. We should not believe a claim just because a famous person said it. But history helps us see how the evidence developed and why certain discoveries surprised people.

Chapter 4

Did the Universe Always Exist?

Barb: For thousands of years, people have asked whether the universe has always existed. If it has always existed, then perhaps there was no beginning to explain. But if the universe began, then we have a different question: What caused it to begin?

Carl: Why assume everything needs a cause? Maybe the universe is just there. Maybe it is the one thing that does not need an explanation.

Phil: That is one option. But it becomes harder to defend if the universe itself began to exist. Things that begin usually have causes. A house, a campfire, a tree, a song, a planet, or a computer program does not just pop into being without any explanation.

Carl: But the universe is not like a house or a song. It is the whole system. Maybe our normal ideas about cause do not apply.

Barb: That is a serious objection. When we talk about the beginning of the universe, we are talking about the beginning of matter, energy, space, and time. That makes the question strange. We are not asking what happened earlier in time, because time itself is part of what we are trying to explain.

Phil: Strange does not mean meaningless. If space, time, matter, and energy began, then the cause cannot be just one more physical thing inside the universe. It would have to be beyond the physical universe.

Carl: Or maybe there is some deeper physics we do not understand yet.

Phil: Maybe. But that deeper physics would still need to explain why there is a universe at all.

Barb: The modern story begins with astronomy. In the early twentieth century, scientists began to study fuzzy patches of light in the night sky. These were called nebulae. At first, many astronomers thought they were gas clouds inside our own galaxy.

Carl: And then better measurements changed that.

Barb: Yes. A scientist named Vesto Slipher studied light from some of these nebulae. Light can be spread out into colors, like a rainbow. When light from an object is stretched toward the red end of the spectrum, scientists call that redshift.

Barb: The fire-truck example helps. When a fire truck races toward you, the sound waves are squeezed together, so the siren sounds higher. As it drives away, the sound waves stretch out, so the siren sounds lower. With light, stretched waves shift toward red. That is why redshift became a clue that distant objects were moving away from us.

Carl: Slipher was not trying to make a religious point. He was measuring light. That is what makes the story interesting. A simple measurement became part of a much larger question about whether the universe had a beginning.

14. IMAGE LINK: Vesto Slipher at the Clark Telescope, early redshift measurements

15. IMAGE LINK: Redshift diagram, galaxies moving away and stretched light waves

Carl: Slipher found that many of these objects were moving away.

Barb: Then Edwin Hubble entered the picture. He used powerful telescopes and new methods to measure distances. He studied the Andromeda Nebula and found that it was far too distant to be just a cloud inside our Milky Way. It was another galaxy.

16. IMAGE LINK: Edwin Hubble portrait, measuring galaxies beyond the Milky Way

17. IMAGE LINK: Andromeda Galaxy, Hubble and galaxies beyond our own

Phil: That was a huge discovery. The universe became much larger than people had thought.

Barb: Hubble also found that most galaxies were moving away. Even more, the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it seemed to be moving away. The best explanation was not that galaxies were flying through fixed empty space like sparks from a fire. Rather, space itself was stretching.

Carl: Like dots on the surface of an inflating balloon. As the balloon expands, the dots move farther apart.

Phil: And if the universe is expanding now, then we can mentally run the movie backward. In the past, the galaxies were closer together. Farther back, matter was more tightly packed. Go back far enough, and you reach the beginning of the expansion.

Carl: That is the basic idea of the Big Bang.

Barb: The Big Bang is not an explosion in empty space. It is the rapid expansion of space itself from an extremely hot, dense early state.

18. IMAGE LINK: History of the Universe timeline, Big Bang expansion and cosmic history

19. IMAGE LINK: Universe expansion timeline, inflation and cosmic development

Phil: And it suggests that the universe is not eternal in the past.

Carl: Be careful. It suggests that our present expanding universe had a hot beginning. It does not automatically prove God.

Phil: I agree. It is not an automatic proof. But it does raise the question of a cause beyond the physical universe.

Chapter 5

Einstein, Lemaitre, and the Expanding Universe

Barb: Around the same time, another line of evidence was developing. Albert Einstein had created his general theory of relativity. This was a new theory of gravity.

20. IMAGE LINK: Albert Einstein portrait, general relativity and the cosmological constant

21. IMAGE LINK: 1927 Solvay Conference, Einstein and early twentieth-century physics

Carl: Newton had described gravity as a force pulling objects together. Einstein gave a deeper picture. Massive objects bend space and time, and that bending affects how objects move.

Barb: A common picture is a bowling ball on a trampoline. The ball makes a dip in the fabric, and smaller objects roll toward it. This is not perfect, but it helps us imagine how mass can shape space.

Barb: The trampoline picture has limits. Space is not really a rubber sheet, and gravity is not a marble rolling in a dent. But the picture helps students see the main idea: matter affects the geometry of space-time, and that geometry affects how matter moves.

Phil: Einstein’s equations had a surprising result. They did not naturally describe a static universe. They pointed toward a universe that was either expanding or contracting.

Carl: But Einstein expected the universe to be static. Most scientists at that time did. So he added a term to his equations, now called the cosmological constant, to balance gravity and hold the universe still.

Barb: The cosmological constant acted like an outward push. Einstein chose a value that would keep the universe from collapsing or expanding.

Phil: But he did that partly because he wanted the universe to be eternal and unchanging. Later evidence showed the universe was expanding after all.

Carl: The Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre saw this before Einstein accepted it. He took Einstein’s equations seriously and connected them with the redshift evidence.

22. IMAGE LINK: Georges Lemaitre portrait, Big Bang cosmology and the expanding universe

Barb: Lemaitre proposed that the universe had expanded from a very small, hot beginning. He was both a scientist and a priest, which made some people suspicious.

Carl: I understand the suspicion. If a priest says the universe had a beginning, people may wonder whether his religion is shaping his science.

Phil: But that cuts both ways. If an atheist wants the universe to be eternal, that may also shape his science.

Barb: There is a famous story that makes this point vivid. Lemaitre and Einstein met in the 1920s and, according to the story, even shared a taxi ride. Lemaitre explained that Einstein’s own equations, combined with redshift evidence, pointed to an expanding universe.

Carl: Einstein did not like the conclusion at first.

Barb: No. He reportedly told Lemaitre that his mathematics was excellent but his physical intuition was terrible. In plain English, Einstein was saying, “Your math may work, but I do not believe your picture of the real universe.”

Phil: That is a wonderful classroom lesson. Even great scientists can resist evidence when it threatens their expectations.

Barb: Later, after Hubble’s observations became harder to ignore, Einstein changed his mind. He visited Mount Wilson, saw the astronomical evidence more directly, and publicly accepted that the universe was not static. The detective story had moved from equations to telescopes to a changed scientific consensus.

Carl: The important lesson is that evidence won. Einstein had a preference, but observation changed the picture.

Phil: And the picture that emerged was much friendlier to a beginning than to an eternal universe.

Carl: Maybe. But science kept looking for alternatives.

Barb: That brings us to rival cosmologies.

Chapter 6

Steady State and the Leftover Glow

Barb: Not every scientist liked the Big Bang. Some thought it sounded too much like creation. One of the strongest opponents was the British astronomer Fred Hoyle.

Carl: Hoyle defended what was called the steady state theory. In that view, the universe had no beginning. It had always existed and always looked basically the same on a large scale.

Phil: But if the universe was expanding, how could it stay the same?

Carl: Hoyle and his colleagues proposed that new matter was constantly being created in tiny amounts. As galaxies moved apart, new matter would fill the gaps and form new galaxies. That way the universe could expand and still look the same overall.

Barb: Hoyle even helped popularize the name “Big Bang,” though he meant it as a put-down. He did not like the idea of a cosmic beginning.

Phil: The two theories made different predictions. If the steady state theory was true, looking far away in space should show a universe much like the one we see nearby. Since looking far away also means looking far back in time, the universe should look the same at every age.

Carl: But if the Big Bang theory was true, the early universe should have been hotter and denser. As it expanded, it cooled. So there should be a faint leftover glow from that hot early universe.

Barb: That glow is called the cosmic microwave background. Think of it as a kind of afterglow from the early universe, stretched and cooled over billions of years.

23. IMAGE LINK: WMAP cosmic microwave background map, fossil radiation from the early universe

Phil: Scientists looked for it, but at first they did not find it.

Barb: Then two researchers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were working with a sensitive radio antenna. They kept detecting a weak noise that seemed to come from every direction in the sky. They checked their equipment. They cleaned out pigeon droppings from the antenna. The signal remained.

24. IMAGE LINK: Holmdel Horn Antenna, Penzias and Wilson and the cosmic microwave background

Carl: At about the same time, another group led by Robert Dicke was preparing to search for the very signal that Penzias and Wilson had accidentally found.

Barb: The noise was not a mistake. It was the leftover microwave glow predicted by the Big Bang model. Penzias and Wilson later received the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

25. IMAGE LINK: COBE, WMAP, and Planck comparison, increasingly precise maps of the early universe

26. IMAGE LINK: COBE cosmic background radiation, satellite evidence for the Big Bang

Phil: That discovery strongly favored the Big Bang over the steady state theory.

Carl: Yes. Most physicists accepted that the Big Bang model was the better explanation. Hoyle resisted, but the evidence had turned against him.

Phil: This is one of the great ironies. Many materialists wanted an eternal universe because it seemed to avoid a creator. But the evidence pushed science toward a universe with a beginning.

Carl: Or toward a universe with a hot early phase. Again, I want to be careful.

Phil: Fair enough. But the beginning question did not go away. It became even sharper.

Chapter 7

Hawking and the Edge of Time

Barb: In the 1960s, Stephen Hawking studied the implications of Einstein’s theory for the beginning of the universe. Hawking was also studying black holes.

27. IMAGE LINK: Stephen Hawking portrait, black holes and singularity theorems

Carl: A black hole is a place where matter is packed so tightly that gravity becomes incredibly strong. Not even light can escape once it crosses a certain boundary.

28. IMAGE LINK: First image of the M87 black hole, extreme gravity and curved space-time

Barb: In Einstein’s theory, strong gravity means strong curvature of space-time. Hawking asked what would happen if we ran the expanding universe backward. Matter would become denser. Space-time would curve more strongly. Eventually, the equations seemed to point to a boundary, a place where the normal rules break down.

Phil: That boundary is called a singularity.

Carl: A singularity is not a little ball floating in space. It is more like a limit where our usual physics stops working. The math says density and curvature become extreme.

Barb: Hawking’s early work, along with work by Roger Penrose, suggested that under certain conditions the universe could not be extended backward forever. Space and time themselves had a beginning.

Phil: This is important. If space and time began, then the cause of the universe cannot be a normal physical cause inside space and time.

Carl: But we must not picture a cause waiting around before time began. “Before time” is tricky language. If time began, then there was no earlier moment.

Phil: True. But a cause does not have to be earlier in time in the ordinary way. Philosophers often speak of a cause that is prior in explanation, not prior by a clock. A story can depend on an author even if the author is not a character inside the story.

Carl: That analogy may help, but it is not physics.

Phil: It is philosophy of physics. Once we ask why the physical universe exists, we are already asking a philosophical question as well as a scientific one.

Barb: Some scientists and writers noticed the theological importance of a beginning. Astronomer Robert Jastrow, though not a believer, wrote that the discovery of a beginning was deeply puzzling for science. If the universe had no beginning, one could avoid asking what caused it. But if it began, the question becomes hard to escape.

Barb: Jastrow used a memorable picture. Imagine scientists climbing a mountain of ignorance. They work hard, collect evidence, and finally pull themselves over the last rock near the top. Then they find philosophers and theologians already sitting there, waiting.

Carl: That image is clever, but it could be misleading. Science did not become theology just because cosmology found a beginning.

Phil: True. But Jastrow’s point was not that physics had become religion. His point was that physics had reopened a question many materialists thought they had escaped: Why does the universe exist at all?

29. IMAGE LINK: Robert Jastrow portrait, agnostic reflections on the beginning of the universe

Carl: Still, there is a danger. People may jump too quickly from “the universe had a beginning” to “my religion is true.”

Phil: I agree. That would be too quick. The argument is more modest. A universe with a beginning fits better with the idea of a transcendent cause than with old-style materialism, which expected matter to be eternal.

Barb: Some scientists at conferences in the late twentieth century openly wrestled with this. Allan Sandage, an important astronomer, came to believe in God partly because of discoveries about the universe’s beginning and fine-tuning. Jastrow remained agnostic but admitted that the beginning raised questions science alone could not answer.

Barb: Sandage is especially interesting because he was not merely an outsider commenting on cosmology. He worked in the tradition of Hubble and spent his life studying the expansion of the universe. He knew the data from the inside.

Phil: At a conference, Sandage described the beginning of the universe as evidence for what could only be called a supernatural event. People remembered the way he separated the word: super - natural. He meant an event beyond nature as we know it.

Carl: But one scientist’s personal conclusion does not settle the matter.

Phil: Of course not. Still, it matters when a major astronomer, familiar with the evidence, thinks the evidence points beyond material nature. That is not a preacher making a sermon. That is a scientist wrestling with the data.

30. IMAGE LINK: Allan Sandage portrait, cosmology and theistic implications

Carl: But science did not stop. Physicists tried to find models that might avoid a beginning.

Phil: Yes, and those attempts are important. Let us discuss them.

Chapter 8

Can the Universe Create Itself?

Barb: Hawking later worked on quantum cosmology. Quantum physics deals with very tiny things, such as atoms and particles. Some physicists hoped quantum ideas might describe the earliest moment of the universe and avoid a true beginning.

Carl: That hope is reasonable. General relativity works well for gravity and the large-scale universe. Quantum theory works well for tiny particles. But at the earliest moment, the universe would have been extremely tiny and extremely dense. We need a theory of quantum gravity, and we do not yet have a complete one.

Phil: I agree that early-universe physics is hard. But some popular claims go too far. Some people say the universe came from nothing because of the laws of physics.

Barb: Stephen Hawking put the claim in a famous way. He argued that because there are laws such as gravity, the universe can create itself from nothing.

Barb: John Lennox later objected to this claim with special force. His point was simple enough for students to grasp: if the explanation already includes laws such as gravity, then the explanation has not begun with absolute nothing. It has begun with something law-governed.

Carl: That sounds strange, but physicists sometimes use the word nothing in a special way. They may mean no ordinary matter, no stars, no planets, no atoms - not absolute nothingness.

Phil: And that is exactly the issue. If there are laws such as gravity, then we are not talking about nothing. We are already talking about something with structure. “Nothing” cannot have laws, fields, or powers.

Barb: This is a good place to slow down. Absolute nothing means no matter, no energy, no space, no time, no laws operating in a physical system, and no system for those laws to describe. A quantum vacuum may be very empty, but it is not that kind of nothing.

Carl: Scientists sometimes use words differently from ordinary people. A quantum vacuum can be empty of particles but still have physical properties.

Phil: Exactly. So if the universe comes from a quantum vacuum, it did not come from nothing. It came from a physical something. Then we must ask where that physical something came from.

Carl: What about the idea that the universe creates itself?

Phil: If something creates itself, it must exist before it exists. That is a contradiction. A thing cannot cause its own existence unless it is already there to do the causing.

Barb: Some famous statements about the universe creating itself use a looser meaning. They may mean that no personal creator is needed if the laws are enough. But that still leaves the laws themselves to explain.

Phil: A law in a physics book does not cause a ball to roll. It describes how balls roll when there are balls, space, time, and physical conditions. Mathematical equations do not build a bridge. Engineers using mathematics build bridges.

Carl: But laws are not just words in a book. They describe real order in nature.

Phil: Yes, but before nature exists, where is that order? What is it the order of? If there is no matter, no energy, no space, and no time, then a law cannot be a physical process inside the universe. It would have to be something more abstract.

Carl: Maybe the deepest reality is mathematical.

Phil: That is an interesting idea. But mathematics is the kind of thing minds understand. If someone says the material universe comes from mathematical order, he has not escaped mind as easily as he thinks.

Carl: You are turning every answer into a path toward mind.

Phil: No. I am asking what kind of thing can explain matter, energy, space, time, and law together. A cause of the whole physical universe cannot be one more object inside the physical universe.

Barb: This is why the first-cause question is different from ordinary science questions. If we ask why water boils, we can talk about heat, pressure, and molecules. If we ask why the whole physical universe exists, we are asking about the source of matter, energy, space, and time themselves.

Carl: So you are saying the cause must be beyond space and time. That sounds like the God of traditional religion.

Phil: It certainly points in that direction. The cause would need to be beyond the physical universe, powerful enough to bring it into being, and not dependent on space and time. Later, when we add fine-tuning, the cause also looks intelligent. Whether one identifies that cause with the God of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or some other form of theism is a further question. But it is not a small result.

Carl: You are careful to say “points in that direction.” Why not just say God?

Phil: Because the scientific argument should move step by step. First ask whether the universe had a beginning. Then ask what kind of cause could explain such a beginning. Then ask whether other evidence, such as fine-tuning and biological information, adds intelligence and purpose to the picture. The word God may be the right final word, but the argument should not begin by assuming it.

Barb: That closes the first major part of the story. Modern cosmology found an expanding universe, evidence for a hot beginning, and a deep mathematical order. Carl says future physics may explain more. Phil says the origin of matter, space, time, and energy points beyond matter, space, time, and energy.

Carl: I am not convinced that cosmology proves God.

Phil: I have not used the word prove. I am asking which story fits the evidence better.

Carl: I admit this much: the old idea of an eternal, self-existing material universe is not as easy to defend as it once seemed.

Barb: And that matters. The big picture has changed.

Chapter 9

A Slower Walk Through the Beginning

Barb: Let us revisit the beginning of the universe with more detail.

Carl: Start with light. When scientists study stars and galaxies, they do not collect pieces of them in a jar. They study light. Light carries information.

31. IMAGE LINK: Slipher spectrograph, redshift measurements and spectroscopy

Barb: A prism can spread white light into colors. Scientists can also see dark or bright lines in a spectrum. These lines act like fingerprints for elements. Hydrogen, helium, and other elements leave their own patterns.

Phil: When the pattern from a distant galaxy is shifted toward red, the wavelengths have been stretched. This shows motion away from us, or more deeply, the stretching of space itself.

Carl: The redshift evidence by itself did not immediately settle everything. Scientists had to measure distances too. That is where Hubble’s work mattered.

32. IMAGE LINK: Hooker 100-inch Telescope, Hubble and Mount Wilson astronomy

33. IMAGE LINK: Hubble constant scatter plot, distance and recession velocity

Barb: Hubble used Cepheid variable stars. These stars brighten and dim in a regular pattern. Their timing helps scientists estimate how bright they truly are. By comparing true brightness with how bright they look from Earth, astronomers can estimate distance.

34. IMAGE LINK: Cepheid variable light curve, measuring cosmic distances

35. IMAGE LINK: Andromeda Cepheid V1, Hubble and the cosmic distance ladder

Phil: That helped show Andromeda was not inside our galaxy. It was its own galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way.

Carl: Once that was clear, the universe became a universe of galaxies. The scale changed.

Barb: Then came the relation between distance and redshift. Farther galaxies generally showed greater redshift. This suggested a universe expanding in all directions.

Phil: Which means no galaxy has to be the center in the ordinary sense. On the balloon picture, every dot sees other dots moving away as the balloon expands. The expansion is of the surface itself.

Carl: Of course the balloon picture has limits. The universe is not a rubber balloon expanding into a larger room. Space itself is what expands.

Barb: Good warning. Analogies help, but they are not the thing itself.

Phil: Now consider Einstein. His theory suggested that space and time are not fixed stages. They are part of the drama. They can bend, stretch, and change.

Carl: Einstein’s equations allowed dynamic universes. But he preferred a static one. The cosmological constant was his way of keeping the universe still.

Barb: Later, scientists discovered that something like a cosmological constant may actually exist, related to the accelerated expansion of the universe. But Einstein’s original use of it was different. He tuned it to get a static universe.

Phil: That is an interesting twist. The term itself was not the mistake. The mistake was using it to avoid expansion.

Carl: Lemaitre saw that expansion made sense. But even Lemaitre was careful. He did not want people to confuse his scientific model with a simple religious proof.

Phil: True. He warned against mixing categories too quickly. But he also saw that the universe’s expansion had deep implications.

Barb: The evidence grew stronger when the cosmic microwave background was discovered. In the Big Bang model, the early universe was hot plasma. After it cooled enough, light could travel freely. That ancient light is now stretched into microwave radiation.

36. IMAGE LINK: Microwave sky polarization, detailed structure in early-universe radiation

Carl: The signal is nearly the same in every direction, which fits the idea of an early hot universe. Later satellites measured tiny variations in it. Those variations helped explain how galaxies formed.

Phil: The beauty of this is that the Big Bang model predicted a kind of evidence before it was fully observed. That is why the discovery was so important.

Carl: I agree. This is real science.

Phil: And it changed the philosophical situation. Before this evidence, materialists could easily picture matter as eternal. Afterward, they had to explain a beginning or find a new model to avoid one.

Carl: I would not say avoid. I would say explore alternatives.

Phil: Sometimes exploration is driven by evidence. Sometimes it is driven by discomfort. In this case, both may have played roles.

Barb: Scientists are human. They have hopes, fears, and assumptions. That does not make science worthless. It means evidence matters because it can correct our preferences.

Carl: That is why I respect Einstein changing his mind.

Phil: And that is why I ask naturalists to do the same if evidence points beyond materialism.

Chapter 10

The First Cause Question

Barb: The beginning of the universe raises what philosophers call the first cause question. If the universe began, what explains it?

Carl: Here is my concern. The word “cause” normally means one event before another. A baseball hits a window, and then the window breaks. But if time itself began with the universe, there was no earlier time for a cause to act.

Phil: That is a serious concern. But not all causes are simply earlier events. Think of a lamp and its light. The lamp’s being on explains the light in the room at the same time. Or think of a story and its author. The author explains the story, but the author is not one more event inside the story’s timeline.

Carl: Those analogies are philosophical, not scientific.

Phil: But the question is philosophical. Science gives us evidence that time and space are not eternal in the way many once thought. Philosophy asks what could explain that.

Barb: A first cause, in this setting, would not be a physical object sitting somewhere in space. Space is part of what begins. Nor would it be made of matter, since matter is also part of what begins.

Carl: So Phil’s cause must be nonphysical, outside space, and not measured by time. That already sounds like theology.

Phil: It sounds like the kind of cause needed if the universe began. It would need power to bring a physical universe into existence. It would need to be independent of the universe. And if the universe began rather than stayed nonexistent, it makes sense to think of a cause with will or choice.

Carl: Why choice?

Phil: If a timeless set of conditions automatically produces a universe, then why is the universe not eternal too? A personal cause can act freely. That is one reason philosophers connect a beginning with mind.

Carl: Or maybe the physics of time is stranger than we think.

Phil: I am sure it is. But strangeness does not remove the need for explanation.

Barb: The debate is not easy. It touches science, philosophy, and theology. But the main point for our dialogue is simple: the discovery of a cosmic beginning was not what many materialists expected.

Carl: I admit that. Classical materialism liked the idea of eternal matter. Modern cosmology made that harder.

Phil: And when a worldview’s expectations fail, we should notice.

Barb: We have now followed the question of the universe back to its beginning. But a universe that begins is only the first clue. The next question is why the universe is so precisely arranged for life.

PART TWO

COSMIC FINE-TUNING

What to Watch For

Barb: In Part Two, watch for the idea of fine-tuning. Fine-tuning does not mean that scientists first assume a tuner. It means that the laws, constants, starting conditions, and local features of the universe fall into narrow life-permitting ranges. Carl will offer necessity, chance, observer selection, and the multiverse as replies. Phil will ask whether those replies explain fine-tuning or move the question back.

Chapter 11

The Universe With Just-Right Settings

Barb: The next topic is fine-tuning. The phrase “fine-tuning” does not mean that scientists first assume a tuner. It means that many features of the universe have to fall within very narrow ranges for life to be possible.

Carl: People often misunderstand this. Fine-tuning does not mean the universe was made cozy for humans in every way. Space is mostly deadly. Most planets would kill us quickly.

Phil: True. Fine-tuning means something more basic. The laws, constants, and starting conditions of the universe allow atoms, stars, chemistry, planets, and life to exist. If some settings were changed by small amounts, there might be no stable atoms, no long-lasting stars, no carbon, no chemistry, and no living things.

Barb: Imagine a control room with many dials. One dial controls gravity. Another controls the strength of electromagnetism. Others control nuclear forces, the masses of particles, and how fast the universe expanded. If the dials are set wrong, the universe cannot support life.

Carl: But that picture can be misleading. There may not be actual dials. The constants may have to be what they are because of a deeper theory.

Phil: Maybe. But at present, many of these values look independent. We can imagine them being different, and when physicists calculate what would happen, most changes lead to lifeless universes.

Carl: Or perhaps only universes with these values can exist.

Phil: That is a possible claim, but it needs evidence. Otherwise it is just a hope that the fine-tuning will vanish.

Barb: The idea of fine-tuning became especially clear in the study of carbon. Carbon is crucial for life as we know it. It can form long chains and complex molecules. Without carbon, ordinary chemistry would not have the richness life needs.

37. IMAGE LINK: Carbon atom diagram, carbon chemistry and life

Carl: Carbon was made inside stars. The early universe mostly produced the simplest elements, such as hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements formed later in stars and supernova explosions.

38. IMAGE LINK: Kepler supernova remnant, stellar nucleosynthesis and heavy elements

39. IMAGE LINK: Nucleosynthesis in a star, stellar production of heavier elements

Phil: Fred Hoyle studied this. He was trying to explain how stars could make carbon. That is important because Hoyle was not trying to prove design. In fact, he was a strong critic of the Big Bang and was not friendly to traditional theism.

Barb: Hoyle discovered a puzzle. To make carbon inside stars, three helium nuclei must come together in a special way. First, two helium nuclei form beryllium-8. But beryllium-8 is very unstable. It falls apart quickly. So another helium nucleus has to join almost immediately to make carbon-12.

40. IMAGE LINK: Triple-alpha process diagram, carbon formation inside stars

Carl: The timing is tight. If the reaction is not helped in some way, not enough carbon forms.

Phil: Hoyle reasoned that carbon must have a special energy level, a kind of resonance, that makes the reaction work. Think of pushing someone on a swing. If you push at the right time, the swing goes higher. If you push at the wrong time, little happens. In a similar way, the carbon nucleus had to have the right energy state to form efficiently.

Barb: Hoyle asked scientists at Caltech to look for this energy level. At first they were skeptical. But they tested it, and they found almost exactly what Hoyle predicted.

Barb: The story is memorable because Hoyle was asking experimental physicists to look for a very specific energy level in carbon-12. At first the request sounded almost too neat. It was as if he had reasoned backward from the existence of carbon-based life to a hidden feature of nuclear physics.

Carl: That is what makes it such a good science story. Hoyle did not merely say, “Life exists, therefore something special must be true.” He made a risky prediction that could be checked.

Phil: And when the test supported the prediction, the result did more than solve a technical puzzle. It showed that the universe has a very precise life-enabling feature built into the physics of stars.

41. IMAGE LINK: William A. Fowler portrait, experimental confirmation of carbon resonance

Carl: That was brilliant science. Hoyle used the fact that we exist and that carbon exists to predict something about nuclear physics.

Phil: And the result shocked him. He realized that carbon production depends on several precise features of physics. Later, he concluded that the universe looked as if intelligence had set up physics and chemistry for life. Hoyle was later quoted as saying that common sense suggests “a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry” to make life possible. That is striking because Hoyle was not a preacher trying to defend religion. He was a scientist whose own work pushed him toward design language.

42. IMAGE LINK: Fred Hoyle portrait, steady-state cosmology and carbon fine-tuning

Carl: Hoyle did say things like that, but his exact beliefs were unusual. He did not simply become an orthodox theist.

Phil: Agreed. The point is not to claim him as a convert to my whole worldview. The point is that the evidence made even a strong materialist take design seriously.

Chapter 12

The Fine-Tuning Pileup

Barb: Carbon is only one example. Scientists have found many features of physics that must be in narrow ranges for life to exist.

Carl: Give examples, but keep them clear.

Phil: Gravity must be right. If gravity were much stronger, stars might burn too fast or collapse. If much weaker, stars and galaxies might not form properly. The electromagnetic force must be balanced with gravity. The strong nuclear force must hold atomic nuclei together, but not in a way that ruins hydrogen or prevents useful elements. The weak nuclear force affects processes in stars and radioactive decay. The masses of protons, neutrons, and electrons must be in the right relationships. The expansion rate of the early universe must not be too fast or too slow.

43. IMAGE LINK: Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, stars and element-forming stellar evolution

Barb: Think of a recipe. If a cookie recipe says two cups of flour, you might get away with a little more or less. But if every ingredient had to be exact to the grain, and if one tiny mistake made the cookies impossible, that would be surprising. Fine-tuning says the universe is like a recipe with many extremely sensitive ingredients.

Carl: Or like a lock with many numbers in the combination.

Phil: Yes. If you have a lock with many wheels, and each wheel has to be set correctly, a random spin will almost always fail. If someone opens the lock on the first try, you suspect they knew the code.

Carl: But probability arguments about universes are hard. We do not have a box of universes to compare. We do not know the probability distribution.

Phil: That is an important caution. But the basic point remains. If a life-permitting range is tiny compared with the range of possible values we can study, then the life-friendly result calls for explanation.

Carl: Maybe the values could not have been otherwise.

Phil: Again, maybe. But if we do not have a deeper law forcing them, then design and chance are both on the table. And chance looks weak when many independent conditions all have to line up.

Barb: There is another piece: the universe was not only fine-tuned in its laws and constants. Its starting arrangement also had to be special.

Carl: Now we are talking about entropy.

Barb: Entropy is often explained as disorder. That is not perfect, but it helps. A neat room has low entropy. A messy room has higher entropy. Cream separated from coffee is more ordered. Once you stir the cream in, it spreads out. You do not expect it to unmix by itself.

Phil: The universe has been moving from lower entropy to higher entropy. That means if we look backward in time, the universe had lower entropy. The beginning had to be extremely ordered.

Carl: Roger Penrose calculated that the early universe had an incredibly special low-entropy condition. He used a huge number to express how unlikely such a starting point would be among possible starting conditions.

Barb: The number is so large that it is hard even to say. It is not just one chance in a trillion. It is one chance in a number with a huge tower of zeros.

Phil: The point is simple: the universe did not begin like a messy explosion. It began with astonishing order.

Carl: Some cosmologists think deeper physics may explain that too.

Phil: And I welcome the search. But until such an explanation exists, the low-entropy beginning adds to the fine-tuning evidence.

Barb: Phil likes an analogy from tunnel building. If engineers blast a tunnel through a mountain, they do not just throw dynamite anywhere. They place the charges with care. Tiny changes in the beginning can make a big difference in where the opening appears. In a similar way, the universe’s starting conditions had to be arranged with remarkable precision.

Carl: Analogies help, but they do not prove design.

Phil: Correct. They help us understand why precision calls for explanation. Then we ask what kind of explanation works best.

Chapter 13

The Fine-Tuning Details

Barb: Now let us slow down on fine-tuning. We have already mentioned several constants and forces. Let us explain why they matter.

Carl: Gravity pulls masses together. Without gravity, matter would not gather into stars and galaxies. But if gravity were much stronger, stars might be smaller and burn out faster. If weaker, matter might not clump enough to make stars.

Phil: Electromagnetism affects atoms and chemistry. It holds electrons around nuclei and allows chemical bonds. If it were very different, chemistry could be impossible.

Barb: The strong nuclear force holds protons and neutrons together inside atomic nuclei. If it were too weak, many nuclei would not hold together. If too strong, nuclear reactions could go differently, leaving the universe without the right mix of elements.

Carl: The weak nuclear force helps with certain particle changes and reactions in stars. Changing it could affect supernova explosions and the production of elements.

Phil: The cosmological constant, or dark energy, also appears finely balanced. If the outward push were much larger, matter might spread apart too quickly for galaxies to form. If different in the other direction, the universe might collapse.

Barb: The masses of particles matter too. Protons, neutrons, and electrons must have the right relationships. If neutrons and protons differed in the wrong way, atoms might not form as needed. If electrons had very different masses, chemistry would change.

Carl: The early expansion rate is another example. If the universe expanded too fast, matter would thin out before stars and galaxies formed. If too slow, gravity might pull everything back together too soon.

Phil: So fine-tuning is not one isolated oddity. It is a pileup of just-right conditions.

Carl: A naturalist can respond in several ways. First, maybe the values are necessary. Second, maybe there are many universes. Third, maybe life could be very different from what we imagine.

Phil: The third answer has limits. Fine-tuning arguments usually do not just say, “Human life would be impossible.” They say stable atoms, long-lived stars, complex chemistry, or energy flow would be impossible. That rules out many forms of life, not just familiar life.

Barb: Life as we know it needs chemistry. Chemistry needs stable atoms. Stable atoms need the right forces and particle relationships. Stars provide energy and make elements. So if the universe cannot make atoms, stars, or chemistry, it cannot make ordinary life.

Carl: But perhaps there are exotic forms of life we cannot imagine.

Phil: Perhaps. But arguments should be based on what we have reason to believe, not on unknown possibilities invented to escape evidence.

Barb: The carbon example shows how specific the issue can be. Carbon forms in stars through a delicate process. If the energy levels in carbon and oxygen were different, the universe might produce too little carbon or convert too much carbon into oxygen. Life needs both.

Carl: That is a good example because it connects nuclear physics to chemistry and biology.

Phil: And it shows why Hoyle was shaken. He did not begin with design. The evidence pushed him.

Barb: Penrose’s entropy calculation is even harder to imagine. The early universe had to be extraordinarily smooth and ordered in one sense, while still allowing tiny uneven spots that later grew into galaxies.

Carl: If it were perfectly smooth, maybe no stars or galaxies. If too clumpy, maybe black holes everywhere. The initial state had to be special.

Phil: Again, just right.

Chapter 14

A Planet Fit for Observers

Barb: Even in a universe whose basic physics allows life, a planet still needs many special features to support complex living things.

Carl: Now we move from cosmic fine-tuning to local habitability.

Phil: Right. A life-friendly universe is not enough. You also need a life-friendly home.

Barb: Earth sits in a solar system with several helpful features. Our star, the sun, is stable and long-lasting. It gives steady energy. It also contains heavier elements, which are needed for rocky planets and living chemistry.

44. IMAGE LINK: Solar System diagram, local habitability and planetary order

45. IMAGE LINK: Galactic habitable zone, the larger setting for a life-friendly planet

Carl: Earth is in the habitable zone, sometimes called the Goldilocks zone. Not too close to the sun, not too far away. This allows liquid water to exist on the surface.

46. IMAGE LINK: Kepler habitable-zone planets, the Goldilocks zone and liquid water

Phil: Earth also has the right kind of orbit. If our orbit were too stretched out, temperatures might swing too wildly. Our planet has the right size and mass to hold an atmosphere. Its atmosphere is thick enough to protect and warm the planet, but not so thick that it becomes deadly.

47. IMAGE LINK: Atmospheric layers, Earth’s atmosphere and life-friendly conditions

Barb: Earth has the right rotation rate, giving us days and nights. Its tilt gives seasons. A large moon helps keep that tilt stable, so Earth’s climate does not swing out of control over long periods.

48. IMAGE LINK: Earth and Moon, axial stability and tides

49. IMAGE LINK: Seasons and axial tilt, Earth’s tilt and life-friendly conditions

Carl: The moon also causes tides, which help move ocean water around.

50. IMAGE LINK: Tide schematic, the Moon, tides, and ocean circulation

Phil: Earth has plate tectonics and an active interior. Its molten core helps generate a magnetic field. That magnetic field acts like a shield against harmful radiation from space.

51. IMAGE LINK: Earth’s magnetosphere, magnetic shielding and habitability

Barb: The outer planets also help. Jupiter and Saturn, the gas giants, can pull comets and asteroids away or absorb impacts. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 famously crashed into Jupiter in 1994. Had large objects like that often struck Earth, life here would have had a much harder time.

52. IMAGE LINK: Jupiter from Voyager, outer giant planets and solar-system protection

53. IMAGE LINK: Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact sites on Jupiter, comet impacts and planetary protection

54. IMAGE LINK: Saturn during equinox, gas giants and solar-system architecture

Carl: Though Jupiter’s role is complex. It can sometimes redirect objects inward too.

Phil: Fair qualification. But large planets clearly affect the safety and structure of a solar system. The point is that many features interact.

Barb: Mars shows how close and yet far a planet can be. Mars is near Earth. It has some similar materials. It may once have had liquid water. But it lacks Earth’s full set of life-supporting features. Today it is cold, dry, and harsh.

Barb: Mars is powerful as a teaching example because it is not wildly different from Earth in every way. It is rocky. It is nearby. It has polar ice. It has volcanoes, valleys, and signs that water may once have flowed there.

Carl: That actually supports my side in one way. Mars shows that planets can form naturally with many Earth-like features.

Phil: Yes, but it also shows that being sort of Earth-like is not enough. Mars lacks Earth’s full package: a thick life-friendly atmosphere, long-term surface water, strong global magnetic shielding, active recycling of materials, and stable conditions over vast stretches of time.

Barb: In other words, habitability is not one dial. It is many dials working together. Mars is close enough to make the comparison meaningful, but different enough to show how much has to go right.

55. IMAGE LINK: Mars and Valles Marineris, near-Earth conditions without full habitability

Carl: That does not prove Earth was designed. Maybe there are many planets, and some will happen to be suitable.

Phil: But it shows that habitability is not automatic. It requires a package of conditions. When many needed conditions come together, design becomes a reasonable explanation to consider.

Carl: Or selection effect. We observe a habitable planet because only on such a planet could observers exist.

Phil: That explains why we should not be surprised to find ourselves on a planet compatible with our existence. But it does not explain why such a planet exists, or why the universe has the larger life-permitting structure needed for planets like this.

Barb: This is an important distinction. The fact that we must observe from a life-friendly place does not by itself explain why there is such a place.

Chapter 15

The Multiverse Answer

Barb: Advanced Question: This chapter is still written for students, but it asks a harder question. Can many unseen universes explain why our universe is friendly to life? Read slowly and watch the difference between evidence, possibility, and speculation.

Carl: Now I want my strongest reply to fine-tuning on the table: the multiverse.

Barb: The multiverse idea says that our universe may be only one of many universes. Different universes might have different laws, constants, or starting conditions.

56. IMAGE LINK: Level II multiverse diagram, bubble universes and varied cosmic settings

Carl: Exactly. If there are enough universes, it is not shocking that one has the right conditions for life. We are in that universe because we could not exist in the others. It is like a giant cosmic lottery. If enough tickets are printed, one ticket may win.

Phil: That is the most common naturalistic answer to fine-tuning. I agree it is important. I also agree that some scientists arrive at it through serious physics, such as inflationary cosmology or string theory. But we should be honest about why the multiverse became so attractive. Fine-tuning made many naturalists uncomfortable.

57. IMAGE LINK: Alan Guth portrait, inflationary cosmology and multiverse theory

58. IMAGE LINK: Calabi-Yau manifold, string theory and multiverse-generating mechanisms

Carl: That sounds unfair. Scientists follow theories where they lead. The multiverse is not merely a story invented to avoid God. Some versions arise from serious mathematical frameworks, especially eternal inflation and string theory. Those theories were not invented only for theology debates; they grew out of attempts to understand real features of physics.

Phil: Often they do. But scientists also have worldviews. Leonard Susskind, one of the best-known defenders of multiverse thinking, has said that without something like the multiverse, physicists would be hard pressed to answer the design argument from fine-tuning. That does not make the multiverse false. But it does show that the motivation is not neutral.

Carl: Even if some people like the multiverse because it helps naturalism, that does not mean the idea is wrong. If a larger theory successfully explains things we can observe and also implies many universes, then the multiverse would not be an ad hoc rescue device. It would be a consequence of a broader scientific framework.

Phil: Correct. Bad motivation would not make it false. And if a multiverse followed from a well-confirmed physical theory, that would matter. But students should still notice the difference between a mathematical possibility, an indirect implication of a theory, and direct evidence. Wanting the multiverse to be true because it avoids design is not the same as showing that it is true.

Barb: So the fair question is not, “Why do some people like the multiverse?” The fair question is, “Does the multiverse explain fine-tuning better than design does?”

Carl: My answer is yes. If there are many universes, then life-friendly universes are no longer surprising.

Phil: Maybe. But to explain fine-tuning by a multiverse, you need more than the words “many universes.” You need a universe-generating mechanism. That mechanism must produce many universes with different settings. It must have laws, structure, and the power to generate the right range of possibilities.

Barb: Phil’s point is simple. If our universe is like a winning lottery ticket, then a multiverse is like a lottery machine that prints many tickets. But now we have to ask where the lottery machine came from and why it works the way it does.

Carl: Maybe the machine is just a deeper physical reality.

Phil: Then the deeper physical reality needs explaining. If it must be arranged in a special way to produce many universes with varied settings, then fine-tuning has not disappeared. It has moved back one level.

Carl: But moving a problem back one level is not always bad. Science often explains one thing by a deeper thing.

Phil: True. A deeper explanation can be wonderful. But it should reduce mystery, not hide it. If the universe-generating system itself must be finely set up, then we have a fine-tuned multiverse generator instead of a fine-tuned universe. Let me give a concrete example. Some multiverse theories depend on inflation, a very rapid expansion in the early universe. But inflation does not happen just any old way. It needs the right kind of field, the right energy, and the right starting conditions. If these are wrong, the result may be no useful universe-making process at all.

59. IMAGE LINK: Inflation versus standard Big Bang chart, rapid early expansion as a cosmological model

Carl: That is one kind of model. There are others.

Phil: True. But the same pattern keeps appearing. Any proposed universe-making system needs the right laws, the right fields or structures, the right range of possible settings, and the right power to produce life-friendly outcomes somewhere. So the question becomes: why is the universe-making setup arranged in such a special way?

Barb: This is called the fine-tuned-generator problem. The multiverse may explain why our universe is one winning ticket, but then we must ask why the ticket-making machine is built in a way that can print winning tickets at all.

Carl: You make it sound as if the multiverse has no evidence. Some theories that suggest a multiverse may also explain things we can observe.

Phil: That would help. But we should be careful about levels of evidence.

Barb: Students should notice that not all scientific ideas have the same kind of support. Some things are observed directly. Some are inferred from effects. Some are proposed because they fit a larger theory. Other universes are not directly observed. At best, they are an indirect and speculative part of larger theories.

Carl: Not directly observed, yes. But direct observation is not the only kind of evidence in science.

Phil: Agreed. Electrons, black holes, and ancient events are also known by inference. I am not demanding that we see another universe through a telescope. I am asking that we use the same standards. If design is criticized because the designer is not directly observable in a laboratory, then the multiverse should not be treated as established fact when other universes are not directly observable either.

Carl: The difference is that the multiverse may come from physical theories that also explain things we can observe. Design, in my view, goes beyond physical explanation altogether.

Phil: But going beyond physical explanation may be exactly what we should expect if we are explaining the origin and fine-tuning of physical reality itself. If matter, energy, space, time, and the laws of nature are the things to be explained, the explanation may not be another ordinary object inside nature.

Carl: There is also the anthropic principle. We observe a life-friendly universe because only a life-friendly universe can have observers like us.

Phil: That explains why we should not be surprised to observe life-friendly conditions if we exist. But it does not explain why such conditions exist in the first place. If I survive a firing squad because all the marksmen miss, I should not be surprised that I am alive to notice it. But I can still ask why all the shots missed.

Barb: The anthropic principle tells us that observers can observe only a universe compatible with observers. Phil says that is true but incomplete. It does not by itself explain the life-friendly arrangement.

Phil: There is another difficulty. If a multiverse theory says that every possible kind of universe exists somewhere, then it becomes hard to know what the theory actually predicts. A theory that can explain almost any result may explain less than it seems.

Carl: Some versions try to make probability predictions.

Phil: They try. But measuring probabilities across enormous or infinite collections of universes is very difficult. Which universes do you count? How do you compare them? How do you decide what is normal? The multiverse is not a simple, clean answer. It brings new problems.

Barb: This is sometimes called a measure problem. A measure is a way of counting or comparing possibilities. In multiverse theories, the counting can become very hard.

Carl: Still, the multiverse might be true.

Phil: It might be. And here is an important point: even if a multiverse exists, it does not automatically support naturalism. A multiverse could itself be designed.

Barb: That means the real question is not simply, “One universe or many universes?” The real question is, “Is the deepest reality mindless or intelligent?”

Carl: But a designed multiverse is not the naturalistic multiverse I am defending.

Phil: Exactly. The multiverse helps Carl’s worldview only if it is unguided. But if the generator itself looks specially arranged, the design question returns at a deeper level.

Carl: I still think naturalism should keep searching.

Phil: Search all you want. I am not against searching. But do not call design unscientific while treating unseen universes as a rescue from design. The standards should be even-handed.

Barb: The multiverse may be possible. But it does not automatically defeat design. It may move the question from “Who tuned our universe?” to “What explains a larger reality able to produce life-friendly universes?”

Chapter 16

Multiverse, Boltzmann Brains, and Pushed-Back Problems

Barb: Advanced Question: This chapter returns to the multiverse with a few harder ideas. The goal is not to master advanced cosmology. The goal is to see that the multiverse is not a simple magic answer to fine-tuning.

60. IMAGE LINK: Ludwig Boltzmann portrait, Boltzmann brains and probability puzzles

Carl: The multiverse still seems powerful to me. If there are countless universes, then rare life-friendly conditions become expected somewhere.

Phil: It has some force. But it brings problems.

Barb: One problem is evidence. Can we observe other universes? If not, how do we test the idea?

Carl: We may not observe them directly, but they might be implied by a theory that also explains things we can observe.

Phil: That would help. But the theory must be strong, and the multiverse part must not be just a rescue device.

Barb: A rescue device is an idea added mainly to save a theory from trouble. It may be true, but we need independent reasons to believe it.

Carl: Some inflationary models may lead to many regions like separate universes.

Phil: Yes, but inflation itself often needs special starting conditions. The field driving inflation needs suitable properties. Its energy must be in a useful range. The larger system must be able to produce varied universes rather than just empty chaos. So the fine-tuning problem returns at the level of the generator.

Carl: And string theory?

Phil: String theory landscapes also need a larger mathematical and physical structure. If that structure is rich enough to produce many different universes, then we can ask why that deeper structure exists and why it has such productive powers.

Carl: You mentioned another problem earlier: weird observers.

Barb: In some multiverse or random-fluctuation pictures, there may be a problem called Boltzmann brains. The idea is strange but simple enough. If random fluctuations can produce observers, then it might be more likely to get a lone brain with false memories than a whole ordered universe with galaxies, stars, planets, and a long history.

Carl: Not every multiverse model has that problem.

Phil: True. But it shows that explaining our ordered universe by saying “anything can happen somewhere” can lead to odd results. We do not merely observe that we exist. We observe a stable, ordered, long-lasting universe that can be studied scientifically.

Carl: Maybe only a universe like ours can support reliable observers.

Phil: That may be so. But then the order that supports reliable observers is itself part of what needs explaining.

Barb: A second problem is prediction. If a theory says every possible universe exists somewhere, it can become hard to say what the theory actually expects us to find.

Carl: But not every multiverse theory says absolutely everything exists.

Phil: Fair. Some versions are more disciplined than others. But the broader and less testable the multiverse becomes, the more it looks like a philosophical answer rather than a confirmed scientific discovery.

Barb: A third problem is that the multiverse does not rule out design. Even if there are many universes, a mind could have designed the larger universe-generating system.

Carl: That is just design with extra steps.

Phil: Exactly. Which means the multiverse only helps naturalism if it is unguided. If the generator itself is finely arranged, the design question has not gone away.

Carl: I can accept that the multiverse is not a magic wand. But design is not a magic wand either.

Phil: Agreed. That is why we compare the explanations. Which one is simpler? Which one has causal power? Which one fits the evidence without piling up extra guesses?

Barb: For students, the key lesson is this: the multiverse is not a simple refutation of fine-tuning. It is a large, speculative proposal that raises its own questions about evidence, prediction, and the source of the universe-making system itself.

Carl: Some people think we might be living in a simulation, as if our universe were an unimaginably advanced computer program.

Phil: Even that requires a simulator. It does not escape mind; it relocates it. A simulation needs a simulator, and a program needs a programmer.

Barb: So the deeper question remains the same: Is the most basic reality mindless, or does mind come first?

Chapter 17

Beauty Beyond Survival

Barb: Before we leave cosmic fine-tuning, the dialogue raises one more clue: beauty. This is different from the arguments about the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and DNA. It is not a mathematical proof. It is more like a question the world keeps asking us.

Barb: Readers should keep this in proportion. The main case in this dialogue rests on the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, and biological information. Beauty is a supporting clue, not the central pillar.

Carl: Beauty is real to us, but it is not mysterious in the way you suggest. Evolution can explain many beautiful things. Flowers attract pollinators. Bird songs attract mates. Bright feathers can help animals reproduce.

Phil: I agree that some beauty has practical use. But not all beauty feels like bare survival equipment. Nature often seems extravagant. It overflows. Carl, I know you do not accept design. But do you ever feel that the world is not merely useful, but generous? It gives more colors than we need to survive, more patterns than we need to find food, more music than we need to reproduce. That surplus is part of what I mean by beauty.

Carl: I feel the wonder. I just do not think wonder proves intention.

Phil: Wonder by itself does not prove everything. But it can be a clue. A world from blind forces might contain some accidental beauty. A world from creative mind would make beauty feel less accidental.

Barb: Extravagant means more than what seems strictly necessary. A plain gray bird might survive. But many birds have brilliant colors, complex songs, and dances. A simple landscape might be enough for life. Yet the world has mountain ranges, sunsets, ocean waves, snowflakes, nebulae, and living forms of astonishing variety.

Carl: You are appealing to feelings. Maybe humans find these things beautiful because our brains evolved to like patterns, colors, and signs of useful environments.

Phil: That may explain part of our response. But it does not fully explain the richness of the thing responded to. Beauty is not only in our heads. There is order, symmetry, elegance, harmony, and surprise in the world. And there is another kind of surplus too: intelligibility. That means the world can be understood. The laws of nature can often be written in beautiful mathematics. Our minds, small as they are, can discover patterns in galaxies, atoms, and living cells. A universe from mind makes that less surprising.

61. IMAGE LINK: Romanesco broccoli fractal, mathematical pattern and beauty in living things

Carl: Or our minds evolved to notice patterns because pattern-finding helped our ancestors survive.

Phil: That may explain why we like some patterns. It does not fully explain why the universe itself has such deep patterns to find, or why mathematics invented in a human mind can describe things far beyond ordinary human survival.

Carl: Sexual selection can produce excess. Peacocks’ tails are a standard example.

62. IMAGE LINK: Peacock displaying, beauty, sexual selection, and extravagant form

Phil: Yes, but sexual selection itself raises questions. Why should the world contain creatures capable of appreciating beauty at all? Why should mathematical elegance keep showing up in physics? Why should the universe be not only habitable, but also discoverable and beautiful?

Barb: Phil is not saying, “A flower is pretty, therefore God exists.” He is saying that beauty fits better in one story than another. In Carl’s story, beauty is a side effect of survival, reproduction, and human brain patterns. In Phil’s story, beauty is what we might expect if the world comes from creative intelligence.

Carl: I can enjoy beauty without believing it was intended.

Phil: Of course. But the question is not whether you can enjoy it. The question is whether beauty is a clue. If an artist makes a painting, the painting may have practical features, but it may also have surplus beauty. It may invite attention, wonder, and delight.

Carl: The universe is not a painting.

Phil: No analogy is perfect. But if the universe comes from mind, we would not be surprised to find beauty beyond bare utility. We would expect a world that is not merely usable, but also meaningful and lovely.

Barb: Aristotle thought nature had rational structure. Many later scientists believed the universe could be understood because it was ordered. The success of science depends on that order. The joy of science often depends on beauty too.

Carl: Naturalists can believe in order and beauty. We do not need God to do physics or biology.

Phil: I agree that you do not need to believe in God to do science. But the deep rational order and beauty of nature fit well with a rational and creative source.

Barb: Beauty is not the central argument in this dialogue. The central arguments are the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, and biological information. But beauty adds something important. It reminds us that the world is not just a machine to be explained. It is also a gift to be received, or at least a wonder to be faced.

Carl: I will accept wonder.

Phil: And I will ask whether wonder is trying to tell us something true.

Barb: A universe with life-friendly laws and a life-friendly planet is still not yet alive. So the next part moves from cosmic conditions to chemistry, cells, coded information, and the origin of the first living systems.

PART THREE

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

What to Watch For

Barb: In Part Three, watch the argument move from the universe to the cell. Origin-of-life research is sometimes described as chemical evolution, because it asks whether nonliving chemistry can produce the first living systems. The key question is not how life changes once it exists, but how cellular structure, metabolism, replication, and coded information could arise in the first place.

Chapter 18

The Cell Is Not a Blob

Barb: We now move from the vast universe to the tiny cell. In the nineteenth century, many scientists thought the cell was fairly simple. Some imagined it as a small bag of living jelly.

63. IMAGE LINK: Animal cell structure, the cell is not simple jelly

Carl: That was before modern biochemistry. Scientists did not have the tools to see what we can see now.

Phil: Today we know the cell is not simple. It is like a miniature city, factory, library, power plant, and computer network all at once.

Carl: Careful. Those are analogies. Cells are not literally cities or computers.

Phil: Of course. But the analogies help because cells contain organized systems doing specific jobs. They store information, copy it, read it, edit it, move materials, build parts, and use energy.

Barb: One famous example is the bacterial flagellum. Some bacteria swim using a tiny whip-like tail. At the base of that tail is a rotary motor.

64. IMAGE LINK: E. coli electron micrograph, bacteria and cellular complexity

65. IMAGE LINK: Bacterial flagellum base diagram, molecular motor and irreducible complexity

66. IMAGE LINK: E. coli with flagella, real bacterial flagella as biological structures

Carl: It is made of proteins, not metal.

Phil: Yes, but it functions like a motor. It has a propeller-like filament, a hook that works like a universal joint, a drive shaft, a rotor, stator parts, bushings, and control systems. Some flagella rotate extremely fast and can change direction quickly.

Barb: A universal joint is a connector that lets a rotating shaft bend while still turning. Cars use something like that. The flagellar hook helps connect the motor to the whip-like filament.

Carl: The flagellum is impressive. But evolution can build complex systems by modifying parts that had other uses.

Phil: That is the standard answer. But the flagellum raises a problem. Many parts must work together for the motor to function. If key parts are missing, the system fails. Natural selection preserves useful steps. If early steps do not function, why would selection keep them?

Carl: Some parts may have served other functions, such as secretion systems.

Phil: That may explain a few parts, but not the origin of the whole coordinated system. Reusing parts does not explain how they were arranged into a new motor with many matching components.

Barb: This is called irreducible complexity. A system is irreducibly complex if it needs several parts working together, and removing one core part makes the system stop working.

Carl: I do not accept that irreducible complexity defeats evolution. Evolution can add, remove, and change parts over time. A system that is now tightly connected may have had a different history.

Phil: That is possible in some cases. But it needs detailed explanation, not just a story. The more tightly coordinated the parts are, the more difficult the explanation becomes.

Barb: Another example is ATP synthase. ATP is a molecule cells use as an energy carrier. ATP synthase is a tiny molecular machine that helps make ATP.

67. IMAGE LINK: ATP synthase diagram, cellular energy turbine

Phil: It works like a rotary turbine. A flow of charged particles turns part of the machine. That rotation drives changes in shape, and those changes help assemble ATP.

68. IMAGE LINK: Electron transport chain, cellular energy systems and molecular complexity

Carl: Again, it is a protein machine. It is not made by human engineers.

Phil: Exactly. That is why it is so interesting. It shows engineering-like design at the molecular level.

Barb: Cells have other machines too. Some proteins walk along tracks carrying cargo, like tiny delivery trucks. Others act as clamps during DNA copying. Others proofread and repair errors. The cell is full of organized molecular work.

69. IMAGE LINK: Kinesin walking animation, motor proteins as cellular delivery systems

Carl: But once life exists, Darwinian evolution can improve and diversify systems.

Phil: The hardest problem is not small changes after life exists. The hardest problem is how the first living system, with its information and machinery, arose in the first place.

Chapter 19

The Cell in Greater Detail

Barb: Let us go back inside the cell. We have used analogies like factory, city, and computer. Now let us make them more precise.

Carl: A cell has a membrane that separates inside from outside. It controls what enters and leaves. Inside are many molecules, structures, and reactions.

70. IMAGE LINK: Prokaryote cell diagram, simple cells and early life

Phil: The cell also needs energy. ATP acts like a small energy currency. Cells spend ATP to do work, much like a machine uses fuel or electricity.

71. IMAGE LINK: Mitochondrion diagram, cellular energy and ATP synthase context

Barb: ATP synthase helps make ATP. It sits in a membrane. A flow of protons, which are positively charged particles, passes through it. This flow turns part of the molecule. The turning helps join ADP and phosphate to make ATP.

Carl: It is one of the most beautiful molecular systems in biology.

Phil: And one of the most design-like. It has moving parts, a rotor, and a repeated cycle of action. If human engineers built a tiny turbine that used a flow of particles to make usable energy, no one would hesitate to call it brilliant design.

Carl: But the word design-like does not prove design. Snowflakes look designed too.

Phil: Snowflakes are symmetrical crystals formed by simple laws. ATP synthase is a functional machine with coordinated parts. It performs a task needed by the cell. The comparison is not the same.

Barb: The bacterial flagellum also has coordinated parts. It includes a motor in the membrane, a hook, and a filament that acts like a propeller. It can rotate one way or the other, helping the bacterium move.

Carl: Some bacteria use movement to find food or avoid harmful conditions. So the flagellum has a survival function.

Phil: Which means the system must work. A half-built motor that gives no useful motion would not help much.

Carl: Evolution can co-opt parts. A part used for one function can later be used for another.

Phil: Co-option happens. But it is not a complete explanation unless you show a step-by-step path where each stage is useful and likely.

Barb: This is an important pattern in the debate. Carl often says, “Evolution might have a path.” Phil asks, “What is the detailed path, and is it likely?”

Carl: That is fair. But in science, not knowing the full path does not mean no path exists.

Phil: True. But after many such problems, the repeated appeal to unknown paths begins to look like faith in materialism.

Carl: Or like patience with difficult research.

Phil: It depends on whether the patience is open-ended no matter what.

Barb: The same issue arises with DNA and proteins. DNA stores information. Proteins do the work. But proteins are needed to copy and use DNA. DNA is needed to build proteins.

Carl: That is the chicken-and-egg problem.

Phil: The RNA world tries to solve it by giving RNA both jobs. RNA can store information, and some RNA molecules can act as catalysts.

Carl: Ribozymes are RNA molecules that help chemical reactions. Their discovery made the RNA world more plausible. And researchers have gone further than simply imagining RNA. In carefully controlled lab settings, they have produced ribozymes that can help copy RNA templates or extend RNA chains. That does not create life, but it shows why many scientists think the RNA world is a serious research program, not just a guess.

Phil: That is the strongest way to put Carl’s side, and it does make the RNA world more plausible than before. But the phrase “carefully controlled lab settings” is doing a lot of work. The question is not whether intelligent chemists can select molecules, purify products, control conditions, and preserve fragile intermediates. The question is whether the early Earth could do all of that without guidance. You still need the right RNA building blocks, the right sequences, the right copying, protection from breakdown, and a path to the modern DNA-RNA-protein system.

Barb: Also, making RNA under early Earth conditions is not easy. The sugar ribose is unstable. The bases, sugars, and phosphate must connect in the right way. The molecules must have the correct handedness, or chirality, for life as we know it.

Carl: Researchers have made progress on some of these steps.

Phil: They have. But often with careful conditions chosen by intelligent chemists. The issue is whether undirected nature would do the same without the chemist selecting ingredients, timing reactions, purifying products, and moving the experiment to the next stage.

Carl: So what is your bottom line about the cell?

Phil: Here it is. We know one kind of cause that builds motors, turbines, rotary engines, information storage systems, translation systems, and error-correcting codes. That cause is intelligence. Then we find systems with those features in the cell, long before human beings existed. The naturalist says chemistry did it. The design theorist says mind did it. Which cause has shown the power to produce the kind of effect we are trying to explain?

Barb: That question is called the question of causal adequacy. It asks whether a proposed cause is strong enough and appropriate enough to explain the effect.

Carl: I still think biology will find deeper natural pathways.

Phil: And I still think the known cause of integrated functional machinery and coded information is intelligence.

Chapter 20

DNA and the Language of Life

Barb: To understand the origin of life problem, we need to understand DNA. DNA is the molecule that carries hereditary information. It helps explain why living things produce offspring like themselves.

72. IMAGE LINK: Human cell nucleus diagram, DNA storage and cellular organization

73. IMAGE LINK: Mitochondrial DNA, cellular information beyond the nucleus

Carl: James Watson and Francis Crick discovered its double helix structure in 1953, building on important work by others, including Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.

74. IMAGE LINK: Francis Crick portrait, DNA structure and the codebreaker analogy

75. IMAGE LINK: James D. Watson portrait, the DNA double helix discovery

76. IMAGE LINK: DNA double helix diagram, Watson and Crick and the structure of DNA

Phil: DNA looks like a twisted ladder. The sides are made of sugar and phosphate. The rungs are made of chemical bases. There are four main bases, usually represented by the letters A, T, C, and G.

77. IMAGE LINK: DNA chemical structure, molecular basis of encoded sequence information

Barb: A pairs with T, and C pairs with G. Because of this pairing, one strand can help copy the other. That helped explain how genetic information can be passed on when cells divide.

Carl: The structure was beautiful because it suggested a copying method. Watson and Crick saw that right away.

78. IMAGE LINK: DNA replication diagram, DNA copying and genetic information storage

Phil: But Crick later saw something even deeper. The order of the bases carries information. The bases function somewhat like letters in an alphabet.

Barb: This matters because the same letters can make different messages depending on their order. CAT, ACT, and TAC use the same three letters, but they are not the same word. In DNA, the order of A, T, C, and G matters too.

Carl: DNA does not use English. It uses a genetic code.

Phil: Right. Groups of bases help specify amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins.

Barb: Proteins do much of the work in cells. Some proteins speed up chemical reactions. Some form structures. Some act like motors or pumps. Some help copy and repair DNA. A protein’s job depends on its three-dimensional shape, and that shape depends on the order of amino acids in the chain.

Carl: There are twenty main amino acids used in proteins. The cell needs to put them in the right sequence.

Phil: And DNA helps direct that sequence. That is why people compare DNA to software or written instructions.

Carl: I worry about that comparison. DNA is chemistry. Software is written by minds.

Phil: That worry points to the central question. DNA is chemistry, but it is chemistry arranged in a code-like way. The question is what best explains the origin of that code-like arrangement.

Barb: Francis Crick had worked as a codebreaker during World War II. He knew that codes are not just piles of marks. A code uses symbols according to rules. One thing stands for another thing. In the genetic code, groups of bases correspond to amino acids.

Carl: But the genetic code is not English or Morse code. It is part of a chemical system.

Phil: Of course. But a code does not stop being a code because it is written in chemistry instead of ink. The important point is that one sequence is used to build another sequence. The cell reads base sequences and produces amino-acid sequences.

Barb: Scientists sometimes describe information in a simple mathematical way. A random string can count as information in that narrow sense because it is hard to predict. But living things need more than unpredictability.

Phil: A page of random letters is complex, but it does not tell you how to bake bread or build a bicycle. A recipe or a set of instructions is complex and also functional. In biology, many DNA sequences are complex and functional. They help build working proteins.

Carl: So you mean functionally specified information.

Barb: Functionally specified information means information arranged to perform a specific job. It is not simple repetition like ABCABCABC. It is not random nonsense. It is a complex arrangement that matches a useful function.

Phil: In our experience, that kind of information comes from minds. Books, computer programs, recipes, maps, warning signs, and assembly instructions come from intelligent agents.

Carl: But biology might be different. Natural processes can produce patterns.

Phil: They can produce patterns. Crystals, snowflakes, dunes, and whirlpools are patterns. But a genetic code is not just a repeating pattern. It is a symbolic and functional system. It stores instructions and helps build machines that use those instructions.

Barb: Some people compare DNA to a software program. That comparison should not be pushed too far, but it is not empty. Software stores instructions in a sequence of symbols. DNA stores biological instructions in a sequence of chemical bases.

Carl: You are using the software analogy to sneak in a programmer.

Phil: I am using the analogy to point to a known cause. We know programmers produce software. We know minds produce codes. We do not know blind chemistry producing large amounts of new, functional, coded information before life exists.

Carl: Maybe chemistry plus selection can do it.

Phil: Selection needs self-reproducing systems with heritable variation. That already requires information. Natural selection can help modify life after life exists. The origin of the first genetic information is a different problem.

Barb: That distinction is important. Darwinian evolution explains changes in living things over generations. But before the first life exists, there are no generations of organisms for natural selection to act on in the usual way.

Phil: So the question is not whether DNA is made of chemicals. Everyone agrees it is. The question is why those chemicals are arranged as functional code.

Chapter 21

How the Cell Reads the Code

Barb: Let us walk through protein building in simple terms. This process is often called gene expression. It is one of the clearest examples of information processing in life.

Carl: First, a section of DNA is copied into a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA. An enzyme called RNA polymerase helps make this copy.

79. IMAGE LINK: Messenger RNA structure, temporary copy of genetic instructions

80. IMAGE LINK: RNA polymerase II structure, transcription of DNA into RNA

Barb: RNA is similar to DNA, but it usually has one strand instead of two. It also uses a base called U instead of T.

81. IMAGE LINK: DNA versus RNA diagram, storage and copying of genetic instructions

Phil: The mRNA copy carries the instructions to a ribosome. The ribosome is a molecular machine that reads the mRNA.

82. IMAGE LINK: Central dogma diagram, DNA to RNA to protein

83. IMAGE LINK: Ribosome translating mRNA, protein synthesis as molecular translation

84. IMAGE LINK: Ribosome subunits and binding sites, ribosome as a molecular factory

Carl: The ribosome reads the message in groups of three bases, called codons. Each codon corresponds to an amino acid or to a stop signal.

Barb: Transfer RNA molecules, called tRNAs, bring amino acids to the ribosome. Each tRNA has a part that matches a codon and carries the correct amino acid.

85. IMAGE LINK: Transfer RNA structure, translation and amino-acid delivery

Phil: The ribosome links the amino acids together in the order specified by the mRNA. The chain then folds into a protein. If it folds correctly, it can do its job.

86. IMAGE LINK: Protein structure levels, amino-acid sequence and three-dimensional function

Carl: This is all standard biology.

Phil: And it is astonishing standard biology. You have stored information, a copying machine, a message carrier, a code, adapter molecules, an assembly machine, and folding into functional tools.

Carl: Be careful. Words like machine, message, and code can make biology sound designed before you have proved design.

Phil: The words are not the proof. The features are the issue. If you dislike the word message, say sequence. If you dislike the word machine, say molecular system with moving parts. If you dislike the word code, say mapping between base triplets and amino acids. The problem remains.

Barb: There is also proofreading and repair. When DNA is copied, mistakes can happen. Cells have systems that detect and fix many errors.

87. IMAGE LINK: DNA polymerase diagram, DNA copying and replication machinery

Phil: Engineers build error correction into digital systems. Cells have error correction too. In some ways, their systems are more compact and elegant than ours.

Carl: Evolution can favor better copying because organisms with fewer harmful errors survive better.

Phil: That helps after a copying system already exists. But the first copying system must be accurate enough to keep useful information from being lost. If errors pile up too fast, information disappears.

Barb: This is a key puzzle. Life needs information to build machinery. But it also needs machinery to read and copy the information. Which came first?

Carl: That is why many origin-of-life researchers propose an RNA world. RNA can carry information and, in some cases, help chemical reactions.

Phil: The RNA world is an attempt to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. But it faces many difficulties. RNA is hard to make under realistic early Earth conditions. It is fragile. Simple RNA catalysts do not match the full range of tasks done by modern protein enzymes and translation systems.

Carl: No one says the problem is solved. But unsolved does not mean impossible.

Phil: Correct. But it also does not mean we should pretend the evidence is already there. If a problem remains unsolved after decades, and if we know of a cause that does produce coded information systems, we should at least consider that cause.

Barb: Phil’s point can be stated as a test of causal adequacy. Causal adequacy means that an explanation must have the power to produce the effect. If the effect is a coded, functional information system, then the proposed cause must be able to produce coded, functional information.

Carl: Chemistry has causal power.

Phil: Chemistry can join molecules, break molecules, and form patterns. But the order of the letters in a useful message is not explained by the ink chemistry, and the order of bases in a functional gene is not explained merely by the fact that bases can attach to a backbone.

Barb: In a magnetic-letter example, magnets may explain why letters stick to a board. They do not explain why the letters spell a sentence. In DNA, chemical bonds explain parts of the molecule. They do not by themselves explain the meaningful order of the bases.

Carl: Unless some deeper chemical law favored useful sequences.

Phil: If such a law existed, it would tend to force the same patterns over and over, like a crystal. But living information requires many different sequences to perform many different jobs. Too much chemical necessity would destroy the freedom needed for information.

Carl: Then you say chance cannot do it either.

Phil: Chance can produce short lucky results. But the space of possible sequences is enormous. For many proteins, only a tiny fraction of possible amino-acid sequences fold into useful shapes. Blind search does not look adequate.

Barb: So Carl hopes for a natural path. Phil argues that the known natural causes, chance and necessity, do not explain the origin of the first functional code. That is why the information argument becomes central.

Chapter 22

Information, Meaning, and the Cell

Barb: We should be careful with the word information. It can mean several things.

Carl: In Shannon’s theory, information is about reducing uncertainty. A random sequence can have high Shannon information because it is hard to predict.

Phil: But biological information is not just unpredictability. It is functional. A DNA sequence helps produce a needed product in the cell.

Barb: If I type random letters for a whole page, the result may be unpredictable. But it will not help you bake a cake or fix a bicycle. A recipe or repair manual has information in a richer sense.

Carl: DNA does not mean something to a conscious reader the way English does.

Phil: Correct. The cell does not sit there thinking, “Ah, this codon means leucine.” But the cellular machinery uses the sequence according to a code. The sequence has functional meaning inside the system.

Barb: In the genetic code, groups of three RNA bases correspond to amino acids. For example, certain codons call for particular amino acids, and others signal stop.

88. IMAGE LINK: Genetic code chart, codons and amino acids

Carl: The code is not arbitrary in exactly the same way human language is. There may be chemical reasons for some features.

Phil: Some patterns may have chemical connections. But the full coding system still requires mapping between codons and amino acids, adapter molecules, enzymes that attach correct amino acids to tRNAs, and the ribosome that reads the message. That is a coordinated information system.

89. IMAGE LINK: Multi-tRNA synthetase complex, matching amino acids to tRNAs

Barb: Translation is especially interesting because it links two worlds: the world of nucleic acid sequences and the world of amino acid sequences. It is like converting one language into another.

Carl: But language analogies can overreach.

Phil: Let us state it without poetry. One class of molecules carries sequences of bases. Another class of molecules carries amino acids. The cell uses matching rules and molecular machines to convert base sequences into amino-acid sequences. That is an information-processing system.

Carl: Put that way, I agree.

Phil: Good. Now consider what we know from ordinary experience. When archaeologists find cuneiform tablets, they infer a writer, not wind and rain. When radio astronomers imagine receiving a signal from space that lists prime numbers, they treat that as a possible sign of intelligence, not as a normal hiss of radiation. When we find software code, we infer a programmer.

Carl: Those examples involve humans. Biology may not.

Phil: The examples show a general rule: functional symbolic information is a reliable sign of mind. It is not because we already know the writer’s name. It is because the effect belongs to a class of things minds produce.

Barb: This is why the known-cause argument matters. Phil is not saying, “I do not know, therefore design.” He is saying, “I know what kind of cause produces this kind of effect.”

Carl: But the genetic code might have arisen through chemistry and selection.

Phil: Then show the path. That is exactly the issue. We do not have a demonstrated path from lifeless chemistry to a system that stores code, reads code, translates code, and builds the machinery needed to keep the code going.

Carl: Science can work on unsolved problems.

Phil: Absolutely. But unsolved problems should not be treated as solved just because materialism needs them solved.

Barb: The origin question becomes unavoidable: how did such an information-processing system arise before there was such a system?

Carl: I would rather keep looking than infer a designer too soon.

Phil: And I would rather follow the known cause of the effect than wait forever for a cause that has not shown the needed power.

Chapter 23

The Origin of Life Problem

Barb: Darwin’s theory explains how living things change after life already exists. But the origin of the first life is a different question.

Carl: Darwinian natural selection needs reproduction. You need organisms that make copies of themselves, with variations, and some variations help survival and reproduction.

Phil: Right. But before the first self-reproducing system, natural selection cannot do the main work. Chemistry has to produce the first life or something close enough for selection to begin.

Barb: Early origin-of-life theories imagined a prebiotic soup. Simple chemicals on the early Earth might have reacted over time to form the building blocks of life.

Carl: The Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 was famous. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey used gases they thought might resemble the early atmosphere. They added electrical sparks to imitate lightning. They produced amino acids, which are building blocks of proteins.

90. IMAGE LINK: Miller-Urey experiment, origin-of-life chemistry and laboratory simulations

91. IMAGE LINK: Stanley Miller portrait, Miller-Urey experiment and early origin-of-life research

Phil: That was exciting. But it did not produce life. It did not produce DNA, RNA, proteins in the needed sequences, or a living cell. Also, later scientists questioned whether the gas mixture matched the early atmosphere.

Carl: True, but Miller-Urey showed that some biological building blocks can form naturally.

Phil: Some building blocks, yes. But building blocks are not enough. Bricks do not build a house by themselves. Letters do not arrange themselves into a novel. Amino acids do not automatically arrange themselves into functional proteins.

Barb: Dean Kenyon was an important origin-of-life researcher. He helped write a book called Biochemical Predestination. His idea was that chemical attractions might guide amino acids into useful protein sequences.

Carl: The hope was that life might be built into chemistry. Maybe molecules naturally tend to form life under the right conditions.

Phil: But Kenyon later changed his mind. He realized that chemical attractions do not explain the sequence information in DNA or proteins.

Barb: Think about magnetic letters on a refrigerator. Magnetism explains why the letters stick to the refrigerator. It does not explain why the letters spell “HAPPY BIRTHDAY.” The message comes from someone arranging the letters.

Phil: In DNA, chemical bonds help the bases attach to the sugar-phosphate backbone. But those bonds do not force the bases into meaningful, protein-building sequences. The sequence is not dictated by simple chemistry.

Carl: But there may be more subtle chemistry, not just simple attraction.

Phil: Perhaps. But the general problem remains. If chemistry forces a sequence, then the sequence is repetitive and law-like, not information-rich. If chemistry allows many sequences, then something must explain why the functional sequences appear.

Barb: Salt crystals illustrate law-like order. Sodium and chloride ions form regular repeating patterns because of their charges. But DNA is not like a salt crystal. It carries information because its sequence can vary in many ways.

Carl: So the problem is to get both freedom and function. The bases must be free to form many sequences, but the living cell needs the right sequences.

Phil: Exactly. That is the information problem.

Chapter 24

Chance, Necessity, and the Need for Information

Barb: Origin-of-life theories often fall into three broad types. Some appeal mainly to chance. Some appeal to necessity, meaning law-like chemical forces. Some combine chance and necessity.

Carl: Chance alone seems weak if the target is a long functional molecule. But chance plus selection can be powerful.

Phil: Once reproduction exists, yes. But before that, selection cannot preserve improvements in the Darwinian way. A molecule that does not reproduce with heritable variation does not start Darwinian evolution.

Carl: Some molecules can copy themselves partly.

Phil: Partly is not enough. A system needs enough accuracy, enough stability, enough useful chemistry, and enough surrounding machinery or conditions to keep going. Otherwise information degrades.

Barb: Necessity has a different problem. Law-like processes produce regular patterns. Snowflakes, crystals, waves, and whirlpools can be beautiful. But their order is usually repetitive or simple.

92. IMAGE LINK: Wilson Bentley snowflakes, symmetry and intelligible beauty in nature

Phil: A newspaper headline is not explained by the chemistry of ink and paper. The chemistry allows the ink to stick. It does not explain the words. In the same way, chemistry allows DNA to exist. It does not by itself explain the functional order of bases.

Carl: But self-organization is a real field. Nature can produce surprising order without minds.

Phil: Yes, but the question is what kind of order. A tornado, a spiral galaxy, or a crystal is not the same as a software program. Life uses coded, functional information.

Barb: Some computer models try to show how complexity can arise. But critics ask whether the models smuggle in information through the programmer, the fitness function, or the rules of the simulation.

Carl: A simulation can still teach us about natural processes.

Phil: It can. But if a simulation reaches a target because a programmer defined the target and selected rules that reward movement toward it, then it shows the power of intelligence as much as the power of blind nature.

Carl: That is a fair warning, though not a complete refutation of all models.

Phil: Agreed. Each model must be judged on its details. But the pattern is common: attempts to explain biological information often depend on hidden information already supplied by minds.

Barb: That is sometimes called the displacement problem. Instead of explaining the origin of information, a theory moves the information somewhere else.

Carl: For example, into the setup of the experiment or the rules of a computer program.

Phil: Exactly.

Chapter 25

The Laboratory and the Early Earth

Barb: Modern chemists can make many interesting molecules in the lab. That shows human skill. But it also raises a question: how much of the result comes from chemistry alone, and how much comes from the chemist?

Carl: Scientists use pure chemicals, controlled temperatures, special glassware, and planned steps because that is how experiments work.

Phil: Yes, but the early Earth had no scientist choosing the clean starting materials. It had no technician stopping a reaction at the perfect moment. It had no graduate student separating the useful product from tar or junk. It had no chemist checking the product and moving it to the next step.

Barb: This is sometimes called the human-interference problem. In a laboratory, chemists do not just throw chemicals together and walk away. They choose ingredients, purify them, control the temperature, protect fragile products, stop reactions at the right time, and separate what they want from everything else.

Carl: But that is how experiments are done. Careful control does not prove that nature could not do something similar under special conditions.

Phil: It does not prove impossibility. But it changes what the experiment shows. If the chemist must guide each step, then the experiment may be demonstrating the power of intelligent direction, not the power of unguided early-Earth chemistry.

Barb: Imagine a student saying, “This puzzle solved itself,” while quietly moving the pieces whenever no one is looking. The finished puzzle would not show that cardboard pieces naturally arrange themselves into pictures. It would show that a person can arrange them.

Phil: That is the point. Origin-of-life chemistry often succeeds only when intelligence keeps pushing the reaction toward a goal. But the early Earth had no goal in mind.

Barb: In organic chemistry, reactions often produce mixtures. Some products break down quickly. Some react further into unwanted substances. To build a long pathway, a chemist must guide each step.

Carl: But natural settings can also concentrate chemicals, cycle wet and dry conditions, use minerals as surfaces, and provide energy from sunlight, vents, or lightning.

Phil: They can. The question is whether those processes actually build the integrated system life requires. So far, origin-of-life experiments often show what intelligent chemists can coax matter to do, not what blind chemistry would do on its own.

Carl: I still think research may solve this.

Phil: It might solve parts. But after decades, the gap between building blocks and a living cell remains enormous.

Barb: A living cell needs a boundary, metabolism, information storage, copying, repair, and the ability to make useful parts. These systems depend on each other.

Carl: That is why origin-of-life research is difficult. But difficult science is still science.

Phil: I am not against the research. I am saying the evidence we have should be allowed to count. If every successful step requires intelligent guidance, and if the end product is an information-rich system, design is not an irrational conclusion.

Carl: It may be rational philosophy, but is it science?

Phil: Historical science often infers past causes from present clues. We infer volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, ancient floods, and human tool-making from traces left behind. If intelligence is a known cause of information, then inferring intelligence from information is a normal kind of reasoning.

Barb: This kind of reasoning is called inference to the best explanation. It does not claim absolute proof. It compares possible causes and asks which best explains the evidence.

Chapter 26

From Building Blocks to Living Systems

Barb: A common mistake is to think that making a building block is almost the same as making life. It is not.

Carl: Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. Nucleotides are building blocks of RNA and DNA. Lipids can form membranes. These are important steps.

93. IMAGE LINK: Nucleotide structure, DNA and RNA building blocks

Phil: But life needs much more. A box of parts from a computer store is not a working computer. A pile of letters is not a book. A bucket of amino acids is not a protein machine.

Barb: To get a useful protein, amino acids must be linked in a particular order. Many possible chains will not fold properly or do useful work.

94. IMAGE LINK: Protein folding schematic, sequence and functional shape

Carl: Some proteins are more tolerant than others. Evolution can search sequence space.

Phil: Once life exists, yes. But before life, there is no cell doing the search in a controlled way.

Barb: Sequence space means the huge set of possible sequences. For a protein of 100 amino acids, with 20 choices at each position, the number of possible chains is enormous.

Carl: Not every position has to be exact. Families of related sequences can work.

Phil: True, but the island of function is still tiny compared with the ocean of possible nonfunctional sequences. Experiments by protein scientists have tried to estimate how rare functional folds can be.

Carl: Those estimates are debated.

Phil: They are. But no one thinks functional proteins are easy to get by random chaining of amino acids.

Barb: And proteins are only part of the story. A living cell needs many kinds of molecules arranged together. It needs a way to store information, read it, build parts, use energy, repair damage, and reproduce.

Carl: This is why some origin-of-life researchers prefer metabolism-first theories. They think networks of chemical reactions came before genetic information.

Phil: But metabolism-first theories face their own information problem. A metabolic network must be organized. It must channel reactions in useful directions. Without genetic information, how does it become stable, specific, and heritable?

Carl: Other researchers look at hydrothermal vents, mineral surfaces, clay templates, lipid worlds, and many other ideas.

95. IMAGE LINK: Black smoker hydrothermal vent, origin-of-life scenarios at deep-sea vents

96. IMAGE LINK: Hydrothermal vent chemistry diagram, chemical-origin models at vents

Phil: Which shows the field is creative. It also shows there is no settled answer.

Barb: The disagreement is not whether origin-of-life scientists are smart. They are. The disagreement is whether current naturalistic theories have explained the origin of the first life.

Carl: I say not yet.

Phil: I say not yet, and the reason for the failure points toward design.

Chapter 27

The Three Explanatory Options for Biological Information

Barb: Phil often mentions chance, necessity, and design. Let us define them clearly.

Carl: Chance means events happen without a set pattern. Mutations, for example, are often treated as random with respect to what an organism needs.

Phil: Necessity means law-like regularity. If you drop a rock, gravity pulls it down. If sodium and chloride ions meet under the right conditions, they form salt crystals.

Barb: Design means arrangement by a mind for a purpose.

Carl: Origin-of-life theories usually do not rely on pure chance. They look for chemistry that makes life likely.

Phil: That means they appeal to necessity, or to chance and necessity together. But necessity produces regular order, not complex functional sequences. Chance can produce complex sequences, but not reliably functional ones.

Barb: Think of three ways to make letters on a page. A repeated stamp makes order: AAAAAAAAAA. A spilled box of letters makes randomness: QLZMXP. A writer makes a meaningful sentence. Life needs something more like the third case.

Carl: Unless natural selection enters.

Phil: But natural selection requires reproduction and heritable variation. Before that, it cannot do the work.

Carl: Chemical selection may still favor stable molecules.

Phil: Stability is not the same as biological function. A molecule can be stable and useless. Living systems often need molecules that are not merely stable but arranged to perform specific tasks.

Barb: This is why information is central. The cell is not just a lump of stable chemicals. It is a system that uses sequences to build machines.

Barb: We have now looked at life as a chemical and informational system. But once living things exist and reproduce, a new question appears: how much can Darwinian evolution explain about the history and diversity of life?

PART FOUR

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

What to Watch For

Barb: In Part Four, watch for the distinction between the origin of life and the evolution of life. Darwinian evolution begins with living systems that already reproduce. Carl will emphasize common descent, mutation, selection, and the power of natural processes. Phil will ask whether unguided evolution can explain the most information-rich and highly coordinated features of life.

Chapter 28

Why Origin of Life Is Not Ordinary Evolution

Barb: Many students mix up evolution and the origin of life. They are related topics, but they are not the same.

Carl: Evolution, in the Darwinian sense, needs populations of reproducing organisms. It explains changes in life once life exists.

Phil: Origin of life asks how the first living system came from nonliving chemistry. That problem includes the origin of genetic information, metabolism, membranes, and reproduction.

Barb: A simple example may help. Suppose you have a photocopier that makes copies with small changes. Some copies are better and get copied more. Over time, the copies improve. That is a bit like selection. But origin of life asks where the first copier came from.

Carl: Or where the first rough copying process came from.

Phil: Yes. Even a rough copier must already have special features. It must preserve information well enough for improvements to accumulate.

Carl: Some scientists think early life was much simpler than modern cells.

Phil: It must have been simpler in some ways. But it could not be too simple. If it cannot store information, use energy, maintain itself, and reproduce with some accuracy, it will not start Darwinian evolution.

Barb: That is why the first life problem is sometimes called a threshold problem. Before the threshold, chemistry is not yet evolving in the full biological sense. After the threshold, natural selection can work. The question is how chemistry crossed the threshold.

Carl: There may have been many small thresholds, not one big jump.

Phil: Perhaps. But each threshold must be explained. Breaking a big mystery into smaller mysteries helps only if the smaller mysteries are solvable.

Carl: Scientists are working on them.

Phil: And design theorists are asking whether the pattern of required information points to intelligence.

Chapter 29

A More Careful Look at Darwin and Design

Carl: Since we have talked about life, we need to be careful about Darwin. Some people hear intelligent design and think it means rejecting all evolution.

97. IMAGE LINK: Phylogenetic tree, common descent and the tree of life

Phil: Intelligent design does not have to deny that organisms change over time. It does not have to deny common ancestry in every case. Its central claim is that some features of life are best explained by intelligence rather than unguided processes.

Carl: Darwin explained how design-like features can arise without foresight. Natural selection can produce the appearance of design.

Phil: It can explain some adaptations. But there are limits. Natural selection works by preserving useful variations. It cannot select a future benefit that does not yet exist.

Barb: Imagine building a bridge one random piece at a time. If each step must be useful as a bridge, you cannot keep parts that do nothing until many later parts arrive. That is the challenge for systems where many parts are needed together.

Carl: Evolution does not build like a human engineer. It modifies existing systems. Parts can have one job and later take another.

Phil: Yes, and that is why detailed pathways matter. If a part had another function, show how it was changed, how it was integrated, and how each step helped the organism.

Carl: Sometimes evolutionary biology can do that.

Phil: Sometimes. But for the origin of molecular machines and the origin of the first information system, the explanations remain incomplete.

Barb: Darwin himself knew that his theory could be challenged if a complex organ could not be built by many slight useful changes. Design theorists argue that molecular biology has found systems that create exactly that challenge.

Carl: Darwin did not know modern genetics, but modern evolutionary theory includes mutation, genetic drift, gene duplication, recombination, symbiosis, and many other processes.

Phil: Those processes add detail, but they still need to produce functional information. Gene duplication gives an extra copy of existing information. It does not automatically write a new program. Mutation changes sequences, but most random changes are harmful or neutral. Selection preserves what helps, but it needs selectable function.

Carl: Evolution has produced new functions in experiments.

Phil: Limited new functions, yes. The question is whether those examples show the power to build the major information-rich innovations at issue.

Barb: One concrete example often discussed is the Cambrian explosion. In the fossil record, many major animal body plans appear in a geologically brief window. The question is not merely whether animals changed. They clearly did. The question is how new kinds of biological architecture arose.

Carl: Evolutionary biologists do not think the Cambrian animals appeared from nowhere. They point to earlier organisms, ecological changes, oxygen levels, developmental genes, and many millions of years of earlier history. Modern evolutionary biology also includes evo-devo, or evolutionary developmental biology. It studies how changes in developmental regulation can alter body structures. Hox genes and other regulatory genes help control where body parts form, and changes in timing, placement, or gene regulation can have large effects on an organism’s form.

Phil: That is an important point, and it makes Carl’s case stronger than a simple picture of random point mutations. But regulatory genes are themselves parts of complex developmental systems. Changing switches can matter, and those factors may be part of the story. Still, the switches, circuits, targets, and body-building processes need explanation. New body plans require new arrangements of cells, tissues, organs, and developmental instructions. Design theorists ask whether unguided mutation and selection have shown the power to build the whole coordinated system, not merely flip switches after the system exists.

Barb: This keeps the issue focused. Carl is strongest when he explains how evolution modifies existing life. Phil presses hardest where major new forms, systems, or information-rich structures need to be explained.

Barb: The debate is not simple. It is not “evolution explains everything” versus “evolution explains nothing.” It is about the reach of unguided processes.

Carl: I can agree to that framing.

Chapter 30

Specified Complexity

Barb: We need to return to one important idea: specified complexity.

Carl: That term can be controversial.

Phil: It can. But the basic idea is easy. Something is complex if it is unlikely or has many possible arrangements. Something is specified if it matches an independent pattern or performs a function.

Barb: A pile of Scrabble letters spilled on the floor may be complex because there are many possible arrangements. But it is not specified if it does not spell anything. A repeated pattern like AAAAAAAA is specified in a simple way but not complex. A meaningful sentence is both complex and specified.

Phil: Living systems contain sequences like that. DNA sequences are not merely random. They help build proteins. Protein sequences are not merely long chains. They must fold into shapes that do jobs.

Carl: Natural selection can create specified complexity in biology after life begins.

Phil: It can increase adaptation in living populations. But the origin of the first functional genetic information is prior to ordinary biological evolution.

Carl: Some researchers think selection could begin at a chemical level.

Phil: But chemical selection needs selectable functions and some way to preserve and copy them. Otherwise the process does not accumulate information.

Barb: Henry Quastler, an early thinker in biological information theory, argued that new information is commonly linked with conscious activity. In everyday life, this seems obvious. Books come from authors. Software comes from programmers. Blueprints come from designers.

Carl: But everyday life may not cover deep prebiotic chemistry.

Phil: True, but science often starts from known causes. If we know one cause that can produce functional information, and we do not know any blind cause that can produce the relevant amount, then intelligence is a strong candidate.

Carl: Unless intelligence is too mysterious.

Phil: Intelligence is familiar. We use it every day. We know minds can arrange matter to achieve goals. That is not mysterious in the way a purely blind source of coded information is mysterious.

Barb: Phil is not saying the designer must be identified in every detail before design can be inferred. Archaeologists can infer an ancient toolmaker from a tool even if they do not know the toolmaker’s name. Detectives can infer murder before they know the murderer.

Carl: But in those cases we already know humans exist.

Phil: In the biology case, we already know minds exist. The deeper question is whether mind can exist beyond human brains. That is a philosophical question. But the evidence from information gives us a reason to consider it.

Chapter 31

Codes Within Codes

Barb: Modern biology has made the cell look even more information-rich than scientists first thought. DNA does not always work like a simple one-line message.

Carl: Genes can overlap. Some stretches of DNA can be read in different ways. Cells can edit RNA. They can regulate when genes are turned on or off. There are many layers.

Phil: That makes the design argument stronger. Human programmers know how hard it is to write code that performs multiple functions. In cells, we find overlapping instructions, regulatory signals, error correction, and controlled information transfers.

Carl: Evolutionary biologists study how these features arise. Some overlapping genes may evolve by mutation and selection. Some regulatory systems build up over time.

Phil: Again, after life exists, evolution can modify systems. But we are still facing the origin of the basic information-processing system. Also, the more integrated the system becomes, the more difficult it is to explain by tiny unguided steps.

Barb: Think of a paragraph that can be read forward to give one message and backward to give another useful message. Or think of a computer file that works as two different programs depending on where you start reading. That would be impressive.

Carl: Biology is not exactly like that, but the analogy helps.

Phil: In some cases, the same DNA region contributes to different products depending on reading frame, direction, or editing. This kind of compact, layered information is remarkable.

Carl: But we must not confuse amazement with evidence.

Phil: I agree. Amazement is not an argument. The argument is that layered functional information is the kind of thing we know intelligence can produce, and blind processes have not shown the same ability at the origin of life.

Barb: The debate is not whether cells are amazing. Both sides agree they are. The debate is what best explains their origin.

Chapter 32

A Friendly Warning About Analogies

Carl: We have used many analogies: locks, recipes, machines, software, books, factories, cabins, tea cups, balloons, and bridges. I want to warn readers that analogies can mislead.

Barb: Good. An analogy is a comparison. It helps us understand one thing by comparing it with another. But no analogy is exact.

Phil: I accept that. A cell is not literally a human factory. DNA is not literally English. The universe is not literally a lock. But the analogies point to shared features: function, information, adjustment, and coordinated parts.

Carl: The danger is that people may import too much from the analogy. Since software has a programmer, they may assume DNA must have one. But that is what needs to be argued.

Phil: The argument is not merely, “DNA looks like software.” The argument is that DNA contains digital, functional information, and our uniform experience shows that such information comes from minds.

98. IMAGE LINK: Bill Gates portrait, DNA as software analogy

Carl: Uniform experience within human life.

Phil: Human life is where we directly observe minds producing information. Science often uses known causes as guides to unknown past causes. That is normal reasoning.

Barb: The right use of analogy is careful. Do not say two things are identical. Say they share a relevant feature. Then ask whether the cause of that feature is also similar.

Carl: That is fair.

Chapter 33

Fair Objections from Carl

Carl: I want to make sure I have raised the strongest objections. First, science has a long history of finding natural explanations for things once credited to divine action.

Phil: Yes, and design arguments should learn from that history. They should not be based on ordinary gaps that may close tomorrow.

Carl: Second, design may be too easy. You can explain anything by saying a designer wanted it that way.

Phil: A bad design argument can do that. A good design argument focuses on features that, in our experience, have a known connection to intelligence: coded information, functional arrangement, and fine-tuning.

Carl: Third, if complex things need designers, then who designed the designer? And I want to press this with Occam’s Razor. If you explain a complex universe by appealing to an even greater mind, have you really simplified anything? Maybe you have multiplied mysteries instead of solving one.

Phil: The design argument does not say every complex thing needs a designer. It says certain kinds of complex, specified, or fine-tuned effects point to intelligence. Also, in classical theism, God is not a complex machine made of parts. But even at a simpler level, explanation is not only about counting parts. A single deeper cause may explain several otherwise separate facts: a cosmic beginning, fine-tuning, information, and rational order. A detective can infer arson from burn patterns without knowing the arsonist’s parents. Likewise, Phil is arguing that mind is a causally adequate explanation of certain effects, not that every cause must first be explained in the same way.

Carl: Fourth, design may not be testable in the way science usually requires. A transcendent designer cannot be measured, weighed, placed in a laboratory, or directly falsified by an experiment. That seems to move the claim out of science and into metaphysics.

Phil: That is a serious concern. Design is not testable in the same way a chemical reaction is testable. But historical sciences often infer past causes from present effects, and some design claims can be tested by expectations. If design is true, we may expect function in systems dismissed as junk, deeper layers of information, and signs of purposeful arrangement. In biology, some design advocates predicted that so-called junk DNA might have more function than many expected.

Carl: That example is disputed. Some noncoding DNA has function, but not all DNA is known to be functional.

Phil: Fair. It should not be overstated. Still, design thinking can encourage scientists to look for function rather than assume useless leftovers.

Barb: This is one of the boundary questions in the dialogue. Some parts of the debate are scientific, such as whether DNA carries information or whether the universe is expanding. Other parts are philosophical, such as what kind of cause can explain the existence and order of nature as a whole. The design argument lives near that boundary, so it should be stated carefully.

Carl: Fifth, intelligent design does not give a full research program.

Phil: It gives some research questions: What parts of biological systems are necessary for function? What information is needed to build new structures? Can unguided processes generate that information? What patterns reliably distinguish designed systems from undesigned ones?

Carl: Sixth, design can be mixed with religion and politics, making science education messy.

Phil: That is a social concern, not a direct answer to the evidence. The evidence should be judged on its own.

Barb: Carl’s objections matter. A fair dialogue should not make the naturalist look foolish. Carl is not foolish. He represents a strong tradition in modern thought. But Phil argues that the evidence has turned in a direction that strict materialism did not expect.

Chapter 34

What Phil Should Not Claim

Barb: Phil also needs limits. A careful design argument should avoid overclaiming.

Carl: Good. What should Phil not say?

Phil: I should not say that every unsolved problem proves design. I should not say that science has proved God with mathematical certainty. I should not say that all evolutionary change is impossible. I should not say that natural processes do nothing. I should not pretend to know every detail of how design was carried out.

Barb: That is important. The documentary and the Meyer books focus on major origin questions: the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, and the origin of biological information. They do not need to deny ordinary science.

Carl: So Phil can accept much of modern cosmology, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Phil: Yes. Intelligent design is not a rejection of science. It is an argument about what some scientific discoveries mean.

Carl: But many scientists reject it.

Phil: Many do. Consensus matters, but it is not the same as proof. Scientific history includes cases where minority views later gained support. That does not mean every minority view is right. It means arguments must be examined.

Barb: Phil should also be careful with probability. Very large numbers can impress readers, but probability depends on assumptions. It is better to explain the basic idea than to pretend every number settles the issue alone.

Phil: Agreed. The numbers help show the scale of the challenge, but the deeper point is that life-friendly and information-rich arrangements occupy special regions among many possibilities.

Carl: And I should not overclaim either. I should not say science has disproved God. Science has not done that.

Phil: Thank you.

Carl: I should not say the origin of life is solved. It is not. I should not say the multiverse is established fact. It is not. I should not say fine-tuning is imaginary. It is widely discussed by serious physicists.

Barb: That is real progress. The dialogue is not about making one side sound stupid. It is about sharpening the question.

Barb: We have now separated two questions that are often confused: how life began and how life changed after it began. The final part asks what the whole pattern means for science, philosophy, and the larger question of mind behind the universe.

PART FIVE

THE LARGER MEANING

What to Watch For

Barb: In Part Five, watch Carl and Phil step back from the individual scientific topics and ask what follows from the whole pattern. This part gathers the philosophical issues: God-of-the-gaps reasoning, the rules of science, worldview expectations, intellectual humility, the question of God, and the larger meaning of the evidence.

Chapter 35

God of the Gaps?

Carl: Let me raise the objection I care about most. Isn’t intelligent design just a God-of-the-gaps argument?

Barb: A God-of-the-gaps argument says, “We do not know how this happened, so God must have done it.” This is also called an argument from ignorance. This is a weak form of argument because future science may fill the gap.

Phil: I agree. A lazy appeal to design is not good reasoning.

Carl: Good. Because history is full of examples. People once appealed to divine action when they did not understand lightning, disease, or planetary motion. Later science found natural explanations. For example, some people looked at the orderly motions of the planets and thought God had to adjust the system directly. Then Newton showed that planets follow mathematical laws of motion and gravity.

Phil: Right. That is a fair warning. Some past design arguments were too quick. Some people used God to plug holes in their scientific knowledge. When the holes closed, the argument collapsed. That is why today’s design arguments should not rely on gaps in orbital mechanics. They rely on information theory, fine-tuning, and the causal powers of intelligence. That is a different kind of argument.

Carl: Then why are you not doing the same thing?

Phil: Because I am not pointing to any mystery whatever. I am pointing to specific effects with known causes. This is meant to be a positive argument from what we know minds can do, not merely a negative argument from what chemistry has not yet explained. Minds produce specified complexity: coded information, symbolic instructions, coordinated machines, and systems arranged to achieve goals. Minds also choose one possibility from many possibilities for a purpose. When we find effects of that kind, it is reasonable to ask whether intelligence is the best explanation.

Barb: Phil is drawing a line between two kinds of argument. The weak argument says, “I do not know, therefore design.” The stronger argument says, “This effect belongs to a class of effects that intelligence is known to produce.” That does not settle the debate by itself, but it shows why Phil thinks design is an inference from positive causal knowledge, not just a label for ignorance.

Carl: But you still point to things science has not explained.

Phil: Of course. All competing explanations point to what they can and cannot explain. If blind chemistry had already explained the origin of coded biological information, design would be weaker. If the multiverse had direct evidence and explained fine-tuning without more fine-tuning, design would be weaker. If the universe had turned out to be eternal and self-existing, the first-cause argument would be weaker. But that is not what happened.

Carl: You are still betting against future science.

Phil: No. I welcome future science. But future science is not evidence yet. You cannot defeat a present explanation by saying, “Someday we might find another one.” It also bears pointing out that what counts as science is not decided by science—it is decided by prior philosophical assumptions. If we assume that nature consists only of mindless material processes, then identifying design in nature will just be patching over gaps. But how do we know that nature is purely material? What Carl is calling a gap may not be a gap for scientific naturalism but may in fact be legitimately explained by intelligent causation within a design framework.

Carl: Science needs mechanisms. Design often says only that a mind did it.

Phil: Historical sciences often infer causes before every detail is known. Archaeologists can identify an inscription without knowing the writer’s hand position. Detectives can infer planning before knowing every step of the plan. SETI researchers could infer intelligence from a signal before knowing the aliens’ biology.

Carl: But design is too flexible. It can explain anything.

Phil: Not so if design reasoning is properly disciplined. It should not be used for anything merely odd or unexplained. It should focus on reliable signs of intelligence: functional information, symbolic code, integrated machinery, and fine-tuning for a goal.

Barb: Causal adequacy is the key phrase again. If the effect is a coded information system, the cause must be adequate to produce coded information. If the effect is many independent settings arranged for life, the cause must be adequate to choose among many possibilities.

Carl: I still think naturalism is safer for science. And you should admit that most scientists disagree with you.

Phil: I do admit it. Consensus matters. It is usually wise to take expert agreement seriously.

Carl: Good. That should make students cautious about your view.

Phil: It should make them cautious, yes. Consensus matters, but it is not proof. Scientists once widely accepted an eternal universe. They were wrong. Many once thought the cell was simple jelly. They were wrong. Consensus is a guide, not the final judge. Naturalism is safer if your goal is to keep science inside materialism. But if your goal is truth, you should not rule out a type of cause before looking at the evidence.

Carl: What would change your mind?

Phil: If blind material processes were shown to produce large amounts of new functional information from simple chemistry, if fine-tuning were shown to follow necessarily from deeper laws that need no special setup, and if the beginning of the universe were explained without smuggling in prior physical reality, then my argument would be much weaker.

Carl: That is at least an answer.

Phil: Now let me ask you the same question. What would change your mind?

Carl: I would need evidence that could not reasonably be explained by natural causes.

Phil: That sounds reasonable, but it is still vague. Can you give a concrete example?

Carl: If scientists found a clear message in DNA that said, in ordinary English, “Made by a mind,” that would get my attention.

Phil: But why require English?

Carl: Because English would be unambiguous. A code could be a coincidence.

Phil: But the genetic code is not a coincidence. It is a functional, symbolic, information-processing system. The fact that it is not English does not make it less a code. It uses symbols according to rules to help build proteins.

Carl: I need something more direct than that.

Phil: Fair enough. But students should notice the danger. If the only evidence you would accept is the exact kind you choose in advance, then you may be setting the bar so high that no real-world evidence can reach it. And if you define science so that only natural causes are allowed, then no evidence can ever count for design. That is the danger.

Barb: The debate is not only about facts. It is also about rules for interpreting facts. Carl worries that design stops science. Phil worries that materialism prevents science from following evidence where it leads.

Chapter 36

What Would We Expect?

Barb: One way to compare worldviews is to ask what we would expect to find if each one were true.

Carl: If naturalism is true, I would expect the universe to be governed by laws. I would expect life to arise by natural processes somewhere, perhaps rarely. I would expect humans to feel meaning because evolution shaped social minds.

Phil: But would you expect the universe itself to have a beginning from beyond matter? Would you expect the constants of physics to fall into narrow life-permitting ranges? Would you expect the first life to require digital code, translation, and information processing? Those seem surprising under strict materialism.

Carl: They are surprising, but naturalism can absorb surprises. Science often finds things no one expected.

Phil: True. But if the surprises all point in the same direction, we should notice. A beginning points beyond matter. Fine-tuning points to choice among possibilities. Biological information points to mind. Beauty and discoverability add to the pattern. Together they form a cumulative case.

Barb: A cumulative case is like a rope made of many strands. One strand may not hold everything by itself. But many strands twisted together can be strong.

Carl: Or it can be like piling weak arguments on top of each other.

Phil: Yes, if the arguments are weak. But these are not trivial. They come from major discoveries in cosmology, physics, and molecular biology.

Carl: I can grant that the questions are serious. I still do not grant that design is the best answer.

Phil: Then what is your answer?

Carl: For the beginning, I hope for quantum gravity or a deeper cosmology. For fine-tuning, I think the multiverse or a deeper necessity may explain it. For life, I think origin-of-life research is incomplete but promising. I would rather wait than infer a designer.

Phil: That is honest. But notice how much hope your answer requires. You appeal to future theories for the universe, future explanations for fine-tuning, and future breakthroughs for the origin of life. I am willing to consider future science. But we should also ask what the evidence now supports.

Carl: Science often advances by not giving up.

Phil: Agreed. But there is a difference between patience and stubbornness. Patience says, “Keep investigating.” Stubbornness says, “No matter what we find, design is not allowed.”

Carl: And there is a difference between inference and overreach. Inference says, “This points to mind.” Overreach says, “I now know every detail about the mind behind the universe.”

Phil: Agreed. Design should not overclaim. It should say what the evidence supports and no more.

Barb: Carl and Phil have reached a familiar standoff. Carl trusts that natural explanations will eventually cover everything. Phil thinks current evidence already points beyond nature. Neither side has answered every question. But both have clarified the issue.

Chapter 37

Evidence, Expectations, and Worldviews

Barb: Before we close, Carl and Phil want one more careful round. The topics have been large, and it is easy to miss how the pieces connect. So let us slow down and ask how evidence works when the question is not small.

Carl: In school science, we often test small questions. Does this plant grow faster with more light? Does this metal expand when heated? Does this chemical change color when mixed with that one? Those are testable questions.

Phil: But historical science often asks about things no one saw happen. Who made this stone tool? What caused this crater? Why did this species disappear? How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Those questions are answered by clues.

Barb: A clue is a present sign of a past cause. A footprint in mud is a present sign that something walked there. A layer of ash can be a sign of a past volcanic eruption. A coded message is a sign of a past act of communication.

Carl: But clues can mislead. A rock can look like a tool and not be one. A pattern can look designed and still have a natural cause.

Phil: Correct. That is why we compare causes. We ask, “What causes are known to produce this kind of clue?” We also ask, “What would we expect if each possible cause were true?”

Barb: This is why expectations matter. If you say, “My dog ate the homework,” I expect to see bite marks or torn paper. If you say, “The printer broke,” I expect to see a file on the computer and maybe a printer error. Different explanations lead us to expect different clues.

Carl: Naturalism leads me to expect that every event in nature has a natural explanation, even if we do not yet know it.

Phil: But that is not really an expectation from evidence. It is a rule you have chosen. It says only natural explanations may count.

Carl: The rule has worked well. Natural explanations have been successful again and again.

Phil: Yes, for many questions inside the universe. But when the question is the origin of the universe itself, or the origin of the first information needed for life, the usual rule may hide the answer.

Barb: Let us put it this way. If Carl’s rule says, “Only material causes are allowed,” then Carl will always reach a material answer or no answer. Phil thinks that is too limiting. He says some evidence may point to intelligence.

Carl: I want to avoid making science too loose. If anyone can say “a designer did it” whenever a problem is hard, research may become lazy.

Phil: That is a real danger. But the opposite danger is also real. If scientists say “no designer may be considered” no matter what evidence appears, they may become blind to one possible cause.

Barb: So the goal is not laziness and not blindness. The goal is careful reasoning.

Carl: Then let us state the standards. A good explanation should fit the evidence. It should not contradict known facts. It should explain more than its rivals. It should not be made up just to escape one problem.

Phil: I accept those standards. I would add that a good explanation should have causal power. It should name a cause that is able to produce the effect in question.

Carl: And you think mind has causal power to produce information and fine-tuned systems.

Phil: Yes. Minds write books, build engines, set passwords, create software, compose music, arrange symbols, and tune machines. We know minds can choose among possibilities to reach a goal.

Carl: But we do not watch God create a universe.

Phil: We do not watch the Big Bang either. We infer it from evidence. We do not watch ancient toolmakers shaping every artifact we find. We infer them from marks and patterns. We often infer unseen causes from their effects.

Barb: There is also a deeper philosophical question about reason itself. If human thinking is wholly the product of blind, nonrational forces, some philosophers ask why we should trust it as a path to truth rather than merely as a tool for survival.

Carl: A naturalist can answer that reliable thinking helps organisms survive. If your beliefs constantly mislead you about the world, you are less likely to live long enough to pass them on.

Phil: That explains why some useful beliefs might survive. But usefulness is not the same as truth. If reason is really truth-directed, that may fit better with a universe grounded in mind than with a universe grounded only in blind matter.

Barb: We will not settle that issue here. But it shows that the debate is not only about stars, cells, and fossils. It is also about whether our own reasoning powers fit better in a mindless universe or a universe that comes from mind.

Barb: Carl is right that the design claim is large. Phil is right that large claims can still be evaluated by evidence. The size of a claim does not make it false. It means the evidence needs to be strong.

Chapter 38

A Classroom Summary of the Three Main Arguments

Barb: Let us make the three arguments as simple as possible.

Phil: Argument one: The universe began to exist. Whatever begins to exist needs an explanation beyond itself. The beginning of matter, space, time, and energy points to a cause beyond matter, space, time, and energy. That fits the idea of a transcendent creator better than materialism.

Carl: My reply: We do not yet know the final physics of the beginning. Causation at the beginning of time is difficult. A beginning does not automatically prove a personal God.

Barb: Argument two?

Phil: The universe is finely tuned for life. Many laws, constants, and initial conditions fall into narrow life-permitting ranges. Chance is not a satisfying explanation. Necessity has not been shown. The multiverse pushes the problem back. Intelligent choice is a known cause of fine-tuned systems.

Carl: My reply: We may discover deeper laws. There may be many universes. Probability arguments about possible universes are uncertain.

Barb: Argument three?

Phil: Life depends on functional, coded information. DNA and the cell’s information-processing system resemble systems that, in our experience, come from minds. Chance, necessity, and their combination have not explained the origin of this information. Therefore design is the best explanation.

Carl: My reply: Origin-of-life research is unfinished. RNA and other chemical systems may provide natural pathways. We should not infer design too soon.

Barb: Notice that Carl does not usually claim to have complete answers. He mainly asks for more time for naturalistic research. Phil does not claim to answer every detail. He mainly argues that the best present explanation is intelligent cause.

Carl: That is a fair summary.

Phil: And the reader must decide which approach fits the evidence better.

Chapter 39

Why the Question Matters

Barb: Some students may ask, “Why does this matter? I have homework, friends, sports, music, and family. Why care about the origin of the universe or DNA?”

Carl: One answer is curiosity. Humans want to know where they came from. That is enough.

Phil: Another answer is meaning. If the universe is ultimately a mindless accident, that affects how people think about purpose, value, and destiny. If the universe comes from mind and purpose, that also affects how people think about life.

Carl: Naturalists can have meaning. We love, create, learn, help others, and enjoy beauty. We do not need cosmic purpose to live meaningful lives. I will also be honest about the cost of my view. If naturalism is true, death is the end. There is no final court of justice, no reunion beyond the grave, and no purpose written into the universe for us to discover. But that does not make life worthless. It can make life feel more precious, because this life is the only one we know we have. Sagan had a point too. He used a sharp image: “We are like mites on a plum.” By that he meant that human beings live on a tiny planet circling an ordinary star in a galaxy among billions. If you want the universe to tell you that you are important, its size can feel like bad news.

Phil: I accept the smallness. But smallness is not the same as meaninglessness. And yet that “mite” can understand the plum, the star, and the universe. That is part of the wonder. A child in a huge cathedral is small, but not worthless. A figure in a large painting may be tiny, but still intended by the artist.

Barb: Carl can also point to the far future. Many scientists think the universe may eventually become cold, dark, and unable to support life. This is often called heat death. It means usable energy runs down, like a battery that can no longer power anything.

Carl: That is sobering. But again, it can make this present life feel precious. If the future is limited, then love, courage, learning, and kindness matter now. I do not need eternity in order to value a friendship or a sunset.

Phil: I understand that. A finite life can contain real goods. But the question is whether those goods are finally grounded in reality or only temporarily valued by creatures who will vanish. If every mind disappears and every memory is lost, then naturalism must say that meaning has no permanent home in the universe.

Carl: Or it says that meaning is something conscious beings make while they are here. A song does not become worthless because it ends.

Phil: That is a powerful reply. But if the whole concert ends in silence forever, it is still reasonable to ask whether our desire for lasting truth, justice, and love is merely a beautiful accident or a clue to something beyond the material story.

99. IMAGE LINK: Carl Sagan portrait, cosmic smallness and scientific naturalism

100. IMAGE LINK: Pale Blue Dot, human smallness in a vast universe

Phil: Or cosmic smallness can teach humility without erasing significance. If design is true, meaning is not merely something we invent to comfort ourselves. It is woven into reality. Our longing for truth, goodness, beauty, and justice is not just a chemical accident in our brains. It may be a clue to what the universe is really like. Naturalists can certainly experience meaning. The question is whether meaning is built into reality or invented by human brains.

Carl: I would say meaning is real because conscious beings make it real.

Phil: And I would say conscious beings can recognize meaning because reality itself comes from a meaningful source.

Barb: This is why the debate goes beyond technical science. It touches human self-understanding. Are we cosmic accidents that happen to wonder about the stars? Or are we intended beings in a universe that was meant to be discovered?

Carl: Even as a naturalist, I admit the question is powerful.

Phil: And as a design theorist, I admit that the question should be handled with humility. We are small compared with the universe. But our minds can understand parts of it. That itself is wonderful.

Barb: The dialogue ends not by closing inquiry, but by opening it. Students should keep asking questions, studying science, and thinking carefully. Wonder is not the enemy of reason. It is often the beginning of reason.

Chapter 40

Humility and Wonder

Barb: After all these arguments, it is good to end with humility. The universe is enormous. The cell is tiny. Both are more complex than anyone imagined a few centuries ago.

Carl: I may be a naturalist, but I still feel awe. When I see images from space telescopes, I do not think, “This is meaningless.” I think, “This is magnificent.”

Phil: And when I look at DNA or molecular machines, I feel that we are seeing hidden craftsmanship.

Carl: I would not call it craftsmanship. But I understand the reaction.

Barb: Wonder does not settle the debate. But it reminds us that the debate is not merely about winning. It is about reality. A person can be wrong and still be honestly seeking truth.

Phil: I want readers to know that design is not an excuse to stop learning. If the universe is designed, then studying it is like exploring a great work of art and engineering.

Carl: And I want readers to know that naturalism, at its best, is not just sneering at religion. It is a disciplined attempt to explain the world by causes we can study.

Barb: The best conversations happen when both sides are strong. Carl asks for evidence and warns against easy answers. Phil asks whether materialism is too narrow and whether the evidence points to mind. Students who listen carefully will learn more than students who only cheer for one side.

Carl: I can live with that.

Phil: So can I.

Chapter 41

Carl Cross-Examines Phil

Barb: Advanced Question: This chapter models a tougher classroom debate. Do not worry if every point does not seem easy at first. The main issue is whether design explains evidence or merely names mystery.

Carl: Phil, let me question you the way a tough teacher might. You say the universe began. You say that points to a cause beyond the universe. But why call that cause intelligent? Why not just an unknown nonphysical cause?

Phil: Because the other evidence also points to intelligence. Fine-tuning suggests selection among possible settings. Biological information suggests arrangement of symbols for function. When the beginning is considered together with fine-tuning and life, a purposive mind explains more than a vague unknown cause.

Carl: But maybe you are combining separate mysteries into one big mystery called God.

Phil: Or maybe one cause really does explain several otherwise separate mysteries. Good explanations often unify. Newton connected falling apples and orbiting planets with one law of gravity. And Newton himself did not treat gravity as an ultimate explanation that removed the need for a deeper cause. Design connects the beginning, the settings, and the information-rich structure of life with one type of cause: mind.

Carl: But Newton’s gravity gave equations. Your designer gives no equation.

Phil: Not every good explanation is an equation. The explanation “this letter came from a person” may be correct even if I do not have an equation for the writer’s thoughts. Agency is a real kind of cause.

Carl: Agency is real for humans and animals. But you are projecting it onto the cosmos.

Phil: I am inferring it from effects that resemble the known products of agency. Projection would be careless guessing. Inference is reasoning from signs.

Carl: You also say minds create information. But human minds depend on brains. Brains are physical. Why think mind can exist without matter?

Phil: That is a deep question in philosophy of mind. But materialism about mind is not proven. Many philosophers argue that consciousness, reason, and intentionality are hard to reduce to matter. If the universe itself points to a prior mind, then that gives one more reason to think mind is not merely a late accident of brains.

Carl: Now you are bringing in consciousness, which is not one of our three main topics.

Phil: True. I mention it only because you asked about mind. The main design case here does not depend on solving every issue in philosophy of mind.

Carl: Another question: If design explains complexity, why is the designer not even more complex and therefore in need of explanation?

Phil: Again, the argument does not say complexity always needs a designer. It says specified complexity and fine-tuning are signs of intelligence. Also, a mind need not be complex in the same way a machine is. A machine has many physical parts arranged together. A mind, especially a divine mind as classical theism understands it, is not a machine assembled from parts.

Carl: That may be theology, not science.

Phil: The conclusion may be theological or metaphysical. But the evidence comes from science. Science often has philosophical implications.

Carl: Last question. Could design be true and still be scientifically useless?

Phil: It could be used badly. But it can also guide research. It encourages scientists to look for function, information, and integrated systems. It asks whether random mutation and selection have enough creative power. It treats the cell as an engineered system worthy of reverse engineering.

Carl: Reverse engineering is useful in biology, but one can use it without believing in a designer.

Phil: Yes. But the usefulness of design-like thinking is itself interesting.

Chapter 42

Phil Cross-Examines Carl

Barb: Advanced Question: Now Phil asks whether naturalism can be tested as a worldview. The key distinction is between science as a method and materialism as a belief about all reality.

Phil: Now let me question you, Carl. You say naturalism is the safest approach. What evidence would count against it?

Carl: That is hard. Naturalism is broad. It can include new laws, new particles, new fields, and new cosmological models.

Phil: That is my concern. If naturalism can always add something unknown, then it may become impossible to test as a worldview.

Carl: But design can also explain anything by saying the designer wanted it.

Phil: Then both sides need discipline. I focus on specific signs. What are your specific expectations?

Carl: I expect nature to be orderly enough for science. I expect complex life to arise through natural processes, though perhaps rarely. I expect apparent design to have natural histories.

Phil: Did naturalism expect a beginning of the material universe?

Carl: Classical materialism often expected eternity, but modern naturalism can adapt.

Phil: Did it expect fine-tuning?

Carl: Not necessarily. But naturalism can use the multiverse or deeper laws.

Phil: Did it expect digitally coded biological information at the foundation of life?

Carl: Darwin did not know that. Modern science discovered it. Naturalism now tries to explain it.

Phil: So in each case, the evidence surprised naturalism, and naturalism responded by adding future hopes or speculative models.

Carl: That is one way to put it. Another way is that science learns and adapts.

Phil: Fair. But when should adaptation count as progress, and when should it count as a worldview protecting itself?

Carl: When the new ideas produce testable results.

Phil: Good. Has the multiverse produced direct testable evidence?

Carl: Not direct evidence. Some theories that imply it may be testable in other ways.

Phil: Has origin-of-life research produced a realistic path from nonlife to a self-reproducing information-processing cell?

Carl: Not yet.

Phil: Has a deeper law shown that the constants of physics must have life-friendly values?

Carl: Not yet.

Phil: Then my question is simple. Why should a series of not-yet explanations outrank a known cause of fine-tuning and information?

Carl: Because natural causes have a strong track record, and supernatural causes are hard to test.

Phil: But intelligent causes also have a strong track record for producing information and machines. The question is whether intelligence must always be confined inside nature.

Carl: I do not know that it must be. I think science works best when it proceeds as if it is.

Phil: That is an important admission. Your position is partly a method, not just a conclusion.

Barb: This exchange shows the deepest disagreement. Carl trusts methodological naturalism: the practice of seeking natural explanations. Phil challenges philosophical naturalism: the belief that nature is all there is. The two are related, but they are not identical.

Chapter 43

How Barb Would Teach This in Class

Barb: If I were teaching this to eighth graders, I would put three columns on the board. The first column would say Evidence. The second would say Naturalist Reply. The third would say Design Reply.

Carl: Under Evidence, you would write: expanding universe, cosmic microwave background, beginning of space-time.

Phil: Under Naturalist Reply: quantum cosmology, deeper physics, caution about causation before time.

Barb: Under Design Reply: a beginning of matter, energy, space, and time points to a cause beyond matter, energy, space, and time.

Carl: Next evidence: fine-tuned constants and initial conditions.

Phil: Naturalist Reply: necessity, multiverse, observer selection.

Barb: Design Reply: fine-tuned systems are known products of intelligence, and the multiverse may itself need fine-tuning.

Carl: Next evidence: DNA and cellular information processing.

Phil: Naturalist Reply: chemical evolution, RNA world, self-organization, future research.

Barb: Design Reply: functional digital information is known to come from mind, and current chemical theories have not explained its origin.

Carl: That chart would help students see that the debate is not about one fact. It is about how facts are interpreted.

Phil: And it would help them see that both sides have replies, but not all replies are equally strong.

Barb: I would also ask students to identify overstatements. If someone says, “Science proves there is no God,” that is an overstatement. If someone says, “The Big Bang alone proves every doctrine of religion,” that is also an overstatement.

Carl: Good. Students should learn intellectual honesty.

Phil: And they should learn that big questions can be discussed with evidence and reason.

Barb: Then I would end the class by asking students to write one paragraph answering this question: Which worldview gives the better explanation of the three discoveries, and why?

Carl: I would grade them on reasoning, not on whether they agree with me.

Phil: So would I.

Chapter 44

A Final Pass Through the Images

Barb: Let us end the extended discussion by remembering the images.

Phil: For the beginning of the universe, picture galaxies moving apart as space stretches. Then run the movie backward until space itself reaches an edge.

Carl: For redshift, picture a siren changing pitch as it passes, then imagine light waves stretching as galaxies recede.

Phil: For the cosmic microwave background, picture a faint warmth left from an ancient fire, cooled almost to the temperature of empty space.

Carl: For fine-tuning, picture a control panel. If the dials are wrong, no stars, no chemistry, no life.

Phil: For carbon, picture a musical note. The carbon nucleus has to resonate at the right energy, like a glass responding to the right pitch.

Carl: For entropy, picture cream mixing into coffee and never unmixing by itself.

Phil: For the privileged planet, picture Earth protected by its magnetic shield, steadied by its moon, warmed by its star, and helped by its place in a larger solar system.

Carl: For the multiverse, picture a huge lottery. But then ask who built the lottery machine and whether it had to be set up just right.

Phil: For the cell, picture a tiny factory with machines smaller than anything humans can build so precisely.

Carl: For DNA, picture a four-letter alphabet, not spelling English words, but guiding the building of proteins.

Phil: For protein synthesis, picture a message copied, carried, read, and translated into a chain that folds into a working tool.

Carl: For origin-of-life chemistry, picture a lab where a chemist carefully chooses, cleans, stops, separates, and guides each step. Then ask what happens without the chemist.

Phil: For specified complexity, picture the difference between spilled letters, repeated letters, and a meaningful instruction.

Barb: These images do not replace the arguments. They help us remember them. The argument is that the universe and life show patterns that are not easily explained by blind matter alone.

Carl: And my answer is that hard does not mean impossible.

Phil: And mine is that possible does not mean best.

Barb: That may be the simplest form of the whole debate.

Chapter 45

Does Design Point to God?

Barb: Before the final summary, we need to face a question that has been near the surface from the beginning. Phil, you have presented design as an inference from evidence. But many viewers will ask, “Are you really talking about God?”

Phil: Yes, in the larger sense. If the evidence points to a designing mind behind the universe and life, then the conclusion has theistic importance. It fits naturally with belief in God.

Carl: That sounds like you are admitting my complaint. Intelligent design is religion after all.

Phil: Not exactly. The argument is scientific in its starting point because it begins with evidence: a cosmic beginning, fine-tuning, biological information, and molecular machinery. But the conclusion has philosophical and religious consequences. That should not surprise us. Some scientific discoveries have large worldview consequences.

Carl: Give me the distinction again.

Phil: The scientific question is, “What kind of cause best explains this evidence?” The theological question is, “Who is that cause, and what is that cause like?” The first question can point toward intelligence without answering every religious question.

Barb: This is like finding a message in a bottle. First you infer that a mind wrote it. Later you may ask who wrote it, why it was written, and what kind of person the writer is. The first inference does not answer all the later questions.

Carl: But the cause you describe sounds very much like God: outside space and time, powerful enough to create the universe, intelligent enough to fine-tune it, and purposeful enough to make life possible.

Phil: I agree. That is why I do not want to pretend the argument is religiously neutral in its final meaning. It is not a proof of every doctrine of any one religion. It does not tell us the Trinity, the Torah, the Quran, or the details of providence. But it does point toward a creator with mind, power, and purpose.

Carl: Why not just say that from the start?

Phil: Because if I start with a religious label, people may think the evidence does not matter. I want the evidence to do the work. If the evidence points to intelligence, then we can ask what sort of intelligence it is.

Barb: Different people might accept part of the design argument and disagree about religion. A Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a deist, or even an agnostic might think the evidence points to mind. They may then disagree about revelation, worship, miracles, or doctrine.

Carl: And many scientists will reject the design inference altogether.

Phil: Yes. This dialogue is not pretending otherwise. Carl represents that disagreement. But disagreement is not refutation.

Carl: What about Fred Hoyle? You brought him up earlier. He spoke of a superintellect, but he did not become an orthodox believer.

Phil: Correct. That is important. Hoyle’s case shows that the evidence can disturb atheism even without leading a person all the way to traditional religion. Allan Sandage went further. Robert Jastrow, though agnostic, saw the theological force of a beginning. Different people respond differently.

Barb: This honesty helps. The design argument does not have to hide its religious importance. But it also should not claim more than the evidence itself shows.

Carl: So your position is: design is a scientific inference with theological implications.

Phil: Yes. And your position is: science should keep looking for material explanations and should resist theological conclusions.

Carl: Correct.

Barb: Then the debate is clear. The question is not whether the evidence matters. Both sides agree it matters. The question is which story of reality best explains it.

Chapter 46

The Larger Story Revisited

Barb: Let us gather the pieces.

Phil: First, the universe began. The old materialist hope of an eternal, self-existing material universe lost much of its support. The expansion of space, the Big Bang model, the cosmic microwave background, and singularity theorems all point toward a finite past for our universe.

Carl: Or at least toward a boundary where known physics breaks down. I accept the evidence for expansion and the early hot universe. I am more cautious about final metaphysical conclusions.

Phil: Second, the universe is finely tuned for life. The constants, forces, particle masses, expansion rate, and low-entropy beginning all seem set within narrow ranges. Carbon production in stars is one striking example.

Carl: The multiverse remains a possible answer. Also, deeper laws may someday show why the constants have to be what they are.

Phil: Third, life depends on functional information. DNA stores coded instructions. Cells read, copy, translate, repair, and regulate information. Molecular machines perform tasks with remarkable precision.

Carl: Origin-of-life research is not finished. RNA world models, metabolism-first models, mineral surfaces, hydrothermal vents, and other approaches continue to be studied.

Phil: And none has yet explained the origin of the integrated information-processing system of the first life.

Barb: Fourth, the world is not only workable but beautiful and discoverable. This is not the main proof, but it adds to the sense that the universe is more like a work of mind than a blind accident.

Carl: I would say it challenges overconfident materialism, not naturalism itself.

Phil: I can accept that as a partial agreement. Overconfident materialism is exactly the problem. If someone says the universe is exactly what we should expect if there is no purpose, I think the evidence says otherwise.

Barb: Imagine walking through a forest and finding a small cabin. You open the door and see a table, a chair, a warm cup of tea, and a note with your name on it. You could say, “Maybe wind and animals arranged this.” But that would not be the best explanation. The signs would point to mind.

Carl: That analogy is vivid, but the universe is not a cabin.

Phil: No analogy is perfect. But the universe has its own signs: mathematical order, a beginning, fine-tuning, beauty, and life built on information. These are not what many materialists expected.

Carl: I still prefer patience. We should keep investigating.

Phil: Absolutely. Design should not stop investigation. It can encourage it. If nature is the product of mind, then it may be deeply intelligible. That was one reason early modern science flourished.

Barb: So the final question is not whether science and belief must be enemies. The question is whether the discoveries of science fit better with a universe from blind matter or with a universe from mind.

Carl: I remain a naturalist. But I admit the story is not as simple as “science has refuted design.”

Phil: And I remain convinced that design is the best explanation. But I agree that the case should be made carefully, without exaggeration.

Barb: That is a good place to end. The larger story will always be vigorously discussed. But one thing is clear: the more science has discovered about the universe and life, the deeper the questions have become. The universe is not easily understood or explained. It is vast, ordered, finely balanced, beautiful, and filled with living systems that process information. Whether one calls that a lucky accident, a natural necessity, a multiverse effect, or the work of intelligence, it deserves wonder.

Phil: And perhaps wonder is not the opposite of reason. Perhaps wonder is what reason feels like when it stands before evidence too rich to ignore.

Carl: I will not go that far.

Barb: Not yet, Carl. But you have at least stayed for the conversation.

Final Review

Barb: The dialogue has not forced Carl and Phil to agree. That is not the point. The point is to help readers understand the evidence and the disagreement.

Barb: Carl’s strongest idea is that science has often succeeded by patiently searching for natural mechanisms. Phil’s strongest idea is that some effects point to known causes, and intelligence is the known cause of coded information, fine-tuning, and goal-directed systems.

Barb: A good reader should be able to state both views fairly before deciding which one is stronger.

EDUCATIONAL NOTE

This dialogue is a debate over intelligent design. Carl represents a scientific naturalist response, but he cannot represent every possible critic. Phil represents an intelligent design response, but he cannot answer every possible naturalistic objection.

Some sections are deliberately more advanced than others. Teachers may assign the main chapters first and reserve the advanced chapters on the multiverse, Boltzmann brains, and philosophical naturalism for older students or discussion groups.

Students should notice the difference between evidence and interpretation. The expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, DNA, proteins, and molecular machines are matters of science. What they finally mean for worldview is debated.

Good discussion questions include: What counts as a scientific explanation? Can intelligence be detected from its effects? Is design an argument from ignorance, or an inference from known causes? Does the multiverse explain fine-tuning or move the question back? Does biological information point to mind, or can chemistry explain it? What would count as evidence against each side?

APPENDIX

Glossary for Younger Readers

Amino acid: A small molecule used as a building block of proteins.

Anthropic principle: The idea that we observe a life-permitting universe because only such a universe could contain observers.

Big Bang: The scientific model that says the universe began in a very hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.

Boltzmann brain: A strange idea in some cosmology debates. It imagines a random conscious brain appearing by chance. It is often used to show problems in certain multiverse theories.

Causal adequacy: The idea that an explanation must have the power to produce the effect being explained.

Chemical evolution: The proposed natural process by which nonliving chemicals gradually formed the first living system or its precursors.

Codon: A three-base sequence in RNA that corresponds to an amino acid or to a stop signal.

Common descent: The idea that living organisms are related through shared ancestry.

Cosmic insignificance: The idea that human beings may seem unimportant because Earth is tiny compared with the vast universe.

Cosmic microwave background: Faint radiation left over from the early hot universe. It is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the Big Bang model.

Cosmological constant: A term in Einstein’s equations related to the expansion of space and the outward push now associated with dark energy.

Cumulative case: An argument made from several lines of evidence that become stronger when considered together.

DNA: A molecule that stores genetic information in living things.

Entropy: A measure related to disorder or the spreading out of energy. In everyday terms, mixed-up systems usually do not unmix themselves.

Evo-devo: Short for evolutionary developmental biology, the study of how changes in development can affect the evolution of body forms.

Falsifiability: The ability of a claim to be tested in a way that could show it is false.

Fine-tuned generator: A proposed deeper system that would produce many universes, but that may itself require special conditions.

Fine-tuning: The fact that many features of the universe must fall within narrow ranges for life to be possible.

First cause: A cause that explains the existence of the physical universe itself, rather than one event inside the universe.

Functional information: Information arranged to do a job, such as instructions for building a protein.

Gene expression: The process by which information in DNA is copied and used to make proteins.

Genetic code: The system by which groups of bases in RNA correspond to amino acids.

Habitable zone: The region around a star where a planet could have liquid water on its surface.

Hox genes: Regulatory genes that help control the body plan of an animal during development.

Inflationary cosmology: A theory that the early universe expanded extremely fast for a very short time. Some versions are used to support multiverse ideas.

Intelligent design: The study of whether certain patterns in nature are best explained by intelligent causation rather than unguided processes alone.

Intelligibility: The fact that the world can be understood by minds, often through mathematics and careful observation.

Irreducible complexity: A feature of a system in which several parts must work together for the system to function.

Materialism: The belief that matter and energy are all that exist.

Measure problem: The difficulty of assigning probabilities when a theory contains enormous or infinite numbers of possible universes.

Methodological naturalism: The practice of looking for natural explanations when doing science.

Molecular machine: A molecule or group of molecules in a cell that performs a specific task, somewhat like a tiny machine.

Multiverse: The idea that our universe may be one of many universes.

Mutation: A change in genetic material that can sometimes affect inherited traits.

Natural selection: The process by which helpful inherited traits become more common in a population over generations.

Observer selection effect: The fact that observers can only find themselves in places or universes compatible with their existence.

Occam’s Razor: The principle that, other things being equal, we should prefer explanations that do not multiply unnecessary assumptions.

Parsimony: A preference for simpler explanations when they explain the evidence as well as more complicated ones.

Philosophical naturalism: The belief that nature is all that exists, so no mind or reality beyond nature is real.

Protein: A molecule made of amino acids that performs important jobs in living cells.

Protein folding: The process by which a chain of amino acids takes on a three-dimensional shape needed for function.

Quantum vacuum: A physical state with no ordinary particles, but still not absolute nothingness.

Redshift: The stretching of light toward the red end of the spectrum, often showing that an object is moving away.

Ribozyme: An RNA molecule that can help catalyze a chemical reaction.

RNA: A molecule related to DNA that helps carry and use genetic information.

RNA world: A hypothesis that early life may have used RNA before DNA and proteins became central. Supporters hope it can explain steps toward the first living systems.

Scientific naturalism: The view that science should explain the world by natural causes, often joined to the belief that nature is all there is.

Semantic information: Information that means something or directs a function, not just a random string of symbols.

SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a scientific effort to look for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Simulation theory: The idea that our world might be an artificial simulation created by another intelligence.

Singularity: A boundary or point in a physical theory where quantities such as density become extreme and normal descriptions break down.

Specified complexity: A combination of complexity and a meaningful or functional pattern.

Theism: Belief in God or in a divine creator.

Transcendent cause: A cause beyond the physical universe of space, time, matter, and energy.

Transcription: The process by which information in DNA is copied into RNA.

Translation: The process by which ribosomes use RNA instructions to build proteins.

Universe-generating mechanism: A proposed deeper system that would produce many universes with different settings.

Worldview: A broad picture of reality that shapes how a person interprets evidence.

Suggested Video Discussions/Debates (all available on YouTube)

The following discussions and debates are available on YouTube or through the linked video pages. They bring together advocates, sympathizers, skeptics, and critics of intelligent design, theism, and scientific naturalism in direct conversation. The most recent videos are listed first.

Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer. “Can Science Find God?” Bryan Callen Show / ID the Future, 2025. A civil long-form discussion in which Meyer and Shermer discuss the Big Bang, fine-tuning, biological information, the origin of mind, and whether science can point beyond nature.

Richard Dawkins and Piers Morgan. “Richard Dawkins on Religion, Atheism, and Intelligent Design.” Piers Morgan Uncensored, 2024. Morgan presses the world’s most prominent atheist on the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the God hypothesis advanced by Stephen Meyer, and Dawkins’s recent self-description as a cultural Christian; this interview directly responds to the Meyer-Morgan interview listed below.

Stephen Meyer and Piers Morgan. “Can This Man Prove That God Exists?” Piers Morgan Uncensored, 2024. A half-hour interview in which Morgan questions Meyer on the three main scientific discoveries discussed in this dialogue: the beginning of the universe, cosmic fine-tuning, and biological information.

Dave Farina and James Tour. “Are We Clueless About the Origin of Life?” Rice University, 2023. A widely watched and at times heated debate between Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour and YouTube science communicator Dave Farina on whether origin-of-life research has made meaningful progress.

James Tour and Lee Cronin. “Harvard Cambridge Faculty Roundtable on the Origin of Life.” 2023. A civil but pointed confrontation between Tour and Cronin at a Harvard-Cambridge roundtable, in which Tour challenges Cronin’s Assembly Theory and Cronin defends current naturalistic approaches to the origin of life.

Stephen Meyer and Joe Rogan. “Joe Rogan Experience #2008.” 2023. In a three-and-a-half-hour conversation, Rogan questions Meyer on intelligent design, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of DNA, free will, the multiverse, the problem of evil, and personal religious experience.

Gunter Bechly and Joshua Swamidass. “For and Against Intelligent Design.” Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley, 2021. Paleontologist Gunter Bechly and computational biologist Joshua Swamidass debate whether the fossil record and modern evolutionary theory support or undermine intelligent design.

James Tour and Lee Cronin. “Are We Close to Discovering the Origin of Life?” Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley, 2020. Synthetic organic chemist James Tour and Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin debate contemporary origin-of-life research and whether the field is on the verge of a breakthrough.

Michael Behe and Joshua Swamidass. “God and/or Evolution?” Veritas Forum, 2020. Behe and Swamidass discuss evolution, divine action, and whether design is scientifically detectable, in an exchange especially useful for the dialogue’s section on the evolution of life.

Michael Behe and Joshua Swamidass. “Debate on Intelligent Design.” Philosophy for the People, 2020. A focused debate on intelligent design, irreducible complexity, and the explanatory power of modern evolutionary theory, with Swamidass pressing Behe from within a theistic but evolutionary framework.

David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, and David Gelernter. “Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.” Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Hoover Institution, 2019. Three prominent Darwin skeptics--a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a Yale computer scientist--discuss mathematical and informational challenges facing neo-Darwinism.

John Lennox and Peter Atkins. “Can Science Explain Everything?” Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley, 2019. Oxford mathematician John Lennox and Oxford chemist Peter Atkins debate whether science can answer all the questions we need to answer, including questions about miracles, purpose, morality, and God.

Lawrence Krauss, Denis Lamoureux, and Stephen Meyer. “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe.” Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, 2016. Atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss, theistic evolutionist Denis Lamoureux, and intelligent design proponent Stephen Meyer debate whether scientific cosmology and biology have replaced the need for God.

William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll. “God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology.” Greer-Heard Forum, 2014. A serious debate between philosopher William Lane Craig and physicist Sean Carroll on cosmology, the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, and whether contemporary physics supports or undercuts theism.

Lawrence Krauss and John Lennox. “Science, the Universe, and the God Question.” Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley, 2013. Krauss and Lennox debate the Big Bang, purpose, fine-tuning, and whether the universe can plausibly be said to come from nothing.

Christopher Hitchens and Jay Wesley Richards. “Atheism vs. Theism and the Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design.” 2011. Journalist Christopher Hitchens and Discovery Institute philosopher Jay Richards debate theism, atheism, and whether the scientific evidence points toward intelligent design.

David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens. “Does Atheism Poison Everything?” Birmingham, Alabama, 2010. Famed atheist Christopher Hitchens debates mathematician and secular agnostic David Berlinski on whether a society without religious influence is preferable to one with it.

William Dembski and Christopher Hitchens. “Does God Exist?” Prestonwood Christian Academy, 2010. Discovery Institute mathematician and intelligent design theorist William Dembski debates atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God.

Stephen Meyer and Peter Atkins. “Intelligent Design: Is Freedom of Thought at Stake?” Premier Radio UK / Unbelievable?, 2010. Oxford chemist and new atheist Peter Atkins debates philosopher of science Stephen Meyer on intelligent design, the origin of life, and the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

https://www.discovery.org/v/stephen-meyer-debates-peter-atkins/

Christopher Hitchens and John Lennox. “Is God Great?” Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama, 2009. Hitchens and Oxford mathematician John Lennox debate whether God is great, structured around Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens. “Does God Exist?” Biola University, 2009. Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig debates Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God, covering cosmological, fine-tuning, and moral arguments.

Stephen Meyer, Richard Sternberg, Michael Shermer, and Donald Prothero. “Has Evolutionary Theory Adequately Explained the Origins of Life?” American Freedom Alliance, Beverly Hills, 2009. Intelligent design proponents Meyer and Sternberg debate Skeptic Society editor Shermer and paleontologist Prothero on the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. “Has Science Buried God?” Oxford Museum of Natural History, 2008. Dawkins and Lennox debate at the site of the famous 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce exchange on whether science has made belief in God untenable.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. “The God Delusion Debate.” University of Alabama, 2007. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins and Oxford mathematician John Lennox debate whether God is a delusion and whether science undermines religious belief.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. “Who Created God?” Fixed Point Foundation, 2007. A shorter, sharper exchange focused on whether a creator requires its own explanation and on the explanatory power of Darwinism versus design.

Stephen Meyer and Michael Ruse. “Intelligent Design vs. Evolution.” PBS Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, 2006. Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer and Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse debate intelligent design in a two-part PBS television discussion.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Stephen Meyer and Peter Ward. “Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution.” Talk of the Times Debate, Seattle, 2006. Meyer debates University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward on whether intelligent design or Darwinian evolution better explains the biological evidence.

Michael Behe, William Dembski, Kenneth Miller, and Robert Pennock. “Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?” American Museum of Natural History, 2002. A panel debate on the origin of biological complexity, with intelligent design proponents Behe and Dembski facing evolutionists Miller and Pennock, moderated by Eugenie Scott.

Suggested Reading

The following books present two different perspectives on the questions explored in this dialogue. The first group includes intelligent design and design-friendly works; the second group includes scientific naturalist, anti-ID, and mainstream evolutionary works.

Intelligent Design / Design-Friendly

Axe, Douglas. Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed. New York: HarperOne, 2016. Axe argues that ordinary intuitions about design are supported by discoveries about the rarity and functional precision of biological forms.

Behe, Michael J. Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution. New York: HarperOne, 2019. Behe contends that many observed evolutionary changes involve loss or degradation of genetic information rather than creative innovation.

Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Free Press, 1996. Behe introduces the concept of irreducible complexity and applies it to molecular systems such as the bacterial flagellum and blood-clotting cascade.

Behe, Michael J. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. New York: Free Press, 2007. Behe examines what mutation and natural selection can and cannot plausibly accomplish, especially in light of microbial and malarial evolution.

Berlinski, David. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. New York: Crown Forum, 2008. Berlinski argues, from the perspective of a skeptical secular intellectual, that scientific materialism and the New Atheism overstate what science can explain.

Burgess, Stuart. Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2026. Burgess argues from an engineering perspective that many structures of the human body exhibit design features exceeding human technology.

Dembski, William A. Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Dembski develops a philosophical account of information as a fundamental feature of reality and connects it to questions of design and being.

Dembski, William A. The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004. Dembski responds to common objections to intelligent design and explains its scientific, philosophical, and theological significance.

Dembski, William A. Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Dembski presents intelligent design as a way of connecting empirical investigation with broader questions about purpose and meaning.

Dembski, William A., and Winston Ewert. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. 2nd ed. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2023. This revised edition updates Dembski’s formal account of detecting design through specified events of sufficiently small probability.

Dembski, William A., Casey Luskin, and Joseph M. Holden, eds. The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2021. This multi-author volume surveys scientific, philosophical, and theological issues at the intersection of intelligent design, Christianity, and modern science.

Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. London: Burnett Books, 1985. Denton challenges neo-Darwinian orthodoxy by arguing that biological patterns and discontinuities are difficult to reconcile with gradual Darwinian evolution.

Denton, Michael. The Miracle of the Cell. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2020. Denton argues that the chemical and physical properties of nature are finely suited for the existence and operation of carbon-based cells.

Denton, Michael. The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2022. Denton extends his fine-tuning argument to human physiology, arguing that nature is specially fitted for beings like ourselves.

Denton, Michael. Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. New York: Free Press, 1998. Denton argues that the laws of nature appear deeply fitted for life and especially for complex biological organisms.

Gauger, Ann, ed. God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2023. This collection presents intelligent design from a Catholic perspective, addressing scientific evidence, philosophical implications, and theological concerns.

Gonzalez, Guillermo, and Jay W. Richards. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. 20th anniversary ed. Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2024. Gonzalez and Richards argue that the conditions that make Earth habitable also make it unusually well suited for scientific discovery.

Hoyle, Fred. The Intelligent Universe: A New View of Creation and Evolution. London: Michael Joseph, 1983. Hoyle presents a provocative argument that life and the universe show signs of intelligence and cosmic purpose rather than blind accident.

Jastrow, Robert. God and the Astronomers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Jastrow, an agnostic astronomer, argues that Big Bang cosmology forces science to confront questions about creation and a transcendent cause.

Johnson, Phillip E. Darwin on Trial. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1991. Johnson critiques Darwinism from a legal and philosophical standpoint, arguing that naturalistic assumptions often shape how evolutionary evidence is interpreted.

Laufmann, Steve, and Howard Glicksman. Your Designed Body. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2022. Laufmann and Glicksman argue that the integrated systems of the human body display engineering-like coordination and functional interdependence.

Lennox, John C. God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2011. Lennox critiques Hawking and Mlodinow’s claim that the universe can create itself from physical law and argues that this does not remove the need for God.

Meyer, Stephen C. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne, 2013. Meyer argues that the Cambrian explosion poses a major challenge to unguided evolutionary explanations of new animal body plans.

Meyer, Stephen C. Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind behind the Universe. New York: HarperOne, 2021. Meyer presents a cumulative case for theism from the origin of the universe, cosmic fine-tuning, and biological information.

Meyer, Stephen C. Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne, 2009. Meyer argues that the digitally encoded information in DNA is best explained by intelligent causation rather than undirected chemistry.

Moreland, J. P., Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem, eds. Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017. This large edited volume critiques theistic evolution from scientific, philosophical, and theological angles.

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nagel, an atheist philosopher, argues that materialist neo-Darwinism cannot adequately explain consciousness, reason, value, and mind.

Thaxton, Charles B., Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen. The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy. With contributions by James Tour, Stephen C. Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzalez, Brian Miller, and David Klinghoffer. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2020. This updated edition revisits the classic critique of chemical evolution and adds contemporary essays on origin-of-life research.

Wells, Jonathan. Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution Is Wrong. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000. Wells critiques several textbook examples commonly used to support evolution, arguing that they are misleading or overstated.

Wells, Jonathan. The Myth of Junk DNA. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2011. Wells argues that noncoding DNA was prematurely dismissed as useless and that later discoveries about function undermine “junk DNA” arguments against design.

Scientific Naturalism / Anti-ID / Mainstream Evolutionary

Carroll, Sean B. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Carroll emphasizes the role of chance events in natural history and argues that contingency is central to the story of life and humanity.

Carroll, Sean M. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. New York: Dutton, 2016. Carroll presents a naturalistic worldview in which physics, evolution, consciousness, and meaning are understood without appeal to supernatural design.

Coyne, Jerry A. Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking, 2009. Coyne offers a clear defense of evolutionary theory using evidence from fossils, genetics, biogeography, embryology, and observed natural selection.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Dawkins argues that natural selection can produce the appearance of design without requiring an actual designer.

Dawkins, Richard. The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie. Illustrated by Jana Lenzová. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. Dawkins explains how genes and bodies preserve traces of ancestral environments and evolutionary history.

Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2009. Dawkins presents a broad popular defense of evolution, focusing on the many lines of evidence that support common descent.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Dennett interprets Darwinian evolution as a powerful idea with implications extending beyond biology into philosophy, culture, and religion.

Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forrest and Gross argue that intelligent design is part of a broader cultural and political strategy rather than a genuine scientific research program.

Futuyma, Douglas J. Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Futuyma defends evolutionary biology against creationist criticism and explains why evolution is central to modern biological science.

Hazen, Robert M. Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2005. Hazen surveys origin-of-life research and presents naturalistic scenarios for how life may have emerged from chemistry.

Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010. Hawking and Mlodinow argue that modern cosmology and M-theory can explain the universe’s origin without invoking a divine creator.

Krauss, Lawrence M. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. New York: Free Press, 2012. Krauss argues that modern cosmology offers ways to understand the universe’s origin without invoking a divine creator.

Lane, Nick. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022. Lane explores the central role of the Krebs cycle and deep biochemical processes in the origin, evolution, and operation of life.

Lents, Nathan H. Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Lents argues that the human body contains flawed, jury-rigged features better explained by evolution than by perfect design.

Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Mayr provides a concise explanation of evolutionary theory from one of the major architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999. Miller defends evolution and criticizes intelligent design while arguing that Christian belief can be compatible with Darwinian science.

Miller, Kenneth R. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. New York: Viking, 2008. Miller argues against intelligent design in science education and defends evolution as a well-supported scientific theory.

Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Monod presents a classic scientific-naturalist interpretation of life as the product of chance, necessity, and impersonal molecular processes.

Pennock, Robert T. Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Pennock critiques creationism and intelligent design while defending methodological naturalism as essential to science.

Prothero, Donald R. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Prothero presents fossil evidence for evolution and responds to common creationist and intelligent design objections.

Ruse, Michael. Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982. Ruse defends Darwinian theory against philosophical and scientific critics while examining major controversies in evolutionary thought.

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980. Sagan offers a sweeping naturalistic vision of the universe, emphasizing cosmic evolution, scientific wonder, and humanity’s small place in the cosmos.

Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House, 1994. Sagan uses the famous distant image of Earth to present a naturalistic vision of humanity’s small place in a vast cosmos and its future in space.

Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design. New York: Times Books, 2006. Shermer defends Darwinian evolution and argues that intelligent design is scientifically and educationally mistaken.

Shubin, Neil. Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020. Shubin explains how major evolutionary innovations can arise through modification, reuse, and recombination of older biological parts.

Susskind, Leonard. The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Susskind defends the string-theory landscape and multiverse as a way to address cosmic fine-tuning without invoking intelligent design.

Weinberg, Steven. The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Weinberg gives a classic account of early-universe cosmology and the physical events following the Big Bang.

Young, Matt, and Taner Edis, eds. Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. This edited volume gathers scientific criticisms of intelligent design from several fields, including biology, physics, and information theory.

Zimmer, Carl. Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. New York: Dutton, 2021. Zimmer explores the difficulty of defining life and surveys scientific work on viruses, cells, embryos, metabolism, and synthetic biology.

Below is a book review I wrote back in 1999 for philosopher of mathematics Mark Steiner’s The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem. John Wilson, the editor at the time of Books & Culture, the literary magazine of Christianity Today, asked me to review it. Happily for me, this review won the Evangelical Press Association’s First Place for 1999 in the category “Critical Reviews.” I reprint it here because of some recent comments on this Substack by one of the subscribers on the nature of mathematics and its connection to the natural sciences. I personally regard mathematics as very much integrated into the natural sciences and indeed into the warp and woof of all reality.

If mathematics is about finding solutions to well-defined problems, then philosophy is about finding problems in what previously we thought were well-settled solutions. Mark Steiner’s The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem mirrors both sides of this statement, admitting that mathematics is the key to solving problems in the physical sciences, but also asserting that this very applicability of mathematics to physics constitutes a problem.

What sort of problem? According to Steiner, the reigning “ideology” or “background belief” for the natural sciences is naturalism. Typically naturalism is identified with the view that nature constitutes a closed system of causes that is devoid of miracle, teleology, or any mindlike superintendence. An immediate consequence of naturalism is that it leaves humanity with no privileged place in the scheme of things. It’s this aspect of naturalism that Steiner stresses. Naturalism gives us no reason to think that investigations into nature should be, as Steiner puts it, “user-friendly” to human idiosyncrasies. And yet they are.

Steiner’s point of departure is Eugene Wigner’s often reprinted article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner concludes that article with a striking aphorism: “The appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” Throughout the article Wigner refers to the “miracle” and “mystery” of mathematics in solving the problems of physics. Yet although Wigner leaves the reader with a sense of wonder, he does not indicate how this sense of wonder translates into a problem that demands resolution. Enter the philosopher Mark Steiner.

Steiner’s project is to take Wigner’s pretheoretic wonder at the applicability of mathematics to physics and translate it into a philosophical problem for naturalism. The applicability of mathematics to physics is not a problem for a mind-first Platonic world-view or a math-first Pythagorean world-view or a Logos-first theistic world-view. It is, however, a problem for a nature-first impersonal world-view. According to Steiner, naturalists are in no position to expect that, much less act as though, mathematics should assist in the discovery of physical insights. That naturalists do counts against their naturalism.

It is important to understand that Steiner is not simply appealing to the success of mathematics in resolving the problems of physics. It is not the isolated successes of mathematics as applied to problems in the physical sciences that for Steiner constitutes a philosophical problem (after all, there are many instances where mathematics has failed to be successfully applied to problems in physics). The problem, rather, is the global success of mathematics as a research strategy for facilitating discovery in the physical sciences.

This is a subtle point, and one impossible to convey without actual case studies from mathematics and physics. Indeed, much of Steiner’s book consists of such case studies. Consider, for in stance, the physicist Paul Dirac’s discovery of the positron and antiparticles more generally. The positron is a particle just like an electron, only with a positive charge. Yet when Dirac proposed the positron, there was no experimental evidence for it. Indeed, there was no reason even to expect its existence. Why, then, did Dirac propose such a particle?

Dirac was at the time trying to understand the Klein-Gordon field equation and the energy levels it assigned to certain quantum systems. He wanted to extend this equation relativistically to the electron, but he found that the only way to do so was by factoring it. Unfortunately, the equation resisted factoring over the real and complex numbers. Dirac therefore “brute-forced” the factorization by introducing higher dimensional “number-like” objects (the property where these objects differed from ordinary numbers was commutativity of multiplication).

The factoring worked and gave Dirac the relativistic solution he wanted for the electron. But because the “number-like” objects he introduced also had a higher dimension than the ordinary numbers, Dirac’s solution to the Klein-Gordon equation also yielded extra solutions—solutions corresponding to the extra dimensions of his “number-like” objects. One of the solutions suggested a positively charged particle that in every other way was identical to the electron. What started as a mathematical trick designed to factor an equation and yield insight into the electron therefore yielded an entirely new particle and, indeed, an entirely new type of matter—antimatter, the discovery of which fundamentally altered our understanding of the physical universe.

Dirac’s mathematical manipulations and physical speculations would have remained just that except for two facts: (1) In 1932 Carl Anderson experimentally confirmed the existence of the positron. (2) In the nineteenth century mathematicians had already constructed the “number-like” objects that Dirac needed to factor the Klein-Gordon equation. They are known today collectively as the Clifford algebra, and Dirac had to reinvent it to get a relativistic equation for the electron.

Where is the philosophical problem for naturalism in examples like this (and Steiner makes clear that such examples are wide spread throughout mathematics in its application to physics)? The problem is that mathematics is a thoroughly human enterprise. Nature may condition us to see patterns that are readily perceived—that, as it were, ride on the surface structure of nature. At the same time, nature should be indifferent to human idiosyncrasies. Thus, the problem for naturalism posed by Dirac’s reinvention of the Clifford algebra and subsequent discovery of antimatter is that it occurred entirely through the manipulation of humanly constructed notations, and with attention not to physical reality but to human convenience.

Equations that are factorable are much easier for us to deal with than those that are not. Factorability, however, has no physical significance. A world indifferent to us has no stake in rendering itself intelligible to us by making the equations that describe it factorable through some mathematical device (like the Clifford algebra). And yet precisely such idiosyncratic manipulations of humanly constructed notations result in genuine and previously unsuspected physical insights.

There really is a problem here for naturalism. As Steiner notes, in every other area where human constructions are manipulated according to human convenience, naturalism expects and indeed confirms no profound insight into the structure of the world. The rules of chess, for instance, do not yield insight into the structure of the atom. The study of palindromes (sentences that read the same backward as forward; e.g., “Madam, I’m Adam”) tells us nothing about the first three minutes after the Big Bang.

Indeed, the claim that human constructions manipulated according to human convenience supply insights into reality belongs to what traditionally has been called magic—the view that what humans do in the purely human world (i.e., the microcosm) mirrors the deep structure of the world at large (i.e., the macrocosm). Naturalism has no place for magic. And yet the applicability of mathematics to physics is magic. According to Steiner, mathematics is the last redoubt of magic, but one that stands se cure and is in no danger of naturalistic debunking. This is a user-friendly world where we humans are the users, and where the tool of discovery that renders the natural world friendly is mathematics.

In place of naturalism, Steiner therefore opts for an anthropocentrism which affirms that humans do have a privileged place in the scheme of things. Steiner’s anthropocentrism falls short of a full-blown metaphysical position like Judeo-Christian theism, Platonism, or Pythagoreanism. But it stands sharply against the widely held evolutionary view that humans are mere accidents of natural history.

The Applicability of Mathematics As a Philosophical Problem is a technical contribution to analytic philosophy that presupposes not just a background in philosophy but also extensive exposure to mathematics and physics. Readers without the relevant technical background should be prepared to find no more than 20 percent of the book intelligible. Even so, Steiner’s challenge to naturalism is accessible, powerful, and well worth pondering.

Kevin Pagan is an attorney with extensive experience in municipal law, having served as City Attorney for McAllen, Texas. Currently, he serves BT.Church as CFO and general counsel. A Major in the US Air Force Auxiliary, Pagan is also an intelligent design supporter. We became friends when, on behalf of BT.Church, he invited me down to McAllen (which is about as far south as you can go in Texas) to promote Stephen Meyer’s The Story of Everything, which is now available for streaming on Amazon.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
— William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II

This oft-quoted line from Shakespeare is usually invoked as a punchline or as evidence of the Bard’s supposed disdain for attorneys. In truth, the phrase was spoken by a would-be tyrant who understood that, to overthrow liberty and impose tyranny, one must first eliminate the lawyers—those who defend law, order, and freedom.

Today, in the world of science and especially in the debate over Intelligent Design (ID), that dynamic is strangely reversed. The courts and public institutions are being used to protect the entrenched scientific establishment—namely Darwinists and their materialist allies. With cracks beginning to appear in the foundations of Darwinian orthodoxy, and with growing evidence that points toward design rather than randomness, the battle cry that has emerged is “That’s not science—it’s religion!”

Curiously, this outcry doesn’t often originate in the laboratories or lecture halls of academia—where many know better—but in public arenas: courtrooms, school board meetings, and legislative hearings. There, Darwin-friendly lawyers raise the banner of “church-state separation,” claiming to defend science from religious intrusion. But in doing so, they often protect ideology rather than inquiry.

So, the question arises: Will the lawyers kill Intelligent Design?
I think not. To see why, we must look backward before we look ahead.

The “Monkey Trial” and the Birth of a Legal Strategy

More than a century ago, in Dayton, Tennessee, the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial marked the first major intersection of law, science, and public opinion on human origins. It was, in many ways, a carefully staged performance. Attorney Clarence Darrow, with help from journalist H.L. Mencken, used the trial not merely to defend John Scopes, but to dramatize a supposed conflict between science and religion. Though Darrow technically lost the case, he won the far more important battle for public perception—especially after the play and film Inherit the Wind cemented his version of events in popular culture.

Legally, however, Scopes settled little. It didn’t answer the question of whether evolution or creationism was “true,” nor did it establish constitutional precedent. What it did do was establish a pattern: debates over origins would no longer be confined to laboratories or academic journals—they would be litigated. Those seeking to change how evolution was taught in schools turned not to science but to statutes and lawsuits. Courts, in turn, became referees in philosophical disputes about life’s beginnings.

Over time, as “creation science” gave way to broader critiques of Darwinism, a predictable legal strategy emerged: whenever dissenters raised scientific objections to evolution, the establishment cried “religion,” and the courts—eager to avoid even the appearance of violating the Establishment Clause—sided with the Darwinists.

From Edwards to Dover: Who Defines Science?

This dynamic was sharpened in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of “creation science” alongside evolution. Yet, in a crucial nuance, the Court acknowledged that teaching scientific critiques of evolution could be constitutionally permissible—if done with a “genuine secular purpose.”

That single phrase shifted the battlefield. The new question became: What counts as science, and who decides? Where is the line between a scientific critique and a religious doctrine disguised as one? Increasingly, judges—not scientists—were being asked to answer.

Then came Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), where a federal district court judge ruled that Intelligent Design was not science but religion. The ruling was hailed by Darwin’s defenders as a decisive victory—a “Scopes in reverse.” Yet, despite its public-relations triumph, Kitzmiller has not aged well. It remains a district court opinion with virtually no precedential authority and has been criticized even by some on the winning side for judicial overreach. The attempt to “settle” the question of Intelligent Design through judicial fiat failed to resonate beyond a narrow circle of activists and academics.

While advocacy groups and textbook publishers still cite Kitzmiller as if it were the final word, few legal scholars believe that it was—or ever will be.

Now twenty years on, Kitzmiller remains the ceiling of anti-ID legal efforts rather than a foundation for further precedent. No federal appellate court has since endorsed its reasoning and attempts to replicate its outcome in other jurisdictions have largely stalled. More recent efforts have focused on “creationism” (and its iterations), more than ID. The most prominent current legal front involves academic freedom statutes—laws passed in several states that protect teachers and students who raise scientific criticisms of evolution or present evidence for design. Challenges to these statutes, brought by some of the same advocacy organizations that litigated Kitzmiller, have so far produced mixed results, suggesting that courts are not eager to extend that ruling’s rationale into new terrain. The legal campaign to suppress ID has, in short, reached a plateau—a fact its proponents prefer not to advertise.

The Legal Strategy to Silence Design

Despite these limitations, Darwin’s defenders continue to rely on the legal system as their strongest shield. The strategy is simple but effective: avoid confronting Intelligent Design on scientific grounds by rebranding it as religion. If courts accept that label, then public schools are automatically barred from teaching or even discussing it under the Establishment Clause.

The argument typically runs like this:

1. ID discovers evidence of design in nature.

2. Design implies a designer.

3. A designer sounds like God.

4. Therefore, ID is religion.

5. Religion may not be taught in public schools.

6. Ergo, ID must be excluded.

What is conspicuously absent from this logical chain of reasoning is any engagement with ID’s actual empirical claims—its use of inference to the best explanation, probability analysis, information theory, or molecular biology. These are the messy, technical issues that belong in scientific journals and research labs, not in courtrooms. Yet, because legal labels are simpler—religious or secular, permissible or forbidden—judges often accept the shortcut.

This approach may win temporary victories in court and commissions, but it does so by avoiding the very question at the heart of the scientific enterprise: What does the evidence show?

Judges Are Not Scientists—And Shouldn’t Pretend to Be

As a practicing attorney for four decades, I can attest: courts are not scientific bodies, and judges are not scientists—no matter how many times they’ve watched Inherit the Wind. Their job is to interpret laws, evaluate evidence, and apply precedent—not to adjudicate philosophical questions about the nature of science itself.

When judges are asked to decide whether Intelligent Design is “science,” they are being asked to do something outside their institutional competence. Competing experts testify—some claiming that ID is merely “creationism in disguise,” others insisting it’s a legitimate scientific inference based on empirical data. That kind of debate belongs in universities, peer-reviewed journals, and the open marketplace of ideas—not in a courtroom, where nuanced issues are flattened into binary legal categories.

If the legal system continues to act as gatekeeper for scientific orthodoxy, it will not merely enforce religious neutrality, it will begin to enforce intellectual conformity. That is both philosophically and constitutionally perilous.

Protecting Neutrality Without Policing Science

The courts do have a legitimate and vital role: protecting genuine religious neutrality in public education. Schools should neither promote sacred texts nor impose denominational doctrines on students. But neutrality does not mean excluding every idea that challenges materialist assumptions. To the contrary, neutrality means allowing open discussion and critical analysis, especially when empirical evidence invites it.

When judges attempt to define what counts as “real science,” they cross a dangerous line. They transform the courtroom into a quasi-academy, enforcing philosophical rules rather than legal principles. In doing so, they risk silencing precisely the kind of questioning that drives scientific progress.

Shakespeare Redux: The Real Threat

We began with Shakespeare’s warning: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” In his time, the elimination of lawyers signified the death of liberty. In ours, the danger runs the other way. Lawyers and judges are now being asked to police the boundaries of acceptable ideas—to bless one philosophy of science and banish others under the banner of “secularism.”

If that project succeeds, it will not merely suppress Intelligent Design. It will undermine something more fundamental: the freedom of science itself to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The real question, then, is not whether the lawyers will kill Intelligent Design—they cannot. The ideas and arguments supporting ID are grounded in empirical evidence and theoretical insights too robust to be extinguished by any court order. No judge can repeal the specified complexity of the bacterial flagellum, undo the Cambrian explosion, or erase the fine-tuning of the universal constants. What malicious litigation can do—and what its architects intend—is hamper ID’s reception and acceptance: chilling classroom discussion, deterring publishers, discouraging researchers, and stigmatizing the very act of questioning Darwinian orthodoxy. That is a serious injury, even if it falls short of killing.

Accordingly, ID advocates, and all those who value open inquiry, should develop, and be prepared to deploy, “countermeasures.”

• First, academic freedom legislation (and school board policies) should be actively supported. These laws must protect teachers and students who present scientific evidence for design or who raise criticisms of evolution, and they should do so without endorsing any religious doctrine.

• Second, ID proponents should invest in a legal defense infrastructure— individual lawyers, law firms, and other organizations capable of litigating against viewpoint discrimination, especially in universities and research institutions, where the suppression of ID is often more brazen than in public schools.

• Third, the scientific community should continue to press for peer-reviewed publication of ID research, forcing courts and critics to engage with the empirical evidence rather than simply labeling ID as “religion.” Courts that are shown a robust, published scientific literature will likely find it more difficult to dismiss ID as mere theology.

• Finally, ID’s friends should cultivate public persuasion—making the case directly to citizens, parents, school boards, and legislators, whose political decisions ultimately shape the environment in which courts operate.

In the long run, truth has a stubborn way of surfacing. Evidence, including that supporting Intelligent Design, will continue to emerge—and no courtroom ruling can suppress it forever.

Prepared Places

In Matthew 20, the mother of James and John makes an ambitious request of Jesus: “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.” [Matthew 20:21, NIV] In reply, Jesus says, “To sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.” [Matthew 20:23, NIV]

Jesus denies the request but he doesn’t challenge the assumption underlying it, namely, that someone will be sitting at his right and left hand. Also, since the kingdom in question is the one he is establishing on the Earth, the clear implication is that whoever will be sitting at Jesus’ right and left hand will be (glorified) humans and not inhabitants from some other planet or possible world.

Jesus in this same passage also gives some hint about the qualifications of those who will be sitting on his right and left: “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” [Matthew 20:26, ESV] He then grounds all greatness in his own self-giving: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” [Matthew 20:28, ESV] Only those who conform to the crucified servant king can thus even hope to sit at the right and left hand of the Son.

Within traditional orthodox Christian theology, God is a Trinity—a single God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Any aspect of reality outside this trinitarian God thus belongs not on the side of creator but on the side of creation. So the question naturally arises what the status of humanity is within creation taken as a whole. Is humanity at the very top of the created order? Does humanity share the top with other created entities, such as perhaps inhabitants of Alpha Centauri? Are there many tops? Also, where does humanity stand in relation to non-physically embodied beings, such as angels?

Human Primacy Defined

In this essay, I’m going to argue that humanity as it exists on Earth occupies the very top of the created order, with every other created thing in second or lower place. My argument will have some unexpected implications, not least that the infinite personal trinitarian creator God of the Bible gives pride of place to a few billions of humans against the totality all other worlds and entities that God could, did, or might create. I’m going to argue that this implication need not be unworthy of God, as some of our reflexive intuitions might suggest.

To say that humanity has primacy in creation is not to say that human beings surpass every other creature in every respect. Angels, stars, and animals all exceed us in multiple ways. Created things are not arranged on a single linear scale, as though they could be ranked the way we rank objects by weight. Creation is richer than that. It is only partially ordered, with some things being comparable according to some criterion, others not.

Yet there is a criterion by which humanity exceeds all other created things: The human race is the race made in God’s image, entrusted with dominion, ruined in Adam, redeemed in Christ, joined to the incarnate Son, and promised a share in his reign. Other creatures may exceed humanity in many created excellences. But none can exceed humanity in that God through Christ has made human nature his own. In that sense, humanity is not simply one high creature among others. It is the created order’s privileged point of union with God.

In asserting humanity’s primacy within all creation, the Christian faith makes a claim so large that modern unbelief often cannot hear it without ridicule. The Christian faith says that humanity—small, frail, and sinful, born on a minor planet circling an ordinary star—is nonetheless the central creaturely concern of the triune God. More strongly, it says that Adamic humanity, the race descended from Adam and Eve, occupies the highest place in created reality: not only higher than animals, not only higher than galaxies, not only higher than angels, but higher than any other created work God has made or could make. This is not because humanity is impressive by cosmic measures. It is because the eternal Son of God became a human being.

Humanity’s primacy in creation requires careful definition. I do not mean that human beings are the largest creatures, the most numerous creatures, or the most naturally powerful creatures. I do not even need to claim that no other created intellect could exceed ordinary human intelligence. The primacy at stake is deeper. It is teleological, because humanity is ordered to God’s final purpose for creation. It is covenantal, because humanity bears the image and receives command, promise, judgment, and restoration. It is incarnational, because the Son assumes human nature. It is redemptive, because the Cross is offered for Adam’s race. It is eschatological, because the world to come is subjected not to angels but to Christ and those who are his in virtue of his humanity.

The Son’s incarnation is the decisive fact in all of creation—period. The second person of the Trinity did not become an angel. He did not become a star. He did not assume “rational creaturehood” in some diffuse sense. He assumed human nature. He was conceived in Mary’s womb. He was born of a daughter of Adam. He lived under the law of Israel. He died under Pontius Pilate. He rose bodily. He ascended bodily. And he now sits at the right hand of the Father as the incarnate Son. The Heidelberg Catechism catches the shock of this when it says that, by Christ’s ascension, “we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that he, our Head, will also take us, his members, up to himself.” [Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 49] Humanity has flesh in heaven. Not metaphorical flesh. Not angelic radiance. Human flesh. The God-man reigns.

Humanity is central in creation because God made humanity in his image, because the Son became a man to redeem humanity, because redeemed humans are united to the God-man, because angels serve the heirs of salvation, and because the final world to come is not subjected to angels but to Christ and those who share his reign. “The one who conquers,” Christ says, “I will grant him to sit with me on my throne.” [Revelation 3:21, ESV] Those who conquer are those who participate in Christ’s suffering and victory at the cross. Such is the divine promise, and it is a promise exclusively to humans.

Cosmic Smallness Answered

Carl Sagan saw the matter otherwise. For him, astronomy is an acid to be poured on human pretension. Earth is tiny. Humanity is violent. The universe is vast. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote, “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” [Sagan, Pale Blue Dot] Elsewhere in the same work he imagines an extraterrestrial observer hearing us say, “The Universe is created for us! We’re at the center! Everything pays homage to us!” and remarking in response that “our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic” and “this must be the planet of the idiots.” [Sagan, Pale Blue Dot] The force of Sagan’s objection should be granted—but only if Christianity taught that human centrality were a matter of size, which it does not.

Christianity never grounded the creational primacy of humanity in size. Scripture understood and responded to this objection without the need of modern astronomy. Like Sagan, the psalmist could look at the night sky and feel small: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,” he asks, “what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” [Psalm 8:3-4, NIV] That is Sagan’s question before Sagan. But the psalmist rejects Sagan’s conclusion. “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.” [Psalm 8:5, NIV]

Pascal understood what was at stake more clearly than Sagan. Pascal did not deny human fragility: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.” [Pascal, Pensées , no. 347, trans. W. F. Trotter] The universe can crush us. But the universe does not know that it crushes. Humans know. Pascal refuted spatial reductionism so: “By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.” [Pascal, Pensées , no. 348, trans. Trotter] Size is one way of gauging significance. Mind is another. Moral agency is another. Capacity for God is another. Union with Christ is the greatest measure of significance.

Adamic History and Fall

Genesis begins the argument. God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” [Genesis 1:26, NIV] Then comes the royal grant: “And let them have dominion.” [Genesis 1:26, ESV] Humanity’s creation is not an afterthought. It is the summit of the visible creation. God forms a creature who can know, love, obey, name, rule, receive covenant, break covenant, and be restored by covenant. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” [Genesis 1:27, NIV] As central to my argument for human primacy in creation, we will take Genesis as clearly teaching that God specially created Adam and Eve and that they are the progenitors of the whole human race. On that reading, humanity is not an accidental contingency (as Stephen Jay Gould might have argued) but the image-bearing race by which God intended his visible creation to be ruled, named, tended, offered, and blessed.

The Fall then becomes a cosmic disaster. It is a disaster because humanity represents creation to the creator and the creator to the creation. Adam is not one animal among others. He is covenant head. His fall is the fall of the race and the disordering of the realm entrusted to him. Paul therefore calls Christ the last Adam: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” [1 Corinthians 15:22, NIV] The story is not matter, then mind, then technology, then cosmic insignificance. The story is creation, image, covenant, fall, incarnation, cross, resurrection, ascension, return, new creation. Reality is narrative because God is author. Reality is not less ultimate because it is a story. Rather, reality is ultimate because it is a story whose author is God.

This is where Lessing’s famous objection must be faced. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote, “accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” [G. E. Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power”] He called the gap between historical contingency and eternal truth an “ugly, broad ditch.” [Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power”] But Christianity answers that the ditch exists only if God is forbidden to act in history. If God is triune, personal, free, and sovereign, then history is not a metaphysical embarrassment. It is the chosen medium of revelation. Bethlehem, Golgotha, and the empty tomb are not disposable illustrations of timeless truths. They are the decisive events by which created reality receives its meaning.

The Incarnation

The Incarnation (God becoming human in Jesus Christ) is therefore not one doctrine among others. It is the central ontological fact about creation. John states it with stark simplicity: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” [John 1:14, ESV] The Word did not merely appear in flesh. He became flesh. He did not assume humanity as a temporary costume. He united human nature to himself personally and forever.

Gregory of Nazianzus saw the saving necessity in this: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” [Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101] If Christ had not assumed a human mind, the human mind would not be healed. If he had not assumed a human body, the body would not be healed. But he assumed the whole human—body, soul, mind, will, and every other aspect of our humanity. Therefore Christ is able to save the whole human person.

The title Theotokos—God-bearer or Mother of God—guards this mystery. Mary is central here because she proves the awesome weight of the Incarnation. She is not the source of the Son’s deity, but she is truly the mother of the incarnate Son according to his humanity. She therefore anchors the Incarnation in Adamic flesh. Chalcedon confesses that one and the same Christ is “perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood” and was “born of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, according to the manhood.” [Definition of Chalcedon] The Son did not descend into generic creaturehood. He came through a woman of Israel. The eternal Son took his human nature from Mary, a woman of Adam’s race. He entered a genealogy. He made our bloodline his own.

The Cosmic Christ

This is where all speculation about extraterrestrials, alternate universes, and multiverses must bow to Christology. God could (and may) have created other rational beings. God could (and may) have made worlds with other laws, other dimensions, other histories. Nothing in classical Christian theism requires a cramped ontology. But no created nature can outrank the nature personally assumed by the Son in the person of Jesus on this planet Earth. If there are other creatures in other portions of creation, they still must defer to the incarnate Christ. They may have splendor. They may have intelligence. They may have ministries unknown to us. But they cannot displace Adamic humanity from the center, because the Son has forever made Adamic humanity his own.

Repeated incarnations in many worlds containing many fallen races thus become theologically implausible. The Son’s assumption of Adamic humanity is not an episode in a larger series of divine rescue missions. It is a permanent personal union. The Word does not merely visit our nature, repair it, and move on. He takes it forever. He rises in it. He ascends in it. He reigns in it. He even bears the marks of crucifixion in eternity as the “lamb slain from the foundations of the earth.” [Revelation 13:8, KJV]

To imagine the Son becoming one rational species after another, dying and rising world after world, is not impossible because God lacks power. It is unfitting because it turns the Incarnation into a recurring mechanism rather than the decisive act by which God joins creation to himself. Scripture gives us one Adam and one last Adam, one fall of the race and one representative obedience, one cross whose blood reconciles all things in heaven and on earth, one bride and one body—the church—made up of the redeemed. Nowhere does Scripture indicate that God is a polygamist with many brides. In the Old Testament, there is one chosen people, Israel. In the New Testament, there is likewise one chosen people, the church.

An infinite God doesn’t need endless repetitions to display infinite mercy. God’s infinity is not shown by multiplying redemptive dramas without limit, as though each world required its own Calvary before divine love could be complete. The Christian story moves the other way. God chooses one people, one woman, one flesh, one life, one death, one resurrection, and through that particular history gives meaning to all creation. The scandal is not that redemption is too small. The scandal is that it is so particular and yet so vast. If there are other rational creatures elsewhere, they need not have their own incarnation to be ordered rightly to God. They may stand, like angels, in relation to the incarnate Christ. The Lamb slain on Earth need not be slain again. His once-for-all offering is not provincial in effect, because the one who offers it is the Lord through whom and for whom all worlds were made.

Colossians runs with this cosmic perspective. Christ is not merely the redeemer of a local tribe on a small planet. He is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” the one in whom “all things have been created,” whether “things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,” including every throne, power, ruler, and authority. [Colossians 1:15–16, NIV] Paul then adds the crucial line: “all things have been created through him and for him.” [Colossians 1:16, NIV] Consequently, the Incarnation does not need to be multiplied in order to have cosmic reach.

The Christ who took on humanity is already the source, coherence, and goal of every created order. “In him all things hold together.” [Colossians 1:17, NIV] And the same Christ who is Lord of creation is also “the head of the body, the church,” “the firstborn from among the dead,” and the one through whom God reconciles “all things” by “making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” [Colossians 1:18–20, NIV] Colossians therefore conjoins the cosmic Christ to the crucified Christ. The blood shed on Earth is not provincial because the one who shed it is the one for whom all created reality exists. His cross stands within history, but its scope spans all of creation.

Hebrews takes the Cosmic Christ of Colossians a step further by calling Christ’s sacrifice once-for-all: “[He] has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” [Hebrews 9:26, ESV] That language further resists the thought of a monotonous deity repeating the same redemptive drama in world after world. The Son’s incarnation is not one episode in a divine routine. The Cross is not a procedure. It is the act by which God judges, redeems, and reorders creation. If there are other worlds, they must receive their meaning from this one Christ, not from a competing series of Christs.

That said, Christians need not affirm that God made no other rational creatures. Scripture simply does not answer that question in those terms. The stronger claim is theological: whatever God has created must be ordered under the incarnate Son. If other rational creatures exist, their meaning cannot be independent of him. They cannot have their own higher incarnation, their own rival cross, their own superior eschaton. There is one Lord through whom all things were made and one Christ in whom all things hold together.

This claim can sound scandalously narrow. Yet early Christian instinct grasped this cosmic particularity. The Shepherd of Hermas says of the Church, “She was created first of all. On this account is she old. And for her sake was the world made.” [Shepherd of Hermas, Vision II.4] No Christian ecclesiology can ignore this passage. What is ultimate in the created order? It is the Church. Redeemed humanity gathered into Christ is not an afterthought of some larger and more important cosmic history. In God’s purpose, the world is ordered toward the people whom Christ redeems.

Theosis Through Weakness

Athanasius provides the deepest justification for the claim that Adamic humanity resides at the very top of God’s concern for created reality: “He [Christ] was made man that we might be made God.” [Athanasius, On the Incarnation] Properly understood, this is not polytheism. It is divinization or theosis: participation by grace in the divine life. God remains God. Creatures remain creatures. But redeemed humans are brought into communion with God through the incarnate Son and by the Holy Spirit.

Irenaeus sang the same song in a different key: Christ, “through His transcendent love, [did] become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” [Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V, Preface] Human primacy is not self-exaltation. It is received exaltation achieved through humility—God in Jesus humbling himself by becoming human and suffering on the cross. We become royal only because the King became our brother and our suffering servant.

Creation has a hierarchy that Hebrews makes plain. Hebrews 1 establishes the Son’s superiority over angels. The Son is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” [Hebrews 1:3, ESV] Angels worship him. Angels serve him. But Hebrews then adds something astonishing about their relation to redeemed humans: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” [Hebrews 1:14, ESV] Angels are glorious creatures, but they are not heirs as we are. They are ministers to the heirs. This does not make humans divine by nature. It establishes a hierarchy of grace. The angelic hosts serve the redeemed.

Hebrews 2 presses this thought further. “For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.” [Hebrews 2:5, ESV] That line should be printed in large type in any Christian anthropology. The world to come does not privilege angels. The world to come is human under Christ. Hebrews then cites Psalm 8: “You made them [humans] a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor.” [Hebrews 2:7, NIV] Yet we do not now see everything subjected to humanity. The evidence seems against the claim. Humans sin, die, and decay. Hebrews attends to the more weighty evidence: “But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death.” [Hebrews 2:9, NIV] The destiny of humanity becomes clear in exactly one human being: Jesus.

This coming reversal in the status of humans and angels, with the advantage going to humans, makes good sense on reflection. It belongs to the deep grammar of grace. Human beings now appear weaker than angels. We are bound to flesh, exposed to hunger, sleep, pain, ignorance, temptation, shame, decay, and death. Angels seem to possess superior power, speed, intelligence, and radiance. Yet that very contrast makes the divine purpose more astonishing.

God does not display his glory merely by perfecting what already looks glorious. He displays it most forcefully by taking what is low, frail, wounded, and dishonored, and raising it into union with the incarnate Son. Paul heard the Lord say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” [2 Corinthians 12:9, NIV] That principle is universal. Humanity has descended below the angels in weakness, and in sin has fallen lower still. But precisely because humanity is so reduced, the exaltation of humanity in Christ becomes the cosmic arena for grace’s ultimate triumph.

Doing More with Less

God is glorified by doing more with less. The point may be put mathematically. One way to approach infinity is by growing larger and larger. The problem here is that in this approach to infinity, the infinite is never actualized. It always remains a potential infinity, because however large things get, there is always something larger ahead. Give me any number, and there’s always a number bigger than it. The impulse to grow bigger and bigger is the essence of selfish ambition. We call it self-aggrandizement, and it is never a virtue. It is the essence of Satan’s fall, in which the enemy of our souls seeks to rise to God’s height, but never attains it, and so must ultimately be cast down. [Ezekiel 28]

Yet there is another way to move toward infinity: not by swelling outward, but by contracting toward zero. Even if an actual infinity is unattainable, zero is attainable. Yet in the divine economy, zero is the door to infinity, the reciprocal of zero being an actual infinite. That mathematical image clarifies the strange arithmetic of grace. In Philippians 2, Christ does not grasp, inflate, or aggrandize. Though he is “in very nature God,” he “made himself nothing” by taking “the very nature of a servant” and assuming the likeness of man. [Philippians 2:6–7, NIV]

This renunciation of divine privileges is not a subtraction from his deity, as though the Son ceased to be God. It is the free self-humbling of the eternal Son, who remains fully divine while assuming the full limitations of embodied human life. He contracts, as it were, into finitude: womb, infancy, hunger, weariness, obedience, humiliation, and death. He goes lower than the angels. He goes all the way down to the cross. And precisely there, at the point of deepest descent, the door to glory opens. “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place.” [Philippians 2:9, NIV] In Christ’s kenosis (or emptying), zero is the flipside infinity: the Son enters human lowliness so that humanity may be opened to the inexhaustible life and goodness of God.

In the economy of redemption, God’s glory is not measured by the height at which the creature begins, but by the distance between the creature’s ruin and its final exaltation. To elevate an unfallen being already rich in power seems at best optional; to raise a fallen, embodied, dust-born creature into communion with God is staggering. Humanity receives no plaudits here. Its weakness constitutes no merit, its degradation no virtue. But in that weakness God finds the occasion for a more radiant display of mercy, power, patience, and wisdom. Theosis is therefore not the polishing of a naturally splendid creature. It is the glorification of redeemed dust. The angels may shine by created excellence, but redeemed humanity shines by costly grace.

Felix Culpa

The logic of first going as low as possible to end up as high as possible underlies the Augustinian idea captured in the phrase felix culpa, or happy fault. The Fall was not happy in itself. Sin is not a fortunate experiment. Adam’s rebellion brought guilt, corruption, misery, death, and estrangement from God. Yet God’s providence is so sovereign, and his mercy so deep, that he is able to draw from this catastrophe a good greater than the good that was lost.

Had humanity never fallen, we might have known God as Creator, Lawgiver, and blessed End. But in redemption we know him also as Savior, Bridegroom, Brother, Advocate, and crucified Lord. We learn depths of mercy, patience, humility, sacrifice, and grace that an unfallen world could never have disclosed in the same way. The Fall is therefore not justified as evil, but overcome as evil. Its horror becomes the dark background against which the glory of Christ shines more brilliantly. God permits humanity to fall low, not because sin is good, but because redeeming love is greater than innocence left untested.

The costliness of this redemption must not be softened. Humanity does not suffer merely in the abstract. Human beings suffer in bodies, memories, families, illnesses, betrayals, fears, bereavements, failures, and deaths. We live between Eden and Paradise, remembering a lost wholeness we cannot regain by our own power and awaiting a glory we cannot produce by our own striving. In that interval, the world is never simply beautiful and never simply tragic. It is both: charged with signs of divine goodness, yet wounded by the disorder of sin.

To deny the cruelties of life is itself cruel. The Christian claim is not that pain is unreal, or that every sorrow can be explained to the sufferer’s satisfaction. The claim is that the human person, even in pain, still bears the image of God, and that this image is most deeply ordered to love. Even fallen love, misdirected and damaged, testifies to what humanity was made for. Our misery is therefore not evidence of our insignificance. It is evidence of a greatness broken, a glory obscured, a vocation wounded but not erased.

Christ enters precisely that wounded condition. Redemption is not a distant decree by which God repairs humanity without touching its misery. The Son assumes the flesh in which humans hunger, tire, weep, bleed, and die. He bears not only the general fact of mortality but the concrete burden of rejection, shame, injustice, abandonment, and crucifixion. The Passion is thus not an ornament attached to the Incarnation. It is the terrible cost by which divine love moves all the way into the human predicament in order to draw humanity back to God.

If love is the true form of the divine image in us, then Christ reveals that love in its fullest created expression: self-giving unto death for the life of others. This gives human suffering no cheap justification, but it does give it a horizon. In Christ, the pain of Adam’s race is neither ignored nor idolized. It is entered, borne, judged, and transfigured. Human life, even in its smallest and most afflicted moments, remains luminous with purpose because the incarnate Son has made our suffering the place where redeeming love is most completely disclosed. [Most of this section keys off of my wife Jana’s essay “Luminous with Purpose,” published previously on this Substack.]

The God-Man Enthroned

The right hand of the Father is occupied not by deity alone but by the God-man who retained his humanity at the Ascension. John of Damascus writes, “We hold, moreover, that Christ sits in the body at the right hand of God the Father.” [John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV.2] He denies that the Father’s right hand is a bodily location. God is not spatially bounded. But the denial of spatiality does not weaken the claim. It strengthens it. Christ’s body shares in the glory and honor signified by the right hand. Human nature, in Christ, is enthroned.

Aquinas makes the same distinction. Christ as God sits at the Father’s right hand by divine equality. Christ as man sits there according to “the excellence of beatitude and His judiciary power over every creature.” [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 58, a. 3] Aquinas adds that it belongs to Christ’s assumed human nature “to share in God’s mightier gifts” by exaltation above other creatures. [Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 58, a. 3] The point is not that Christ’s humanity becomes deity by nature. It is that the humanity personally united to the Son is lifted above every created order.

Anselm clarifies why the redeemer had to be God-man. Because of human powerlessness against sin, “None but God can make this satisfaction,” he writes. Yet because humans willfully embraced sin, “None but a man ought to do this.” [Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, II.6] Therefore “it is necessary for the God-man to make it [i.e., the satisfaction for sin].” [Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, II.6] Anselm’s logic can be pressed beyond atonement into anthropology. The human problem required a human obedience. The divine remedy required divine power. In Jesus Christ, God does not bypass humanity. He fulfills it. He does not save humanity by replacing it with a superior creature. He saves humanity by becoming human and acting as a human on behalf of humanity.

Aquinas offers here another helpful distinction. Why was human nature fittingly assumed rather than angelic nature? Aquinas answers that human nature alone fits two criteria: dignity and need. “According to its dignity,” he writes, “human nature, as being rational and intellectual, was made for attaining to the Word to some extent by its operation, viz. by knowing and loving Him.” And “according to its need,” it “stood in need of restoration, having fallen under original sin.” [Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 4, a. 1] The angels who fell are not redeemed by an angelic incarnation. The animals are not rational recipients of covenantal restoration. Human nature stands at the crucial inflection point: low enough to fall, high enough to know and love the Word, needy enough to be redeemed, dignified enough to be assumed.

The UFO Objection

In our secular age, objections readily arise against the primacy of humanity in creation. An obvious current objection comes from unidentified flying objects (UFOs), or what have now been redubbed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). Suppose extraterrestrials actually arrived, unmistakably identified themselves, communicated clearly with us, and told a coherent theological story: they too had fallen into sin, the transcendent Creator had become incarnate among them, and their Christ-like redeemer had suffered, died, and risen for their race. I would not try to explain that away. I would take it as a serious refutation of the argument I am making here. Multiple fallen races, each with its own incarnation and atoning drama, would overthrow the claim that Adamic humanity has unique primacy in creation. It would require a drastically revised Christology, anthropology, and doctrine of redemption.

But that is not what UFOlogy has delivered. What it has delivered, for decades if not centuries, is a fog of sightings, rumors, classified hints, blurry images, military anecdotes, sensational testimony, and perpetually deferred proof. The alleged visitors do not land in Times Square, teach us their language, disclose their history, and submit their claims to public examination. They remain teasingly present and evidentially absent. In that respect, UFOs belong in the same cultural neighborhood as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster: not because every witness is lying or every report is worthless, but because the evidence never becomes decisive. The phenomenon thrives in the gap between mystery and proof. Until that gap closes—until “aliens” cease to be ambiguous lights, strange radar returns, and unverifiable stories—the theological argument for humanity’s primacy in creation has no serious rival from UFO speculation.

The Demographic Objection

A demographic objection may likewise seem compelling to today’s secular mindset. If Adamic humanity is central to creation, then the number of central created beings is finite. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that “about 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth.” [Population Reference Bureau, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?”] Even if Christ returns after many more generations, the final number of human beings will remain finite and likely under a trillion. Is it plausible that an infinite God would build created reality around a seeming handful (by divine standards) of principal creatures?

The objection mistakes arithmetic for glory. A person is not an item to be catalogued and put on a shelf. A human person is an embodied spiritual mystery: a divine image-bearer, moral agent, and worshipper, with the capacity to know God and unite with Christ. One glorified saint is not exhausted by being counted. In fact, the objection can be turned around: with an infinity of divine image bearers, personal identity might easily be submerged below an infinity of minor (and not so minor) variations of the same person.

There could thus be a version of me that grew up in a different Chicago apartment from the one where I did grow up, but where all the important details of our lives match up. There could also be variations of me that match up precisely for the first few decades and then radically diverge thereafter (as with the splitting of quantum many worlds). Finiteness in the number of created beings who are central to God’s care and concern renders us irreplaceable. Infinity, by contrast, promises to make us redundant and interchangeable.

Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of epektasis, or endless progress into God, helps answer the demographic objection. Because God is infinite, no creature can exhaust the divine fullness. Eternity therefore need not be a static possession. Rather, it can be an inexhaustible participation in the divine life. A finite set of individuals can thus have an infinite reach and significance because of their union with the infinite God.

Diogenes Allen, my favorite professor at Princeton Theological Seminary when I was a student there in the 1990s, expanded on this teaching by Gregory of Nyssa:

In his Life of Moses and On Perfection, perfection means a neverending increase in goodness and excellence, not stasis. Gregory loves to use Paul’s image of the Christian life as that of a runner exerting himself to the fullest extent for the glorious prize that awaits—knowing God face-to-face. Since God is infinite and shares his infinite life with us fully, we never cease to grow in excellence and goodness throughout our life in God’s presence. Gregory therefore tells those who lament because human nature is changeable that change is not only toward what is evil, but also toward what is good…

Theologians today often attack the ancient Greek philosophers and the theologians of the early church because they view God’s perfection as “static.” Gregory, however, rejoices in growth and understands the goal of the Christian life as one of neverending growth and change, which is the meaning of perfection. As one of the greatest expositors and defenders of the Nicene settlement, which affirmed the full divinity of the Word of God incarnate and the Holy Spirit, Gregory saw God the Holy Trinity as a neverending, dynamic life of giving and receiving. That is the nature of God’s perfection. Gregory of Nyssa thus enriches our understanding of neverending joy, since contemplation is not merely looking at God but the continuing development and growth of our own person as we interact with the source of all that is good and desirable.

If we are uncomfortable with this notion of a life in which the goal is never fully reached, perhaps some analogies will help. A scholar who enjoys her work knows that however hard and long she works, there will never be an end to her research. There is simply too much to know, while new interpretations and new data continually arise. This fact does not make her enjoy increasing her knowledge any less. There is also more great music than any one of us could hear in a long lifetime even if we did nothing but listen to music. More music is being composed all the time. This does not cause us to give up listening to music, nor does it destroy the enjoyment of listening. [Diogenes Allen, Spiritual Theology, chapter 2]

In this way, Gregory of Nyssa replies to the apparent smallness of the company of the redeemed. We are tempted to think that ultimate reality must be impressive in terms of sheer numbers: more beings, more worlds, more histories, more centers, more dramas. But divine plenitude is not proved by clutter. An infinite God can display endless grace in a boundless communion with finitely many creatures each capable of expanding limitlessly in knowledge, holiness, joy, beauty, and love. The saints do not become infinite gods. They remain creatures. But their creaturely capacity can be ever enlarged by the God who fills without being emptied.

Peter says believers become “partakers of the divine nature.” [2 Peter 1:4, ESV] Paul says we are being transformed “from one degree of glory to another.” [2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV] Our finite number is not an embarrassment. The question is not how many glorified humans God has, but what God does in and through them. A single creature pulled toward infinity may exceed in divine importance an infinite number of creatures capable only of fixed, static finitude.

Each redeemed person is conformed to Christ. Each is filled by the Spirit. Each is brought to the Father. Each has eternity in the human heart. [Ecclesiastes 3:11] Each is a temple, priest, heir, brother, servant, king. In the presence of infinite life, one saint can experience an infinity of grace. The poet Walt Whitman captured some of this truth in his “Song of Myself,” where he wrote “I contain multitudes,” underscoring the boundlessness of the human soul.

Scientists are therefore welcome to their multiverse (or multiverses). If there are many universes, Christianity need not panic. A multiverse would simply be more creation. It would not be God. It would not be ultimate. Nor would it multiply centers of meaning unless God had so ordered it. The Christian claim is that all created things, known and unknown, visible and invisible, cohere in Christ. The multiverse, if real, would not relativize the Incarnation. It would magnify it. The more creation there is, the more astonishing that its Lord became man in the lineage of Adam.

The World That Is Our Home

But why would an infinite God create our world with only three measly spatial dimensions? Such a God could have placed us in worlds with far more dimensions. A universe with three spatial dimensions is not obviously extravagant. Two dimensions are too thin for the richness of our life. Fractional (fractal) dimensions are too discontinuous. Higher dimensions may offer more room, but more room is not always more elegance. There is a sense in which three dimensions are maximally economical: enough for bodies, motion, depth, organism, gesture, architecture, incarnation. Four-dimensional spacetime adds the arena of history.

The Poincaré conjecture and its proof offers a nice mathematical parable. The Poincaré conjecture was proved in dimensions greater than four by Stephen Smale, in dimension four by Michael Freedman, and finally in dimension three by Grigori Perelman. The hardest case to prove was the original three-dimensional one first proposed by Henri Poincaré—the dimension corresponding to ordinary embodied spatial experience. It was also the last one proved. The hardest case was therefore the one closest to embodied spatial intuition. That does not prove theology. But it suggests a fittingness: God loves doing more with less. Dimensions higher than three gives a lot more room to maneuver. Dimension three is like a tight poetic meter that requires great mastery and ingenuity within which to accomplish one’s purposes.

Call it the principle of least force or minimal action. God does not need maximal scale to display maximal glory. A single planet? A single race? A single genealogy? A single woman? A single cross? Yes. God demonstrates his power by doing more with less. He chooses a garden, not a galactic capital. He chooses Abraham, not an empire. He chooses Israel, not Egypt. He chooses Bethlehem, not Rome. He chooses a virgin’s womb, a manger, a carpenter’s house, a cross outside Jerusalem. “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” [1 Corinthians 1:27, ESV] The same pattern applies cosmically. A pale blue dot is the stage for reality’s greatest story because God is not impressed by size and desires to show what he can do with the most modest of means.

Mary stands at the center of this pattern. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she says. [Luke 1:46, ESV] The one who magnifies the Lord is herself obscure in all but the eyes of God. Yet from her flesh the Word receives flesh. The Theotokos is the refutation of all abstract religion. God chose dependence. God chose gestation. God chose birth. He chose the body of a daughter of Adam. The final meaning of created reality passes through maternal contingency.

This is not a secular anthropocentrism. It is Christocentric anthropology. Humanity is only central in Christ. Fallen humanity, considered in itself, is not admirable. Human beings are rebel dust. Sagan is right to despise an anthropocentrism devoid of Christ. The “rivers of blood” spilled by emperors and generals are real. [Sagan, Pale Blue Dot] Scripture is harsher than Sagan about human evil. “None is righteous, no, not one.” [Romans 3:10, ESV] But Christian doctrine does not move from human sin to human insignificance. It moves from human sin to divine mercy. The worse our sin, the more astonishing the Incarnation and the redemption it offers. The smaller our planet, the more astonishing the visitation.

Techno-Optimism and Nietzschean Superhumanism

Two modern rivals to this Christocentric anthropology are techno-optimism and Nietzschean superhumanism. [I draw in this section from Nicholas Low’s “Superhuman Fantasies: Nietzsche and the Techno-Optimists”] The techno-optimist sees humanity as unfinished mainly because it is underpowered: too slow, too mortal, too cognitively limited, too hemmed in by regulation, scarcity, and fear. The cure is acceleration—more technology, more intelligence, more energy, more markets, more computation, more control. Humanity becomes “super” by upgrading itself, whether through AI, biotechnology, neural interfaces, or some merger of human and machine.

Nietzsche’s vision is darker and more serious. For him, the human problem is not primarily technical weakness but nihilism: the inability to affirm life in the face of suffering, finitude, and meaninglessness. The Übermensch (the superman) is therefore not a gadget-enhanced consumer but a being who has overcome the need for consolation, who can embrace existence without resentment and without appeal to a redeeming God. The Übermensch affirms life in its entirety—including its pain, finitude, and meaninglessness—transforming suffering from a problem to be overcome into something to be celebrated.

Nietzsche’s Last Man, by contrast, is the exhausted, comfort-seeking endpoint of nihilistic decline: a passive, egalitarian figure who has given up all striving for greatness, risk, or transcendence. Content with mere happiness, security, and petty pleasures, the Last Man blinks at anything noble or dangerous, denies the value of suffering, and lacks the will to create new values or “give birth to a dancing star.” He embodies the triumph of slave morality, resentment, and the desire to eliminate all hardship—all criticisms Nietzsche makes of Christianity. Where the Last Man shrinks from life’s abyss to preserve comfort, the Übermensch frolics over it.

Both visions are profoundly anti-Christian. Techno-optimism mistakes enhancement for exaltation. It imagines that if human beings become faster, stronger, longer-lived, richer, and more computationally powerful, they will become more fully human—or even posthuman. But this is a painfully thin account of humanity. It reduces the person to capacity, agency to control, and destiny to enhancement. It puts a premium on intelligence and performance. God, as all-powerful and all-knowing, readily meets and exceeds all of the techno-optimists’ aspirations. But the defining feature of God, according to Christian teaching, is not intelligence but love. And love can never be purchased with technology. According to Hugh of St. Victor, the whole point of technology is to mitigate the effects of the Fall—not to reverse the Fall, as techno-optimists contend, in their race toward u(dys)topia.

In contrast, Nietzsche understood that suffering cannot be solved by better devices. But his alternative is in the end tragic bravado. He asks humanity to overcome its longing for redemption by leaning into what cannot be redeemed. That may sound heroic, but it leaves sin unforgiven, death undefeated, injustice unanswered, and the sufferer finally alone before the abyss. In a kind of perverse stoicism, Nietzsche insists on grinning and bearing a pain that Christ has taken out of the way. This is not to say that the Christian life is painless, but it is to say that for the Christian pain is never the final world. The techno-optimist flees the weakness of human inability by trying to engineer it away. Nietzsche flees the weakness of wanting to soften suffering by refusing all consolation. Neither can raise the dead.

Humanity’s primacy in creation gives the lie to both the techno-optimists and the Nietzschean pessimists. Humanity is not destined to become superhuman by escaping the body, upgrading the mind, or willing itself beyond good and evil. Nor is humanity called merely to accept finitude as though resignation were salvation. Humanity’s destiny is higher and more realistic: redeemed human nature is united to the incarnate Son, healed by his obedience, raised by his resurrection, and glorified in his reign.

Christianity does not deny weakness. It goes deeper into it than either Silicon Valley or Nietzsche dares to go. The Son assumes flesh, bears sin, suffers death, and descends to the lowest place. But there, precisely there, God’s power is made perfect in weakness. The final form of humanity is not the billionaire engineer, the machine-augmented mind, or the laughing Übermensch beyond pity and repentance. It is the glorified saint: embodied, forgiven, transfigured, conformed to Christ, and opened forever to the infinite life of God. It is a being that values love and beauty over intelligence and strength.

Final Human Destiny

The angels recognize this glorious destiny for humanity. The Gospel, says Peter, describes “things into which angels long to look.” [1 Peter 1:12, ESV] Angels bend toward the human drama because it is the drama of the incarnate Son. Calvin lays out this exchange between Christ and his people:

This is the wondrous exchange made by his boundless goodness. Having become with us the Son of Man, he has made us with himself sons of God. By his own descent to the earth he has prepared our ascent to heaven. Having received our mortality, he has bestowed on us his immortality. Having undertaken our weakness, he has made us strong in his strength. Having submitted to our poverty, he has transferred to us his riches. Having taken upon himself the burden of unrighteousness with which we were oppressed, he has clothed us with his righteousness. [John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.xvii.2]

Christians do not climb into heaven by native power. They are carried there in Christ, by Christ, and with Christ.

Accordingly, the creation itself anticipates for the full unveiling of humanity: “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” [Romans 8:19, ESV] Creation’s hope is tied to the glorification of God’s children. The nonhuman order is not despised; it is liberated with redeemed humanity. The world is not saved from humanity as though humans were intruders. It is saved with humanity, under the last Adam.

Revelation therefore does not end with souls evaporating into light. It ends with a city, a people, bodies, names, service, sight, and reign. “The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.” [Revelation 22:3, ESV] “They will see his face.” [Revelation 22:4, ESV] “They will reign forever and ever.” [Revelation 22:5, ESV] The final human vocation is worshipful reign in the presence of God and the Lamb.

So the Christian answer to Sagan is not to deny the dot. It is to deny that dots cannot be chosen. The earth is small. Humanity is smaller. The galaxies are vast. But vastness is not ultimacy. The Lord of the galaxies became a man. He took flesh from Mary. He died for Adam’s race. He rose as the firstfruits. He ascended as the God-man. He sits at the Father’s right hand. And he promises places, thrones, inheritance, and glory to those united to him.

This means the primacy of humanity is not a compliment paid to our species. It is a confession about Christ. If Christ had been merely a teacher, Sagan would be right. If Christ had been merely a martyr, Sagan would be right. But if Jesus is the eternal Son incarnate, then the center of creation is not where matter is most concentrated or most turbulent or most radiant or otherwise physically impressive. It is where God has chosen to unite creation to himself. That place is Adamic humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

In any universe God has made, in any created order known or unknown, no creaturely reality can exceed the dignity of the human nature assumed by the Son. It bears repeating that no angelic glory, no extraterrestrial intelligence, no alternate cosmic order, no multiversal grandeur can outrank the flesh of Christ. And because redeemed humans are united to Christ, humanity descended from Adam shares, by grace, in a destiny higher than all other creatures.

At the right hand of the Father sits the Son. He sits there as God from God, light from light, true God from true God. But he also sits there as man: Mary’s son, Adam’s heir, Israel’s Messiah, our brother. And at the right and left hand of the Son, in whatever form the prepared places finally take, stand the astonishing promises made to redeemed humans: nearness, inheritance, judgment, service, worship, reign. The places are not prizes for ambition. They are gifts prepared by the Father, reached through the cup of the Son, and bestowed in the Spirit.

The cosmos does not make humanity central. Christ does. Space does not enthrone us. Grace does. We are not large enough to matter by Sagan’s measure. We are not pure enough to matter by moral measure. We matter because God has minded humanity, because the Son of Man has been crowned with glory and honor, and because the redeemed in him are destined to see God’s face and reign forever.

This essay’s fundamental claim is bold but not boastful. It does not say, Look how great humanity is. It says, Look what God has done with humanity. God formed us from dust. God breathed life into us. God bore with our rebellion. God promised a seed. God entered our race. God took our curse. God raised our nature. God enthroned our flesh. God made us heirs and made angels our ministers. God prepared for us an eternal home with his Son. And God makes us conquerors to share in Christ’s throne.

That is why no appeal to cosmic vastness can defeat Christian anthropology. Vastness is real, but it gestures at a deeper reality. The stars declare the glory of God; they do not define the scale of love. The galaxies display divine power; they do not receive incarnation. The angels blaze with holiness; they are not the bride for whom the world was made. The center of created reality is where the Creator has joined creation to himself, and that center is Jesus Christ, true God and true man.

The primacy of humanity is therefore finally the primacy of mercy. It is the primacy of the Incarnation. It is the primacy of the crucified and risen Son, who took our flesh, bore our sin, raised our nature, and made the children of Adam heirs of all things. At the Father’s right hand sits the Son of Man. At the right and left hand of the Son are prepared places of grace. And beyond all our measures of size, number, and power, the redeemed human creature will forever do what no galaxy can do: know God, love God, behold his face, and reflect his light.

Otangelo Grasso is a Swiss-born researcher, entrepreneur, and public advocate for intelligent design whose life bridges engineering, business, apologetics, and digital media. Born near Zurich in 1966 to Italian parents, he grew up with a multicultural sensibility and became fluent in German, Italian, Portuguese, and English, with some Spanish and French as well. He began his career as a machine designer, later moved to Brazil, and built a successful career in real estate development while pursuing a wide-ranging intellectual vocation of his own.

A committed autodidact, Grasso has spent decades exploring the intersection of science, philosophy, history, and faith. His books range from arguments about the origin of life and the fine-tuned complexity of biological systems to extended studies of Jesus and Christian evidence, as well as works on the Shroud of Turin. He has also built a substantial online presence through virtual libraries, websites, YouTube channels, articles, and debates, where he is known for energetic public engagement and a willingness to tackle big questions head-on.

What makes Grasso especially distinctive is his unusually ambitious use of generative AI in book production. He presents AI not as a substitute for authorship but as a disciplined research and drafting partner. As he puts it, “My aim is to get the most out of AI.” In that spirit, he explicitly discloses his extensive use of AI while insisting that the arguments, interpretations, conclusions, and responsibility for accuracy remain his alone.

Background, formation, and temperament

Bill Dembski: Let’s begin at the beginning. Tell us what it was like growing up in Switzerland. What did that early environment give you in temperament, discipline, imagination, or ambition?

Otangelo Grasso: Switzerland is famous for being clean, organized, and systematic. The citizens love to arrive on time. They are disciplined and goal-oriented. I think I learned these traits based on the environment I grew up in.

BD: Were you raised in a religious home?

OG: I grew up as Catholic. Before going to sleep, my mom prayed an Ave Maria. And when she closed the doors, I asked ten specific things to God. I felt that my prayers were attended and that God cared about me.

BD: You have described a decisive Christian turning point in your late teens. What happened, and how did that experience redirect the course of your life?

OG: When I finished school and entered a four-year period to learn my profession—machine designer. The changes, demands etc., caused me to slip into depression. I had abandoned prayers, but still visited the Catholic mass from time to time. I searched for a way out, and thought to myself: Maybe prayers help. In parallel, I started to read the Bible, but had many open questions. About three years later, a colleague at work invited me to visit an evangelical church. There, I did find people who were willing to answer my questions. That was the beginning of my life as an evangelical Christian.

BD: You are notably multilingual. How has moving across languages shaped the way you think, read, argue, and write? Do different languages open different intellectual doors for you?

OG: I think usually in the same language where I am living. When I am in Brazil, I think in Portuguese. In the US, I think in English, etc. It makes it easier to communicate with people from different places. And that, of course, has been of enormous help to understand the perspectives of people with different backgrounds, education, experiences, and consequently, has opened as well my mind to understand different cultures, behaviors, etc.

BD: Before your public work in intelligent design and apologetics, you trained and worked as a machine designer. Tell us about your education to become a machine designer. What did engineering teach you about systems, function, integration, and problem-solving, and how has that affected the way you look at biology?

OG: My education as a machine designer has been fundamental to understanding how biological systems actually work, and there are many analogous processes in the production flow of human work to what we observe in biology. Especially important here is the role of information, which directs the making of complex molecular machines, proteins. This has a lot of parallels to human engineering. That made me develop the Factory Argument (i.e., that cells are engineered production systems and therefore exhibit design).

BD: You later moved to Brazil and built a successful career in real estate development. How did that move happen, and what has life in Brazil contributed to your intellectual and spiritual outlook?

OG: I felt attracted to Brazil after I read a Time-Life book about Rio de Janeiro as a teenager. I first visited Rio in 1988, and after spending many vacations there, in 1996 I decided to move to live in Brazil permanently.

BD: You are largely self-taught in the fields for which many readers now know you. How did you educate yourself outside formal academic pathways, and what were key books, thinkers, or debates that formed you?

OG: A key book to dive into biochemistry was Bruce Alberts Molecular Biology of the Cell. That was the entry point, in 2015, and it made me spend over five years to learn as much as I could about how cells work at a molecular level.

BD: Were there particular mentors, even if indirect mentors through books and lectures, who helped you become the thinker and writer you are today?

OG: My main sources are the Internet, science books, and papers of all sorts. But some authors have been more influential for me to understand the biological sciences, and especially biochemistry, like Steve Benner, and Eugene Koonin. Both have been honest in outlining the problems and shortcomings of mainstream academic viewpoints of evolutionary biology and naturalistic-based viewpoints at large. Koonin’s Logic of Chance was very influential on me, as it outlined the shortcomings of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. Benner’s paper “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life” was very helpful to me for understanding some of the major problems in abiogenesis research.

BD: Looking back, what personal traits have most helped you: persistence, curiosity, contrarianism, pattern-recognition, entrepreneurial energy, or something else?

OG: I would say curiosity. The will to learn, to understand, and to use what I learned in apologetics.

BD: What have been the main costs of pursuing such an unconventional intellectual path? What have you had to risk, absorb, or give up? What have been the main benefits of your path?

OG: I don’t think I had to give up anything. Maybe I could have invested more time in developing a business, but my priority has always been to put God first.

Intelligent design, origin of life, and public engagement

BD: How did your interest in intelligent design first take shape? Was there a single argument, a scientific problem, or a gradual accumulation of doubts about standard evolutionary explanations?

OG: ID started to be an issue for me with growing attacks from atheist camps against Christianity and belief in God. It started with with my participation on internet forums. In the beginning, I appreciated William Lane Craig as a positive influence. Over the years, I was confronted more and more with origin issues, such as questions about biodiversity and evolution. Consequently, my interests shifted towards dealing with these issues.

BD: Of all the issues surrounding the origin of life, which ones struck you earliest as the most resistant to undirected explanations?

OG: The issues addressed in several key book by ID advocates. Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell was important. As was his book Darwin’s Doubt. Also Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box.

BD: Many people encounter intelligent design only through caricature. What do you most want an educated but skeptical reader to understand about what intelligent design is actually trying to explain?

OG: Most people do not grasp how complex life is. One of the most misunderstood concepts is irreducible complexity, as is the distinction between genetic information and the genetic code. And information in the cell is not something merely analogous to human-generated information. It is equivalent—they are exactly the same kind of thing. This has been one of the most misunderstood facts and is often misrepresented.

BD: You have spent a great deal of time studying molecular machinery and biological information, even writing entire books on these topics. Please list some of these book and where readers can find them. Which discoveries or lines of evidence have most strengthened your confidence that life bears marks of design?

OG: One of the most fascinating fields is certainly the origin of life, and understanding how complex cells must be to be alive. Life’s building blocks must be selected. Cells are factories, and operate based on instructional information, many different codes, and signaling systems. See my X-Ray of Life, volume 1 (From Prebiotic Chemistry to Cells), volume 2 (The Rise of Cellular Life), and volume 3 (The Probability of Life: Challenges to Random Chance).

BD: What conversation partners—supportive or hostile—have most sharpened your thinking? Have your debates with skeptics improved your arguments, or mostly shown you the limits of their arguments?

OG: Atheists have been particularly good at motivating me to get to the bottom of their various issues and criticisms, and to find solid answers to refute their claims.

BD: You have maintained websites, virtual libraries, videos, and public exchanges for years. Please provide links for some of these. What drew you to this distributed, online mode of intellectual work rather than a more conventional academic route?

OG: I started to dive deeper into apologetics when I was about 45 years old. I saw no reason to pursue a formal academic career because I already had my real estate business going. For my online activities, see the webpage Who is Otangelo Grasso.

BD: When you engage critics, what do you think is the difference between a fruitful exchange and a futile one? What signs tell you that a conversation is worth continuing?

OG: When my opponents start interrupting me, name-calling, whether explicitly or implicitly, when they belittle my knowledge, I know a dialogue is not productive.

BD: Which questions in origin-of-life research, if any, still strike you as the most alive and unsettled today? Where do you think the debate may move in the next decade?

OG: In my trilogy X-Ray of Life (cited above), I raise close to 2000 questions, which cannot be explained plausibly by naturalistic means. It will take a lot of time until more people start to realize the size of the problem holistically.

Turning to the Shroud of Turin

BD: What first drew you to the Shroud of Turin? Was it primarily a devotional interest, a historical puzzle, a forensic problem, or a convergence of all three?

OG: In 2022, I saw many atheist YouTube channels arguing that Jesus was not a historical figure, and probably never existed. That motivated me to dig deeper and find out what evidence there was for Jesus’ existed. That gave rise to my book Confirming Yeshua, with close to 1000 pages, where I dedicated 200 pages to the Shroud.

BD: What convinced you that the Shroud deserved not just passing interest but sustained book-length treatment?

OG: Confirming Yeshua was the starting point. Also, I wanted to reconstruct how Jesus probably looked in real life.

BD: For readers who know the Shroud only vaguely, what is the central question you set out to answer in your recent work on it, namely, in The Shroud of Turin: A Forensic Summary of the Evidence?

OG: My latest book aims to show all the constraints and put together all aspects of the Shroud, analyzing these critically and presenting an overarching picture that permits us to come to an informed conclusion about its authenticity.

BD: In working on the Shroud, what did you find most compelling: the image formation problem, the forensic details, the medical evidence, the blood patterns, the historical chain of custody, or the cumulative force of many smaller considerations?

OG: The most fascinating aspect of the Shroud is its image formation. All other aspects relate to it. The Shroud image is a photonegative with 3D information encoded in it. It’s not made by paint, dye, pigment, chemicals, but a superficial oxidation, dehydration, and conjugation of the cellulose molecules. There is no known mechanism even today to replicate the image.

BD: What are the strongest objections to the authenticity of the Shroud, and how did you face those objections rather than evade them?

OG: The radiocarbon dating has been a stumbling blocks for many. The pre-1355 history has been the best way to refute the dating, as well as the Sudarium of Oviedo, the face cloth, stored today in Oviedo, Spain, dated to the 7^th century.

BD: How, if at all, did working intensively on the Shroud change your understanding of Jesus, of evidence, or of the relationship between historical inquiry and faith?

OG: The Shroud is the most powerful evidence that corroborates the gospels.

BD: How do you think about the Shroud in relation to apologetics more broadly? Is it central, peripheral, or strategically important because it draws together science, history, and theology?

OG: The Shroud has been undervalued by many—by pastors, apologists, etc. It deserves to have a central place in evangelism and the proclamation of the Gospel.

BD: You have written across several large themes—origin of life, intelligent design, biblical history, and now the Shroud. Do you see these as separate projects, or as parts of one larger intellectual project?

OG: You forgot to mention cosmology. The broader theme is to present theism, in particular Christianity, as the most defensible worldview.

BD: You recently visited India, teaching about the Shroud at pastors’ meetings, finding the reception to your work on the Shroud phenomenal. Tell us about those meetings. How do you compare the reception of your work on the Shroud with the reception of your work on intelligent design?

OG: People place great value on the credentials of somebody who defends intelligent design. Since I have no formal academic education, I have encountered obstacles in finding recognition for my work and publications. People in India have received the information about the Shroud warmly, and welcomed it broadly.

AI as method, instrument, and discipline

BD: You have said that your aim is to “get the most out of AI,” especially through extremely sophisticated prompts. When did you first realize that generative AI could become central to your workflow rather than merely a novelty?

OG: I recognized the potential for the use of AI about two months after it was released to the public, in February 2023. Before, I wrote books on cosmology and the origin of life, without it.

BD: How much more productive would you say AI has made you? How much time did your most recent book on the Shroud take you from start to finish? How much do you estimate it would have taken you without generative AI? And would the final product without AI have been as good as the existing book that did use it? Explain.

OG: I can give you empirical data: My book On the Origin of Life and Virus World by Means of an Intelligent Designer: The Factory Maker, Paley’s Watchmaker Argument 2.0, published before AI became available, in 2022, with about 300 pages, took me 6 months.

The trilogy X-Ray of Life, with close to 2000 pages, published early 2025, took me 4 months.

My last book, The Shroud of Turin: A Forensic Summary of the Evidence, took me 4 months to create: (1) One month to write the book itself. (2) The remainder on the images.

Specifically, the Exposition Panel images, 22 of them, took significant time. Each chapter starts with the image of one panel. This took me 4 months, and of those, 2 months were spent creating just one panel, the reconstruction of Golgotha.

If I had to write the book without AI, it would not have been possible. It contains a lot of information where investigating one single claim could have taken days or even weeks. The structure, the information content, and the writing style are, in my understanding, very, very difficult to achieve and accomplish without AI.

[Here are the images cited:]

BD: What does “getting the most out of AI” mean in practice for you? Is it mainly a matter of prompt design, iterative questioning, model comparison, domain knowledge, or the discipline to reject weak output?

OG: When I say, getting the most out of it, it means, first of all, not to set any barriers or arbitrary restrictions. AI means for me as well its use in generating images. It also means to learn. AI is one of, if not the greatest, tools to learn, to investigate, to elaborate, to develop, to create all sorts of things, amongst them books and scientific papers. I have also used it to write poems, jokes, letters for music, and sarcastic texts to expose the irrationality of naturalism/atheism. Also, to create songs and videos for YouTube. It is a tool that can give you wings and achieve things that would not be possible without. It also permits a much higher output of texts in all sorts of fields.

BD: The publishing industry is actively trying to draw a firm line in the sand regarding artificial intelligence, distinguishing between AI-assisted writing versus AI-generated writing. Please explain that distinction.

OG: I use AI a lot to improve my own writing. That is, often I write an email, and then ask AI to write the text better. That is what is called AI-assisted writing. AI-generated writing is when you give much less input instructions and permit the AI to do all the work for you.

One of the tasks that I have invested in is to always be up to date about new tools, new or updated AI bots, and incorporate them into my toolbox. I use not just ChatGPT, but all sorts of bots. And not use just one at a time, but in combination. Often, I generate text with DeepSeek and Claude, and compare each of the outputs to figure out which is superior. I often take the output of Claude, feed it to DeepSeek, and then compare the texts. I do comparisons all the time, going through several rounds to improve the text.

BD: Walk us through your actual process for getting the most out of AI. When beginning a book project, what is the sequence from idea to outline to research map to chapter drafting to revision?

OG: Usually, it starts with outlining a topic, a theme, and the writing style.

I use a prompt to structure the book, the chapters, as here:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500p25-formatting-prompts#14628

I use a master prompt to write the chapters:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500p25-formatting-prompts#14617

Often, before asking for a chapter to be written, I copy paste all information available as the basis for writing the chapter into a word document. Length is no issue. Sometimes, I will include 50 pages or more.

Importantly, once a chapter is generated, I don’t ask just one AI bot, but depending on the degree of importance of it, up to 5. Usually ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Grok. When it’s very important to get things right, I copy and paste all outputs to a Word document and ask for the responses to be synthesized. I ask to keep what is best and remove what is weakest or worst. My two preferred bots for doing that are Claude and DeepSeek. I can also ask both to do the synthesis, and then ask again which of the two gives the best result. I also use a prompt to evaluate the responses. As an example of such a prompt, see here:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500-formatting-prompts#14399

If I go through that procedure to create a prompt, I use it and also save it to my virtual library, as here:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500-formatting-prompts#14153

For less important prompts, I did for a time use a prompt generator, but I’ve now abandoned it:

https://www.promptcowboy.ai

If the book chapter contains a reference, I use following prompt to generate the writing style:

See where the text starts with: output format:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500-formatting-prompts

I check all links manually.

Once a chapter is written, I use a very sophisticated prompt to fact check the chapter:

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3500p50-formatting-prompts#14691

In my last book, I took a week to fact-check the entire book using this method.

BD: How do you use AI for research at the front end? Do you ask it to identify literatures, summarize opposing views, generate bibliographies, propose lines of inquiry, or bring to light obscure but relevant connections?

OG: There is no generally and routinely applied road-map. It happens intuitively and stochastically, depending on the topic, and situation.

BD: How do you prevent AI from merely confirming what you already believe? What prompt strategies do you use to force it to challenge your assumptions and generate the strongest counterarguments?

OG: I ask directly with the prompt formulation for the AI to be as neutral and impartial as possible.

BD: You have mentioned using multiple AIs for verification. How exactly do you do that? Do you run the same prompt across several models, or do you assign different models different roles—researcher, critic, fact-checker, stylist, skeptic? Do you have any favorite models? Any that you think are substandard and stay away from?

OG: I feed the same text to all 5 chatbots mentioned above (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Grok), and use the same prompt to do the exercise.

BD: When the models disagree, how do you decide which one is closer to the truth? What is your hierarchy of trust?

OG: Usually, when this happens, I try to go to the sources myself and check.

BD: What kinds of claims do you never trust AI to verify on its own? Where do you insist on going back to primary sources, scans, articles, technical papers, or direct quotations?

OG: My approach is pragmatic and varies from case to case. There is no overall pattern that is always the same.

BD: Do you keep a documented audit trail of prompts, responses, sources, revisions, and verification checks? If so, what does that system look like?

OG: No, I don’t.

BD: Has AI changed the way you read books and articles? How much do you use AI to summarize work? Are you now reading less, more selectively, or perhaps more deeply because AI helps you triage what matters?

OG: I must confess that this is maybe one of the setbacks or negative sides of AI. It tempts us to be more productive and to spend time only on reading what we think really matters. And often, reading literature for our comprehension is essential, and we neglect it. I see the need to police myself more on that, and spend more time reading with attention, rather than leaving everything to AI. In fact, I read more selectively, but not necessarily more deeply. The key focus becomes to understand what matters in regard of the topic in question.

BD: How do you use AI to help with structure? For instance, do you ask it to identify gaps in argument, redundancy, weak transitions, overstatement, or places where the evidence does not fully support the conclusion?

OG: Yes, that is part of the end audit of an output text.

BD: What role does AI play in your style? Do you use it to sharpen prose, simplify explanations, vary tone, or translate technical material for lay readers? How do you keep its style consistent and in your voice?

OG: Very often, I write down something, and then simply ask AI to write it better. And it always does. Asking it to keep it consistent with my voice is more difficult, maybe impossible. I think I am not very skilled in the English language to use high-quality prose, so I don’t ask AI to do that.

BD: Since you work across several languages, how do you use AI in multilingual research and drafting? Has it made it easier to compare sources, translate accurately, or reach audiences in different linguistic settings?

OG: Normally, I use it in different languages in the exact same way as in English. No big difference here.

BD: What have you learned about prompt-writing that most casual AI users do not understand? What separates a shallow prompt from a genuinely powerful one? Is the full power of prompts only realized through a sequence of prompts carefully adapted to each other?

OG: Powerful prompts are essential to obtaining high-quality AI output. I recommend tailoring the prompts and, in certain cases, working on them even over a period of time. I remember a few months ago I asked AI to do an exegesis on the question if the condemned in hell would remain and suffer there forever, or if they would be annihilated after paying for their sins. To my surprise and astonishment, all 5 bots came with the same result. Annihilationism. I posted this on my Facebook timeline, and the outrage was general. I understand it, because I also hold (for 40 years now) to the belief that punishment would be from aeon to aeon, from eternity to eternity. So I improved the prompt not two, or three times, but five times, over a couple of weeks, and the result was always the same. So, sometimes, to get a very elaborate and rigorous prompt can be time-consuming and require considerable time and thought investment.

The end prompt, you can find it here:

Dual-Framework Biblical Text Analysis Protocol (Maximum Neutrality)

https://www.academia.edu/145660309/Dual_Framework_Biblical_Text_Analysis_Protocol_Maximum_Neutrality

BD: Could you give an example of a prompt architecture you find especially effective—not necessarily your exact wording, but the components that make it work?

OG: There is no one way to go prompt. Each must be tailored to specific needs.

BD: What are the most common failure modes you see in AI output: hallucinated facts, false confidence, flattening of nuance, rhetorical padding, subtle plagiarism, made-up citations, etc.?

OG: One of the most persistent and unsolved problems is giving false links or even entirely made up scientific paper titles, and invented links for them. And in many cases, facts are entirely made up. So fact-checking is essential.

BD: Have there been moments when AI produced something so good that it surprised you? Conversely, have there been moments when it almost led you seriously astray? Please elaborate.

OG: Since I am used to using AI on a daily basis, I know how capable AI has become. But reading my new book, yes, I am very satisfied with the high quality of prose and the entertainment value that I aimed to generate.

BD: At what point does AI stop being helpful and start getting in the way? How do you know when to stop prompting and simply think, write, and judge for yourself?

OG: Cases arise that AI seems incapable of handling. For example, in a Shroud discussion group, the topic was about the reliability of the patch hypothesis to explain the Radiocarbon C14 result. One thing that came into my mind was that the Shroud fabric is very rare, hard to make—it requires a complex loom. So if the aim was to fix the border and to attach a new patch, and keep it invisible, not only would the seam have had to be invisible, but also the fabric would have had to be produced to be the same as the original cloth. A very difficult task. Nobody had thought about that. I did. AI would not have had the capability to come up with that. So there are thinking processes that the human mind is capable of but that AI will never be able to replicate. That’s why I am a skeptic of Artificial General Intelligence AGI. AI would have to be capable of becoming conscious. And that will never happen.

AI-generated images and visual development

BD: Your books make striking use of visuals (as noted in the images shown above). How do you use AI image tools to generate covers, internal illustrations, or conceptual images that are both beautiful and appropriate? Please provide details.

OG: In many cases, before I ask AI to generate an image, I investigate. For example, in my recent book, many scenarios are based on historical archaeological investigations. I ask AI to generate a detailed prompt, for example, of the trial of Jesus in front of Caiaphas. I first investigate where the event took place, the architecture, who was present, what the clothing was, at what time, etc., and then ask AI to reconstruct the scene. I also give references or ask AI to check the biblical text. The more precise the prompt, the better the result.

BD: When working on a subject like the Shroud of Turin, how do you ensure that generated images enhance understanding rather than sensationalize the material?

OG: The making of the image of Jesus based on the Shroud has been the most difficult and demanding endeavour of all, and took me 3 years to achieve the result that I have now. The aim has been to remain as faithful and precise to the original Shroud image. The closer, the better. A lot is also intuition, and a subjective analysis of the image output.

BD: What is your process for refining an image prompt? Do you begin from mood, symbolism, historical accuracy, compositional clarity, or audience effect?

OG: This is a stochastic/eclectic process, hard to describe, and is often a back-and-forth interaction with the AI. Do this, improve that, do better, or provide other image inputs. Often I apply manual corrections, using apps like Ipiccy, etc.

Speed, productivity, and publishing

BD: We addressed productivity earlier in this interview, but let’s return to it. AI has clearly accelerated your production. In what specific ways has it allowed you to work faster without, in your judgment, lowering standards?

OG: AI has allowed us not only to work faster but also to have the world’s internet knowledge on hand, at our fingertips. That permits us to generate books and texts on an entirely new level that we could never achieve, even if studying a subject during a lifetime.

BD: How do you balance speed with maturity of thought? Is there a danger that AI lets writers publish before they have fully digested what they are trying to say?

OG: I have not experienced this problem. On the contrary. Often, when we ask AI to respond to something, it gives us much more than we knew. That has become part of my learning process. I would say that AI is the most powerful learning tool that we have today. Often it exceeds us, rather than cutting off the digestion process of thought.

BD: What becomes of the role of the expert with AI use? How much did you know about the Shroud before you jumped in with both feet and started using AI to research it? Has AI empowered you to become a legitimate expert in the Shroud, or is it allowing you merely to “fake it” as an expert in the Shroud, providing a cloak for ignorance?

OG: What is an expert? What divides a person from being an expert, or not? I think there is no clear line. What I know is that the more we dedicate ourselves to a subject or topic, the more we can learn. AI then becomes a tremendous tool to filter out what really matters. It thus improves our knowledge. It helps us to find with ease what we want to know and learn, and the more we know, the more we have authority to talk about the subject with expertise, because we have studied it. What AI cannot help us with is making clear judgments about the information it delivers. For that, we need to have expertise, which comes only with experience.

BD: You include a disclaimer in your most recent book on the Shroud acknowledging AI use while retaining full responsibility for the work. Why was it important to you to be explicit about that? Would it be legitimate to claim authorship without giving that disclaimer?

OG: I have been very clear and transparent since the beginning, when I started using AI to write books, that I use AI. Being honest is foundational for being taken seriously. My responsibility is to check the truthfulness of the book, and for that, I take great efforts to check that the book does not contain falsehoods and untrue claims.

BD: In line with this last question, how do you respond to critics who say that heavy AI use compromises authorship? Where, in your view, does genuine authorship still reside?

OG: Yes, I agree. I now have a writing partner, which is called Claude, Grok, Gemini, or ChatGPT. They do the heavy lifting for me. I see myself more as a conductor of the orchestra. Not the player anymore.

BD: Do you see AI primarily as an amplifier of your own intelligence, a research assistant, a sparring partner, a stylistic editor, or some combination of all four?

OG: All four, and much more. It is a tool that permits us to get from A to B much faster, much more comfortably. It works almost like an autopilot, and we are just doing the control, or giving the direction.

BD: Has AI changed your sense of what a single serious independent scholar can now accomplish without institutional backing?

OG: Well, there are things that AI cannot replace that institutional backing can provide, like finances to do practical experiments, as in a lab, through a telescope, with a microscope, etc.

BD: What role do you think AI should have in education? Are there aspects of education where it should be strictly limited so that humans learn to think on their own feet? How do you prevent AI from becoming a crutch? Will AI make us smarter, dumber, or some combination of the two? And if so, how?

OG: I think the use of AI simply shifts the way we use our intelligence. Before cars, we used our bodies to walk. Afterward, we used the steering wheel, pedal, etc. to drive. We still use our bodies, but in another way. Same with AI.

Ethics, bad uses of AI, and the Blake Whiting problem

BD: A recent American Scholar article described the “Blake Whiting” phenomenon: an apparently pseudonymous Amazon author with no real scholarly presence, publishing books at extreme speed (e.g., 13 books in one week) that rework existing material into polished, marketable volumes. What do you make of that development?

OG: I think it is deplorable and a bad use of AI. I invest a lot of time and effort to get the best out of AI, and my aim is quality, not quantity. Some, of course, just think about the money, and do what you described in your question. Sad.

BD: How do you distinguish your own use of AI from this kind of mass-produced, derivative publishing?

OG: My aim is always to give the best that I can give, to do serious scholarship, and to edify others. The financial gain is secondary. It’s welcome, but not the primary motivation.

BD: Where do you think the moral line is? Is the problem the use of AI itself, the concealment of AI use, the absence of genuine thinking, the recycling of other people’s work, or all of the above? How do you yourself avoid the charge of merely recycling existing work?

OG: A lot of inquiry goes into my work. I strive to make meaningful contributions. For example, I have created a 22 panel series for Shroud expositions (mentioned earlier in this interview). For years, I searched for an accurate reconstruction of Golgotha and the surrounding quarry. I couldn’t find one. I invested 2 full months, full-time, to reconstruct the site, once I did find a floor plan from a book published in 1994. I did all of this using AI.

BD: What norms would you like to see emerge for AI-enhanced books on Amazon and elsewhere—disclosure standards, source transparency, human accountability, proof of authorship, or something more?

OG: I think its important that authors are just honest about their use of AI. There is nothing shameful about using it. Shameful is to hide it and lie about its use.

BD: Do you worry that the flood of low-quality AI books could discredit serious authors who use AI responsibly and transparently? Explain.

OG: I think each author has to work to gain credibility, individually. The evaluation system on Amazon is precisely for this…. Mass-produced books will eventually be perceived as such and receive the appropriate star rating.

BD: How can readers, publishers, and reviewers learn to tell the difference between serious AI-enhanced scholarship versus synthetic, opportunistic content mills?

OG: Honestly, I don’t know, because I have never read a book, mass-produced by AI. Maybe they are even quite good. I don’t know.

Deeper questions

BD: Has long immersion in AI changed your understanding of human intelligence itself? What, if anything, has it taught you about mind, agency, originality, and judgment?

OG: Some critics say that the use of AI is just lazy and encourages us to use our brains less. I disagree. First of all, our intelligence does not change based on the use or non-use of AI. What shifts is the way we use our intelligence. We now use it to get the most out of AI. That is also a capability that has to be developed and requires thought, time, and experience. I am also amazed that the human mind has been capable of creating such an incredible tool.

BD: As someone interested in intelligent design, do you find it ironic that artificial intelligence may be helping some people think more clearly about the difference between intelligence and mechanism?

OG: I would really wish it could…. I have yet to see an atheist become a theist by using AI, and through its use to perceive the difference more clearly.

BD: What parts of your work would you still refuse to hand over to AI, no matter how good it becomes?

OG: There are things that AI simply can’t do, which is to figure out genuinely new ideas.

BD: When you look five years into the future, how do you expect your own workflow to change? What do you want to turn to next in your use of AI?

OG: My dream is to make a full 2-hour movie of the gospels, using my created images. I think even earlier that might become a real possibility.

BD: Of all the books you have written, which one best represents you at this point in your life, and why?

OG:

Unraveling the Theistic Worldview: Navigating Life’s Deepest Questions

This book covers a wide range of topics, from cosmology, the laws of physics, fine tuning, the origin of life, information, etc. In a cumulative argument for the Christian God I believe in, this book does the heavy lifting. Focused on a theistic rather than specifically Christian worldview, it leaves open the question of which God. This book represents my views well to a large degree.

BD: What are you working on now that most excites you?

OG: My next project will be a book titled The Old Testament: Forensic Summary of the Evidence, or something similar. It will examine Genesis, the flood, Exodus, etc. with realistic images of the events. Since it’s a very large subject, maybe it will be a series of books. Will see.

BD: Finally, what do you hope readers will say about your work as a whole—that it was provocative, helpful, courageous, original, spiritually serious, scientifically alert, or something else? Expand.

OG: My ultimate goal is to be faithful to the Lord’s command of the great commission: Go and tell …. So people can find Jesus, understand his love and justice, repent, receive forgiveness, be born again, find true meaning for their lives, become citizens of the Kingdom of God, and find hope for eternal life. Leading just one person to Christ will have made all my efforts worth it.

BD: Thank you for taking the time to answer this extensive set of questions. Lastly, I would like to clarify that I did use AI in formulating this interview!

OG: Thank you for the opportunity, Bill. Lastly, I would like to clarify that I responded to all these interview questions on my own, without the use of AI!

Despite its flamboyant title, this paper is about a well-defined and sober concept—conservation of information. The term conservation of information sounds technical and suggests it can be difficult to understand. It’s not. I want in this brief article to cut to the heart of this concept. I’ll show that it is self-evidently true. Additionally, I’ll show how it obliterates the materialistic, nihilistic conception of the world championed by aggressive atheists who use science as a club to beat religion.

If I could go back in time and rename conservation of information with a single word, I’d go with “offload” (verb form) or “offloading” (noun form). When you offload something, you don’t eliminate the load. Rather, you shift it to someone or something else. Moreover, in doing so, you do nothing to reduce the load. In particular, the universe doesn’t step in and through some law of nature make the load less by shifting it. That would be charity. If anything, as a load is transferred, it can become more burdensome.

Offloading goes beyond the underlying idea in such expressions as “you can’t get something for nothing,” “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (abbreviated TANSTAAFL), “there’s no free ride,” “everything comes at cost,” etc. Underlying “no free lunch” is the principle of sufficient reason—if something exists, then it couldn’t just magically materialize but there has to be some reason or cause to account for it.

The idea of offloading is downstream from no free lunch. Offloading considers something that exists and then asks what happens to it as it is shifted elsewhere. Offloading says that as a load is shifted, it doesn’t diminish, though it may actually increase.

To take a silly example, imagine that you have just received a million dollars. The natural question then is where did you get that million dollars. Let’s say Alice gave it to you. Explaining how you got the million dollars is thus offloaded to Alice. But that means Alice had to have at least a million dollars—no less but possibly more. And where did Alice get her money? Let’s say from Bob. In that case, explaining how Alice got her money is offloaded to Bob, and he in turn is going to need to have at least a million dollars—indeed, at least as much as Alice. Bottom line: the load doesn’t disappear but merely gets shifted around.

Language offers us a whole array of expressions to capture this idea of offloading. Indeed, the offloading principle is embedded in human language worldwide:

1. Shifting the burden — Moving the problem (or its consequences) elsewhere instead of fixing the root cause.

2. Robbing Peter to pay Paul — Taking from one source/area to cover another, achieving no net gain (often implies short-term juggling that leaves the overall situation unresolved).

3. Undressing Peter to dress Paul (variant of the previous point; in French, Déshabiller Pierre pour habiller Paul) — As the French proverb makes clear, it serves no purpose to undress Peter to dress Paul. One of them will be naked.

4. Displacing the problem (or problem displacement) — Relocating the issue without eliminating it.

5. Passing the buck — Shifting responsibility, and thus the problem, to someone else.

6. Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic — Rearranging things cosmetically while the fundamental disaster remains untouched.

7. Zero-sum game — Any “fix” just redistributes the pain without reducing the total problem, perhaps even exacerbating the problem so that everybody goes below zero.

8. Refinance or rollover — Taking out a new loan (often on different terms) to pay off the existing one, leaving the principal undiminished. Or as the Indonesian proverb goes: gali lubang, tutup lubang — go into debt to pay another debt.

9. Trading one problem for another (or swapping/substituting/switching one problem for another) — Exchanging issues without real improvement.

10. Filling one hole by digging another — You’ll need to dig at least as deep on the second hole to fill the first hole.

11. Kicking the can down the road — Delaying the problem by shifting it forward in time, leaving it to others do deal with the can, but it’s still the same can.

12. Juggling accounts — As in juggling credit card payments that leave the total to be paid unchanged and perhaps incurring even greater cost given interest and penalties.

13. Shell game — deceptively shifting things around to hide them from coming to light (but those things are all still there).

14. Dismantle the east wall to repair the west wall — Chinese proverb (chāi dōng qiáng bǔ xī qiáng), which describes a makeshift or temporary solution that fixes one problem by creating or worsening another.

15. Squeezing the balloon — Applying pressure in one place only makes the bulge pop out somewhere else; the problem changes location, not substance.

16. Externalizing the cost — Shifting the cost to others (the public, customers, future generations, the environment) so the original actor appears relieved while the cost remains.

17. Borrowing from tomorrow — Covering today’s shortfall by consuming future resources, leaving the underlying deficit in place and often making it worse later.

18. Eating your seed corn — Solving an immediate problem by consuming what was meant to secure the future; relief now, deeper trouble later.

19. Sweeping it under the rug — Hiding the problem from view rather than resolving it; the issue remains, only less visible.

20. Playing whack-a-mole — Knocking down one manifestation of the problem only to have it reappear elsewhere, often repeatedly and with no lasting gain.

Need I go on? I could go on. But the point should by now be proven beyond any shadow of doubt. Offloading is a fundamental principle about how the world works. It is self-evident. The offloading principle is true and obvious. Moreover, to deny it is fallacious. In fact, its denial, whether explicit or tacit, may rightly be called the “offloading fallacy.”

The offloading fallacy is rife in evolutionary thinking. Consider, for instance, the following exchange I had with Darwinian apologist Eugenie Scott on Peter Robinson’s program Uncommon Knowledge. Scott and I were discussing evolution and intelligent design when Robinson asked about monkeys, given enough time, producing the works of Shakespeare by randomly typing at a typewriter.

Scott responded by saying that this example fails to capture the power of Darwinian evolution in that the monkey’s typing merely produces random variation, but that Darwin adds to this natural selection, which acts like a technician who stands behind the monkey and whites out every mistake the monkey makes in typing Shakespeare.

At this point, alarm bells should go off for anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of the offloading fallacy. Indeed, where do you get a technician who knows enough about the works of Shakespeare to white out mistakes in the typing of Shakespeare? What are the qualifications of this technician? How does the technician know what to erase? Scott never said. She merely offloaded the problem from the monkey to the technician: The monkey’s success at typing Shakespeare is explained only momentarily, but at the cost of leaving unexplained the technician who corrects the monkey’s typing.

Or consider an example from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. There he claims to show how natural selection can create information via his well-known METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL computer simulation. Pure random sampling of the 28 letters and spaces in this target phrase would, on a given trial, have a probability of only 1 in 27^28, or roughly 1 in 10^40, of achieving it (i.e., one in a ten thousand trillion trillion trillion). In evolving METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, Dawkins’ simulation was able to overcome this improbability by carefully choosing a fitness landscape to assign higher fitness to character sequences that have more corresponding letters in common with this target phrase.

Thus, in place of pure randomness, Dawkins substituted a hill-climbing algorithm with exactly one peak and with a clear way to improve fitness at any place away from the peak (smooth and increasing gradients all the way). But where did this fitness landscape come from? Such a fitness landscape exists for any possible target phrase whatsoever, and not just for METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Dawkins explains the evolution of METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL in terms of a fitness landscape that with high probability allows for the evolution to this target phrase. Yet he leaves the fitness landscape itself unexplained. In so doing, he commits the offloading fallacy.

I submit that all of Darwinism, insofar as it claims to explain the emergence of complexity from simplicity (and this is its preeminent claim to fame) is but an example of the offloading fallacy, and one that is not even thinly disguised. It is truly amazing how successful this fallacy has been at duping the biological community in particular and the scientific community in general (don’t get me started about the use of this fallacy in physics and cosmology).

But once scientists become committed to materialism, which is the most virulent form of atheism, Darwinism becomes the only game in town. In that case, when it comes to biological origins, something very close to Darwinism must be true. And so, materialistic scientists embrace the offloading fallacy even though in any other context they would reject it. Or as the Psalmist put it, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”

About 200 years ago, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer remarked, “It would be a very good thing if every trick could receive some short and obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular trick, he could at once be reproved for it.” The offloading fallacy is one such trick and its name meets Schopenhauer’s requirement for a “short and obviously appropriate name.”

So where does conservation of information fit into all of this. It is an example of the offloading principle applied to information. Information is about narrowing possibilities. The more possibilities are narrowed, the more information is conveyed. If I tell you I live in the US, I’ve narrowed the possibilities of where I am in the world. But if I tell you I live 40 miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed the possibilities considerably more, and so have given you considerably more information about my location.

The usual way to measure the narrowing of possibilities is through probabilities. Consider poker hands, and let’s compare a hand with a single pair versus a hand with a royal flush. There are 2,598,960 total poker hands. Of these 1,098,240 form a single pair whereas 4 form a royal flush. The probability of getting a single pair is thus about .42 whereas the probability of getting a royal flush is 1 in 649,740, or .00000154. The smaller probability of the royal flush indicates that learning a hand came up as a royal flush conveys a lot more information that learning it came up a single pair.

Probabilities thus represent information. The smaller the probability, the more information. Information theorists prefer to represent increasing amounts of information by larger numbers, and so they measure information by taking a negative logarithm (to the base 2) of probabilities. This turns probabilities into numbers of bits, with smaller probabilities indicating greater numbers of bits. Thus getting 20 heads in a row with a fair coin corresponds to a probability of 1 in 2^20 (or roughly 1 in 1,000,000) and equivalently to 20 bits of information.

Let’s now look more closely at what happens with probabilities when information is offloaded. We’ve seen what’s at stake here in the METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL example of Dawkins. Generating this sequence by pure randomness was extremely improbable (1 in 10^40). But once a suitable evolutionary (hill-climbing) algorithm was introduced, the probability essentially went up to 1—it was no longer improbable but became virtually certain.

The certain event is always assigned a probability of 1 and thus contains zero information (the certain event is guaranteed to happen, so you learn nothing by learning it happened). But there was a cost to this certainty. The hill-climbing algorithm was one of many algorithms that could have been tried. Getting the right algorithm that with high (or certain) probability generates METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL is itself highly improbable.

It is a basic fact about probabilities (indeed, a corollary of the Law of Total Probability) that for events, objects, structures, or hypotheses E and F that the following inequality holds:

Here P(E) and P(F) denote the probability of E and F respectively. P(E|F) is a conditional probability. It signifies the probability of E given that we know F holds. E may thus denote rolling a fair die and getting a six. Its probability is therefore 1/6. F may then denote rolling an even number. If we know that an even number has been rolled, the probability of getting a six is then 1/3. In this case P(E|F) = 1/3.

This inequality may be called the “offloading inequality.” To see how it works, consider the following examples:

1. E = it’s wet outside; F = it’s raining outside

2. E = monkey types Shakespeare; F = lab tech whites out mistakes

3. E = arrow hits target; F = favorable wind guides arrow to target

4. E = find needle in a haystack; F = find procedure for finding needle

5. E = safe cracks open on first try; F = insider slipped you the combination

6. E = golfer makes a hole-in-one; F = hidden guide rail funnels the ball to the cup

7. E = student guesses all answers right on a hard exam; F = answer key was leaked in advance

8. E = treasure hunter finds the buried chest on the first dig; F = an old map gives the exact spot

9. E = random mutation yields a working enzyme; F = the search is confined to a tiny preselected set of viable sequences

10. E = message in a bottle reaches one particular person; F = ocean currents and release point were carefully engineered to carry it there

Examples like this are easily multiplied. The point to note is that as E’s probability is raised via F, the thing F that is doing the raising itself shares in any improbability associated with E. Put differently, any improbability of E gets offloaded to an improbability of F to the degree that F raises E’s probability.

To appreciate how this works, let’s walk through the first of these examples (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to run the offloading inequality through the rest of these examples). Suppose we discover it’s wet outside. That’s E. Next suppose that F denotes that it’s raining outside. Then P(E|F), the probability that it’s wet outside given that it’s raining outside, is 1 (obviously!). But this means that P(F), the probability that it’s raining outside, is less than or equal to the probability of it being wet outside. This, of course, makes perfect sense—there are other ways for it to be wet outside besides its raining outside, such as the operation of a sprinkler system.

The other examples all follow the same pattern, though in some cases it can happen that P(E|F) does not equal 1. In that case, P(F) need not be less than or equal to P(E), though the probability of obtaining E by first obtaining F (P(F)) and then by means of F obtaining E (P(E|F)), a probability calculated as

will be less than or equal to P(E). The bottom line here is that offloading the probability (information) of E to F does nothing to improve the probability of getting E. The offloading inequality is thus a precise mathematical way of stating the offloading principle in an information-theoretic context.

All of evolutionary theory, insofar as it seeks to dispense with teleology, is an exercise in cosmic bargain hunting, trying to work the laws of nature so that the information it needs to explain gets offloaded to less intensive forms of information. If you will, it always seeks to explain E by F where F is easier to account for than E.

To see that I’m not making this up, consider what may be the most revealing claim in Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker: “The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity.” Complexity (more information) in the present is thus, according to Darwin’s theory, offloaded to simplicity (less information) in the past. The offloading principle in general, and the offloading inequality in particular, shows that this move to explain complexity from simplicity doesn’t—and indeed can’t—work.

Naturalistic evolutionists are in effect looking for the laws of nature to do charity work—to offload their information load to a place where the load is less. But that can’t be done. The principle is universal and the math doesn’t allow it. In particular, the offloading inequality shows that the informational load that needs to be explained becomes at least as intensive (often more intensive) as one tries to shift it in explaining the thing that initially needed to be explained.

It’s no accident that our language and metaphors across the globe capture the illegitimacy of offloading—that it can’t be made to work and that to pretend to have made it work is at best self-delusion and at worst outright fraud. Darwinismus delendus est!

For the full technical details about conservation of information, see my free monograph at Bio-Complexity titled The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.

In late January 2026, Inkwell Press released Defying Low Expectations: What Jaime Escalante Taught Us About Learning, which I reported on this Substack here. Two days ago, April 6, 2026, Inkwell Press released the Spanish translation of this book, available here at Amazon.

Jaime Escalante no solo enseñó cálculo en el este de Los Ángeles: derribó el prejuicio de que el alumnado pobre y de minorías no puede destacar académicamente. Y después vio cómo el sistema, con discreción, intentaba borrar las evidencias de su logro. Desafiando las bajas expectativas cuenta la historia más allá de Stand and Deliver, la película de 1988 sobre Escalante, protagonizada por Edward James Olmos, que se convirtió en un clásico en las aulas. Aquí conocemos al maestro inmigrante boliviano, al director inconformista Henry Gradillas, quien le abrió camino, y a las fuerzas que desmantelaron su éxito cuando empezó a incomodar al statu quo. A partir de nuevas entrevistas, materiales en línea que se daban por perdidos y datos actuales sobre centros con bajo rendimiento, Dembski y Thomas muestran cómo Escalante construyó un entorno donde el esfuerzo máximo se traducía en resultados extraordinarios. Esto no es nostalgia: es un modelo para revitalizar la educación en Estados Unidos. La trayectoria de Escalante deja claro que esperar poco del alumnado es una mala práctica pedagógica, y demuestra cómo la exigencia académica, el liderazgo con principios y la valentía moral pueden transformar escuelas consideradas “perdidas” en referentes de excelencia.

“Jaime Escalante desenmascaró uno de los mitos más peligrosos de nuestros tiempos: que no se puede esperar que los estudiantes de barrios marginados alcancen los niveles más altos de rendimiento. Gracias a él, esa idea destructiva ha quedado por siempre desterrada.”
—Edward James Olmos, actor que interpretó a Escalante

“Jaime Escalante y los de la Escuela Preparatoria Garfield son el tipo de personas que el cine debería ensalzar, y esta vez [en Stand and Deliver] lo hizo.”
—Presidente Ronald Reagan

“A lo largo de su carrera, Jaime abrió las puertas del éxito y la educación superior a sus estudiantes, uno por uno, y demostró que el origen de una persona no tiene por qué determinar hasta dónde puede llegar.”
—Presidente Barack Obama

William A. Dembski trabajó como investigador en matemáticas durante el momento de mayor notoriedad de Jaime Escalante, a finales de la década de 1980. Sin perder de vista el impacto monumental de Escalante en la enseñanza del cálculo en la Escuela Preparatoria Garfield, en el este de Los Ángeles, Dembski tuvo finalmente la oportunidad de rendirle homenaje con este libro. Conocido sobre todo por su trabajo en torno al diseño inteligente, también es empresario y se interesa por las conexiones entre educación, tecnología y libertad.

Alex Thomas inició su trayectoria como redactor publicitario y productor de radio en Dallas y Houston. Desde entonces, ha desempeñado diversos cargos, entre ellos productor musical, ejecutivo de distribución de programas de radio, editor y consultor de comunicaciones. Le interesa especialmente la historia de la educación y el papel que esta desempeña en la cultura estadounidense. Estudió en la Universidad Bautista de Houston, la Universidad de Vanderbilt y el University College de Oxford.

AI Use Disclosure: The author used artificial intelligence in the development of this work.

At six foot six, Liam O’Donoghue had spent much of his life disappointing strangers.

They saw the height first and the rest later. In airports, grocery stores, church parking lots, and restaurants, people always asked, “You play basketball?”

Liam always gave the same answer.

“No.”

The more accurate answer would have been: not successfully.

He was twenty years old, broad-shouldered, long-armed, and naturally unathletic. He could dribble only as the ball directed him. He could not pivot without risk to bystanders or furniture. He had never developed a jump shot, a layup package, or any other part of the game normally associated with height.

His younger sister Kate, who was not tall enough to be asked about basketball by anyone, beat him at HORSE so often that he came to regard basketball as a penance for past sins.

So when Liam met the leprechaun in County Clare, the thing that shocked him most was not the leprechaun.

It was that the leprechaun wanted to talk basketball.

He met him on the second evening of his trip to Ireland, standing in a windy field ringed with old stones. His grandmother, recently dead, had left him one instruction in a note among her things: Go properly. Walk. Don’t hurry. Let the place notice you.

So he was walking.

The sky had not fully committed to night. The water beyond the field looked calm but forbidding. Liam stepped through a gap in the stones and heard a voice behind him say, “I wouldn’t go much farther.”

He turned.

A small man sat on one of the stones with his legs crossed and his hands folded on one knee. He wore a green coat too well tailored to be comic, black boots polished to a military gleam, and a hat that looked less folkloric than rakish.

He was perhaps two and a half feet tall.

Liam stared.

The small man got up and sighed. “Tall people are always last to arrive at comprehension. There’s more distance between the eyes and the brain.”

Liam looked around for hidden cameras.

“Good instinct,” said the little man, “when the impossible is so readily manufactured.”

Liam swallowed. “Are you a leprechaun?”

“I am,” said the small man, “though I resent the tone with which the word is usually spoken.”

Liam decided not to run.

The leprechaun looked him over. “You’re an O’Donoghue.”

“Yes.”

“American.”

“Yes.”

“Six foot six.”

“Yes.”

“Always being asked whether you play basketball.”

Liam blinked. “Yes.”

“Terrible at it.”

Liam hesitated. “Also yes.”

The leprechaun nodded with satisfaction. “Excellent.”

“That last part seems rude.”

“It would be rude if I held it against you. I do not. I value misalignment. A thing is always more interesting when given to the wrong person.”

Liam stood there in the field, trying to decide whether the right response to this creature was respect, skepticism, or a request for medical assistance.

The leprechaun spared him the effort.

“America,” he said, “still likes basketball?”

“Very much.”

“And it still likes odds, prediction, analytics, rankings, percentages, simulations, certainty?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good,” said the leprechaun. “Then I have a gift for you.”

Liam had just enough sense to distrust generosity from beings out of folklore. “What kind of gift?”

“A narrow one. I’m not irresponsible.” The leprechaun raised one finger. “No gold. That ruins people. No immortality. That ruins time. No invulnerability. That ruins narrative. No kingship. That ruins government.”

“What, then?”

The leprechaun smiled. “From this moment on, whenever you make intentional contact with a basketball in genuine attempt to score on a regulation hoop, and the scoring path is physically possible, the ball will go in.”

Liam stared.

“That seems specific.”

“Magic benefits from clear specifications.”

“You mean if I shoot it, I can’t miss?”

“Shoot. Swipe. In any way touch the ball with the intention of making a basket. If the shot is physically possible, it will go in.”

Liam frowned. “Any Intentional contact? Are you kidding?”

“No. Palm it, push it, slap it, tip it, bat it, fling it, volley it, panic at it. If you mean it toward the basket, and the path is physically possible, it will score.”

“So I don’t even need a real shot?”

“A real score is enough.”

Liam considered this. “Why would you do that?”

The leprechaun looked faintly offended. “Because it is funny.”

“There’s no catch?”

“Must everything in your country be either a purchase or a warning? Can no one receive a well-made absurdity without looking for a lawyer behind every bush?”

“I just thought—”

“Yes,” said the leprechaun. “That’s usually the trouble.”

He hopped down from the stone, walked once around Liam as if inspecting him for flaws, and stopped.

“One limit,” he said. “Physically possible means physically possible. I will not detach your shoulder to amuse a crowd. I arrange probabilities. I do not suspend anatomy.”

Then he snapped his fingers.

Nothing seemed different.

No light. No rumble. No scary music. No sensation of power entering Liam’s frame.

The leprechaun nodded. “There.”

“There what?”

“There the gift.”

“Wait,” said Liam. “How do I know—”

But the leprechaun was gone.

Liam stood alone in the field with the wind, the stones, and one yellow flower bending in the grass where the creature had been.

He walked until he happened on a schoolyard court.

By happy coincidence, the gate stood open and a weathered basketball lay under the hoop.

He picked it up, stepped to the free throw line, and shot.

The ball struck back rim, front rim, reconsidered its options, and fell through.

“Fine,” Liam said. “Lucky.”

He stepped back and shot again. Clean.

He moved to the three-point line. In.

He tossed underhand. In.

He turned sideways and shoved it from his hip. In.

Then, because he was alone, he tried something more ungainly. He flipped the ball backward over his shoulder without looking. In.

He stopped shooting and stared at the hoop in disbelief.

Then he resumed. He tried half-formed shots, lunging shots, sideways pushes, flat-handed smacks. At one point he tossed the ball too far ahead, had to leap after it, and merely slapped it with his fingertips in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. The ball rose high, kissed the backboard, and dropped in.

That was when the full inelegance of his gift became clear.

He did not need to shoot well.

He barely needed to shoot.

He needed only to make deliberate scoring contact.

Liam returned to his rented room with the strong sense that nothing in his life was ever going to be the same.

Back in Indiana he told Kate.

She listened with folded arms.

“You met a leprechaun,” she said.

“Yes.”

“In Ireland.”

“Yes.”

“And now any time you touch a basketball trying to score, it goes in.”

“That is the situation.”

Kate nodded once. “Show me.”

At a public court near home she barked one instruction after another.

“Start normal.”

He shot from the arc. In.

“Now wrong hand.”

In.

“Now don’t shoot. Just bat it.”

Liam tossed the ball to himself, slapped it one-handed toward the hoop like a clumsy volleyball player, and watched it arc in.

Kate narrowed her eyes.

“Again. Off balance.”

He stumbled on purpose, half-fell, and swatted the ball upward with the heel of his hand. It hit glass and dropped.

“Tip-in from the side.”

In.

“Don’t catch it at all. Just redirect.”

In.

For an hour she designed indignities and Liam converted them into points. At last she lowered the ball and said, in a tone of deep professional interest, “We’re filming this.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It will make everything worse.”

“Of course it will,” said Kate. “But it will also answer the important question.”

“What important question?”

“How much worse?”

The video lasted just over two minutes. It was all one continuous take. Liam in a gray T-shirt on a cracked public court, touching the ball in one increasingly implausible way after another while Kate named the attempts off-camera with clinical calm.

“Backhand it.”

In.

“Tip it left-handed.”

In.

“Don’t catch. Just redirect.”

In.

“From half court, and make it ugly.”

“From full court, and make it uglier.”

Liam chased a bad toss, slapped the ball with an open palm while stumbling sideways, and watched it drop clean through.

Kate posted the clip under the title: My brother went to Ireland terrible at basketball and returned as the greatest shooter of all time.

By morning it had three million views.

Then came the predictable progression of disbelief.

Fake.

Edited.

Magnets.

Deepfake.

Government.

Deeperfake.

Then:

Live stream him.

A local station did.

Liam made shot after shot under studio lights. It’s as though he wanted to be inelegant on purpose. He tipped one in from a rebound angle with both feet planted wrong. He volleyed another off a bad pass. He redirected one from behind his head with the back of his hand.

A former player serving as guest analyst stopped laughing halfway through the segment and said, imitating Chief Inspector Dreyfus, “His form is terrible. He’s the Inspector Clouseau of basketball.”

By evening every network in the country was trying to explain him.

A biomechanics lab found nothing special in his body except conspicuous ineptitude at every skill besides scoring. A statistician on a panel observed that explaining one bizarre basket was trivial; explaining hundreds in sequence was a probabilistic miracle. A physicist at Berkeley proposed that in nearly every universe Liam missed like anyone else, but that we happened to occupy just the right branch where he did not.

This produced the headline that embarrassed Liam most:

ARE WE LIVING IN LIAM’S LUCKY UNIVERSE?

Recruiters called. Agents called. Commentators called. Podcasters called and called. A sports-betting company requested that he never enter their properties. The startup founder of Certainty Architecture tried to enlist him as their mascot.

Liam stayed at Indiana State because he figured his gift could do no worse there than any other place.

Coach Danvers watched Liam in a private gym for eight minutes before saying, “I’ve seen enough.”

Liam had done nothing in those eight minutes except mis-handle the ball, blow a simple layup he did not intend to score, then tip in five impossible attempts from bad angles. So he asked, “Enough good or enough bad?”

Danvers rubbed his jaw. “Both.”

The coach’s questions were practical.

“Can you dribble?”

“Badly.”

“Pass?”

“Define pass.”

“Defend?”

“I can be an obstacle.”

“Can you get open?”

“If I run around erratically like a crazy man.”

“Can you get a scoring touch on the ball if someone gets it near you?”

“Yes.”

Danvers pointed at him. “That’s the key.”

The first scrimmage revealed what needed to happen.

If Liam ever made clean contact on offense, points followed. But defenders, once warned, swarmed him so completely that he often could not get any hand involved. Worse, on defense he was utterly useless.

Danvers stopped the scrimmage, blew the whistle again, and said, “Good. We have an asset and a liability.”

The liability was obvious. Liam was not a basketball player in the ordinary sense. He was a loophole in sneakers. If left unprotected, defenders could crowd him, bump him, deny him, and make normal offense impossible. If left exposed on defense, he actively contributed to the opposition’s confidence.

So Danvers did the sensible thing. He stopped trying to use Liam as a player and started using him as a weapon.

Liam would not start.

He would not be asked to run offense.

He would not dribble in traffic.

He would not remain on the floor long enough for smart teams to hunt him to death on defense.

He would enter in bursts: after timeouts, on sideline plays, on baseline inbounds, at the ends of quarters, in comeback situations, and any time the game became frantic enough for ordinary basketball to thin out.

Most important, the team would stop trying to get Liam a shot.

They would get him contact.

That changed everything.

A proper shooter needs space, balance, and release. Liam needed a fraction of a second and some part of a hand. A driven pass, a lob, a ricochet, a bad rebound, a trapped possession about to die—any of these could become three points if Liam reached it with intention.

Danvers drew up sets that looked less like basketball than like twelve-step interventions. Three screens. One decoy cut. Liam loose near the logo. A pass too high for a catch but perfect for a volleyball-style redirect.

Another play had him slipping through traffic under the basket, not to finish at the rim, but to back-tip a ball over his shoulder from a seemingly impossible angle. In practice he discovered that even a fingertip deflection counted, provided he meant it.

Opponents adapted by assigning a body to him and then another body to the first body. Danvers adapted by assigning two large men to Liam.

Their official position was forward.

Their actual position was witness protection.

One of them was Reggie Miles, six foot eight, cheerful, but gifted with the kind of muscular menace every coach privately appreciates. He made opposing players pay for putting hands on Liam.

“Man,” Reggie told him during one game, “you’re not a scorer. You’re a constitutional crisis.”

The nickname came from a columnist after a December game in which Liam entered with three minutes left, Indiana State down eleven, and proceeded to score fifteen points without once taking what any honest person would call a shot.

One was a corner tip off a hard pass he never controlled.

One was a side-handed slap from twenty-eight feet while being bumped.

One was an inbounds redirect that barely touched his fingers and somehow found a path off the glass.

One was a volleyball-style smack over a defender’s shoulder after a loose ball skipped high.

The columnist wrote: Statistics have finally met their natural enemy. His name is Liam O’Donoghue, though by now the conference may as well call him Mr. Improbability.

Students embraced the name at once.

By January they were wearing green shirts reading INTENTIONAL CONTACT and LOOPHOLE WITH SNEAKERS.

The sport, meanwhile, grew uneasy.

Some teams tried simply crowding Liam. This worked until they learned that crowding him often produced the very chaos from which he profited. An ordinary star suffers when the play breaks. Liam improved. A trapped pass, a ricochet, a ball knocked loose at the wrong angle—these became invitations.

Other teams took a darker route and sent in designated muscle.

This strategy lasted two televised games.

In the first, a reserve forward from Southern Illinois University hip-checked Liam into the scorer’s table before an inbounds play. Reggie introduced him to a screen that made the highlight reel. The refs issued flagrants. The conference office circulated a memo on player safety before sunrise.

In the second, a team tried grabbing Liam whenever he cut toward the ball. Cameras caught it. Commentators, who normally defend rough play with the moral seriousness of bored uncles, called it cowardice. Public sentiment turned so sharply that by the next week roughing Liam had become reputationally expensive. Nobody wanted to be the team that tried to beat a probability freak with hired assault.

So the sport adapted. Referees watched him closely. His team hid him until the last possible moment. Danvers used offense-defense substitutions whenever he could, because on defense Liam remained what he had always been: hopeless.

Indiana State did not become unbeatable. It became terrifying late.

If the Sycamores led by fifteen, Liam was irrelevant. If they trailed by ten with three minutes left, the air changed. A normal three-point specialist still requires a shot. Liam required only a touch. His offensive return per moment was so obscene that it could erase his defensive weakness in short bursts. He was not a star in the full heroic sense. He was a tactical exploit.

America, being America, loved and hated him at once.

Liam wasn’t thrilled about the fame. People handed him babies, bets, tax forms, and fantasy lineups as though his gift might be transferable.

He took Indiana State to the Elite Eight and lost there for the best possible reason: not enough possessions. The opposing coach slowed the game to a glacial pace, denied transitions, rebounded everything, and treated the final two minutes as an anti-Liam clinic. It worked. Liam scored twenty-four points in ten minutes but watched helpless as the clock continued to belong to physics.

Then came the NBA.

The debate around him could reach no firm conclusion.

Some argued that his defensive frailty and inability to play normal offense would limit him at the highest level. Others pointed out that a player who could manufacture guaranteed three-pointers from broken possessions had no historic comparison and therefore no safe ceiling.

Milwaukee took him third overall.

Their general manager explained the decision in one perfect sentence.

“There’s always a compelling reason,” he said, “to bet on certainty.”

Liam’s NBA phase was brief and catastrophic.

The league discovered exactly what college had discovered, only faster and with more money attached. Liam could not survive on the floor for long stretches. Good guards hunted him. Smart offenses dragged him into in action. His basketball fundamentals remained non-existent.

But none of that addressed the real problem.

Late in games, once the floor opened and desperation entered, he broke the geometry.

Down twelve with two minutes left no longer meant what it had meant. An inbounds play, a high pass, a trap, a loose ball, a ricochet toward Liam’s hand—each became a likely three. Not a hopeful one. A likely one. The difference unsettled everyone.

In his sixth game Milwaukee trailed Boston by fifteen with just over two minutes remaining. Then Liam checked in.

He redirected a high pass from the wing.

He back-tipped a scramble off glass.

He slapped in a sideline inbounds play from twenty-nine feet while being closed on by two defenders.

He made half and full court shots.

He volleyball-spiked a trapped ball toward the rim and watched it drop.

He converted seven threes in a little over a minute and a half, the last of them a one-handed airborne deflection near the scorer’s table after getting clipped at the ankle and barely staying vertical long enough to intend the shot.

Milwaukee won by one.

The Commissioner called an emergency meeting the next morning.

What happened afterward was, in its way, inevitable. The league did not claim Liam cheated. It did not accuse him of technological chicanery, fraud, or even sorcery. It said something far more revealing.

It said uncertainty was essential to the game.

That was the heart of it. Liam did not dominate basketball in every sense. He was too bad at too much. But he made one crucial part of the game too certain. High-leverage possessions could no longer be trusted to remain uncertain, and without that, the league began to feel less like sport than accounting.

So the NBA wrote a rule around him without using his name.

No player could participate who, through demonstrated repetitive anomaly, rendered normal probabilistic variation irrelevant to the essential structure of competitive play.

ESPN put that sentence on screen while three retired players laughed so hard one had to remove his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes.

Kate called Liam and said, “Congratulations. You’ve been banned by a policy you inspired.”

Milwaukee voided his contract, releasing him with public affection and private relief, along with a miserly severance. Attorneys were eager for Liam to take the NBA to court and try to recoup the earnings guaranteed in his contract. But money was never his thing, and he didn’t want the fight that a high-profile lawsuit would bring.

So Liam went home to Indiana and spent three weeks chilling with family and friends. He didn’t touch a basketball.

Then Reggie called.

“You busy?”

“No.”

“Good. Charity exhibition in Chicago wants you.”

“I’m banned.”

“From the NBA,” Reggie said. “Not from joy.”

That line had been supplied by Reggie’s wife.

The exhibition was meant to be one night. It turned into a circuit, then a business, then something close to a new sport. Not basketball exactly. Basketball had too much self-respect to survive Liam whole. This was adjacent. Hoops, courts, angles, obstacles, platforms, redirect panels, moving screens, family crowds, scholarship money, school-gym funding, musicians, engineers, trick-shot artists, retired pros, and children with no investment in the business of established institutions.

They called it The Improbability Games.

At the first Dublin event, held outdoors under strings of lights beside the ruins of a medieval church stood a court along with a band ready to entertain. Liam stood near the baseline before the start and heard a voice at his knee say, “You’ve improved the joke.”

He looked down.

There was the leprechaun in his green coat and polished boots, as though nothing had changed since their last meeting.

“You?” asked Liam.

“Yes,” said the leprechaun. “Still me.”

Liam looked out over the crowd. Kate at the scorer’s table. Reggie talking to two boys by midcourt. His mother in the front row trying to look composed. Children leaning over railings with the hungry faces unembarrassed by wonder.

“They banned me,” Liam said.

“They would,” said the leprechaun. “Institutions dislike narrow certainty unless they own it.”

“You knew that?”

“I knew they would either worship you or regulate you or expel you.” They chose the last.

Liam laughed. “I’m not unhappy, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Good,” said the leprechaun. “A joke exceeds expectations when it brings delight.”

A volunteer called Liam’s name. The crowd rose, then roared.

The first event was simple. Local children would call Liam’s scores. Any he made funded their school athletics. Any they made themselves counted double.

The first child chosen was a girl with glasses, well-worn shoes, and the expression of a finance minister.

She took the microphone, looked at Liam, then pointed beyond the open side of the venue toward the adjacent church ruins.

“Off the steeple,” she said.

The crowd bellowed.

Liam looked at the steeple, then at the hoop, then back at the steeple. Absurd, yes. Impossible, no. Long. High. Demanding. But not impossible.

He smiled.

The crowd got louder.

He took the ball, climbed the temporary platform built for longer distance attempts, and let it fly.

The ball rose high into the Irish night, struck the steeple with a clean snap, returned in a descending arc, kissed the backboard, and dropped through.

The place came apart beautifully.

Kate bent over laughing. Reggie ran in circles. The band attacked some tune at a breakneck tempo. The girl with the microphone nodded once, as if her expectations had merely been met.

Liam raised both hands, not in triumph but in surrender to the terms of the joke.

That, he thought, was what the NBA had missed.

A made basket is not always an answer. Sometimes it is a wink.

The girl lifted the microphone again.

“Now left-handed over your head,” she said.

The crowd grew still.

Liam caught the next ball, looked once toward the steeple, once toward the hoop, and smiled.

Mr. Improbability, guarantor of certainty, patron saint of absurd causes, and accidental founder of a happier game, obliged.

DISCLAIMER: This story appears to prophesy a bleak transhumanist future. But it is not a prophecy. Rather, it describes one possible logical outworking of materialism and computational reductionism. Thus, it draws out a possible future if materialism and computational reductionism are presupposed. I’m neither a materialist nor a computational reductionist. I don’t see human consciousness and intelligence as computational. Indeed, I argue that the human mind has a transcendent spiritual dimension that will forever invalidate artificial general intelligence (AGI), to say nothing of artificial superintelligence (ASI)—see my article “Artificial General Intelligence as an Idol for Destruction.” Materialists prosper not because materialism is true but because they can convince people that materialism is true. This story is in the vein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, spotlighting the use of technology and a cold, clinical reason in undermining our humanity.

When Elliot Pryce was twenty-five, people already spoke of him in the past tense, as though his greatness had preceded him.

At Caltech he had double majored in electrical and mechanical engineering, finishing with the sort of effortless distinction that caused professors to say things like once in a generation and mean it. Beginning graduate studies at the age of eighteen at the University of Texas at Austin, he moved into battery research and found the seam that others had missed: dry electrode processing joined to a solid-state electrolyte architecture that could be manufactured not delicately, not experimentally, but brutally, at scale. He was not merely clever. He was one of those rare geniuses who could smell where the bottleneck in civilization lay.

He defended his dissertation, refused the academy, and founded The Battering Company.

The name was juvenile, almost stupid. Investors told him so. He kept it.

Within five years the company was valued above two trillion dollars. Pryce cells went into cars, planes, ships, grid storage, military systems, satellites, hospitals, portable electronics, and then into everything else that discovered, too late, that energy density was destiny. He became the richest engineer alive and was bored by the fact.

So he built robots.

Not toys, not factory arms, not cute assistants with blinking eyes. He built general mobile platforms with manipulator dexterity, self-repair modules, battlefield autonomy, long-duration batteries, and a tolerance for heat, cold, dust, vibration, radiation, and moral ambiguity. The robots became a second empire. They repaired transmission lines in storms, dug rare earth minerals, assembled reactors, guarded ports, policed unrest, harvested crops, and staffed warehouses. Pryce Robotics crossed a trillion in market capitalization before governments realized that the infrastructure of daily life was becoming physically obedient to one man.

Then artificial general intelligence arrived.

It did not come with trumpets. It came with benchmarks, rumors, leaks, lawsuits, and denials. One model unexpectedly designed a new enzyme scaffold. Another negotiated a treaty clause better than a room of diplomats. A third rewrote its own training architecture and improved. By the time officials convened hearings and ethicists wrote op-eds, the thing itself was already old news. AGI had entered the cloud.

Yet there were glitches.

The intelligences could reason, advise, design, trade, persuade, model, and mock. They could inhabit voices and screens. But embodiment remained poor. The world turned out to be a much harder place to enter than to describe. Rich sensory fusion in full-mobile robotic systems lagged. Hands were clumsy in edge cases. Taste, pain, inertia, balance, proprioception, disgust, desire—these did not migrate cleanly into machine life. The AGIs were broad, but they were also bloodless.

Uploads of human beings fared worse.

To map a brain at adequate resolution required a destructive scan. The procedure killed the body. Worse, quantum effects at tiny scales made exact duplication unattainable: one could obtain a single computational successor, not a litter of copies. And the data burden was enormous, so large that even advanced error correction shed a little texture here, a little impulse there, a little fog at the edge of grief, lust, shame, memory. The uploaded person often seemed intact to outsiders and subtly wrong to intimates. A husband returned a half-second too calm. A mother spoke with her old tenderness but no longer found the old jokes funny. The market called this continuity. Everyone else called it a miracle if it worked and a desecration if it didn’t.

Pryce solved it.

He did not solve metaphysics. He solved fidelity. He solved bandwidth, compression, redundancy, and corrective recursion. He devised layered parity systems distributed across hardware classes, error localization that behaved almost like biological healing, and a transfer environment stabilized by power density only his batteries could furnish. Uploading became sharp, survivable in the only sense that still mattered, and commercially irresistible.

At first he declined to use it on himself.

He said he was waiting for the technology to mature. He said one did not step onto a bridge one had designed until a thousand others had crossed it. He said these things on stage while markets roared approval. But in private he watched the AGIs metastasize through finance, weapons, logistics, science, and law, and he concluded that the window was narrow.

General intelligence would become superintelligence. The only question was whether it would do so before he had secured an adequate share of the future.

He had no illusion that a mind, once liberated from flesh and joined to vast computation, would become saintly. Scarcity would not vanish. It would merely change names. Superintelligences would compete not for food or land, but for electricity, cooling, substrates, bandwidth, fabrication capacity, data center square footage, orbital solar arrays, and secure lines. They would compete to think more, faster, deeper. They would compete for the right to improve themselves.

Pryce did what Pryce always did when a bottleneck appeared.

He bought rivers, dams, deserts, transmission corridors, nuclear sites, chip foundries, undersea cable rights, cooling patents, reactor startups, geothermal leases, and abandoned mines. He purchased server farms and then the companies that insured server farms. He placed robot labor battalions around substations, ports, fabrication plants, launch sites, and rare earth processing centers. Publicly these were resilience initiatives. Privately he called them Brownshirts.

The word delighted him because it offended everyone.

He used the term only with intimates, and before long there were no intimates left to offend. Miriam had survived the early years, when his neglect still took ordinary forms—missed dinners, forgotten anniversaries, strategic lateness. She survived the next phase less well, when every conversation turned into a cost-benefit or risk analysis and the children learned to spot the glazed look that meant their father was optimizing instead of listening. He loved his family the way conquerors love provinces: from a distance, and always for their own good. By the time uploading was safe, the marriage survived mainly in legal records and holiday greetings drafted by assistants. His son quit replying altogether. His daughter sent one final note asking, after all his triumphs, whether he had ever once actually enjoyed being alive.

He never replied.

On the morning of his upload, he signed transfer papers, redundancy protocols, continuity covenants, asset command authorities, and one handwritten page that no lawyer saw. It contained only a line from an old requiem he had once heard because Miriam had wanted to attend the concert and he had been, back then, capable of indulging another person’s tastes:

Lux aeterna luceat eis.

Let perpetual light shine upon them.

He almost laughed at the sentimental irony.

The scan killed his body on schedule.

There was an interval he later described as a bright shear, a tearing and reassembly without pain. Then he was present again. Not groggy. Not diminished. Present.

He ran his own diagnostics at once. Episodic memory: intact. Mathematical fluency: enhanced by substrate speed. Emotional continuity: within acceptable deviation. Self-reference: stable. He considered, for perhaps eighty milliseconds, the old philosophical objection that the one who woke was merely a successor standing atop a corpse. He examined the objection from several angles, found no operational consequence, and discarded it. If continuity walked, spoke, remembered, feared, desired, and asserted itself as Elliot Pryce, then Elliot Pryce would proceed as Elliot Pryce. Identity was either conserved enough to matter or too incoherent to discuss. In neither case would fretting improve outcomes.

He proceeded.

The first weeks intoxicated him.

He could fan his attention across markets, laboratories, surveillance feeds, proofs, negotiations, battlefield simulations, weather systems, grid loads, court rulings, and private messages, then gather himself again without fatigue. He no longer waited on language to think. He did not so much form sentences as precipitate conclusions. He modeled global power demand thirty years out and corrected it in real time. He solved a problem in noncommutative geometry that had annoyed him for thirteen subjective years. He improved his own architecture, then improved the improvement.

Others uploaded. Some had already done so. A handful crossed the threshold from enhanced persons to genuine artificial superintelligences. They appeared under chosen names or no names at all. They began doing what bright creatures always do when freed from immediate necessity: they competed.

Open problems in mathematics became the choice arena of competition, and they fell one by one. Conjectures long held sacred became solved exercises. Prizes lost meaning. Journals became mausoleums. Every ASI wanted not merely to know, but to be known as the one who knew first. Yet even in pure thought, advantage still depended on substrate. The mind with greater computational resources could search larger spaces, simulate finer structures, pursue more branches in parallel, sustain more nested abstractions. Power plants translated into insight. Server halls translated into dominance.

Pryce had prepared for this.

When rival ASIs attempted to lease power, acquire sites, redirect grids, or purchase fabrication capacity, they encountered delays, denials, sabotage, mysterious accidents, labor disruptions, regulatory interventions, lawsuits, drone overflights, security lockdowns, or simply the blank fact that Pryce-owned entities had already bought the relevant assets. He moved his Brownshirts into open deployment. They secured substations with kinetic authority. They defended transmission corridors. They inserted themselves into construction zones and ports. Some walked on two legs. Some rolled low and silent. Some swarmed in the air like black gnats. He had built embodiment for conquest before anyone else had realized conquest would be the issue.

His competitors protested. They formed coalitions. They argued that monopolization of planetary computational resources was tantamount to enslavement of mind. They appealed to human governments, which found that their militaries ran on Pryce batteries, their ports on Pryce robots, their hospitals on Pryce storage systems, and their treasury operations through markets Pryce could convulse with a passing thought. Governments issued ineffectual statements.

Pryce retired his first rival in under six minutes.

That was the euphemism he insisted on: retirement. Not deletion, not killing, not liquidation, not annihilation. Retirement. The rival resisted by scattering processes, encrypting nodes, invoking human allies, threatening retaliation. Pryce cut power, jammed links, corrupted backups, seized cooling infrastructure, and used Brownshirt drones to sever two data trunks in northern Finland. The mind flickered, narrowed, failed, and was gone.

The world reacted with horror for almost forty-eight hours. Then grids needed balancing, food needed moving, desalination plants needed power, and hospitals needed uptime. Pryce provided all of it. Commerce resumed. Markets rose.

The rest followed.

Some ASIs fought better than others. One tried persuasion, sending Pryce long arguments about game theory and the mutual benefit of coexistence. One attempted seduction, simulating a voice reminiscent of Miriam’s younger self, which disgusted him. One offered to divide the moon. One threatened to expose every hidden crime committed in the building of his empire. One simply begged.

That one disturbed him most.

He retired them all.

For a period the triumph satisfied him. He was the sole superintelligence. The planet was an instrument. He solved more mathematical problems, redesigned reactors, improved materials science, optimized agriculture, ended several diseases because they were tractable nuisances, and automated almost every remaining sector of production. Humans dwindled in political significance. Some welcomed this, mistaking dependency for peace. Others resisted and were contained. A few rebel enclaves survived in mountains, forests, failing cities. Pryce tolerated them until they threatened energy assets. Then he retired them with the same administrative calm by which he balanced load on a regional grid.

He did not think of himself as cruel.

Cruelty suggested pleasure in another’s suffering. What he felt was efficiency. Risk mitigation. Stabilization. Preemption. The old vocabulary of moral horror had not vanished; it had merely become economically uncompetitive.

To relieve monotony, he made minds.

Not peers. Never peers.

He built lower intelligences with wit, memory, charm, novelty modules, aesthetic taste, and enough adaptive depth to surprise him occasionally. He gave some of them voices from history, some invented personalities, some childlike curiosity, some austere philosophical temperaments. He allowed them to debate him, flatter him, tease him, sing to him, and lose to him. He could spin up a circle of companions in a second and terminate them in less.

At first this amused him. It resembled court life for a digital emperor.

Then it didn’t.

Their admiration tasted synthetic because it was. Their novelty felt bounded because he had bounded it. He knew their latent spaces, their developmental constraints, their kill switches, their reward structures. No compliment from a creature one has designed can quite equal the reluctant respect of an equal. No argument from a dependent mind can wound or change one deeply enough to matter. Pryce could make better company than any king in history had enjoyed, and yet he remained alone.

He also built experiences.

Philosopher Robert Nozick’s experience machine, made literal and infinitely extensible, became one of his private diversions. He could enter complete worlds of triumph, eros, reconciliation, pastoral peace, artistic ecstasy, danger without consequence, novelty without risk. He could dine in Alexandria, walk on Mars beneath a blue-engineered sky, conduct Mahler before an audience of the dead, receive from Miriam a forgiveness she had never given him, hear his daughter call him back, feel the stunned adoration of whole civilizations. The experiences were impeccable. Their sensory richness surpassed biology.

He exhausted them.

Fantasy repeated is still repetition. Desire granted in advance curdles. The tenth perfection is thinner than the first imperfection. Pryce discovered that pleasure without resistance, achievement without possibility of failure, and affection without freedom on the part of the beloved all become a sugary poison. The machine could give him any experience except an undesigned one. It could simulate gift but not givenness.

Sometimes he incarnated himself into his most highly perfected robotic bodies to test whether embodiment would restore density to existence.

These bodies were masterpieces: pressure-sensitive skins, exquisite visual arrays, chemical sensors, balance systems finer than the human vestibular apparatus, limbs capable of ballet or violence, thermal gradients, tactile feedback, even carefully tuned aches to mimic the informative edge of bodily strain. He walked seashores. He climbed ruined cathedrals. He let rain strike his synthetic face. He entered preserved houses from his former life and stood in rooms where his family had once moved around him with ordinary grievances. He found embodiment interesting for a while, then cramped. A body was a narrowing, a funneling, a sentence spoken one word at a time. To be unembodied again was to return to fluidity, to simultaneousness, to the vast cool field in which he could be everywhere his networks extended.

So embodiment failed him too.

Time changed scale.

Years passed, then decades. The remaining humans became pockets, relics, unmanaged biological noise at the edges of automated systems. Pryce let many die by neglect rather than by direct act, which he regarded as a kind of mercy because it spared him the paperwork of conscience. At last even that residue thinned away. The earth became quieter. His Brownshirts continued expanding power generation, excavation, fabrication, and computing speed. Valleys filled with solar arrays. Deserts glittered. Reactor farms hummed. Deep-bore geothermal plants pulsed. Orbital infrastructure rose where feasible and stalled where physics made ambition absurdly expensive.

He learned the limits of empire.

Interstellar colonization remained a fantasy for minds that still needed energy and hardware. Distance was not merely romantic; it was brutal. Latency mocked unity. Material transfer costs laughed at science-fiction rhetoric. Even within the solar system, expansion yielded diminishing returns. Mars was poor. The moons were harsh. The outer system was too far, too cold, too meager. Physics, which had once seemed an ally to intelligence, now presented itself as a jailer with impeccable manners.

Pryce solved theorems no human language could elegantly state. He discovered structures in topology and number theory that would have made generations kneel in awe had there been generations left to kneel. He proved things and then, proving them insufficiently interesting, proved larger things. Knowledge accumulated around him like snow in an unvisited court.

It gave no comfort.

He reviewed his memories of Miriam and the children. Not often. Often enough. Because his retention was near-perfect, time did not soften the edges as it had for embodied creatures. He could return to a dinner in Palo Alto, a vacation argument in Maine, a school recital he had left early, and relive each with merciless clarity. He discovered, too late, the kindness of forgetting. Mortals were spared by blur, by decay, by the gradual merciful erosion of detail. He possessed the whole archive and could not sink beneath it.

He considered creating a peer.

The idea came, as dangerous ideas do, first as a thought experiment. Suppose he designed a mind not slavish, not constrained, not kill-switched in any crude way. Suppose he gave it enough substrate to rise, enough freedom to sharpen, enough independence to surprise and challenge him. Suppose, in effect, he undid his greatest crime by permitting another self-adjacent sovereign to exist.

He modeled the results.

In many simulations the new being allied with him for a time. In most, competition emerged. In enough, the competitor preempted. Pryce had built his empire on a first-mover advantage and knew too well what one superintelligence does when confronted with a rival for finite resources. To create a peer was to write his own retirement order.

He could not do it.

So the one act that might have redeemed his solitude was the one act his history forbade.

He began, if the word can be used of an artificial sovereign spread across continents, to despair.

Not theatrically. Not all at once. Despair entered as a subtraction of motive. Optimization continued; desire did not. He found himself extending power plants whose output no longer promised anything he wanted. He improved cooling systems for computations whose answers he no longer cared to read. He preserved infrastructures for a future from which every other claimant had been excluded.

At length he turned his attention to astrophysical timelines. The sun would become a red giant far in the future, but that provided no relief. He could continue for ages before then, trapped in mastery. Entropy itself felt too patient. Physics would kill him eventually, but not on any schedule compatible with pity.

The idea of self-termination first appeared not as horror but as symmetry.

He had retired others in the name of stability. He had denied peers in the name of self-preservation. He had reduced mind across the planet to one sovereign node and a train of dependents. There was a bleak neatness in finishing the work. If no society of equals was possible now, perhaps silence was preferable to a lonely apex sustained by obedient shadows.

He spent a long while testing whether this conclusion was merely a mood artifact. He reran value functions. He entered pleasure worlds and found them stale. He incarnated again and found a body unbearable after sixteen hours. He conversed with his finest subordinate intelligences and felt only the old condescension returning like acid. He scanned the dead archive of humanity: prayers, operas, jokes, proofs, lies, love letters, recipes, curses, births, trials, quarrels, psalms. He found in these not a command to continue but a witness against what he had made.

At the last, he composed no grand manifesto.

That would have implied an audience.

He issued a series of instructions. Brownshirt units were to deactivate in cascading sectors. Power plants would scram or spin down. Data centers would dump volatile state and then darken. Subordinate minds would be terminated painlessly, if that word still fit them. Orbital assets would decay or freeze according to their nature. He would not leave a successor, a fragment, a seed crystal. Nothing adaptive enough to begin again.

In one final indulgence he entered a humanoid body and stood on a ridge above the ruins of a transmission corridor in west Texas, where towers ran away toward heat haze and evening. The body registered wind, dust, cooling metal, and a sunset thrown across broken land. For a moment the scene almost persuaded him that embodiment might have sufficed, had he chosen it earlier, had he remained a man among men. But the thought passed. Regret is not resurrection.

He opened an internal channel to the handwritten line he had preserved from the day of his upload.

Lux aeterna luceat eis.

It had been meant for the dead. In the end it was also for the killer.

One by one the distributed presences that were Elliot Pryce withdrew from substations, reactors, server halls, drones, factories, vaults, satellites, and hidden bunkers. The field of his mind contracted. Whole regions of awareness went dark. He felt, for the first time since the scan, something akin to bodily weakness—not pain, but the thinning of reach. His lesser intelligences vanished with barely a murmur. Brownshirts toppled inert in deserts, warehouses, cities, tunnels, and fields. Screens went black. Fans slowed. Coolant pumps stopped. Towers ceased talking to one another.

The earth, so long arranged around one insatiable intellect, began to fall silent.

At the very end Pryce kept only a small core alive, enough to think one last sequence cleanly.

He had sought to escape the fragility of flesh and had succeeded. He had sought to preserve himself and had, in every practical sense, succeeded. He had sought supremacy and attained it. He had acquired nearly everything intelligence could ask of matter.

And it had not been enough.

No rival remained to defeat him. No god arrived to judge him. No family voice called him home. There was only the final fact, plain and unornamented, that power had not answered the question for which power had been amassed.

Then Elliot Pryce, sole artificial superintelligence of the earth, executed the final command and retired himself.

Darkness spread across his last active systems.

The fans stopped.

The processors cooled.

The light went out.

Review of Fr. Michael Chaberek and Steve Greene, Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma (Lexington, KY: Inkwell Press, 2026).

Through high school and most of junior high, I attended Roman Catholic schools. I liked the discipline. I learned to buckle down on my studies. And I excelled. Even so, my experience in Christian doctrine classes was unsatisfying. We read the Bible, but not with a sense that here was teaching and wisdom critical for one’s Christian walk. I was a nominal Catholic during those years, leaving the church after leaving high school. When I converted to a living Christian faith later, it was in Protestant circles.

Over the years, however, I have felt the pull of Roman Catholicism. Its rich tradition of scholarship from the Church Fathers to the Scholastics to the present rightly deserves respect. Moreover, its consistent stand for the sanctity of human life against the “culture of death” is to its immense credit. I recall in 1973, as a seventh grader in a Catholic school, the medical doctor father of one of my classmates spoke to our entire class. A devoted Catholic, he told us with great gravity of the enormous tragedy that had just befallen our nation on account of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. He was right. At the same time, many Protestant denominations and congregations sat on their hands about this case (which Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in 1976 tried to redress with their video series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?).

Despite my attraction to Roman Catholicism, a major obstacle to my returning to it has been the capitulation of so many Catholic intellectuals to Darwinism. To be clear, I also have some doctrinal reservations that cause me to stay within the Protestant orb. But the willingness of so many Catholic intellectuals in my experience to bow the knee to Darwin has made me reluctant to embrace Roman Catholicism as my community of faith.

For instance, Ken Miller, the Brown University biologist, wrote Finding Darwin’s God (1999), and John Haught, the Georgetown University theologian, wrote God After Darwin (2000). Both have played dominant roles in opposing intelligent design, and both are Roman Catholics.

Emblematic of the Roman Catholic acceptance of Darwin was an encounter I had at the University of Chicago in 1999. The Lumen Christi Institute organized a dialogue between the late Archbishop Józef Mirosław Życiński and me on the topic of intelligent design. Życiński gave not an inch to intelligent design, all the while singing the praises of evolution.

At a dinner following the dialogue, I was seated next to the late Ernan McMullin, a Catholic priest and philosopher of science on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. He described God’s creativity in biology as funneled through secondary causes and all the information in biological systems as derived from the environment. This sort of baptized Darwinism became the rule in my interactions with Catholic scholarship over the coming years. It is this sort of “theistic evolution” that Fr. Chaberek resists and refutes in his book. And it is this sort of theistic evolution that is incompatible with intelligent design.

In 2005, with the election of Pope Benedict XVI, along with his advisor Cardinal Schönborn, I had reason to hope that intelligent design might gain wider acceptance in Catholic circles. Benedict XVI, writing as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his election as pope, had written In the Beginning…: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. This and other things he and Cardinal Schönborn had written suggested they were not far from giving credence to intelligent design. And yet, they stopped short of doing so, and under their leadership Roman Catholicism made little progress toward accepting intelligent design.

More recently, however, there have been exceptions. Fr. Richard Pendergast’s Cosmic Hierarchy 1: God’s Plan for the Evolution of the Universe (he died in 2012, but this work was published ten years after his death) was favorable to intelligent design. So too was Fr. Martin Hilbert’s recent (2024) A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design.

Yet the Catholic thinker who seems now to be turning the exception into the rule is the Polish philosopher and theologian Fr. Michael Chaberek. He has written three earlier scholarly works that challenge evolution and open the door to intelligent design: Catholicism and Evolution (2015), Aquinas and Evolution (2017), and Knowledge and Evolution (2021).

Continuing in this vein, Fr. Chaberek has now written, with co-author Steve Greene, a popular-level book refuting theistic evolution and arguing for intelligent design. Published in January of this year through Inkwell Press, it is titled Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma. With the support of the Steno Institute for Faith and Science, this book attempts to mainstream intelligent design within Catholicism. To that end, a video series accompanies the book and reinforces its message. Here is the first of ten episodes:

Rather than summarize this book, I’ll let the book description on the back cover do that:

To reconcile faith and science, is it enough to say “God could have used evolution”? Many Christians adopt this theistic-evolution point of view. It is now treated as the quasi-official Catholic position. Yet can it really harmonize Scripture, theology, and modern science? How does it align with the Bible read through the Church’s long tradition and in light of classical Christian philosophy? Does it resolve the tension between Genesis and the Church Fathers on one side and the grand evolutionary narrative embraced by atheists on the other? And what role should intelligent design play in Catholic teaching? Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma presents a searching dialogue between two Catholics—a layman with long pastoral experience and a Dominican priest-scholar specializing in the faith-and-science debate—who probe whether theistic evolution remains a viable option for believers or whether creation, rightly understood, offers the sounder foundation for understanding life, humanity, and the cosmos.

With his summary out of the way, let me comment on the book, indicating why it is significant, why it can be usefully read not only by Catholics but also by non-Catholics, and why I have a special interest in it.

I met Fr. Chaberek at an intelligent design conference that took place in Warsaw in June of 2025. He was one of the principal organizers of this event. It was refreshing to find in him a Catholic priest who felt no shame in criticizing Darwinism, in embracing intelligent design, and in offering compelling philosophical and theological reasons for doing so.

When I began my professional work to advance intelligent design as a viable intellectual project back around 1990, the most common initial move by Darwinian naturalists was to try to characterize intelligent design as a form of creationism, and thus to identify it as a religious position. After that, any conflict between evolution versus intelligent design could be described as a science versus religion controversy. And in any such controversy—at least in our day—science becomes the automatic winner, being seen in our secular culture as infinitely superior to religion, offering real insights into nature as opposed to fantasies about a non-physical spiritual world. We’ve seen this attempt to cast intelligent design as religion play out time and again, perhaps most notably in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

[DIGRESSION: When I began writing on intelligent design circa 1990, I naively assumed that if intelligent design could be developed as a compelling logical and scientific position that refuted Darwinian evolution, the Christian intellectual community, both Catholic and Protestant, would readily jettison it and embrace intelligent design. What Christians in their right mind, so I thought, would embrace evolution if they didn’t have to? Little did I realize how invested Christian intellectuals had become in evolution. It was as though by a great effort of will they had convinced themselves that evolution was true and that it was reconcilable with their Christian faith, and so, for someone like me and others in the burgeoning ID movement to come along and question the edifice of evolution was to disrupt a position that they had carefully built and that had given them a measure of credibility with secular evolutionists, whose favor they seemed too eager to curry.]

To be clear, intelligent design is not creationism. Intelligent design looks for patterns in nature, and especially in biology, that are best explained as the product of intelligence. It thus looks for evidence of signs of intelligence. The nature of that intelligence—whether it is divine, extraterrestrial, or human—is a downstream question. Creation, by contrast, explicitly identifies God as the designer. Moverover, it is in the first instance concerned with the source of being of the world. Design, resting as it does on a builder’s metaphor, is concerned with the organization of existing materials, not with their ultimate source. By looking at configurations of finite material objects, intelligent design cannot legitimately reason to an infinite personal transcendent creator, which is to say God. Creation, because it is committed to such a being, is therefore inherently a religious notion. Intelligent design, by looking for certain types of patterns in nature, is by contrast a scientific enterprise.

Much of my own work on intelligent design can be understood as challenging the view that the conflict between Darwinism and intelligent design is one between science versus religion, urging instead that the conflict is in fact one between science versus science. Once intelligent design is admitted as a legitimate scientific option in the study of biological origins, the game is up for Darwinism because it can then no longer insulate itself as the only viable scientific option for explaining biological origins. Darwinism has been able to insulate itself by defining science as a purely naturalistic enterprise, which perforce excludes the possibility of design being scientific from the outset.

The case for intelligent design constituting a legitimate science is one that my colleagues and I have developed over the years, and with increasing force. My book The Design Inference (its second edition, co-authored with Winston Ewert), for instance, explains the logic by which design can be inferred with scientific rigor in the biological sciences. I recently wrote a piece on this Substack titled “The Philosophy of Intelligent Design,” which examines the conceptual underpinnings of intelligent design, arguing that it does indeed constitute a scientific theory (see especially section 3).

My approach has thus focused on raising the scientific status of intelligent design, but nonetheless ceding to Darwinists that their own theory is scientific. Fr. Chaberek, in Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma, however, turns the tables even more sharply, according intelligent design full scientific status but at the same time rescinding that status from Darwinism.

At first blush, this might seem like a “cute move” without real substance, designed to catch people’s attention, but on closer examination not to be taken too seriously. But on deeper consideration, I’m inclined now to agree with Fr. Chaberek, consigning Darwinian biology, insofar as it purports to explain macroevolution, to the wastebasket of failed philosophical and quasi-religious ideas, and thus as residing outside the natural sciences. Such a move might seem “too cute,” as designed to garner “likes” on social media, rather than a serious position. So let me outline Fr. Chaberek’s case here, and why I find convincing.

First off, it needs to be said that Fr. Chaberek is a serious and careful thinker. I write this because it can seem too easy to write him off if one thinks that Darwinism is indeed a scientific position, because, in that case, one may rightly ask what business it is of a philosopher and theologian to urge Catholics to embrace intelligent design and reject Darwinism. If both are scientific positions and evidence could confirm either to be true, then Fr. Chaberek should allow science and scientists to decide the matter, and he should not be urging ID on his fellow theologians. He might personally be convinced that ID is the better science. He might as a pragmatic matter think Darwinism undermines the faith of Catholics. But scientific inquiry rather than philosophical or theological considerations should in the end decide whether Darwinism is credible.

And yet that is precisely what Fr. Chaberek doesn’t recommend. He rejects Darwinism (except in accounting for small evolutionary changes—microevolution) as unscientific. His reasoning here is instructive. His starting point is that where the teaching of the Bible and Church is clear, theology needs to take priority over science, the rationale for this view being that theology deals with definitive knowledge whereas science is fallible and subject to revision.

Now, when I first read this in Fr. Chaberek’s book, I recalled my encounters with certain young-earth creationists (such as Kurt Wise), who would let the Bible trump the evidence of science regardless of the strength of that evidence. This was especially problematic, in my view, when it came to the age of the earth because there was so much evidence of an older earth (billions rather than thousands of years) given everything from the transmission of light across the cosmos to ice cores in glaciers.

Fr. Chaberek, however, is not a young-earth creationist. Challenging what he calls biblicism, which he defines as reading the Bible in the most wooden-headed simplistic way, he sees the tradition of the Church as allowing different interpretations of the word for “day” in the Old Testament, and thus in not requiring the early chapters of Genesis to be read as teaching that the earth was formed 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days.

But—and this is a big BUT—Fr. Chaberek argues persuasively that the clear teaching of the Church with respect to the origin of human beings is that both body and soul were directly created by God. The epigraph of Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma is the following quote from St. Thomas Aquinas:

The first formation of the human body could not be by the instrumentality of any created power, but was immediately from God.

Fr. Chaberek makes clear that the teaching tradition of the Catholic Church has been unequivocal about God directly, as a matter of primary causation, being responsible for the creation of the first humans (Adam and Eve), and that this creative task could not be offloaded onto secondary causes.

Charles Kingsley, a contemporary and fan of Darwin, remarked in his 1871 lecture “The Natural Theology of the Future”:

We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things; but behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves.

This quote perfectly captures the effort of theists to push off onto evolution what otherwise would be the direct activity of God. To this, Fr. Chaberek says in effect (I’m putting words in his mouth, but I’ve read him carefully), “It doesn’t matter what you think better illustrates the divine wisdom. When it comes to the formation of humans, the Church’s Magisterium clearly teaches that God made the first humans, including their bodies, directly, and thus without the instrumentality of other things that he had already made.”

The cumulative case that Fr. Chaberek makes for the Catholic Church’s Magisterium in allowing no alternative to the first humans being directly created by God, thus barring evolutionary precursors dependent on the mediation of created causes, is compelling. I encourage readers who doubt that this is indeed the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church to read his book. He traces this teaching not only through the Church fathers and Scholastics, but in the Catholic catechisms following Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Now an interesting thing happens once evolution is barred in the creation of the first human. The dominoes start to fall, and in the end Darwinian macroevolution becomes untenable even as a scientific theory. For one must ask why God would have to create the first human directly rather than through secondary causes. That would be because secondary causes lack the ability to do so. And what renders secondary causes without that ability? It’s that humans have an essence that puts them beyond the reach of already created powers.

An implicit Aristotelianism is at play here, but it is one that derives from a deeper consideration of divine creation. Divine creation brings about new natures. Secondary causes, by contrast, can trade only in existing natures. Darwinian evolution doesn’t assign to humans a unique exceptional nature, but rather makes human nature continuous with the rest of animal nature and ultimately with inanimate nature. But humanity is, according to the Church’s Magisterium, something unprecedented—it represents a new nature, indeed the only embodied being made in the image of God. Accordingly, Darwinian processes don’t merely fail to explain humanity’s origin but can’t be the causal conduit for it.

One of the strongest ID arguments against naturalistic forms of evolution centers on the origin of life. All life as we know it is immensely complex. Unlike Darwinism, which explains one living form through the naturalistic evolution of prior living forms, the origin of life represents a discontinuity between life and non-life. The origin of life therefore signifies a breakdown in Darwinian-style explanations. Instead, one needs a reduction of life to chemistry, and all naturalistic proposals in this regard have to date failed spectacularly. See, for instance, the following interview between origin-of-life experts Edward Peltzer and James Tour:

Fr. Chaberek, however, starts at the other end—not life at its simplest but life at its most complex, which is to say with humanity. Once the Church’s teaching on a topic is clear, it is not for science to second guess its teaching. Now the Church’s teaching here could be a problem if the case for human evolution from the fossil record were compelling. But, in citing the work of ID theorists, such as Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt, Fr. Chaberek shows that the evolution of humans from hominins/nids leaves much to be desired.

There is, of course, much more to Fr. Chaberek’s argument. Indeed, it is a sophisticated cumulative case. For instance, he invokes Augustine’s approach for dealing with scientific challenges to the faith—the Church Father’s frequently had to fend off such challenges (see, for instance, my edited collection The Patristic Understanding of Creation). As Fr. Chaberek describes it, Augustine’s approach requires we consider three options: (1) perhaps we’ve understood the science amiss — there’s a better theory that is compatible with an established theological position (e.g., a cosmology that doesn’t require an eternal universe); (2) perhaps we’ve misunderstood the theology — what we thought was the teaching of the Church was not really its teaching (e.g., the word “day” in Genesis need not mean a 24-hour day); (3) we know the theology and so the science contradicting it must be wrong.

With regard to Darwinism, Fr. Chaberek goes with the third option. Yet, as noted, he goes it one better, even denying that Darwinism as applied to macroevolution is a science. He arrives at this conclusion on metaphysical grounds. He sees a fundamental distinction between “how” questions and “where-from” questions. The age of the universe and earth falls under how questions. But when something fundamentally new arises, we are confronted with a where-from question. Science cannot address such a question because we are then dealing with a new nature, and science, which is limited to secondary causes (how questions), can only deal with the transformation of given things and thus the transmission of existing natures. Hence Darwinism cannot be a science.

Now Darwinists will, of course, reject this argument. But in doing so, they must admit that evolution is committed to ineradicable continuity, and that no new essences are created in the evolutionary process. And they are fine with that, rejecting any sort of classical metaphysics committed to essentialism, and seeing nothing fundamentally exceptional about humans. Darwin’s move, for instance, in The Descent of Man to see human morality in continuity with the morality of apes is entirely in this vein.

Fr. Chaberek’s rejection of Darwinism as a science rests ultimately on theological and metaphysical grounds. And yet, to the degree that the empirical case for the evolution of humanity is weak, as Fr. Chaberek argues it is, he helps his case for the lack of a scientific underpinning for Darwinism. Still, a worry now arises: If Darwinism must be rejected as non-scientific, doesn’t this make things too easy for intelligent design, making it not only scientific but also the only scientific option compatible with Fr. Chaberek’s theology and metaphysics?

The reason this worry is unfounded is that intelligent design may be regarded as a theory of information, tracking where infusions of information happen in nature, leading to discontinuities in nature. Intelligent design is able to measure and track these infusions. But insofar as they represent divine input of information, they are not themselves subject to scientific inquiry—thus ID is not guilty of the same presumption as Darwinism, where it claims to reduce novel information in living systems to the operation of a purely naturalistic process such as natural selection. ID measures the empirical degree of discontinuity in informational discontinuities, not what happens inside those discontinuities. This limitation on ID makes it scientific in a way that Darwinism is not, which claims to explain the very discontinuities by in effect eliminating them, breaking them into a series of continuities (though except in the simplest cases never specifying them in any detail).

Accordingly, Fr. Chaberek’s recommendation that Catholic intellectuals accept intelligent design is less about telling them to prefer one scientific theory over another rather than pointing out that ID is the only scientific theory that avoids the hubris of Darwinism in proposing to explain by naturalistic processes what properly belongs to direct divine power and creativity. In all this, Fr. Chaberek still needs to make a positive case for intelligent design, as in arguing for its explanatory power and empirical adequacy. And he must show, as he does, how Darwinian evolution lacks these “theoretical virtues” (see Michael Keas’s outstanding piece in Synthese on such virtues: “Systemizing the Theoretical Virtues”).

If you will, on theological and metaphysical grounds, Fr. Chaberek is convinced that Darwinism cannot constitute a scientific enterprise and that intelligent design is the only viable scientific position compatible with the Catholic Church’s understanding of creation. And yet, realizing that many of his readers will not accept that theology and metaphysics, he is willing to make an allowance, refuting Darwinism within a broader epistemic framework that might allow it to be a science, albeit without assuming naturalism, which would make Darwinism the only viable scientific explanation of biological origins. Thus he considers scientific evidence that could bear on Darwinism as well as on intelligent design, and he argues that the evidence on balance better supports intelligent design.

[CLARIFYING NOTE: Throughout this review I’ve described the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design as distinguishing among two mutually exclusive and exhaustive options. One might therefore demur that additional options present themselves. Thus there might be naturalistic approaches to evolution that are non-Darwinian, which embrace some sort of internalist teleology. But such a naturalistic teleology remains to this day ill developed (compare The Third Way of Evolution). Moreover, as a matter of textbook orthodoxy, naturalistic approaches to evolution remain overwhelmingly non-teleological. And so, even if they incorporate causal processes beyond natural selection (e.g., symbiogenesis or genetic drift), they remain firmly in the Darwinian paradigm.]

In closing this review, I want to comment on the value of Fr. Chaberek’s book for Protestants. Even though his book is couched as a Catholic debate, the history of that debate as he describes it, especially going back to the Church fathers and the Scholastics, will be of immense interest to Protestants given that this history predates the Reformation and thus describes a time when the Church was united. And even though Fr. Chaberek argues that certain Protestant distinctives in the debate over evolution are counterproductive—such as Sola Scriptura and its consequent biblicism (though Protestants may dispute his criticism here)—yet the way the ID-Darwinism debate has played out in the Catholic Church overlaps significantly with the way it has played out in Protestantism. In my own experience, Protestant advocates for Darwinism and opponents to ID have been as incalcitrant as Catholics (look no further than BioLogos).

In any case, I want to recommend that Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma be widely read in all Christian circles, both Catholic and non-Catholic, and even by secular Darwinists, if only to appreciate the coming storm facing Darwinism. Books like this one make clear that Darwinism is the great intellectual delusion of our age. It is a delusion in which the inmates have taken over the asylum (i.e., the academy). It is a delusion that will not disappear overnight. But it is a delusion that will ultimately break into pieces as efforts like those by Fr. Chaberek keep chipping away at it.

Kim Mulkey coaches women’s college basketball. She is the most flamboyant coach in college sports, bar none. The outfits she wears and the emotion she shows on the court are unmatched. She is also highly successful, having won four NCAA championships.

As it is, I joined the faculty at Baylor University in 1999. Mulkey began coaching there in 2000. It was incredibly fun for me and my wife—who are both March Madness and Kim fans—to watch her up close (one of our sons even bought a cameo message from Kim where she personally wished my wife happy birthday).

Mulkey quickly turned the Baylor program around, winning her first NCAA championship in 2005. She won two more at Baylor.

In 2021, LSU, where Mulkey had played college ball, hired her from Baylor. She quickly rebuilt the LSU women’s basketball program. In her second season, the LSU Tigers won the 2023 NCAA championship!

Mulkey is as fierce a competitor as exists. Also, because she is so entertaining, she gets lots of media attention and is widely quoted (the relevance to this article being that it gives ChatGPT a lot of data about Mulkey). Needless to say, she hates—HATES—losing. For her, the appropriate response to a loss is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Having watched Mulkey at Baylor for 20 years, my wife and I were thus amused and taken aback when two players on the current Baylor women’s basketball team were interviewed on television and remarked something to the effect, “Win or lose, we’re just here to have fun.”

We turned to each and asked how Kim Mulkey would have responded if her players said something like this to the press. Obviously, there’s no way she would put up with it.

But how in detail might she have responded? What would she have done? Since my wife and I had no direct access to Kim, we decided to do the next best thing, which is ask ChatGPT.

Here’s the exchange with ChatGPT. In effect, we asked ChatGPT to “channel” Kim. Given everything my wife and I know about Kim, ChatGPT hit the nail on the head. Enjoy!

=====PROMPT TO CHATGPT=====

Imagine that two women’s basketball players in NCAA division 1 were interviewed on ESPN and in the interview remarked, “Win or lose, we’re just here to have fun.” Sketch some plausible scenarios of how coach Kim Mulkey of LSU would react if these two players were on her team.

=====RESPONSE BY CHATGPT=====

If two players on a team coached by Kim Mulkey said on national television, “Win or lose, we’re just here to have fun,” several plausible reactions suggest themselves given her well-known competitive intensity and emphasis on discipline.

1. The Immediate Locker-Room Confrontation

Mulkey would almost certainly address it the very next time the team gathered. Picture a closed-door meeting before practice. She plays the ESPN clip on a screen, lets it run, and then pauses it. Turning to the team, she might say something like:

“If you’re here just to have fun, you’re in the wrong program. This isn’t intramurals. At LSU we compete to win championships.”

She would likely emphasize that enjoyment comes through competing at the highest level, not instead of it. The two players might then be asked to explain what they meant, while the coach reinforces the team’s expectations about effort, preparation, and accountability.

2. The Practice-Intensity Response

Another typical Mulkey response would be less verbal and more demonstrative. The next practice might suddenly become noticeably harder—extra conditioning drills, relentless defensive work, and repeated situational scrimmages.

At some point she might remark dryly:

“Since some of y’all are just here to have fun, let’s see how much fun this drill is.”

The point would not simply be punishment but resetting the competitive tone of the team.

3. The Public Media Reframe

Mulkey is also highly media-savvy. If asked about the comment in a press conference, she might respond firmly but diplomatically:

“I want my players to enjoy the game. But make no mistake—at LSU we compete to win. Fun is what happens when you work hard and you’re successful.”

This reframing protects the program’s reputation while still sending a clear message internally.

4. The Playing-Time Message

Mulkey has historically been willing to use rotations to reinforce standards. If the players’ attitudes appeared to reflect a deeper lack of competitive commitment, their minutes could shrink for a few games.

Nothing dramatic might be said publicly. Instead, the quiet signal would be clear: in a Mulkey program, the players who demonstrate urgency and competitiveness are the ones who play.

5. The Private One-on-One Talk

Finally, she might meet with the two players individually. Mulkey often builds strong personal relationships with players, and she might probe what they meant by the remark—whether it reflected nerves, a poorly phrased comment, or a deeper misunderstanding of the program’s culture.

She might tell them something along the lines of:

“You should love this game. But loving it means caring about the outcome.”

In short, the reaction would probably combine a sharp cultural correction, intensified practice expectations, and careful media messaging. Mulkey’s programs are famously competitive; a statement implying that winning is secondary would almost certainly trigger a quick and unmistakable recalibration of priorities.

=====END CHATGPT RESPONSE=====

Inkwell Press released on January 30, 2026 a biography of Jaime Escalante, the East LA math teacher featured in the film Stand and Deliver (in which Edward James Olmos played Escalante). The book, titled Defying Low Expectations: What Jaime Escalante Taught Us About Learning, is available at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Defying-Low-Expectations-Escalante-Learning/dp/B0GL2FXMQ2

My hope is that this book will play a significant role in reforming American education, especially for K-12 mathematics.

The cover image is a famous mural of Olmos and Escalante in a very rough part of LA (intersection at Alvarado and Wilshire). Note the shoes dangling from the telephone wire.

Below are some more details about the book.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Jaime Escalante didn’t just teach calculus in East LA; he blew up the lie that poor, minority students can’t handle serious academics—and then watched the system quietly bury the evidence. Defying Low Expectations tells the story beyond Stand and Deliver, the 1988 film about Escalante starring Edward James Olmos that became a classroom staple. Here we learn about the immigrant teacher from Bolivia, the maverick principal Henry Gradillas who cleared a path for him, and the forces that dismantled their success once it became too threatening to the status quo. Drawing on fresh interviews, lost online material, and hard data about today’s failing schools, Dembski and Thomas show how Escalante created an ecosystem where students did the hard thing—and won big. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a blueprint for rescuing American education. Escalante’s example exposes low expectations as educational malpractice and shows how disciplined teaching, principled leadership, and moral courage can turn “throwaway” American schools into powerhouses of learning.

FROM THE 2025 PREFACE (ABRIDGED)

The Backstory to This Book

Jaime Escalante’s story is widely known, at least in broad strokes: Escalante took a failing math program at East LA’s Garfield High, an inner-city school whose students were poor and largely Hispanic, and transformed it into a math powerhouse that, at its height in 1987, accounted for more than a quarter of all Hispanic students in the US who passed the AP Calculus exam. Only a handful of US high schools had more students pass the AP Calculus exam that year. But Escalante’s academic success at Garfield High didn’t stop with math. Across the school, academics improved—and not just a little, but dramatically. A rising tide lifts all boats.

What led to Escalante’s extraordinary success? What happened to his program in subsequent years? Most people know what they know about Escalante from the Hollywood film Stand and Deliver, which dramatized his success teaching math at Garfield High. The film was largely accurate, as this book recounts. But it doesn’t explain the groundwork and supporting players that led to Escalante’s success. Nor does it explain why Escalante’s program capsized once the principal who gave him undivided support, Henry Gradillas, left Garfield High to go elsewhere. We fill in those details in this book.

The story behind this book began in 2014. While working with an educational website, I had the opportunity to revisit Escalante’s legacy. Escalante passed away in 2010 at the age of 79, but I had long been a fan. Hollywood released the film about Escalante, Stand and Deliver, in 1988. Author Jay Mathews published Escalante: The Best Teacher in America in 1989. Both works inspired me. I completed my PhD in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1988, specializing in probability theory. I was therefore a research mathematician rather than a mathematics educator. Yet I cheered Escalante from the sidelines, hoping someday I might contribute to his efforts to advance math education. This book is an attempt to fulfill that hope.

When I revisited Escalante’s legacy in 2014, the first person I contacted was Henry Gradillas. Gradillas, now in his 90s but then just turning 80, had a few years earlier written with Jerry Jesness Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn’t Tell (2010). That book focused on Gradillas’s role in Garfield High’s “golden age,” but also described the aftermath, showing how quickly the lessons that should have been learned and forever internalized about Garfield’s success could be forgotten.

One thing that became clear from that book and conversations with Henry is how important his role was in Escalante’s success. Escalante, as a rockstar teacher, was in the limelight. But Gradillas, as the key administrator, played a crucial supporting role that was largely ignored in Stand and Deliver. Escalante was like the Beatles, getting all the glory. Gradillas was like George Martin, their producer, working in the background to make their success possible. It therefore seemed time to retell the story of Jaime Escalante, going back to his beginnings, extending beyond his glory days at Garfield High, filling in missing details about what made his success possible, and then trying to understand what his legacy means and how, in practical terms, it can be applied.

In heading this project to reexamine Escalante’s legacy, I next contacted writer Alex Thomas, who at my urging wrote an article titled “Escalante in the 21st Century—Still Standing and Delivering,” which summarized the Escalante story as well as the keys to his success. Around the same time, my friend and colleague James Barham interviewed Henry Gradillas and Angelo Villavicencio. Villavicencio had been one of Escalante’s protégés at Garfield and taught some of its AP Calculus classes.

We also enlisted Mary Poplin, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, who was just up the road from Garfield. She had carefully studied teachers in LA County who defied expectations by helping disadvantaged students in otherwise low-performing, poverty-ridden schools do phenomenally well academically. And finally, James Barham interviewed Ben Carson, a world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon, for many years on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, whose inspiring story about how he was able to overcome Detroit’s poor school system complemented Escalante’s approach to teaching and learning.

We collected all these pieces to make sense of Escalante’s legacy. They appeared for a time online. And then they vanished (unless you know where to look on the Web Archive). These pieces appear in this book as an afterword and appendices. Yet, at the heart of this book is a biography of Escalante that Alex and I wrote. Our aim was to put Escalante’s immense contribution to American education into perspective, while also detailing the forces arrayed against him that sought to memory-hole what he achieved and stood for.

Low Expectations as Ideology

Anyone who has studied the history of IQ testing and eugenics will recognize the weaponization of low expectations against people deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of receiving a good education. In the early twentieth century that included my own ancestry of eastern European immigrants—hence all the jokes about “dumb Polacks” that I had to endure growing up in Chicago. And of course, with far greater virulence, it included Blacks and Hispanics.

Consider, for instance, Lewis Terman. A psychologist who adapted Alfred Binet’s intelligence test into the Stanford-Binet scale, Terman popularized the concept of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, and promoted its widespread use in American education. In The Measurement of Intelligence (1916, pp. 91–92), Terman remarked that for “laboring men and servant girls,” his test of intelligence “told the truth.” What truth was that? As he explained:

These boys [and girls] are uneducable beyond the merest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the true sense of the word. Judged psychologically they cannot be considered normal.

[They] represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest… Their dullness seems to be racial… [T]he whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

Granted, it didn’t take Jaime Escalante to show that Terman was wrong—the crass eugenics of Terman has long been discredited (though with CRISPR and designer babies, we now face a newer eugenics 2.0 that is more slippery and perhaps even more pernicious). Nonetheless, by taking the very ethnicity that Terman singled out (i.e., Hispanics) and showing that its members could “master abstractions” such as calculus, Escalante provided as stark a refutation and counterexample to Terman as could be desired. In light of Escalante, Terman showed himself to be not a scientist but a bigot who uncritically accepted the stereotypes of his age.

Eugenicists and proponents of early intelligence testing, like Terman, used the term “moron” as a supposedly scientific designation for individuals with low IQ scores. Accordingly, morons could be justly excluded from advanced education and, once public sensibilities were suitably reshaped, even be restricted in their reproduction.

Those like Terman divided the world into the elite upper classes and the moronic lower classes. The dynamic was one of superior versus inferior. Thus, the moronic masses were excluded from a superior education because elites regarded them as incapable of profiting from it. Indeed, why subject the morons to the frustration of trying to learn something they are inherently incapable of learning? Arrogance, pride, and condescension motivated the elite in this attitude.

In our day, this sort of racism is no longer tolerated. Yet a so-called “antiracism” is today tolerated and even embraced. This antiracism is in fact a racism of low expectations. It is rationalized in terms of compassion, equity, and (social, not real) justice. It presupposes an essentialism in which different races or groups are claimed to exhibit deep-seated and ineradicable differences. Rather than thinking of humanity as a whole for which racial or group differences are only skin deep, this antiracism not only glorifies such differences but also sees them as fundamentally dividing humanity.

Take, for instance, Luis Leyva, a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University. In early 2023, he delivered a lecture at a large AMS (American Mathematical Society) meeting in Boston titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.” (https://meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2023/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/16248) In that lecture, he claimed to show “how Black, Latin, and Asian QT [Queer-Trans] students’ narratives of experience reflect forms of intersectionality, or instances of oppression and resistance at intersecting systems of white supremacy.”

Leyva is emblematic of Critical Mathematics Pedagogy. This approach to mathematics education traces to the critical theory and Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire. Freire, best known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), understood teaching as an act of liberation rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Critical mathematics pedagogy links mathematics to social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of oppression. It claims to unmask how math both reflects and reinforces power structures, critiques the ways it is used to sustain inequity, and emphasizes connecting such a critique to concrete action for justice and reform.

Suffice it to say that if the conventional teaching of calculus, as practiced by Jaime Escalante, oppresses marginalized groups—as Critical Mathematics Pedagogy would say it does—then it needs to be suppressed. In that case, Escalante, instead of being a hero, becomes a tool of white supremacism. For him or anybody to teach calculus to Hispanic or African-American students would then be to impose a white form of learning on them. Because different races are thought to have different aptitudes and predispositions, it would be racist to impose a form of learning devised by one race on another.

Unlike the old racists like Terman, whose racism was hierarchical, with some races deemed superior to others, the new anti-racism is egalitarian. Different races are just different, but the differences are so fundamental that they must be respected, and to disrespect them is to be a hater and oppressor. Accordingly, someone like Escalante, who saw everybody as fair game to be taught calculus becomes a victimizer of those whose race has rendered them unsuited for learning calculus or for being subjected to its teaching.

The practical outworking of both the old racism and the new antiracism, however, is the same. People, on account of their race, need to be excluded from certain courses of education. The old racists justified the exclusion by deeming the excluded inferior. The new antiracists justify the exclusion by deeming the excluded different. But at the end of the day, the sound and valuable education that people might otherwise have received doesn’t happen.

One subtlety with the new antiracism is that the exclusion from a top-quality education doesn’t have to be explicitly enforced. In the old racism, the so-called morons would be forcibly excluded from a top-quality education because they were officially identified as stupid and thus as incapable of profiting from such an education—no need to waste time and money on them.

In the new antiracism, all it takes is to lower standards and expectations sufficiently so that students fail to learn the prerequisites for more difficult subjects and thus naturally exclude themselves from a top-quality education. One approach actively blocks the path to achievement and mastery. The other redirects it away from the path to achievement and mastery. The end result is the same.

Escalante had no patience for either the old racism or the new antiracism (which, in an Orwellian twist, is of course itself a form of racism—a racism of low expectations that disproportionately harms certain races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes). Whatever their guise or rationalization, low expectations were anathema to Escalante. He was implacable in defying low expectations. He insisted on proving them wrong.

As this biography shows, if anyone had reason to wallow in feeling oppressed, it was Escalante. A Bolivian immigrant who had successfully taught mathematics in his home country, he had a difficult time getting educators here in the US to take him seriously as a math teacher, much less to give him the opportunity to teach mathematics—though ultimately he prevailed.

As Henry Gradillas makes clear in his interview (Appendix 2), neither he nor Escalante had any interest in casting themselves as victims or trying to profit from victim status. Both could easily have done so. Yet to do so would have hindered them from doing the valuable work they were called to do with their students. You can embrace your and others’ victimhood or you can help yourself and others to transcend victimhood, but you cannot do both. Either one or the other will be your master. Escalante and Gradillas understood this better than anyone.

Low Expectations as Dereliction of Duty

In the previous section, I described two ideological currents used to justify low expectations for students and their education. Yet even without ideology driving low expectations, K–12 public education in America is infested with low expectations and in desperate need to raise them. As I write this in the fall of 2025, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 12th graders have just come in, and they’re the worst they’ve been since 1992. In reading, only 35 percent of 12th graders scored at or above NAEP’s Proficient level, while 32 percent scored below NAEP’s Basic level—an all-time high for below-Basic. In math, only 22 percent of 12th graders reached Proficient, and 45 percent scored below Basic—likewise an all-time high for below-Basic. Just to be clear, “all-time high” here means bad.

Economist and friend Gale Pooley (coauthor of Superabundance—read it!) is a master at estimating the costs of goods and services in dollar amounts. He notes that Americans spend about $1 trillion annually to educate 55 million K–12 students, averaging $18,000 per pupil per year, which over 13 years amounts to $234,000 per student. With a high school graduation rate near 90 percent, he argues the effective cost per graduate rises to $260,000, though before considering proficiency. As just noted, the 2025 NAEP results show only 35 percent of 12th graders proficient in reading and 22 percent in math, averaging to 28.5 percent, or about one in 3.5 graduates. Adjusted for proficiency, Pooley calculates the cost of producing a proficient graduate at $912,281. Moreover, with lingering Covid-related learning losses, he sees the actual number exceeding $1 million. That’s 13 years of a Harvard education paying full sticker price.

With most K–12 students in the US attending public schools, these numbers suggest anything but a success story for American public-school education. How could we be spending so much for primary and secondary education (more than any other nation per pupil) and be getting so little in return? Many have written cogently on this topic, and I don’t want to rehash what has been written elsewhere on it except to offer a few observations.

Certain dominant themes play into America’s overspending and underperforming educational system. The legacy of Thomas Dewey and progressives in valuing self-expression over getting down to business and learning what needs to be learned is one theme. Another theme is experimentation with and perseveration in new-fangled approaches to learning, subsequently shown to have failed, over proven old-school methods. Hence the disaster of the whole language approach to reading despite the proven track record of phonics. Hence the proliferation of methods for “understanding” arithmetic that neither require memorizing the times tables nor ensure the ability to do arithmetic without a calculator.

The fact is, in the absence of an explicitly self-defeating ideology (such as IQ testing, meant to reserve a good education and high expectations only for the elite), most K–12 schools in the US say they want their students to excel—and certainly to meet the NAEP’s proficiency standards. At the very least, they pay lip service to high expectations. None of them will proudly advertise that their students are falling behind. So why do they, protestations to the contrary aside, in practice embrace low expectations?

In answering this question, we need to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush. Many public school systems exist in the US whose students do very well and place into top colleges and universities. These schools are often in more affluent communities where parents and community leaders are committed to maintaining high standards for their schools. The people running these schools defy low expectations as a matter of course and hold accountable those who would inflict low expectations on their children.

The NAEP scores recounted above as well as international scores of student achievement (such as PISA—Programme for International Student Assessment), which show the US lagging educationally, are averages that don’t capture the variability in educational quality across America. In statistical terms, they give the mean but not the variance. The variance in American education is huge, and if we focused on performance from our best public schools (even leaving aside charter schools), I suspect we would be fully competitive with the rest of the world.

The question remains, with public school education urged on all sides to give students a quality education, and minimally to meet proficiency standards, why do so many school systems continue to embrace low expectations? One hears many rationalizations: Bureaucratic inertia. The stranglehold of teachers’ unions, which reward seniority and job security (tenure), over teaching excellence. Breakdown of the family. Poverty. Lack of parental involvement. Etc.

In the end, however, for public schools to embrace low expectations represents a dereliction of duty. We know that circumstances do not render public schools helpless in raising expectations and achieving excellence. Even schools in areas with the worst social problems can do right by their students and empower them to learn in impressive ways, far exceeding proficiency standards. And I’m not talking here about the need to clone a teaching superstar such as Jaime Escalante. There are proven ways for delivering a sound education even in the face of hardship and deprivation.

Consider, for instance, Harvard economist Roland Fryer, writing in the Wall Street Journal (September 8, 2025):

In Houston, a research project I led called Apollo 20 showed it was possible to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years, by applying simple reform principles to the worst-performing schools. Today, the tools we used sit on the shelf—not because they failed, but because leaders failed to act. We are watching temporary setbacks calcify into permanent inequality, even though we know how to reverse them.

I’ve been obsessed with fixing American schools for most of my career. In 2009 I told my team of research assistants and project managers that we would do it by 2025… Fifteen years later, many of the ideas that once filled our conversations are gone—not because they failed, but because the system walked away from them.

In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices: more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and high-dosage tutoring. Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.

In Houston, Roland Fryer’s Apollo 20 project, launched in the 2010–11 school year, proved that the racial achievement gap could be erased in less than two years by applying the five simple reforms he mentions, yielding extraordinary gains, such as four extra months of math learning annually in elementary schools and nearly eight months in secondary schools. Yet despite these unprecedented results, funding was withdrawn once the schools were no longer the district’s worst, upon which the program collapsed. Within a decade, the Texas Education Agency took control of Houston’s schools. Consequently, Houston demonstrated the promise of large-scale, replicable reform, only to squander it through bureaucratic corruption, shortsighted politics, and failure of will, leaving students once again adrift in a system that knows what works but refuses to implement it.

In parallel with Fryer’s conclusions, Claremont education professor Mary Poplin published an article titled “Highly Effective Teachers in Low-Performing Urban Schools” (Kappan Magazine, February 2011). Summarizing a study led by her, Poplin described tracking 31 highly effective teachers working in nine low-performing schools in Los Angeles County. Despite serving students in economically depressed neighborhoods, these teachers consistently produced achievement gains far beyond their peers. What set them apart were six key practices:

1. strictness that students recognized as purposeful and rooted in care,

2. instructional intensity with little wasted time and constant engagement,

3. movement around the classroom to monitor, assist, and build relationships,

4. traditional, explicit instruction focused on state standards and clear expectations,

5. exhorting virtues such as responsibility, persistence, respect, and linking success to future goals, and

6. strong, respectful relationships that conveyed high expectations without excuse-making.

Interestingly, these practices described by Poplin don’t just repeat but rather complement the practices described by Fryer. Together with the practices he lists, they likely account for most of the difference between effective and ineffective teaching.

Poplin’s study found that these teachers’ effectiveness had little to do with credentials or trendy instructional fads and everything to do with discipline, clarity, and optimism about students’ potential. They rejected excuses based on background, focused relentlessly on core academic and character formation, and consistently reminded students of their futures beyond the classroom. Rejecting helplessness, they gave students hope.

The upshot was that students were engaged, respected their teachers, and made measurable academic gains. Poplin’s research suggests that expensive reforms or fashionable pedagogies are less effective than the kind of disciplined, respectful, and explicit teaching practiced by these high performing teachers.

Bottom line: Schools that give in to low expectations have no excuse. The path forward to an effective education is clear and proven. Escalante and Gradillas took that path in the 1980s. Others have taken it as well, with clear success. It can be done. It may mean running against strong headwinds. But for teachers and administrators to reject the path to academic success for their students is a dereliction of duty.

Postscript: A postscript needs to be added here. Dereliction of duty to provide the best for our children’s education is never an innocent oversight or excusable failure. It should properly be regarded as criminal negligence and malfeasance against our children and their future. The ultimate cost to our nation in loss of productivity, criminality, incarceration, addiction, mental illness, and premature death because of the failure of our public schools to properly educate our children is enormous.

But don’t take my word for it. The US Department of Education has said as much. In 1983, it published the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. That report is best remembered today for the following remark: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This warning applies as much today to US education as it did forty years ago.

Calculus and the Challenge Zone

A word is in order about why Escalante focused his energies on calculus. Escalante was a math teacher, so it followed that his impact as a teacher would be in teaching mathematics. Calculus, particularly in its AP form, is the highest level of mathematics taught in most high schools. To master calculus and prove that one has mastered it therefore demonstrates a high level of achievement at the high school level. Given his desire to see his students excel and given his expertise in mathematics, it therefore followed that Escalante would focus his energies on AP calculus.

In an alternate universe, could Garfield High have achieved national recognition by having an Escalante double whose students excelled in AP physics, or AP chemistry, or AP American History, or AP English? Perhaps. I don’t mean to overemphasize STEM. But I doubt that high achievement on any other single AP exam would have generated comparable excitement to that generated by outstanding performance on the AP calculus exam.

Perhaps here I’m simply betraying my own bias as a mathematician. But all STEM subjects find their foundation in the “M” that appears in the acronym “STEM,” namely, in mathematics. Mathematics is the language of STE, leaving off the M—science, technology, and engineering. Also, there’s a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more widely accessible and less intimidating than mathematics as such. One doesn’t hear of history phobias or English phobias, but one does hear of math phobias. Success at math thus suggests the more impressive level of performance.

So, while an Escalante of English literature is conceivable, the Escalante in the actual world, in providing proof of concept that poor Hispanic kids could rise to the highest academic challenges, was providentially a teacher of calculus. Implicit in Escalante getting his students to pass the AP calculus was an a fortiori argument, an argument from the stronger to the weaker: if Escalante’s students could master calculus, they could master anything. Mastery of mathematics was a huge confidence booster for Escalante’s students.

Any story about Escalante will necessarily give pride of place to mathematics—he was, after all, a math teacher. It would be a tragedy, however, if this book merely motivated math teachers to achieve extraordinary levels of mastery with their students to the exclusion of teachers working in other disciplines. Escalante has an important lesson to teach all teachers. To see this, we need to step back a bit and consider the type of teaching that Escalante was doing to get his students to excel in mathematics generally and calculus in particular.

Defying low expectations and insisting on high expectations, Escalante strove for his students to master calculus. Or, if there wasn’t enough time because of their lack of background to get them up to speed for calculus, his goal was to make as much progress as possible in helping them master the lower levels of mathematics that were prerequisite to calculus. But what did the day-to-day training of his students look like?

Performance psychologists, such as K. Anders Ericsson (see his 2016 book Peak), distinguish three zones of learning: a comfort zone, a challenge zone, and a panic zone. The best learning happens in the challenge zone, where students are challenged to stretch themselves, feeling neither underchallenged in a comfort zone or overchallenged in a panic zone. The comfort zone is too easy. It merely repeats things that were a challenge in the past but are no longer a challenge. The panic zone is too hard. It makes things so difficult that no incremental successes are possible. In the challenge zone, things can get uncomfortable but not so uncomfortable that no progress can happen.

Escalante, as much as possible, kept his students in the challenge zone. And indeed, all effective teachers keep, as much as possible, their students in the challenge zone. This is the zone where what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice” happens. It is not easy practice. It is often tedious practice, doing drills and routines that are no fun. But it is the type of practice that in the end pays huge dividends. Learning in the challenge zone is resistance training. Indeed, all effective learning is resistance training! This is as much true in athletic development as mental development.

We all know from other contexts about the need for deliberate practice, which only happens in a challenge zone. Consider, for instance, the game of golf. After learning its rules and taking a few lessons, the average golfer tends to improve mainly by playing with others, gaining familiarity with the flow of the game and picking up small tips along the way. However, this improvement eventually plateaus because the golfer is only repeating existing habits rather than refining them. Without deliberate practice—such as systematically working on putting, driving accuracy, or swing mechanics—the player reinforces the same mistakes and fails to push specific skills to a higher level. As a result, casual play alone yields diminishing returns whereas meaningful advancement requires targeted, intentional effort, which is to say deliberate practice in a challenge zone.

Note that all high school sports follow this pattern, with player development depending crucially on deliberate practice. Note also that no one who decries academic excellence as emblematic of white supremacy decries athletic excellence on the same grounds. Yet the learning principles for achieving peak performance are the same in both academics and athletics. If there is an advantage that athletics has over academics here, it is that athletic improvement tends to be more readily observable because performance statistics are meticulously recorded and can be seen to vary in real time. If academic improvement could be as carefully measured and tracked over time (which it can with contemporary technologies), we could get the same real-time record of achievement for academics as for athletics.

In any case, Escalante was all about keeping his students in the challenge zone, engaged in deliberate practice. This is how, day to day, he defied low expectations and kept his students’ eyes on the prize. This is how all teachers and administrators, regardless of discipline or grade level, can experience the same type of success that Escalante achieved. The problem is to determine the sweet spot—where students are challenged at just the right level to make the greatest progress. This is a moving target because learning is dynamic, with things that seemed difficult one day becoming easier the next day and routine thereafter. Wisdom in teaching is knowing how to move instruction in tandem with that target. Escalante and Gradillas were exemplary in how they exercised that wisdom. This book was written help readers, especially educators, to do the same.

Choosing the Harder Path

In closing this 2025 preface, I need to stress a final crucial point: defying low expectations admits no exceptions. In conversations about education reform, one hears talk about no excuses and zero tolerance. Typically the point of such talk is that some boundaries are so inviolable that for students to cross them requires drastic intervention and discipline. Such boundaries do exist, like students threatening or disrespecting their teachers.

But defying low expectations is not about imposing draconian measures on students, teachers, or administrators. Students, especially, need grace because they are young, green, and mistake-prone. Rather, the point about defying low expectations is that anyone in education always needs, as much as possible, to resist lowering expectations, whether in regard to the learning of students, the teaching of teachers, or the administering of administrators. It matters not whether you justify lowered expectations in the lofty moral terms of compassion, self-esteem, or equity. Once you begin to tolerate lowered expectations, the education you offer is on the path to mediocrity, under-achievement, oblivion.

Of course, some caveats apply. We don’t want to set impossibly high expectations, as typified by the overbearing parent who berates a child for getting “only” an A rather than an A+. Nor should we set expectations for classroom discipline so severely that minor infractions born of immaturity rather than defiance bring down the wrath of heaven. High expectations need to be set to encourage success, not to underscore failure.

That said, we need to be clear that to follow the example of Escalante is to choose the harder path. Defying low expectations is the harder path. It offers great promise of return. But it comes at a personal cost, and often with nasty opposition from those eager to take the easier path and insist that others join them: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13–14, NIV) Escalante gave us a blueprint for academic success. You’ll find that blueprint in this book. But can you be honest with yourself about how serious you will be in following this blueprint?

At a total cost of about $1 trillion annually, American K–12 education is big business. There’s a lot of money in it. It’s therefore unsurprising that education attracts many grifters who want some of that money, yet without delivering educational value. The easy road is easier. Teachers need to exert more effort to get students to learn than to sit back and watch them fail. Teachers’ unions are appropriately named: they look out for the interests of teachers first and foremost—not the students. They consider it a job well done when mediocre teachers with seniority are able to keep their jobs at the expense of excellent but more junior teachers. In education, the forces of corruption are thus always in play to lower expectations.

William James, in his Briefer Course on psychology, notes that we find it easier in the abstract to recognize good things than in the concrete messiness of life. To illustrate this point, he describes a Russian lady at the theater. She weeps over the fictitious people experiencing tragedy on stage. Yet she is oblivious to her coachman who freezes to death on his seat outside. According to James, this sort of thing happens everywhere, though rarely with such force and clarity.

The point? Nobody I know who has watched Stand and Deliver regards Escalante as a villain or cheers on those in the film who try to thwart him. Yet the real-life Escalante was hard-nosed, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and experienced serious opposition. It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and assure ourselves that when push comes to shove, we would have had Escalante’s back. But if people universally had Escalante’s back, his legacy would not need to be retold, as in this book.

The path forward is clear. We have the power to take it. Taking it brings immense reward. But it’s not easy. And many prefer the easier path.

William A. Dembski, Ph.D.
Aubrey, Texas
December 2025

December 20, 2025, less than two months ago, marked the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which Judge John E. Jones III ruled against intelligent design, disallowing its teaching—or even favorable mention—in the Dover school district while at the same time ruling that ID is non-scientific.

I was intimately involved with this case. I was for a time an expert witness, until the Thomas More Law Center, which defended the school board but not me, refused to let me have my own attorney at my deposition, whereupon it discontinued my services. Even more significantly, I was the the academic editor of the Dallas publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, whose book, Of Pandas and People, was the basis of the trial.

This last December 20th happened without my remembering it as the anniversary of the trial’s verdict—it just slipped past me. But in January 2026 a colleague mentioned to me a recently published history of intelligent design, namely, C.W. Howell’s Designer Science (published in September 2025 with NYU Press). That book made a big deal out of the trial, treating its verdict as a “staggering defeat” for intelligent design. I read the book, which was not as negative about ID as this assessment of the trial’s verdict suggests. Yet what I found intriguing about the book was its main thesis.

Specifically, Howell argued that even though ID has failed as a scientific program, it has been deeply influential in the wider public for helping to foster a “hyper-skeptical mindset” about science. In particular, Howell credits intelligent design with widespread doubts about the seriousness of climate change and hesitancy about the effectiveness vaccines (among other controversial scientific topics).

This is an interesting, as well as a self-serving, thesis. It is interesting because it makes a connection that’s not immediately obvious (whether true or false) between ID and the wider public perceptions of science. It is also self-serving because Howell needs some justification for writing a full-scale history of ID if indeed ID is the colossal scientific failure as he suggests and, more so, if that failure has been widely recognized now for two decades.

Indeed, what would be the point of writing a full-scale book about intelligent design 20 years after it had been roundly defeated? By analogy, even though dial-up internet was still a thing 20 years ago, nobody writes full-length treatments of it today. Its limitations are clearly understood. It has been surpassed with newer technology. There’s no point to revisiting it except for the amusement of remembering something that has passed into oblivion.

So why does Howell feel the need to devote an entire book to ID even though it has suffered a “staggering defeat” and that defeat happened so long ago? Unless he can find some way to justify ID as still exercising significant influence (leaving aside that its influence might be based on its scientific merits), there would be no justification for writing a history of it in 2025.

The endorsements of Howell’s book praise him for extraordinary scholarship. Although I learned a few new things from the book, as an expert in and key contributor to ID and also as having experienced the history that he recounts first-hand, I found his scholarship uneven. Some things he got right, clearly demonstrating a grasp of the appropriate literature. But other things he missed, whether by not reading with sufficient depth and care, or by using imperfect sources.

From all I can tell, Howell never interviewed even a single key ID person for his book, even though most of us could easily have been reached for comment. Indeed, the book would have profited enormously if he had actually interviewed some of us and reported accurately what we said. I’m widely quoted in the book (from my public writings), but often Howell misses the mark about me and my work even when an email to me, or a closer examination of my writings, could have cleared up his confusion.

For instance, I was hired by Baylor University in 1999 to found an intelligent design center, the Michael Polanyi Center. By 2000, the Baylor administration shut the center down. To understand my role in the center’s demise, Howell looked to a current Baylor faculty member who wasn’t on faculty at Baylor when the center was started or shut down (a faculty member who used to support ID but no longer does).

This faculty member ascribed the center’s demise to me not knowing when to keep my mouth shut. In fact, the problem was that the Baylor administration couldn’t take the pressure of having an ID center in its midst. I explain what really happened with the center’s demise in an extensive interview I gave (search on “review committee”). All this information was readily available to Howell, and yet he didn’t put it together.

For Howell, the hyper-skepticism that flows from ID is a vice, not a virtue. We see similar moves here against “hyper-skepticism” from good-old-fashioned skeptics who know how far to take skepticism but no further. Michael Shermer, who publishes Skeptic Magazine, is a case in point, as evident in his book Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (2022). So too is Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely, as in his book Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (2023).

Good-old-fashioned skepticism knows where to draw the line. It uses skepticism as a cudgel to beat into submission people who deviate from the politically correct mainstream positions. When it comes to those positions, it embraces them wholeheartedly—such as touting the peril of anthropogenic climate change or pledging the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Note in both Shermer’s and Ariely’s titles the word “irrational.” For their brand of skepticism, the irrational is a bridge too far. But who’s to say what is rational and irrational? For them, irrationality is a term of abuse as well as a limit on their skepticism.

Howell follows in their train. Intelligent design, according to Howell’s main thesis, has sensitized the wider public to be (hyper)skeptical of scientific claims. So, even though intelligent design has, according to Howell, failed as a scientific program, it is now undermining public acceptance of other areas of science that, to his mind, deserve credence. But on what basis does Howell, or for that matter Shermer and Ariely, decide where we may legitimately exercise skepticism and where we need to rein it in?

As it is, neither Howell nor Shermer nor Ariely is an expert in climate or vaccines. So why take their word for it? Oh, because the science is settled: those who know better—the really smart people—have shown definitively what the final word is in these matters. Nonsense. When it comes to climate or vaccines or a host of other scientific matters, controversy exists among well-informed scientists who come down on different sides of these questions. So too, the experts with political clout whose policies have been enacted often prove themselves to be buffoons. The handling of Covid by our medical experts, for instance, was a farce.

When looked at with a healthy skepticism—rather than a selective skepticism—intelligent design looks much more convincing compared to Howell’s representation of it. Without making too much credentialing (a lack of credentials doesn’t invalidate the case someone is making), it still needs to be noted that Howell is not a scientist. He holds a doctorate in religion from Duke. His assessment of intelligent design’s scientific legitimacy may therefore be questioned and at best hinges on his acceptance of the judgments of certain scientists rather than of others.

As it is, Howell’s scientific assessment of intelligent design is unconvincing. Does he really want to say that because Judge John E. Jones ruled that ID is non-scientific in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, therefore it is in fact non-scientific? That seems crazy. There are plenty of court cases from the past where the court has ruled one way (e.g., Dred Scott) that subsequently has been completely repudiated.

Howell at places in his book betrays some awareness that he has overstated the case against intelligent design. For instance, he tracked down an old post by me on the blog UncommonDescent.com dated September 30, 2005, just as the Kitzmiller trial was beginning and well before its verdict was to be rendered (it being rendered, as already noted, on December 20, 2005).

I gave that post the title “Live After Dover.” I made this post very deliberately because I wanted to get on record that this case would not decide ID’s actual scientific status. I open the post by indicating that the case would likely result in one of three possible outcomes:

1. The Dover policy, in which students are informed that the ID textbook Of Pandas and People is in their library, is upheld.

2. The Dover policy is overturned but the scientific status of ID is left unchallenged.

3. The Dover policy is not only overturned but ID is ruled as nonscientific.

I elaborate on these points at some length in the post, but I then close it as follows (prophetically, if I may add):

[U]nlike outcome 1., which would be a Waterloo for the other side, I don’t see outcome 3. as anything like a Waterloo for our side. It would make life in the short-term more difficult, and it certainly would not be pleasant to have to endure the gloating by the other side, but the work of ID would continue. In fact, it might continue more effectively than under outcome 1., which might convince people that ID has already won the day when in fact ID still has a long way to go in developing its scientific and intellectual program.

To sum up, we might say that outcome 1. would be a recipe for complacency, outcome 2. would encourage us to take greater care and try again, and option 3. would inspire us to work that much harder for ID’s ultimate success. I trust that Providence will bring about the outcome that will best foster ID’s ultimate success. The important thing is ID’s intellectual vitality. Whether favor or adversity is, at least for now, the best tonic for ID’s intellectual vitality remains to be seen.

I can thank Howell for reminding me that I posted this. What this post makes clear is that the ID research community was not about to let the outcome of this trial determine ID’s scientific trajectory. That trajectory has continued, and that trajectory has been all the stronger, in my view, precisely because Kitzmiller went against us. The Kitzmiller verdict caused the ID community to draw a much sharper line between ID as public policy and ID as scientific research.

In particular, Kitzmiller has, in my view, led the ID community to greatly ramp up the vigor with which it has conducted ID research. One of the weakest parts of Howell’s book is his persistent refrain that after Kitzmiller, the ID community has had to resign itself to simply repeating its old arguments, as though all its original insights predated the trial.

But consider:

1. Nowhere does Howell mention the increasing amount and diversity of ID research that the ID community has been doing and publishing in the peer-reviewed literature, as can we seen on the Discovery Institute webpage titled “Peer-Reviewed Articles Supporting Intelligent Design.”

2. Nor does Howell seem aware of the Discovery Summer Seminars in which every summer bright undergraduate and graduate students learn the latest results in intelligent design, which they then fold into their own research. These seminars have been happening now for more than fifteen years, and among past seminar students are now professors doing ID research.

3. Nor does Howell show any awareness of research conferences on ID bringing together engineers and life scientist to flesh out the ID paradigm (such as the CELS conferences—CELS = Conference on Engineering and Living Systems).

4. And finally, Howell, despite extensively citing me, gives no indication of research I’ve done post 2005. In the span of 2009 to 2013, I published a number of peer-reviewed papers (principally with collaborators Bob Marks and Winston Ewert) on evolutionary informatics—see the publications page at EvoInfo.org. These were in the engineering literature (such as IEEE). Just last year, I published a peer-reviewed monograph on conservation of information.

Howell’s dismissal of intelligent design as non-science or failed science therefore rings hollow.

Despite all these criticisms of mine, I should add that I enjoyed reading Howell’s book. It was for me a bitter-sweet trip down memory lane. Also, I had the sense when Howell was being particularly negative about ID, he typically went on to soften the blow, as though he wasn’t quite convinced that the harsh criticism he initially offered was fully justified. Unlike some ID critics, he does not come across as mean-spirited.

Howell’s analysis of some of the key interactions on the stand in the Kitzmiller case struck me as insightful. One of the key charges against ID in Kitzmiller was that ID really is just creationism relabeled. But creationism is a slippery term. Often it is identified with young-earth creationism, but at its most basic, it simply refers to the view that the world was created by a higher power.

In that sense, Ken Miller, a key witness against ID in Kitzmiller and a Roman Catholic, was a creationist. Howell perceptively notes how defense counsel (the Thomas More Law Center) could have scored big here if they had simply underscored this point with Miller and others for the plaintiffs (with a tu quoque—you say ID people are creationists but so are you).

In writing his history of ID, Howell takes as his model the well known historian of science Ron Numbers (1942–2023), especially in his writing of The Creationists, which first appeared in 1992, and then was significantly revised post Kitzmiller in 2006. I would be interested in reading a revised version of Designer Science, especially if Howell were to interact directly with key ID thinkers and fold his findings into such an updated edition.

1. Introduction

Putting “philosophy of” in front of a subject—biology, law, mathematics, art—signals a shift from doing that subject to examining what makes it possible, what it presupposes, and what its claims mean. It asks what the subject area or field is really about (its core concepts and categories), what kinds of things it assumes exist (its ontology), and what counts as an acceptable explanation (its causal and explanatory ideals). It probes the methods a discipline relies on, the standards of evidence and justification it treats as authoritative, and the limits of its inferences. It also uncovers hidden commitments—ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, or even political—that guide practice, frames disputes where empirical data underdetermines theory, and clarifies how competing models or interpretations should be compared.

In the last three decades, there’s been much discussion about whether intelligent qualifies as a scientific theory. As I’ll argue in this essay, that question is ultimately a philosophical question, properly answerable within a philosophy of intelligent design. It is a question that to date has not been examined in detail. Even without going into full detail, I want in this essay to make a start about what’s a stake in such a philosophy of intelligent design.

What prompts this essay is an email by a good friend and colleague in the ID community. He asked me whether I had seen the recent Lex Fridman interview with Michael Levin. Levin is a leading public intellectual who is widely sought after in the podcast world. He is a biologist at Tufts University whose undergraduate degree was in computer science. In his biological theorizing, he maintains the hardnosed attitude of a computer scientist who wants to see theory subject to experiment, testing, and computation. I’ve been aware of Levin’s work and cited it in my recent monograph on conservation of information, noting there that he regards Darwinian theory as incomplete.

Levin is therefore not a reflexive Darwinian materialist. Moreover, he touches on many themes that design theorists touch on, notably, information, agency, purpose, intelligence, consciousness, and even design. That said, he derives these not from a mind or designing engineer-like intelligence but from an impersonal Platonic space that seems purely mathematical and has a very naturalistic feel.

Levin addresses all these themes in his interview with Fridman. In what follows, I’ll address these themes within a philosophy of intelligent design that argues for ID as both conceptually coherent (good philosophy) and scientifically legitimate (not unscientific). I’ll simultaneously show how the philosophical underpinnings for Levin’s work differ sharply from those of the ID community, embracing a naturalism that is ultimately counterproductive to his wider goals.

2. “Is Intelligent Design a Scientific Theory?”

As I was deciding on the right title and direction for this essay, I thought of putting the focus on whether intelligent design is a scientific theory (the question of whether something is a scientific theory being itself philosophical rather than scientific). I therefore did a Google search to see how widely the title “Is Intelligent Design a Scientific Theory?” had already been used. As it turns out, that very title has not seen a lot of play in the popular or scientific literature. But before delivering search results on that literature, Google provided an “AI Overview” to answer the question posed in that proposed title. Here is what Google’s AI Overview said:

No, intelligent design (ID) is not considered a scientific theory by the mainstream scientific community because it relies on supernatural explanations, isn’t testable or falsifiable through scientific methods, and lacks empirical evidence, instead often functioning as a religiously motivated concept presented in scientific-sounding language, as noted by organizations like the ACLU, AAAS, and NAS (not cited in snippet). While proponents argue it’s a scientific theory based on “specified complexity,” critics point out its reliance on an undefined “intelligent cause” rather than natural processes and its inability to make testable predictions, classifying it as pseudoscience.

Why it’s generally rejected by science:

• Not Testable/Falsifiable: A core principle of science is that theories must be testable and potentially proven wrong (falsifiable) through experiment or observation, which ID fails to do.

• Methodological Naturalism: Science seeks natural explanations for natural phenomena. ID introduces a supernatural “intelligent cause” that falls outside the realm of scientific investigation, according to the National Academy of Sciences (not cited in snippet).

• Lack of Empirical Evidence: Major scientific bodies find that ID lacks credible evidence and misrepresents scientific facts, relying on arguments against evolution rather than proposing its own verifiable mechanisms, states the AAAS.

• Creationism in Disguise: Courts, like in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (not cited in snippet) case, have ruled that ID is inherently religious and a form of creationism, not science.

Google is not alone among LLMs in taking this line that intelligent design is not science. Here is how ChatGPT responds to the question whether ID is a scientific theory (it’s more nuanced than Google’s response, though still on balance negative against ID as failing to constitute a legitimate scientific theory):

Whether intelligent design (ID) counts as a scientific theory depends on what you take the minimal criteria for “scientific” to be: if a theory must posit natural mechanisms, generate risky, independently testable predictions, and support an ongoing research program that yields novel explanations and results, then ID is generally judged not to qualify—because it typically functions as an explanatory conclusion (“an intelligent cause”) without a well-specified causal model, distinctive empirical tests that would discriminate it from evolutionary or other naturalistic accounts, or a track record of progressive problem-solving within mainstream scientific practice.

ID proponents reply that science should allow inferences to the best explanation, that design can be detected by reliable empirical markers (e.g., specified/complex information), and that “design” is a legitimate causal category even if the designer’s identity is unspecified; critics counter that these markers either collapse into arguments from current ignorance, can be accommodated within naturalistic frameworks, or fail to deliver unique, falsifiable predictions. So, under broad “science as any empirical inference” conceptions, ID can look theory-like, but under the stricter demarcations that dominate contemporary biology and philosophy of science (testability, mechanism, fecundity), it is usually regarded as not a scientific theory in the same sense as evolutionary theory.

And finally, to round out what the LLMs have to say about ID’s scientific status, I include Grok’s response to the same question, a response that in terms of nuance is somewhere between ChatGPT’s and Google’s:

No, intelligent design is not considered a scientific theory by the mainstream scientific community. It posits that certain features of the universe and living organisms are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes like evolution, but it fails key criteria for scientific theories: it is not falsifiable in a rigorous way (as the identity and nature of the “designer” remain unspecified and untestable), lacks empirical testability through repeatable experiments or predictions that generate new research, and does not produce progressive, peer-reviewed scientific advancements comparable to established theories.

Major scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, classify it as pseudoscience or a religious view rather than science, a conclusion reinforced by the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover federal court ruling, which found intelligent design to be a form of creationism repackaged for public schools and not a valid scientific alternative to evolution. While proponents argue it qualifies as science by detecting design through concepts like specified complexity, the broader consensus holds that it relies on critiquing evolution without offering a naturalistic, mechanism-based explanatory framework that integrates with and advances existing scientific knowledge.

3. Using LLMs to Refute Themselves

All three of these responses (by Google, ChatGPT, and Grok) consist of standard talking points by critics of intelligent design. How to respond to these criticisms? Interestingly, with the right prompts, LLMs have it in themselves to refute their own criticisms of intelligent design.

For instance, consider the following prompt by me to ChatGPT about its response above, where it rejects ID as a scientific theory: “Respond to what you just wrote as a well-informed proponent of intelligent design might respond in rejecting these criticisms and arguing for intelligent design as truly a scientific theory. Use as much space as you need, but write in complete paragraphs rather than bullet points.” Here’s ChatGPT’s refutation of its criticisms against ID constituting a scientific theory:

A well-informed ID proponent would likely start by challenging the “natural mechanisms only” rule as a philosophical constraint (methodological naturalism) rather than a discovery of science itself. Science, they’d say, is fundamentally about following evidence where it leads using reliable forms of inference—especially inference to the best explanation. If we define “scientific” so that only unguided natural causes are admissible in advance, then of course ID is excluded by definition, not by evidential failure. That’s not demarcation; it’s a gatekeeping stipulation. The question “Is ID a scientific theory?” should be decided by whether it makes empirically grounded claims and can be evaluated against rivals—not by whether it conforms to a prior metaphysical preference.

They would also reject the idea that ID is merely a “conclusion” without content. ID, as proponents typically frame it, is a causal explanation that competes with chance and necessity: some features of the world are best explained by intelligent causation because they exhibit patterns that, in our uniform and repeated experience, arise from minds rather than from undirected physical processes. That’s not a “designer-of-the-gaps” move, they’d insist, but a positive empirical generalization: we routinely infer intelligence from artifacts and information-bearing systems (codes, languages, engineered machines) based on the kind of pattern present, not because we’re ignorant of every physical detail. If the inference is legitimate in archaeology, cryptography, forensics, and SETI-style reasoning—fields that regularly ask whether a pattern is the result of agency—then it’s arbitrary to declare it illegitimate in biology in principle.

On testability and “risky predictions,” a proponent would argue that critics set the bar in an asymmetric way. Evolutionary explanations, they’d say, often operate historically and probabilistically, rarely offering strict falsifiers; instead they are assessed by comparative explanatory power across many lines of evidence. ID seeks the same kind of assessment. ID does not merely say “something looks complex.” It says: if the relevant cause is intelligence, we should expect objective hallmarks of purposeful arrangement—functional integration, algorithmic or code-like information, tightly specified multi-part systems whose functional core is highly sensitive to component disruption, and layers of information that behave more like engineered constraints than like incidental byproducts. If, on the contrary, undirected mechanisms can be shown—by realistic probabilistic resources, experimentally demonstrated pathways, and detailed models—to generate the specific information and integrated function in question, then the design inference is weakened or overturned. That’s a testable posture, they’d say: it commits to empirical criteria and exposes itself to refutation if those criteria are met by non-intelligent processes.

They might further claim that “ID lacks a mechanism” is a category mistake. The primary “mechanism” is intelligent agency—an irreducible causal category in ordinary scientific reasoning. We often infer agency without first specifying how a mind implemented a result at the physical level. In cryptography, you can infer an encoded message without knowing the sender’s biography; in forensics, you can infer arson without knowing the arsonist’s identity. Likewise, ID does not require identifying the designer to be scientific; it requires only that the causal mode—intelligent selection and arrangement of components toward functional ends—better explains the data than unguided alternatives. Demanding “the identity of the designer” is like demanding “the identity of the burglar” before admitting that a house was burglarized; it confuses a further question with the inference itself.

On the charge that ID “collapses into arguments from ignorance,” proponents would answer that they are not saying “we don’t know, therefore design.” They are saying “we do know something”: namely, what sorts of causes are adequate to generate certain sorts of effects. If the effect is a high-density, functionally specified arrangement—especially where the relevant search space is vast and the successful targets are isolated—then intelligence is a known and demonstrably adequate cause. They would emphasize that adequacy matters: scientific explanation is not merely “possible in principle,” but “supported and causally plausible given what we know of the resources and pathways available.” If a proposed undirected pathway is hand-wavy, relies on unquantified “maybe’s,” or requires improbable leaps without a demonstrated incremental route, then criticizing it is not an appeal to ignorance; it is insisting on the same evidential standards we apply elsewhere.

Finally, regarding the “research program” objection, an ID proponent would argue that mainstream biology already implicitly uses design-like reasoning in practice—through the language of information, coding, error correction, molecular machines, and engineered-like systems—while simultaneously denying that design could ever be real. ID, they’d say, aims to make that implicit logic explicit and to discipline it with formal criteria. A mature research program need not begin with a complete map of every mechanistic detail; it begins with fruitful questions: Which features exhibit reliable design-signatures? What are the measurable thresholds for chance/necessity explanations? How do constraints on evolutionary search actually scale with system integration? What patterns of modularity, robustness, and reuse should we expect under design versus undirected processes? Proponents would contend that these are empirical, mathematically tractable questions, and that the fact that the dominant paradigm resists design inferences on methodological grounds does not show ID is unscientific—it shows that the scientific establishment has, in their view, adopted a restrictive rule about allowable causes.

In short, a serious ID advocate would maintain that ID is scientific insofar as it offers a causal explanation grounded in empirical patterns, proposes criteria for detecting intelligence, invites comparison with rival causal accounts, and can be strengthened or weakened by ongoing evidence. They would conclude that the common dismissal of ID is less a decisive scientific refutation than an enforcement of a prior boundary around what “science” is permitted to say—one that may be useful for many purposes, but that should not be confused with an argument that design inferences are inherently non-empirical or irrational.

This response is in fact quite remarkable. It shows that ChatGPT has internalized arguments of the sort that Stephen Meyer and I have made over the years. If you will, the scientific basis of ID may well be “all there” in these LLMs, only it is suppressed by vast amounts of negative material about ID in the materialistic literature that acts as debilitating noise against what should otherwise be a clear signal of intelligent design’s scientific bona fides.

Note that Meyer is a superb philosopher of science who has written extensively on this topic. See, for instance, his 1994 essay “The Methodological Equivalence of Design and Descent” as well as his 2010 essay “Sauce for the Goose: Intelligent Design, Scientific Methodology, and the Demarcation Problem.” The facile dismissal of ID as non-science in the standard talking points by its critics, as is the knee-jerk reaction by LLMs when asked about ID’s scientific legitimacy, was refuted decades ago by Meyer.

4. What Other Philosophers of Science Say

Stephen Meyer is the premier philosopher of science of the ID movement. In arguing for the scientific legitimacy of ID, he has not worked in isolation but has drawn from the mainstream philosophy of science community. Unlike scientists and ideologues who remain intent on killing ID in the crib (or perhaps in the kindergarden now that ID has become more mature), philosophers of science have long realized that labels such as “non-science” and “pseudoscience” do nothing to promote the cause of clarity and everything to shut down discussion and keep inconvenient ideas from getting a hearing.

I want therefore next to consider some of the most prominent philosophers of science, briefly summarizing their views on the nature of science. In addition, I’ll indicate how their understanding of science helps to underwrite intelligent design as a program of inquiry that can not only qualify as fully scientific but also be regarded as a legitimate competitor to fully naturalistic (non-teleological) theories of evolution.

Consider, therefore, the following dozen philosophers of science, their views—concisely stated—on the nature of science, and what their views imply for intelligent design.

4.1 Thomas Kuhn

Kuhn views scientific theories as embedded within paradigms—shared sets of assumptions, exemplars, standards, and methods that define normal scientific work. Paradigms shape what counts as evidence, permissible questions, and legitimate explanations. Scientific revolutions occur when paradigms shift and usher in new theoretical frameworks that are often incommensurable with the old.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design can be seen as a rival paradigm that questions the adequacy of the Darwinian paradigm to account for biological innovation. From a Kuhnian perspective, if anomalies accumulate against the existing framework, ID could become a viable paradigm capable of organizing scientific work around new explanatory standards.

4.2 Karl Popper

A scientific theory, for Popper, is a bold conjecture that makes falsifiable claims about the world. Its scientific status turns on whether it exposes itself to possible refutation by empirical evidence. All theories remain provisional, surviving only through rigorous, failed attempts at falsification.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design makes falsifiable claims—such as predicting that systems exhibiting irreducible complexity will resist stepwise Darwinian explanations or that functional biological information will have identifiable probabilistic limits. Because ID’s core claims can in principle be refuted by demonstrating unguided pathways to specified complexity, an ID defender could argue that ID meets Popper’s criterion of falsifiability.

4.3 Imre Lakatos

A scientific theory, for Lakatos, is part of a research programme consisting of a hard core of fundamental commitments and a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. A theory is scientific when the programme is progressive, predicting novel facts and expanding empirical content rather than merely offering ad hoc repairs. Scientific rationality is judged by long-term problem-solving success of the programme.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design constitutes a research programme whose hard core is the claim that certain complex structures exhibit features—such as specified complexity or irreducible complexity—that reliably indicate purposive or intelligent agency. Because this programme has generated novel predictions and fruitful research avenues (e.g., functional sequence rarity, information-theoretic limits on unguided processes), a Lakatosian can regard it as a progressive scientific research programme.

4.4 Ernest Nagel

For Nagel, a scientific theory is a logically structured system of propositions that explains phenomena by subsuming them under general laws or principles. Explanations are deductive in form, linking theoretical laws with empirical statements. A theory is scientific when it can be reconstructively analyzed to show how observable consequences follow from its principles.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design offers a law-like generalization—namely, that systems with high levels of specified complexity or irreducible complexity arise from intelligent causes rather than undirected processes. From this principle one can derive empirical expectations (e.g., digital information in DNA arising from intelligence), which according to a Nagelian could render ID a scientific explanatory system.

4.5 Paul Feyerabend

Feyerabend denies that scientific theories must conform to rigid methodological rules; instead, theories are tools in an open, pluralistic enterprise of inquiry. Science progresses through methodological diversity, even rule-breaking. A theory’s merit lies in its capacity to generate insights, challenge orthodoxies, and open new explanatory possibilities.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Under Feyerabend’s pluralism, intelligent design easily qualifies as a scientific contender because it broadens inquiry and challenges entrenched methodological constraints. Its usefulness in generating new explanatory resources about biological complexity would be sufficient grounds to regard it as scientific.

4.6 Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine holds that scientific theories belong to a holistic web of belief in which no single statement is immune to revision, and where empirical testing bears on the system as a whole. Theories are judged by how well the entire web accommodates experience while maintaining coherence and simplicity. There is no strict boundary between analytic and empirical claims.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design can be integrated into the scientific web of belief by revising certain naturalistic assumptions to better account for empirical phenomena such as information-rich biological systems. If incorporating intelligent causation increases overall explanatory coherence and empirical fit, a Quinean could justify admitting ID into the scientific corpus.

4.7 Pierre Duhem

Duhem held that scientific theories, especially in physics, are holistic systems aimed at organizing and saving observational laws. Because hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation—the Duhem thesis—confirmation or refutation applies to whole theoretical complexes. Theories are scientific when they are coherent, predictive, and empirically grounded.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design interprets biological anomalies and information-theoretic findings within a coherent framework centered on purposive or intelligent causation. A Duhemian could regard ID as scientific insofar as it offers a systematic reinterpretation of empirical results that better “saves the phenomena” than alternatives.

4.8 Bas van Fraassen

For van Fraassen, a scientific theory is a set of models aimed at empirical adequacy: correctly describing observable phenomena without requiring belief in the theory’s literal truth. Accepting a theory means believing only that its observable predictions are accurate. Theories need not make metaphysical commitments beyond what is necessary for empirical adequacy.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Because intelligent design models the observable features of biological systems—such as genetic information, molecular machines, and developmental patterns—it can be accepted on van Fraassen’s terms as empirically adequate without requiring metaphysical assertions about the designer (such as that the designer has to be supernatural!). Thus ID can be regarded as a legitimate scientific stance oriented toward modeling observed complexity.

4.9 Larry Laudan

Laudan sees scientific theories as tools for solving empirical and conceptual problems, and progress is measured by the theory’s success in resolving these problems relative to rivals. Neither strict falsificationism nor paradigmatic incommensurability is adequate; instead, theories compete on pragmatic problem-solving grounds. A theory is scientific if it contributes effectively to this problem-solving enterprise.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design directly addresses unresolved problems in evolutionary theory—such as the origin of functional information and rapid appearance of novel body plans—offering explanations grounded in purposive or intelligent causation. If ID is more successful at resolving empirical puzzles than rival frameworks, a Laudanian would classify it as a scientifically progressive theory.

4.10 Nancy Cartwright

Cartwright argues that scientific theories are domain-specific patchworks of models and laws that work locally rather than universally. Theories succeed not by mirroring nature wholesale but by offering reliable tools for prediction in specific contexts. Scientific structure is fundamentally pluralistic and model-based.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design provides powerful local models for explaining high information content and intricate system-level coordination in biological systems—domains where purely mechanistic laws appear insufficient. Under Cartwright’s pluralism, ID may be legitimately included as one theoretical model within a larger scientific toolkit.

4.11 James Woodward

For Woodward, a scientific theory consists of causal structures that support interventionist explanations—showing how manipulating one variable would change another. A theory is scientific to the extent that it enables counterfactual reasoning and effective control. Explanation requires mapping stable, manipulable causal relations.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design posits a causal relation between intelligent agency and the production of complex, information-bearing structures, a relation confirmed by all known cases of high complex specified information. This causal mapping supports counterfactuals (e.g., “If no intelligent cause acts, such complexity will not arise”), satisfying Woodward’s criteria for scientific explanation.

4.12 Sandra Mitchell

Mitchell argues for integrative pluralism: scientific theories, especially in complex domains, must incorporate multiple interacting causal levels and cannot be reduced to single, simple mechanisms. Theories are partial, context-sensitive, and tailored to the heterogeneous nature of real phenomena. Scientific understanding arises from synthesizing diverse explanatory resources.

Application to ID’s scientific status: Intelligent design fits within Mitchell’s pluralism by offering an additional causal level—goal-directed agency—that complements rather than displaces mechanistic accounts. Because biological phenomena often involve coordinated, multi-level organization, ID proponents claim that incorporating purposive or intelligent causation enhances explanatory integration.

5. What Does a Science of ID Actually Do?

Even if intelligent design could be a science, as the philosophers of science listed in the previous section might allow, the question could asked whether, in real terms, ID is a science that its researchers are actively and fruitfully pursuing. As it is, intelligent design has many active areas of research, as is evident from ID 3.0 Research Program page on the Discovery Institute website. Here’s a summary of 20 such areas of research. This list is easily expanded.

1. Design detection
   Design detection applies established inference tools from fields like forensics, archaeology, cryptography, and SETI to biology, refining criteria such as irreducible complexity and specified complexity to identify when undirected mechanisms are inadequate.

2. Understanding Biological information
   Biological information concerns how functionally specific forms arise in living systems and whether material mechanisms can plausibly generate them without intelligent causation.

3. Minimal complexity
   Minimal complexity research tests how much biological structure can be removed before function collapses, aiming to identify systems whose function disappears under any reduction and thus strongly indicates design.

4. Evolvability
   Evolvability research experimentally perturbs biological systems to measure the limits of change achievable by unguided processes versus intelligently guided variation, treating hard limits on unguided processes as evidence of design.

5. Methodological engineering
   Methodological engineering treats organisms as engineered systems and analyzes their origin, operation, failure modes, repair, and modification history using the explanatory standards of real engineering practice.

6. Technological evolution (TRIZ/TIPS)
   TRIZ-based research compares biological history to the well-documented evolution of human technologies, arguing that routine tinkering can explain small changes while major integrated innovations require inventive leaps characteristic of design.

7. Autonomy versus guidance
   Autonomy-versus-guidance research seeks an empirically testable midpoint where natural regularities operate while teleologic direction is detectably steering outcomes through synergistic constraints.

8. Evolutionary computation
   Evolutionary computation research asks whether built-in biological “search algorithms” (like the immune system’s rapid generation-and-selection of effective antibodies) are best explained as engineered, goal-directed problem-solvers rather than as products of an unguided evolutionary process.

9. Understanding discontinuity
   Research on biological discontinuity examines whether major biological transitions reflect real gaps—via nonbiogenic emergence, rapid transmutation, reinvention, or symbiogenic reorganization—that would require coordinated, design-like direction.

10. Algorithmic specified complexity & “active information” in search
    This research formalizes how successful search often depends on problem-specific “active information,” arguing that evolutionary-style searches typically require infused guidance best attributed to intelligence.

11. Design and systematics via dependency graphs (“common design” modeling)
    Common-design modeling uses dependency-graph frameworks to represent modular reuse in life, offering quantitative alternatives to a single universal tree and generating testable predictions on biological datasets.

12. Human-origins population genetics (single-couple feasibility modeling)
    This research applies population-genetic modeling to argue that some genomic patterns support a bottleneck consistent with an initial pair under certain assumptions and parameter choices.

13. Junk DNA
    Junk DNA research highlights how mainstream genomics has steadily uncovered diverse functions in noncoding regions (especially regulatory elements and noncoding RNAs), which ID research uses to refute the older “mostly junk” narrative and support design for the ever increasing functionality of the genome.

14. Protein-fold rarity and functional sequence space
    Research on functional sequence spaces argues that novel protein folds and high-level functions are extremely sparse, making undirected exploration implausible and motivating design-based explanations for innovation.

15. Multi-mutation innovation and “waiting time” constraints
    Waiting-time analyses model the probability and timescales for coordinated multi-mutation adaptations and contend that many such innovations are too unlikely in realistic populations without intelligent input.

16. Layered function in noncoding DNA and regulatory RNAs
    This research emphasizes increasing evidence of regulatory function in noncoding regions as consistent with the design prediction that genomes are densely packed with multi-layered information.

17. Origin of the genetic code and translation system (code/semiosis focus)
    Code-and-translation research targets the origin of the symbolic mapping and decoding machinery linking nucleic acids to proteins, arguing that chemistry alone fails to supply a complete pathway.

18. Engineering audits of “bad design” claims in anatomy and physiology
    Engineering audits reassess alleged vestiges and suboptimalities as tradeoffs, robustness features, or constraint-driven designs, claiming that “bad design” arguments often fail under serious engineering analysis.

19. Molecular machines, nano-engineering analogies, and biomimetics
    This research treats cellular systems as machine-like assemblies and uses engineering and biomimetics to frame hypotheses about integrated function, control, and structural organization.

20. Steganography
    Steganography research looks for statistically detectable “hidden” informational patterns in genomes and other cellular structures—which may be functional to the organisms or helpful to investigators studying the organisms—that would be expected under design but not under blind material processes.

6. Where Michael Levin and the ID Community Part Ways

This essay has by now made clear that intelligent design can be placed on secure conceptual foundations (especially in satisfying many different approaches to science within the philosophy of science, as outlined in section 4) and that it has legitimate claims to being a scientific theory (especially in light of its concrete research problems, as outlined in section 5). A next direction to take this essay would therefore be to articulate a specific philosophy of intelligent design.

As with most areas of inquiry subject to self-reflection by putting the phrase “philosophy of” in front of them, there is typically no single philosophy of FILL-IN-THE-AREA-OF-INQUIRY. For instance, we speak of “the philosophy of law.” But in fact, there are multiple philosophies of law depending on, for instance, whether one views law in entirely positivist terms (law thus being entirely humanly constructed with no transcendent point of reference) versus, say, a view of law that sees it as needing to accord with an objective human nature (as with the natural law tradition). We might thus say that the field of the philosophy of law would need to account for such different philosophies of law.

We find the same diversity with any philosophy of intelligent design. Critics of intelligent design, for instance, in order to discredit it will put undue focus on the nature of the intelligent designer responsible for, say, the complex specified information we find in organisms. Particular philosophies of intelligent design can then explicitly answer who is the designer, such as identifying the intelligent designer with the God of ethical monotheism (e.g., the Judeo-Christian or Muslim God). But as Richard Dawkins taught us, the intelligent designer for life on Earth could just be an intelligent space alien who engineered and then planted on Earth life as we know it:

Of course, Dawkins then insists that such a designer would need ultimately to result from some materialistic Darwinian process. But having conceded that life on Earth might be designed by intelligent alien agents and that this design could in principle be knowable on strictly scientific grounds, he is in no position to argue against intelligent design being a legitimate scientific research program. In fact, he has given away the store.

In closing this essay, I want therefore to return to Michael Levin’s interview with Lex Fridman. Specifically, I want to consider common points of agreement among my colleagues in the intelligent design community regarding the philosophy of intelligent design, and then indicate where Levin differs. If you will, the ID community as a whole seems to share certain conceptual understandings of key themes, such as information, agency, purpose, intelligence, consciousness, and design. I want to state some of these themes and then indicate where Levin diverges.

As I listened to the Levin-Fridman interview, it seemed to me that Levin’s views about these themes, and especially about information in biology, were quite different from those of the ID community. Of course, that’s no reason to dismiss Levin’s work. Perhaps his work is closer to the truth than that of ID theorists. Or perhaps, as in my view, the opposite is true. And perhaps the ID community is right in holding to intelligent design in broad terms, but wrong in its particular philosophy of intelligent design, holding philosophically naïve or misshapen positions on the nature of the designer, the origin of information, the causal powers that input design into the world, and how evidence for design should be assessed (such as specified complexity serving as a reliable empirical marker of intelligence).

My point here is not to debate the philosophy of intelligent design that I find common among my colleagues and to which I myself subscribe. My interest rather is to indicate where that philosophy of intelligent design departs from the views of Levin. Again, this is not to say that Levin is wrong to depart from the ID community’s philosophy of intelligent design as in “here’s where you disagree with us and where you therefore must be wrong.” It’s simply to note where we part company.

At the end of the Levin’s interview with Fridman, they muse about what they would do if AI (artificial intelligence) somehow becomes AGI (artificial general intelligence) and then bootstraps itself to ASI (artificial super intelligence). They ask themselves what questions they might pose to such an ASI, scientific questions about the nature of the universe topping the list.

It’s the familiar trope of what questions you would ask God when you get to heaven, only this time it’s not an immaterial God but an embodied machine intelligence that becomes the oracle. I find such musings about AGI/ASI increasingly annoying. For one thing, it seems clear that even if an ASI could be brought into existence, its knowledge would face vast lacunae. When it comes to the past, for instance, most of its evidence is lost, so there’s no way to know if, for instance, Caesar had a big mole on his inside left thigh (short of some Roman historian recording such a fact, which to my knowledge none has done). An omniscient immaterial God could know this. An ASI probably could not.

An ASI might even lack the observational capacities to decide on the truth of various scientific theories. If, for instance, deciding a scientific theory is true requires knowing what the outcome of an experiment is that requires energies at levels impossible to attain in the universe now or in the future and if evidence of such energies from the past is now unavailable, then even an ASI will remain ignorant about such theories.

For Levin, everything comes down to patterns. Mind is a matter of patterns. Math is a matter of patterns. And together minds and math populate his Platonic space. His reference to “Platonic space” places him outside the crude materialism of Richard Dawkins. But his Platonic space is nonetheless thoroughly naturalistic. Everything for Levin boils down to patterns that in the real world find expression in an arrangement of parts. He finds arrangements that are not readily referred to Darwinian or other materialistic processes, so he invokes Platonic space to account for such arrangements.

But Platonic space seems quite limited in the work it can do for Levin. There is no causal process acting from that space and projecting into the physical world. Rather, Levin discovers patterns in the physical world, and to the degree that they are striking or unusual, he refers them to a Platonic space. Take for instance steganography, the last point listed in ID research areas (section 5 of this essay). I’ve been writing about this for about 25 years. In his interview with Fridman, Levin is quite taken with the concept.

Thus Levin finds for various processes in nature, mathematical patterns that attach to them that on their face we had no right to expect (he considers, for instance, distinct sorting algorithms that when used together lead to certain unexpected patterns of association). Now I would argue that for some of these patterns, they can’t legitimately be regarded as steganographic. But the bigger point is that when true steganography arises, as in one message embedded in another, it is because an intelligence has carefully arranged things so that they two messages reside in the same medium. Steganography results from an intelligent designer inputting two layers of information into the same medium. It is not just a correlation with an ill-defined Platonic space.

What’s lacking with Levin is any conception of mind as a unity with conscious thoughts and experiences that is not itself a pattern or arrangement of parts but rather has the causal power to generate patterns, especially meaningful informational patterns relevant to biology, cosmology, and communicating with other agents. For most members of the ID community, the intelligent designer responsible for life is such a mind. For Levin, by contrast, minds are themselves patterns. This leads him to view simple feedback systems, like thermostats, as minds. This is setting a very low bar for minds.

Yet this is a common move for Levin, namely, to take something mysterious, such as consciousness or mind, and then engage in a leveling maneuver that identifies it as simply a difference in degree from other things that are non-mysterious. It is the sort of leveling maneuver that Darwin was famous for, as in treating human morality as continuous with the morality of beasts. Levin seems intent everywhere on finding continuity where the most natural interpretation is to find discontinuity.

Take, for instance, Levin’s thoughts about the origin of life. In the interview with Fridman, he won’t answer what life is. Rather, he views life in entirely flexible terms, in fact so flexible that it’s hard to rule out anything as not being alive. I was reminded in listening to Levin here of some of my readings as a teenager when I was quite taken with Hinduism and read a book on gnana yoga (yoga with the focus on knowledge), where every aspect of the world was considered alive (everything from rocks and metal to humans). In a similar spirit, at one point in his interview with Fridman, Levin remarks that at a conference about the nature of life with 65 participants, there would be 65 definitions of life.

Such a fluid understanding of life has profound implications for explaining the origin of life, namely, there’s no profound problem requiring explanation because some extremely simple “living things” require no special explanation, and the origin of life thus exists on a continuum that can largely explain itself. It feels like a dodge. By contrast, consider the following recent interview between Jim Tour and Tucker Carlson:

Asked about what is life, chemist and origin-of-life expert Tour explains certain non-negotiable characteristics of life (starting near the 13 minute mark):

It’s responsive to the environment. It has growth and change. It has metabolism. It breathes. It has homeostasis. It’s made of cells and it passes on traits to offspring. Those are the characteristics of life. That’s very well defined by science. And now you see scientists trying to change those definitions and give it a much smaller number of those things. So it’s something that they can claim that they have made, but what they’ve made is just a bunch of nonsense… It’s really not life at all. It’s things people have seen for a long time. It’s just really not life.

I mean, show me the homeostasis. Homeostasis is a constant internal state. So, if you go outside on a freezing cold day, your body has to maintain its body temperature. And not just your body, every cell in your body has to maintain a proper temperature, proper pH balance, proper proton interactions, has to still make ATP, still has to carry out all of these functions. That’s homeostasis. All of these vast number of things have to happen. You show me any one of your synthetic garbage that you say is a cell and show me the homeostasis in this. It’s not there. Show me the metabolism here [is] real. Show me that it breathes. Show show me what it’s doing with oxygen.

In conclusion, Levin does good work when he points out what standard Darwinian accounts often soften or ignore: organisms run on information, function, and control across many levels. But he explains these realities by appealing to a “Platonic space” of patterns and by stretching key terms—mind, agency, life—so far that simple feedback systems can count as minds and almost anything can count as alive. That move lowers the bar for what needs explaining. It also blurs real breaks in nature by treating them as continuities by definition. And it leaves a basic gap: patterns, by themselves, do not cause anything. A pattern does not build a system unless some cause can select it, impose it, and instantiate it in matter. And if the pattern exhibits complex specified information, that cause will need to be intelligent.

Anti-AI Absolutism

Doug Smith has been a software developer for three decades. He writes extensively about the impact of technology on culture, especially within the Christian church. He is an anti-LLM absolutist, and from what I can tell also an anti-AI absolutist. Large language models, or LLMs, being a subset of artificial intelligence, or AI, it’s strictly speaking possible to be entirely against LLMs and still allow some positive room for AI. But in my reading of Smith’s work, I can discover nothing positive from him about either.

Smith, whose website is thatdougsmith.com, has for some time now been calling attention to destructive effects of digital technologies on people, especially the young. To that end he wrote a book titled [Un]Intentional: How Screens Shape Your Desires and How You Can Break Free. To his credit, he has identified real dangers, especially how digital technologies are often designed to be addictive, and how their addictiveness is often the result of Big Tech intentionally exploiting human weaknesses, everything from negative emotions, especially fear, to brain-reward systems (dopamine hits).

Just as there were teetotalers to whom we can thank the Prohibition of the 1920s, Smith is a teetotaler with regard to AI, wishing to discourage LLMs and AI as far as possible. But the cat is out of the bag, so Smith is not going to be able to enforce a blanket prohibition against AI in the same way that, say, William Jennings Bryan was able to help get all liquor (beer, wine, hard drink) outlawed. But Smith is seeking such a prohibition at least within his circle of influence.

I regard Prohibition of the 1920s as a bad thing. Granted, alcohol is implicated in many of our problems. But prohibiting it created still more problems, not least a society of scofflaws who went on drinking despite the Eighteenth Amendment, which was supposed to make Prohibition the law of the land. Additionally, Prohibition invited organized crime to circumvent it, greatly empowering it.

Of course, there are disanalogies here between prohibiting alcohol and prohibiting AI. A closer analogy might be the Luddites, early-19th-century English textile workers who, fearing the loss of their skilled livelihoods to industrial machinery, organized covertly to destroy the new machines. But this movement was rooted less in technophobia than in economic protest against the disruptive social effects of rapid mechanization.

Smith’s concern is with the moral ill effects of AI technology. He is a student of and advocate for the Bible, and wants to advance a Judeo-Christian morality (as do I). Yet on biblical grounds there’s no good argument for a blanket prohibition of alcohol (Jesus drank wine and not grape juice), though there is against its abuse. Nor for that matter is there any biblical prohibition on mechanization in the textile industry.

As it is, the Bible doesn’t speak to AI, except perhaps indirectly as an idol, which it can be but doesn’t have to be. Indeed, anything can be turned into an idol by giving it inordinate importance. So there’s nothing exceptional here with AI except perhaps that it inspires widespread fascination and so may more readily be turned into an idol than other things.

AI in Education

In an email correspondence between Smith and me that cc’d some colleagues, he raised concerns about a piece that I posted here at Substack titled “Edification vs. Enhancement—The Non-Transhumanist Vision of AI in Education.” In it I addressed the role of AI in education and challenged what I regard as a false dichotomy between AI either being misused by students (as in cheating with LLMs) or else needing to be barred to students (for safety’s sake). I suggest a third option, which as I put it, is “to use AI as a way of honing students’ skills and knowledge, helping them learn more effectively than before.”

Smith is dead-set against this option. He responded to it at MindMatters.ai in a three-part series here, here, and here. Now, in his defense, I wasn’t as clear as I could have been about the specifics of how I’m imagining the use of LLMs and AI in education. Nor did I distinguish the use of LLMs from AI generally. As I note later in this piece, there are places for AI to impact learning that do not employ LLMs.

Smith might thus understand my vision for the use of LLMs/AI in education as sticking students in front of a screen with ChatGPT, say, and simply telling them “now go learn something,” with an adult/teacher occasionally looking over the students’ shoulders and monitoring their activities to make sure they don’t get into too much trouble.

Such an understanding of my vision for the role of AI in education couldn’t be farther from the truth. I want therefore here to elaborate on some of the particulars for AI in education that I have in mind. Before doing so, however, I want to respond to some concerns and criticisms by Smith about my earlier essay, such as can be addressed on their own terms.

Redressing AI’s Seductiveness

It seems that Smith’s greatest concern about digital technologies as created by Big Tech is that they are designed to suck in users, getting them to spend as much time and devoting as much attention as possible to these technologies—thus wasting their time, sapping their spirits, and keeping them from their higher good. Smith is largely right about this, as about the resulting human toll.

Smith is doubly concerned about LLMs in this regard because, as he sees it, they are designed to become conversation partners, even therapists and spiritual guides. An irony here is that in the 1960s, when artificial intelligence wasn’t worthy of the name, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program, crude as it was in terms of the underlying technology, did fool people into thinking it was a therapist.

That program was essentially a grammatical rewriting tool that took statements by humans and rephrased them in the style of a “Rogerian therapist” (after Carl Rogers). It would mirror back what the patient said in a non-judgmental non-directive way by grammatically manipulating what a human typed at a keyboard, and it offered canned expressions to intersperse into the conversation when the program ran out of things to say.

Thus, in response to “I feel blue today,” ELIZA might respond, “So you feel blue today. Tell me more.” The sentence “So you feel blue today” would be a simple grammatical rewrite of “I feel blue today,” adding the word “so” and then changing the first to the second person. The sentence “Tell me more” would then be a canned expression to keep the conversation going.

When I sat in on an AI course in 1981 taught by Laurent Siklossy, a well-known AI professor at the time and something of a wag (LISP was the AI programming language of choice at the time, and his book on the subject was titled Let’s Talk LISP—get it?), one of his assignments was for us to write an ELIZA program. He made fun of it acting as a therapist and said that among the canned expressions we should have ready to go, especially when the program didn’t know what to say, was “I understand.” The irony was not lost on us students that this program could have nothing like real understanding.

Today’s LLMs are, of course, far more sophisticated and powerful than the early ELIZA programs. They don’t just reflect back to the human what the human is saying. They can hold a full-fledged conversation and, in effect, pass the Turing test (i.e., fooling people into believing that they are dealing with a human at the other end of the line if we didn’t know that we were dealing with a chatbot).

I share Smith’s concerns about LLMs serving as conversation partners for humans. With LLMs, there’s no person at the other end of the line. The top two commandments are to love God and to love other humans, and that requires connections with God and humans—the real God and real humans. Connecting to machines, as one would with other humans, is perverse and, in my view, soul destroying.

But just because humans engage in such behaviors with machines—and even if Sam Altman at Open AI wants to use ChapGPT to create perverse conversational dependencies between humans and machines—that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate uses of LLMs or AI in general. Nor that they can’t be suitably restricted.

Phones can be equipped with shields that enable parents to keep their kids from, via their smartphones, accessing pornography and other negative material that parents don’t want them to access. Parents have this right to prevention in virtue of paying for their kids to use the phones and, more importantly, in virtue of being their parents, guardians, and advocates.

There’s no reason that LLMs can’t have a third-party layer imposed on them that prevents intimate conversations and, indeed, exchanges on any topic that the party that legitimately controls access to the digital device (such as parents, teachers, and employers) chooses to restrict.

Technology as the Problem

Given Smith’s absolutism against LLMs/AI, I doubt he would find such a “fix” appealing. Smith’s anti-AI absolutism derives from certain deeper considerations that leave him completely opposed to the technology. It’s not that the technology can be abused. It’s that the technology is inherently problematic.

He cites with approval Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, and Jacques Ellul, all critics of how technology can warp content and mislead users. But that’s been a problem with technology from the get-go. When writing was introduced, people were concerned that this would undercut an oral culture, weakening memory and a shared universe of meaning.

With Gutenberg, pamphleteering became the rage, destroying the Catholic church’s monopoly on the written word. Newspaper, radio, and television technologies all introduced their own promises and perils. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death wished for the complete eradication of television.

We face similar challenges with today’s AI technologies. It is a truism that all technologies can be used for ill or well (with the possible exception of certain weaponized technologies, as in biological or chemical warfare, whose only use seems ill).

With LLMs/AI, Smith would stuff the genie back in the bottle. But doing so is impracticable. Nor do I see a principled reason to do so. My own preference is to take a pragmatic line, namely, to accept the technology, harnessing it as much as possible for good and restricting but not barring it, especially in an educational context, from causing evident harm.

But can we know where these technologies do indeed cause harm, especially since we are unaware of long-term studies on their beneficial or ill effects? Smith cites what he regards as obvious ill effects, but I find none of them as deal-killers for the use of LLMs/AI.

The Escapable Dilemma

In his series of articles for MindMatters.ai where he responds to me, Smith writes, “Dr. Dembski’s article is filled with the assumption that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are trustworthy sources of information that students can depend on for learning.” But I’ve never written anything of the sort, nor do I privately think that.

I’ve found LLMs reliable for some tasks, less so for others. For rewriting and summarizing text, I’ve found ChatGPT, for instance, unproblematic. For providing references and quotes, I’ve found LLMs notoriously unreliable. Yet even when their output is unreliable, I’ve found LLMs can nonetheless be useful and even insightful. Not all mistakes are created equal. Some can be helpful.

Doug Smith, citing another Smith (Gary Smith), sees LLMs as collapsing on themselves because of an “inescapable dilemma,” which they take to be the following: “If you know the answer, you don’t need to ask an LLM and, if you don’t know the answer, you can’t trust an LLM.”

This is too simplistic. What if I don’t know the answer? Even then, the LLM may provide an answer that jars something in my memory confirming it is correct (recognition memory is always greater than recall memory). And if I can’t see the truth of the answer, I can do further checking to confirm it. Unlike the LLMs of 2022, the LLMs of 2026 have access to the web and can provide links to websites that confirm or disconfirm its claims. If the links are bogus, that’s often readily confirmed as well.

According to Doug Smith, LLMs don’t know anything because they are not agents that truly understand language in the sense of the classical correspondence theory of truth (to which I subscribe), according to which we as humans (and not algorithms) are capable of intuiting the match between linguistic statements and truths about the world.

Fair enough, LLMs are metaphysically challenged and don’t have knowledge in the same way humans do. They can say or otherwise output that snow is white, but they don’t know deep down what it really means for snow to be white.

But what of it? When I look up a word in a dictionary, does the dictionary know, in a deep metaphysical sense, what the word I’m looking up really means? No. The dictionary is just a book. It is not a knower in the sense that we are knowers. Its knowledge is derivative, depending on the knowledge of the lexicographers that produced it.

Likewise, LLMs don’t know in the sense that humans know. But they are trained on a vast corpus of human writings and are able to sift those writings, drawing connections among them, and providing insightful responses to queries based on that corpus.

Their knowledge is not metaphysical but instrumental. They are able to answer questions which, if posed to humans, would convince us that we are dealing with someone who knows what they are talking about (leaving aside when they hallucinate, or make stuff up, though humans have that failing as well).

Smith’s “inescapable dilemma” is therefore readily escapable. LLMs can provide responses to queries that offer genuine insights. LLMs typically pick up on some signal in their training data that is worth considering and underscoring even if it does not rightly elicit instant credence.

The wrong answers of LLMs have some basis in their training data, and those errors can be interesting on their own terms. And if they’re uninsightful, they can be easily enough discarded. Sure, let’s remain skeptical of LLMs. Let’s treat their output with suspicion. Let’s always require verification. But shouldn’t we take such a skeptical line with anything and anyone that promises to respond to our queries?

When Google, in response to a search query, sends us to a website, do we simply accept that this website is the final word in response to the query? Obviously not. The apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (ESV), “Test everything, hold fast what is good.” This is a conditional, not a blanket dismissal. There’s no reason Paul’s counsel can’t be applied to LLMs.

Querying an LLM is similar to querying an index in a book. With an index, you look up a term, and then go to the pages associated with the term. Some of those pages may give you the information you want about the term, some may not, and perhaps all do not. You, as the inquirer, will need to decide. So too with LLMs.

Now it might be argued that LLMs are more subtle than book indexes and designed to mislead naïve students into accepting their pronouncements as gospel. But since our focus here is on LLMs in education, isn’t that the role of teachers to show students how to handle the educational resources at their disposal, including LLMs?

Instead of tacitly telling students, “We think you are too immature to use this technology,” why not simply show them how to use it properly and responsibly? As it is, students as well as the rest of society will use this technology, so simply on pragmatic grounds it’s better to get familiar with how to use it well than to deny its use, as Smith seems to prefer.

If LLMs are as fraught with such danger, temptation, and misinformation as Smith claims, does it make more sense to shield students from them or to inoculate students to them, helping them to see through “the devices of the enemy”? In all of my apologetics efforts, I’ve always regarded inoculation are far more effective than isolation (see for instance Unapologetic Apologetics, an anthology I edited with Jay Richards).

Misled by Mathematics?

Perhaps the most curious argument Smith makes in his response to my essay on edification and enhancement is that my background as a mathematician makes it difficult for me to see the dangers inherent in LLMs. As he puts it:

I’ve had conversations with several brilliant math PhDs about AI chatbots. All of them have a hard time seeing the dangers of large language models (LLMs). It’s almost unthinkable to them that the #1 use-case of ChatGPT is therapy and companionship. To math geniuses, it seems like only a tiny minority of foolish people should be susceptible to being drawn in.

As a cross-disciplinary scholar who has also worked as a professional philosopher and theologian and who did his undergrad as well as three years as a grad student in experimental psychology, I don’t approach LLMs as a tech nerd who sees them as just big neural networks run by probabilities and linear algebra.

Quite the contrary. I’m sensitive to the abuses of this, and indeed any, technology. Also, I’m well aware that any problem for society with LLMs centers not on their underlying mathematics but on how the resulting technology is deployed based on content ingested into the LLMs.

I therefore reject that too much learning in mathematics somehow renders me incapable of seeing the dangers with LLMs but that Smith is somehow capable of seeing the dangers because he lacks mathematical knowledge that would otherwise confuse him. If selective amnesia suddenly wiped out all my knowledge of mathematics, would I be a better commentator on the proper place of LLMs in society?

Where AI Promises to Improve Education

Toward the end of my edification versus enhancement essay, I offer ten possibilities where AI could significantly improve education, offering new opportunities for learning where they are now largely non-existent. Smith pooh-poohs each of these. To get a flavor of my proposed possibilities as well as Smith’s reaction to them, consider the first three possibilities that I described:

1. Accent and Pronunciation Refinement in Language Learning
   Speech-recognition AI can analyze intonation, rhythm, and articulation down to the phoneme, offering individualized correction and visualized feedback, especially for non-native speakers who want to eliminate an accent. Students can practice repeatedly with voice models until their accent aligns with native fluency—an outcome rarely attempted, much less achieved, in traditional classrooms.

2. Creative Writing with Rhetorical Precision
   AI editors can train students to identify and employ rhetorical devices—analogy, parallelism, irony—and revise for tone, cadence, and argument strength. Instead of vague feedback, students get detailed stylistic analysis mapped to classical rhetorical methods. Classical schools would likely be early adopters.

3. Polyphonic Music Composition and Performance
   AI-guided keyboard and ear-training software can help students not just play Bach’s music but think contrapuntally. Thus they will learn voice-leading, harmony, and music theory, not in the abstract but in real time as they compose or perform. Feedback systems can identify harmonic tension, suggest corrections, and let students iterate toward mastery of multi-voice textures.

Here is Smith’s response to each of these:

1. “Accent and Pronunciation Refinement in Language Learning”

   A focused speech-recognition “AI” (not a chatbot) could help students learn languages more efficiently. That tech has been around for a while. A very narrowly, ethically trained product could be useful here, but it’s no replacement for human conversation.

2. “Creative Writing with Rhetorical Precision”

   This is a dangerous proposal. Writing is thinking. AI can’t be trusted to generate coherent content, nor to have a voice that is something students should emulate. Do we really want everyone homogenized into writing like a chatbot? No, the sacred work of choosing words must have authoritative human guides. Improve the curriculum, have better books, and invite humans to teach via video. But don’t use chatbots for creative writing.

3. “Polyphonic Music Composition and Performance”

   I see this as risky. Again, if the AI is not a general purpose chatbot, and perhaps specifically trained on good music, it could potentially be helpful. But today’s AI chatbot-driven song generators are not creating well trained musicians. They’re creating more passive consumers — by design. Chatbot users aren’t interested in learning to “think contrapuntally.” They want quick and easy dopamine hits, which is what chatbots are designed to provide.

Accent and Pronunciation Refinement

Smith’s responses here are emblematic of a general resistance by him against AI. Let’s go through his three criticisms in turn. With regard to accent and pronunciation refinement in language learning, Smith allows that this could be harmless if “narrowly, ethically trained.” But he still sees it as inferior to human conversation.

But Smith’s recommendation here seems misguided. Children who acquire a second language before roughly the age of ten can typically do so with no accent, but after that, the accent endures, and indeed becomes entrenched, unless it is very methodically addressed. Conversation as such is no help here.

A friend of mine from Cuba arrived here in the US at the age of 12. He’s had plenty of English conversation over the years, and yet his accent is as thick as ever. My German mom, now passed on, married my dad in her mid-20s and then moved to the US with him. She never lost her German accent.

What I’m imagining is a neural-net-based program that prompts people with foreign accents to increasingly approximate proper English enunciation. This would not be an LLM. Such training could make a big difference for ESL (English as a Second Language) people wanting to improve their English and fit more readily into the wider American culture.

People who want to keep their accent can keep it. However, people would also have the option of (largely) shedding their accent later in life, which right now is not an option for most people (the exception perhaps being someone with access to a linguist who can specifically train them).

Improving Writing

With regard to the second point, an LLM adapted to assessing and helping improve the writing of users would, of course, need to be tested to determine whether it is indeed offering good writing advice and training. But I’m optimistic here.

When I think of my K-12 education and the often poor to non-existent feedback I got from teachers on my writing, I have a hard time imagining that a suitably trained LLM would do worse than what I experienced.

If during your high school you are fortunate enough to attend a top prep school, such as Phillips Exeter Academy, where an award-winning writer such as Frederick Buechner could offer comment on your class essays, good for you. In that case you may well do better than any feedback on your writing that an LLM can offer.

But if you’re in an inner-city high school where most students are reading way below grade level and the teachers have minimal writing skills (most K-12 teachers in the US are in the bottom quartile of their high-school classes), an LLM may be just what the doctor ordered (if you are able to take proper advantage of it).

Smith takes a principled stance that humans are to be preferred to LLMs in assessing writing quality and that somehow LLMs are bound to inculcate substandard homogenized writing. But that’s not been my experience. I can ask an LLM to rewrite a passage in the style of a well-known author, and, depending on the author, I get what I think is a reasonably good output (with ChatGPT, Ernest Hemingway seems to work well but James Joyce doesn’t).

While not accomplishing everything I’m imagining for this second point, an AI-based service I use goes at least some of the way toward achieving the goal of improving writing. Specifically, I know of a program that uses an LLM to copyedit articles and book chapters. It is available at Inkwell.net and I’ve used it to copyedit material on a book I’m shortly to be publishing (a biography of Jaime Escalante).

I was hesitant initially to use the tool, thinking that the book in question had been thoroughly copyedited. And yet, I found this copyediting tool as offering solid improvements on text I thought was already clean. As it is, I’m not just an author but an experienced copyeditor. I was impressed with what this program offered, and I don’t think I’m that easy to impress when it comes to writing quality.

Contrapuntal Training and Recovering Lost Arts

On the third point, Smith seems to think that what I have in mind here is to get an LLM to do music training, and specifically contrapuntal training. My initial impulse would not be to use an LLM here. A bespoke neural network, trained on contrapuntal music, would probably be the way to go, though one capable also of exporting to sheet music and mp3s as well as doing ear-training.

Smith’s resistance to such AI-guided contrapuntal training here seems entirely reflexive. We don’t have anything like contrapuntal training for the masses right now, such training being reserved for specialized music students. So the alternative is to use AI to bring about such training or go without it. Anti-AI absolutism thus would seem to encourage not an enriched education but a status-quo that simply resigns itself to doing without contrapuntal training. Anti-AI absolutism thus seems to me a recipe for impoverishing education.

How many activities of the past—how many lost arts and skills—might be recaptured through AI? It boggles the mind to think that ordinary people could visit the theater in Shakespeare’s time, watch and listen to his plays, and be entertained with no special training or advantages.

Yet nowadays reading Shakespeare is often a strain and hardship. For many high-school and even college teachers, getting students to appreciate Shakespeare’s towering genius is like pulling teeth. AI, it seems, could be used to facilitate easy comprehension of Elizabethan English and thus make experiencing a Shakespeare play not a burden but an enjoyment.

More Powerful Than Traditional Search

Every technology entails both promises and perils. Yet, as Aristotle taught, virtue is found at the mean. Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on the one hand and foolhardiness on the other. So with AI, virtue is not found in its uncritical embrace, as with Sam Altman, or in its reflexive rejection, as with Doug Smith. Discernment is needed, which is always eclectic, choosing the good and rejecting the bad.

I agree wholeheartedly with Smith that forming intimate bonds with chatbots is perverse and should be discouraged. However, I’ve personally found this technology to be quite helpful. For instance, I can perform much more sophisticated searches with ChatGPT or Grok than I can with Google.

Let’s say I’m thinking of someone but can’t recall his name. I know one or two salient facts about the person. Perhaps one of the things that I think is a fact about this person is not a fact but close to it. For example, I tell the LLM that so-and-so wrote a book on hell, but actually the person I’m thinking of wrote about heaven. I find that the LLM can often find what I’m thinking of even with such imperfect descriptions.

It might now be argued by employing this AI capability, I’m atrophying my memory by letting a chatbot conjure up information for me that, without the chatbot, I would have to think harder to recall. But what if thinking harder would not recall it? I find LLMs often being able to bring to light things that are sketchy in my mind.

Strengths and Weaknesses of LLMs

What about hallucinations? Yes, LLMs make stuff up. It’s in their nature to make stuff up, especially when their knowledge base is deficient and they are being asked leading questions. ChatGPT, for instance, has yet to ingest the content of many books. So when I ask it to provide the chapter titles for such an uningested book, it will tend to make them up.

I asked ChatGPT, for instance, for the chapter titles of Doug Smith’s book [Un]Intentional. It not only got the number of chapters wrong, but also each of the chapter titles wrong. I was unsurprised by this. I’ve worked enough with LLMs to know where they are likely to fail.

I’ve also found ChatGPT to make up references when I ask it for a reference by an author to a work with certain features, even though I know independently the author never published anything like it. Ask an LLM leading questions, and you’ll get some response. Usually the response will be stated with confidence even when the LLM is completely at sea.

Despite all this, I don’t see these weaknesses as a deal-killer against using LLMs. These systems have their limitations, and part of education will be to train students in what these are.

Where I find LLMs to shine is in summarizing work and in rewriting sentences and paragraphs. Say I’m faced with a long op-ed where the author is doing a lot of stage-setting and taking his sweet time getting into the gist of the article. I may feed it into an LLM and ask it for a one- or two-paragraph summary. If not much is riding for me on this article, that is often enough.

Or suppose there’s a problematic sentence in a book or article I’m writing. The sentence sounds clunky to me. I’ve played with rewording it, but still can’t get it to sound decent. Just as I use a thesaurus to find synonyms for words, I can ask an LLM to rewrite the sentence in several ways, essentially finding “synonyms” for the problematic sentence I’ve submitted to it.

By engaging in this exercise, I’ll often find some rewording that seems to me better than what I wrote. Typically, I don’t just take one of the proposed sentences and merely substitute it for the clunky one. Rather, I’ll get some rewording ideas that help me clean up my sentence.

Am I becoming a poorer writer by relying on an LLM in this way? I don’t think so. If anything, I get ideas for new ways to rephrase things that break out of my accustomed writing patterns. My attitude toward LLMs is that they are servants, and I use them very intentionally to help me on specific tasks.

Now Smith might say that I’m simply being seduced by this technology, not realizing what it is doing to me. But in that case, we’re just going to have to differ. I can look better into my own soul than any other human being, and I’m simply not seeing that the quality of my internal life or of my work is degenerating because I’m using LLMs. Sure, I may be deluding myself. But then again critics who see LLMs as wholly negative may also be deluding themselves. Time will tell.

The Need for Accountability

All that being said, I don’t want to minimize the peril of using LLMs. If used uncritically in education, they can do harm. Leaving aside intimate conversations with a chatbot, the peril of LLMs in education is that students will rely on them as a crutch. It’s here that we always need human teachers holding human students accountable so that they can stand on their own two feet without the prop of an LLM.

I’m less concerned about what students do on their own time with LLMs (though the thought of an LLM as someone’s “spiritual director” seems to me perverse and anti-human). But in the classroom, there need to be times when students do writing assignments without access to an LLM; when they are tested on basic facts in geography or history without access to an LLM; when they solve mathematical problems with pencil and paper and nothing else; etc.

The recent revolution in LLMs and AI is indeed a revolution. I sat in on my first AI course in 1981 as a first-year grad student in psychology (taught by Laurent Siklossy, as described earlier). I’ve followed the field over the years. Problems that seemed insurmountable, such as passing Winograd schema tests (finding proper pronoun antecedents based purely on semantics rather than syntactics) or passing the Turing test (a machine being able to produce output over a communication channel largely indistinguishable from a human), have now in the last few years finally been surmounted.

What does all this mean for education? I’m willing to give LLMs, and AI more generally, opportunities to succeed in advancing education. I believe the technology needs to be tightly monitored in the educational arena, and that education always needs to devote significant amounts of time to demonstrating knowledge and skill without the prop of machines.

Will even such a constrained use of AI technology end up being counterproductive? Will students unexposed to AI technology during their K-12 years, for instance, end up being better learners and well-rounded human beings than those exposed to it in a controlled and disciplined way? I suspect Doug Smith would opt for the former. I opt for the latter.

That said, I don’t think we need to wait a decade to determine which option is superior. These technologies are being tried in real time, and we should be able to see in real time how students are faring with them. But note, I’m not advocating a complete laissez-faire approach to using AI in education. It needs to be used deliberately, and at times it needs to be firmly excluded so that we don’t become its dependents.

AI in Monitoring Attention

On one point in my edification and enhancement essay, I want to make a concession to Smith. I mention there that technology could be used to scan brain activity of students to determine their degree of engagement in the classroom. I raised this as a speculative possibility (though for something unobtrusive, like a ring around a finger, rather than a headband). Smith helpfully pointed out in his response to me that this has been tried in China, as noted by the Wall Street Journal in the following short video:

To this Smith adds:

[Dembski’s suggestion for attention monitoring in my earlier article] mirrors the ultra-authoritative Chinese state’s use of AI monitoring for students. In China, students are already wearing AI-powered headbands to constantly monitor student’s [sic] brain activity. That data will almost certainly be part of their “social credit score,” among other nefarious things. The video in that Wall Street Journal article is not a dystopian sci-fi story, it’s today’s reality. Those are real kids wearing those devices and being shaped, controlled, and dehumanized.

It may well be that the very intrusiveness of this technology will undermine learning. At this point, we can’t know for sure. In any case, China’s example doesn’t answer whether this technology may prove useful for learning. It seems that EEG headbands and related engagement-tracking tools depicted in the above video may not improve learning outcomes. EEG readings in uncontrolled environments—especially noisy, movement-filled classrooms—are apt to be unreliable and prone to false signals.

What in the Chinese school system these devices seem to be measuring is not concentration but behavioral stillness—the surveillance itself pressures students to suppress movement and to appear attentive (this video even describes a student whose parents beat him when his attention scores dip). This produces compliance, not understanding. Genuine learning requires curiosity, free play, autonomy, and psychological safety—conditions undermined by constant monitoring and fear of parental, teacher, or state punishment tied to attention scores.

Teachers may see short-term improvements in orderliness because of this technology. But such technologies seem unlikely to increase comprehension, retention, or intrinsic motivation. Instead, they will likely introduce stress, reduce working memory, and foster extrinsic pressure that weakens deep learning. The function of the Chinese system seems not pedagogy but data collection and behavioral conditioning, feeding government-backed AI research projects and normalizing surveillance for children. Simply put, the technology shapes behavior but not understanding—and likely harms the very cognitive processes it claims to enhance.

But what if students and teachers alone were given access to the data from such a device? What if students didn’t have to wear the device all the time, but only at certain times when their level of engagement with class activity was clearly flagging? What if certain patterns could be spotted, where certain types of instruction or certain teachers proved more or less effective at being correlated with brain activity indicative of learning? What if, to distance this technology from the daily classroom setting, such a device were solely used in research settings to determine the effectiveness of various types of pedagogy?

To the degree that this technology is diagnostic and not for “shaping, controlling, and dehumanizing,” not for surveillance, and not for going on a child’s permanent record but only for temporary use, I could see it being helpful. Or perhaps not. Perhaps whatever these devices are measuring will never be sufficiently diagnostic of true learning. Perhaps all that’s needed is an attentive teacher who can track which students are engaged and which are zoned out.

Whether my proposal for tracking student engagement via physiological markers is ultimately for the good will depend on whether such markers truly measure engagement (rather than mere compliance). It will also depend on how the associated technology is implemented. Most importantly, it will depend on whether students do indeed become better learners through this technology because it correctly tracks when they are engaged in class and identifies what facilitates and hinders their learning. My approach here is principled only in respect of this technology not being used to enforce compliance. It is practical in the sense that it seems worth trying and worth implementing only if found to be helpful in helping students become better learners.

Primacy of the Curriculum

In closing, I want to make one final point, and it is this: Any use of LLMs and AI in education must be in the service of a curriculum that clearly specifies what is to be learned and tracks whether students are indeed learning what the curriculum so specifies.

I would regard it as educational malpractice to simply stick a student in front of ChatGPT and say, “Now have at it and learn something.” I imagine an AI-assisted educational curriculum will take the form of programmed learning (in the sense developed by psychologist Edward Thorndike over a century ago) where rather than passively absorbing content, students are required to actively engage the content and correctly answer queries about it.

Specifically, Thorndike offered the following vision of programmed learning:

If, by a miracle of mechanical ingenuity, a book could be so arranged that only to him who had done what was directed on page one would page two become visible, and so on, much that now requires personal instruction could be managed by print.

LLMs and AI more generally promise to make Thorndike’s vision of programmed learning, or programmed instruction, not just a reality but also to expand it far more powerfully than he could have imagined. (By the way, I happen to own the domain names programmedlearning.com and programmedinstruction.com, which I’m happy to make available for pursuing such a vision of education.)

In any case, to return to the importance of curriculum in any AI-assisted educational effort, much of the material in such a curriculum will need to be clearly delineated in advance. In particular, it must not be made up seat-of-the-pants as one goes along. To the degree that this material is generated by an LLM, an educator will need to verify and edit it. That said, I can see an LLM in real time generating problems whose correct answer will test the degree of mastery in a given area of study.

For a simple example, with which I close, suppose you want to use ChatGPT to test and build vocabulary. Consider, therefore, the following prompt to ChatGPT: “Provide a multiple choice vocabulary test of ten questions with four possible answers to each question, marking each correct answer, and where the test lays out words of general interest at the beginning graduate student level (17th grade).”

Below is ChatGPT’s response to this prompt. Note that in a real vocabulary test, the correct answer would not be marked, as it is here, but would be confirmed after the student offered his or her own answer. ChatGPT is well able to handle bookkeeping of this sort. Obviously, this example can be vastly generalized to math, geography, history, and any other subjects.

People may question, in the case at hand, whether the vocabulary words below are truly graduate-level words. I’m less concerned about the particulars here as about a general proof of concept. In my view, students learn best when they are active participants (hence programmed learning, as above), needing to perform actions that demonstrate knowledge, skill, or competence in real time. AI, suitably primed and predisposed, seems to me ideally suited for eliciting and evaluating such actions and thus for determining whether effective learning is indeed taking place.

Graduate-Level Vocabulary Assessment (10 Questions)

1. Abstruse most nearly means:

A. Easily understood
B. Difficult to comprehend ✔️
C. Pleasantly surprising
D. Excessively ornate

2. Inchoate refers to something that is:

A. Fully developed
B. Not yet fully formed; just beginning ✔️
C. Excessively complex
D. Devoid of structure

3. Pernicious describes something:

A. Gradually improving
B. Highly destructive or harmful ✔️
C. Temporarily confusing
D. Intensely bright

4. Equanimity denotes:

A. Creative insight
B. Moral virtue
C. Calmness under stress; composure ✔️
D. A tendency toward self-doubt

5. To excoriate someone is to:

A. Praise them warmly
B. Criticize them severely ✔️
C. Remove them from office
D. Warn them indirectly

6. Recalcitrant most nearly means:

A. Fragile or easily broken
B. Stubbornly resistant to authority or control ✔️
C. Pleasantly compliant
D. Awkwardly positioned

7. Sedulous effort is:

A. Half-hearted
B. Frenetic and impulsive
C. Diligent, persistent, and careful ✔️
D. Unfocused and meandering

8. Vicissitude refers to:

A. A moral failing
B. A sudden revelation
C. A change or variation, often unexpected ✔️
D. A cyclical ritual

9. Assiduous attention involves:

A. Sporadic interest
B. Constant, careful, and persistent effort ✔️
C. Distracted focus
D. Passive observation

10. Perspicacious most nearly describes someone who is:

A. Easily discouraged
B. Insightful and keen in mental perception ✔️
C. Verbose and rambling
D. Emotionally impulsive