Blair: Well, here we are again, ladies and gentlemen, in the bunker of the secular fox
hole.
Today we have a great guest.
His name is Frederick Seiler, and he has an Ma in the history of science and degrees in
electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and Rensalar Poly Ethnic Institute.
And he is the author of the book we are here to discuss today, god versus Fred.
Fred: Hi. Hello.
Blair: Fred, you know this book.
In your preface, you point to two historical
works that guided your thinking.
What were they and what was your goal in
writing the book?
Fred: Yeah, first of all, thank you for inviting me.
Blair: Oh, you're welcome.
Fred: Yeah, about 25 years ago, I was at Indiana University studying history of
science.
And in my sort of random explorations at that
time, I discovered two books that were written by Americans in the late 19th century that had
to do with religion and science.
And one of them is John William Draper's book
history of the conflict between Religion and science.
He was a scientist himself, American scientist.
And the other book is by an educator named Andrew Dixon White.
And his book was, if I remember the title, history of Warfare Between.
I can't remember the exact title, but it has to do with warfare of science and religion and
Christendom.
And both of these books were very popular when
they came.
Mean John William Draper's book selled
extraordinarily.
Well, it was translated into at least maybe at
least a dozen different languages, so it was very popular.
And also, Andrew Dixon Dwight came out, like, a little bit later, not as popular, but much
more detailed.
A long book, like at least eight or 900 pages
long, going into lots of detail about science, conflicts between science and religion.
Both of these books the main theme of the book is conflict, conflict between science and
religion throughout history.
And when I discovered the books, I discovered
that there were issues with the books.
Certainly they were written over 100 years
ago, so we've discovered more.
And our understanding of a lot of issues in
history is a lot better in many ways.
But certainly I discovered that modern
professors in history of science and otherwise look at these books with absolute contempt
that these books they consider completely worthless.
I think the main issue is well, there are two issues.
One issue that the issue that they keep bringing up is that, well, they get a lot of
facts wrong.
And, yeah, there are facts.
If you look hard, you can find a number of facts here and there things that at least
things we know, we're confident about, about history that we know today that these guys got
wrong.
And there were certainly issues with these
books.
And both of these authors were inconsistent.
They were philosophically inconsistent in certain ways.
And at various times, they said in their books, they said, oh, I'm not against
religion.
Religion is a good thing.
They would say things like that.
And then they would come out at some point in
a later chapter and they would say faith and religion are absolutely at war and they're
completely opposed to each other, completely in all their forms are opposed to each other.
And so if you just read just on their own terms, they're a bit contradictory sometimes
they just didn't go far enough, in my opinion, in terms of attacking or explaining what's
wrong with religion.
But I think today's historians of science
really unfortunately, they really don't know how to deal with abstract issues like science
versus religion.
That's a very abstract issue in terms of a lot
of these professors of history.
They're comfortable with a lot of very
concrete facts.
So if you ask them about to describe the
relationship between this type of Protestantism and this kind of science within
this decade of the 17th century, they will talk to you for hours and they'll be very
confident what they say.
But if you start talking about, well, science
and religion in general, they will start saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is all abstract
terms.
This is a lot of hot air.
You're just going way beyond what's justified by any kind of rational study of the past.
So in my opinion, there's a lot of concrete bound thought in a lot of historians of
science, okay? And on the other side, there are a number of
historians of science who are just very sympathetic to religion for one reason or
another.
They really don't like some of them religious
raised with religious backgrounds, and they just don't want to attack religion.
So a lot of them will come out and say, well, there's this thing called the conflict thesis.
The conflict thesis is that science and religion are at war throughout history and
they say, well, today we know the conflict thesis is wrong.
And they say, well, then they start.
Tons of books have been written about this in
the last 40 years.
It's amazing how much has been written on this
by academics.
And basically they sort of dance around the
subject and they basically say, well, sometimes science religions seem to work
together.
There are all these scientists in history who
were religious, right? Look at Gregor Mendall and his was the Monk
and he did all this work on Peapods and Isaac Newton believed firmly in God.
And so they give all these examples and then they say, well, yes, there were certain
conflicts and then they said, well, there must be really a complex relationship.
So now they're saying, well, what, we should replace the conflict thesis with what they
call a complexity thesis? In my opinion, they're very confused and I
really just don't know how to deal with abstractions as such.
Blair: This is sort of an off the cuff question, and if you want to delay the answer,
you certainly can.
But I think the core issue what is the
difference between belief and proof.
Does that make any sense?
Fred: Belief and proof.
Blair: If you believe something, even if it's not true, but you believe it and then proof, I
see that this is true.
Fred: There might be different ways of using the word belief.
Sometimes the word belief can imply some sort of religious belief or non rational, right?
But then there's the idea of having a rational conviction or certainty.
So, I don't know, you could quibble about the right definition of the word, the right way to
use the word belief.
You could talk about beliefs in the sense that
a belief could be correct, could be justified or not.
I don't have a firm opinion on that, although I tend to try to avoid the word belief because
it just sounds a little bit too much like a religious view.
Martin: Yeah, and in Swedish it really does that when we say true.
So that's really a belief like faith almost in Swedish language.
So I say the same, but I joke now.
And we come back to your first question that
Blair had.
Why do you write the book?
But we really get it from the big gecko here that it's so important, why it is to write
this kind of book.
But we could say that we believe in reason and
then if people listen to us, then you could not joke about it because it's serious issue.
But again, as Blair said, to understand the concepts and the words meaning and so on.
But on the other hand, as you said, to really get to the point.
So yeah, please continue.
Fred: Sure. I mean, to get back to Blair's question, answering his question, I guess, why
did I write this book? What was my motivation?
And my motivation was basically I thought nobody has come along since Draper and White
and really done a decent job on this subject.
So it's been 130 years probably about since
these books came out and I don't think anybody has really done a decent job.
And I also thought that Ein Rand, in her philosophical work, especially regarding the
nature of reason and her metaphysical view about the nature of reality, I thought that
Einrand had some really important insights that really need to be brought bear on this
subject.
And I think it really helps illuminate the
history of science, the history of the conflict between science and know throughout
history.
So my main goal was sort of come up with an
updated, very readable version of a book like what Draper and White did, just making sure I
get all the facts right and also getting a really good historical perspective and
bringing in some philosophical insights from yes.
Blair: Thank you for that.
And you also mentioned in both the ancient and
modern worlds, where did science take root, like in ancient Greece, what were some of
their achievements? Or was there even science before that?
Fred: Yeah, I mean, historians will debate exactly where the definition of where science
really began and where do you draw the line? Because there is kind of fuzzy places there.
Certainly in ancient Greece there are some fuzzy places where you could arguably draw the
line slightly different places.
The chapter of the book, basically is if I got
it right for the second chapter excuse me.
Of the book is about the birth of science in
ancient Greece, as I argue, and that there were things that were being done before the
Greeks, that Greeks learned from the Mesopotamians, were doing work in a lot of
astronomical work, certainly recording positions of the stars and things like that.
And in Egyptians also, there was a lot of mathematical and other things being done in
those cultures.
But I argue that it was with the ancient
Greeks where a real scientific mindset really started.
And with thinkers like Thales.
Thales is kind of an outline border case, but
you can see it to some extent with was he before him, everybody was really talking about
the gods as causes and they were looking for supernatural type of explanations for things.
And that was pretty much any kind of abstract explanations of anything always went to gods
and things like that.
But with Thales you see evidence at least that
he was trying to get a more naturalistic view of the world.
And I gave one well known example with Thales is he believed that water, everything is made
out of water, is in some sense the universal stuff.
And we can talk about that.
But that's another issue why the ancient
Greeks like to look for one of the fundamental stuffs or reduce everything in the world to
like one or a few different kinds of things.
And he ended up thinking of water, but he
thought people were wondering about earthquakes and where did earthquakes come
from, what was the cause of earthquakes? And Thales said, well, there must be a lot of
water underneath us where the solid earth we're living on is maybe resting on something
which is not so solid, some sort of water that's beneath us.
And so when there are waves in that water that's causing the earthquakes we're
experienced.
And the fact that he came up with that
explanation as opposed to there were some supernaturalistic explanations that were
common at that time, then that sort of points to that naturalistic view.
And if you look at other Greek thinkers, you see a lot of the similar kind of things going
on.
They were really looking for more naturalistic
ways of looking at the world.
Blair: Right? Well, obviously the Greeks, I'm going to say
in my personal view, they were the first philosophers, if you will.
Fred: Yes, definitely.
Blair: That's why they took a more naturalistic view or this worldly view.
Yeah, that's cool.
Now, near the end of the Roman Empire, of
course, sadly, Christianity takes root.
And you have a section titled the Murder of
the Remnants of Pagan Philosophy.
Can you delve into how that happened?
What did happen?
Fred: For a bit, sure.
Throughout the Roman period, there was a
gradual sort of decline in philosophical thought.
It seemed to be more descending, getting more otherworldly in terms of I mean, the ideas
stoicism became really big throughout the Roman period and an element of that was trying
not to worry so much about the physical world.
And the Romans themselves weren't really ever
particularly pro science.
They were very focused on certain practical
issues, but philosophically they really tried to stay away from any kind of abstract ideas.
In the Roman period, figures like people talk about the persecutions of the Christians under
the Romans, and these persecutions did happen, and some of them were horrendous.
And the Diocletian, the Emperor Diocletian is probably the worst of the Roman emperors in
terms of persecuting Christians.
However, they were not that universal in Roman
history and were often long periods of time in which there wasn't any real Christian
persecutions.
And it wasn't until the Emperor Constantine
I'm trying to remember 313, I believe, he basically officially recognized sort of
Christianity as a valid view of the world, a valid religion, and basically decided for
political reasons, basically, he said he was going to accept Christianity.
He needed to unify all of Roman, basically under a single religion.
That's what he decided he wanted to do, and it would be Christianity.
He basically decreed Christianity is correct and it's acceptable, but it turned out to be
more than that.
People talk about it was good for religious
freedom, but at that point there are basically more and more steps that the Roman government
took in order to basically give an edge to Christian churches.
And basically there's a lot of government money from Rome went to Christian churches
supporting Christian churches, and nothing else.
Blair: Is this historically documented?
Fred: I'm pretty sure it I reckon the best source that I know of on this is a book by the
British historian Charles Freeman, and he wrote a book called Closing of the Western
Mind.
He's written a number of books on this and on
these types of issues, but that's probably the best on this particular issue.
And he goes into a lot of detail on this.
There were a lot of government resources given
to Christian churches and support to them.
And basically bishops, Christian bishops were
given extra powers.
They were basically made into legal
magistrates and arbitrating legal disputes and things like that.
So this went on for a while and basically gradually the Romans basically started to
stamp out anything that was not Christianity.
And I think it went on gradually, but over
time it became clear that this was the only religion that was acceptable in the Roman
Empire.
And at a certain point, all other Christians
were made illegal.
I think it might have been Theodosius it was a
later Roman Emperor.
He said any views, philosophical or pagan
views outside of Christianity are illegal.
And he actually issued the death penalty for
teaching or promulgating other views like these.
Martin: And then you see the faith and force.
It's very fascinating how you and scary how
you talk about this.
And then fast forward to today's.
Fred: Absolutely.
Martin: It's like a detective work here that you have done.
Fred.
So, yeah, please continue, Fred and Blair,
with questions.
Yeah.
Blair: Now, in the I guess in the early days or certain period of time, they were
Aristotelian, but obviously Islam is no longer associated with Aristotle.
So Islamic Faith Versus Reason and Philosophy is one of your titles, I think, on the.
Fred: Exciting I mean, this is part of a very exciting part of the history of Western
civilization, how Aristotle's ideas and the ideas of ancient Greece and the positive
philosophy of the pro science philosophy of Aristotle, sort of.
It got going in Greece, of course, and then it declined during, basically, the fall of Rome
and the Dark Ages.
But then in the Islamic world, there were
certainly elements of the Islamic world that rediscovered Aristotle and a lot of this other
ancient Greek thought about science especially, and really did exciting work with
it.
And then later that all got there was a
translation movement that was supported by certain people, like in Baghdad, and that got
a lot of translated, a lot of these works from ancient Greek into Arabic.
And then you had these whole schools, a lot of scholars in the Islamic world really studying
this stuff and then actually mastering a lot of the ancient Greek work in astronomy and
medicine and then going beyond it and just extending it further.
And that's part of basically considered the golden age of Islam.
Yeah.
Martin: And that's interesting.
Fred and Blair and that's the know was it
called Aristotle Adventure?
Blair: Yes.
Martin: And I had the poster also, and it's so fascinating to see that.
And this is really important, I think, and maybe that's fast forward again.
But do you know any scholars or any studying that now in this area of the world right now?
Because it's fascinating if you could find the light or the fire or the science and get it,
of course, here in the Western world is really crucial also.
But think about that.
Fred: So is your question people studying how Aristotle influence area in the Middle East.
Martin: Or is it totally locked down, forgotten?
Fred: Oh, in the Middle East?
Blair: Yes.
Fred: Oh, I'm pretty sure it's follow.
I don't really follow that much lately, but I
don't have any reason to think that it's survived there no, not at all in the Islamic
world that I'm aware of in any pockets.
Blair: So, again, staying in the Islamic world, who was Al Ghazali, is that correct?
Fred: Yeah. Al Ghazali yeah.
I mean, he's probably the most famous and
revered Islamic scholar in history, and I understand he's still really revered today.
He came along and wrote about he was very critical about the ideas that had come in from
ancient Greece and ideas of Aristotle and pro reason ideas and talking about causality in
nature.
And he basically came out explicitly and said,
this is all limiting God's power.
This is all antireligious, in a sense, because
what's most important is God's will.
And God's will is everywhere and is beyond, is
the ultimate.
And that is what's important.
And that's the only real explanation of anything.
And he basically came out and said, who are you to say that if you have a match and you
bring a match, a piece of paper, and the paper starts burning, he sort of said, who are you
to say that the match causes the paper to burn?
It's not that.
It's that we see the match, we bring it to the
paper, and of course, it's God doing everything.
God is basically causing the paper to burn.
And we just happen to see these things that
look like they go together, but everything that happens is God's will.
Martin: But that's Blair's questioning.
And how could you prove that then?
How could he prove that that's happened?
Fred: Yeah, proof was not a concept he was interested in.
Blair: It's not really funny, but.
Fred: Al Ghazali was sort of part of a tradition in the Islamic world, the Asha
Rights.
There were sort of philosophers, theologians
who had these ways of thinking.
There was conflicts between the Islamic world,
between the Mutazalites and the Asharites, and where the Mutazalites were slightly better,
were more rational, and they talked about, well, the ultimate cause of everything is God.
But we should also talk about more causes which are more connected to the things we see.
And we can look for kind of scientific laws, in a sense.
But the Asherites basically said they you know, that's really limiting God much too, you
know, al Ghazali, his ideas triumphed in the Islamic world.
So that's the big catastrophe.
Yes.
Although, I mean, scholars also debate about the extent of his influence and at what point,
because the decline of science in the Islamic world was not sudden.
It was very gradual.
Blair: Sure.
Fred: And there were elements of scientific work being done beyond after Al Ghazali, but I
think in terms of the broad trend of what was going on, it's yeah, yeah.
Blair: Now, as objectivists, we know that we certainly give credit to St. Thomas Aquinas,
who reintroduced Aristotle.
And I found interesting, you claimed or you
said that he created a, quote, a protected area for reason unquote.
Can you describe what you meant by that or what he meant by that?
Fred: Yeah, this is idea that I think this is after aristotle's ideas had been to some
extent rediscovered in the European world, and they were getting back thanks to figures like
maybe Abelard and Albert the Great were before.
Blair: Yeah, there are others certainly before others.
Fred: But I think Aquinas gets a lot of credit because he's the grand systematizer and he's
the one who really basically tried to synthesize Christianity and Aristotle into one
big system.
And he talks about reason and faith and to he
likes reason, so he's a real defender of reason.
So he argues that they're basically reason and faith are both valid forms of knowledge.
And he argues that there are certain areas, in most areas they do not overlap.
And those places where there's a small area where they do overlap, he basically said
they're going to give us the same knowledge.
And those areas that they do overlap, he
talked about the fact that God exists.
He thought that could be proven by reason.
And some of God's attributes, like that God was all good, or that he was somehow infinite,
he thought that could be proven by reason.
But he was basically saying reason is fully
valid and in the domains for which it applies.
And in that day and age that was a big deal.
And he became very influential for.
Blair: And and thank you.
Thomas yes.
Now of course, in your book, now we come to Galileo and the Church.
Certainly I've heard modern historians say, oh, that's not really what actual what really
did happen between Galileo and the Church.
Fred: Maybe if you gave me like 2 hours you will come back.
Fred, it's very complicated.
There's a lot of history here and the Catholic
Church has saved so much paperwork on this.
So historians had a field day trying to figure
out all of the complexities of what happened and what didn't happen and who did what to so
that's why a lot of books have been written on this subject.
I mean, the bottom line is, I think that Galileo was trying to defend the Copernican
worldview and the Catholic Church basically came along and said, this is contradictory to
certain lines in Scripture.
And at a certain point the first issue, I
think was in 26 excuse me, the year 1616, that Galileo had sort of a conflict with the Church
and somebody denounced Galileo.
And it's been a while since I worked on this,
so I'm a little forget some of the details.
But basically he was told not to defend the
Copernican view anymore, not to formally, not to say the Copernican view was true.
And he promised, he said, okay, I'm not going to do that.
That was in 1616.
But then years later that things started
changing.
The politics of the Catholic Church seemed to
be changing in some ways that could be favorable to him.
There were certain key figures who died and an old person friend.
If somebody, a Pope who had actually seemed to be Galileo's friend and supported him, the
person became Pope who had previously been supportive of Galileo in certain ways.
Blair: I remember this.
Fred: So at this point, Galileo thought maybe it's safer for me to try to promote these
ideas, but just in a careful way.
So he basically wrote this dialogue on two
chief world systems in which he had three people arguing together about these views of
the Copernican view of the world, the old what's called the Ptolemaic view of the world,
which is the view of the earth at the center of the universe that was accepted by the
Church.
And so Galileo probably wasn't quite as
careful as he should have been, and he was just a little too vociferous, basically.
He couldn't help himself, and he had to make the case for the Copernican view stronger seem
stronger than the other cases.
And then certainly at the end of the book,
there were some words that the Church had told him.
You have to put if you're going to say something good about the Copernican view, you
have to say something about well, there was a certain sentence or a set of sentences you had
to say, which sort of had to qualify everything and basically say, well don't
really know anything and God can do anything.
And he basically took those words and he put
them in the voice of the person of the story, who was really kind of a simpleton Simplicius,
I think was Simplicius.
That's it.
Yeah, that's the character.
Simplicius.
So that's what basically led to more denunciations.
And then the Pope getting absolutely furious when he learned what happened.
And then he was dragged before the Inquisition and forced to recant, basically.
And then put under initially was meant to be imprisonment for life, and then it was later
commuted because the many powerful people tried to help Galileo at this point.
And at that later, it was commuted to house arrest in his home know, in Arquetry IBLI.
But I mean, the big conflict, of course know, how much is this Galileo thing, the Galileo
affair? How much does it tell us about if there are
conflict between science and religion? Because a lot of historians today have come
out and said, well, this doesn't say that there's a real conflict between science and
Galileo.
He just didn't know politically what was going
on.
He just overstepped his bounds a little bit.
He could have finessed his way better through this, things like that.
It was a bad political situation for the Church and so forth.
And certainly Galileo, he certainly was very assertive, and he loved to ridicule his
enemies, and so he had made a number of enemies.
There's a lot of debate about that.
But in my mind, this still comes down to
ultimately the fact that he was arguing for the truth of the Copernican system based on
evidence and trying to give rational arguments for it.
And the Church was basically using force against him to censor him.
That is the main issue, and a lot of historians just don't want to.
Blair: See that that's true.
Now, in keeping with the theme of your book,
what was Francis Bacon's warning about not mixing God's?
Two.
Fred: I mean, I thought this was interesting because it don't I don't think I've ever seen
anybody explicitly make this connection.
Blair: Yeah, I never heard clear.
Fred: Francis Bacon and he wrote a lot and in numerous places.
Francis Bacon in his advice, talking about science and how to do science, he basically
says do not mix God's two books.
He said you should study there are two books
from God that we have.
There's the Bible and there's the natural
world around us and we can study he says you should study both, study the Bible and you
should also study the natural world.
So these are God's two books.
And he says but he says whatever you do, do not mix them because you're going to cause all
sorts of problems if you do mix them.
And he said this repeatedly in his writings.
And Bacon was very influential, certainly all the British thinkers after him.
I think Bacon wrote a lot of his work around the year a little after 1600, 1620 was his
book on logic, 16 five, I believe, was one of his books about the grand project of science.
But he was very influential on a lot of people at this time, a lot of people looking into
trying to learn about scientific type things.
But I saw God's.
Two books.
This whole idea of God's two books and you
shouldn't intermingle them struck me as very much as coming from probably very indirectly,
but coming from Aquinas and his idea that there's reason here and that works and there's
faith here.
And there's not much little overlap between
the.
Blair: Talked about or we mentioned Isaac Newton before, so let's jump to evolution now.
I wasn't aware, although this makes sense when I think about it, I wasn't aware that prior to
Darwin there was other theorists looking at evolution.
And so can you delve into a couple of those people and how did Darwin capitalize on that?
If you would, another two hour discussion.
Fred: No, I can try to do it mean, even Darwin's own mean, erasmus Darwin actually
wrote a short work and you sort of speculated about filaments of life and that life had
somehow changed.
In fact, I think even if you go to the ancient
Greeks, there's at least one ancient Greek thinker who actually did some wild speculation
that somehow things gradually life, living things gradually changed over time.
And they originally came out of the water, out of the sea.
But if you look at so there was some here, people who speculated wildly here or there
about the mean.
But the first person who really came up with a
solid theory was Jean Baptiste Lamarck.
And so this was like, I think it was in 1809,
he wrote he published a book, I forget his exact, exact position, but he was within the
French government.
He was supported by the French government in
some way doing his studies.
And he came out with his theory of, I guess
what's now known as Lamarckism or the idea that inherited certain characteristics can be
inherited.
And the famous one we hear in school when.
We learn this is about the giraffes, right? Why do giraffes have such long necks?
Is because at a certain point, trees were getting within a certain area, trees were
getting sparser, and more of the leaves were higher up.
So these animals, the precursors to the giraffes, kept on having to stretch their
necks to get to the food.
And the act of their stretching their necks to
get to their food basically got into their system in such a way that the children of
these giraffes basically had longer necks because of the striving that they had to find
to reach the food.
So anyway, Lamarck did have he thought that
there is a kind of natural must be some natural process by which living things over
long periods of time slowly get more complex and change over time.
He actually thought that living things must have somehow emerged out of nonliving things
and that somehow there's some spontaneous generation that went on and maybe he thought
still goes on, that in the world around us, there's always some.
If you look at pond water and take a piece of pond water, you'll see that there's little
things that start growing in it.
So he saw that as evidence.
Well, there must be things, living things come from non living things.
And then as they get more people were looking also at all the fossils, and that's a fossil
record.
And they could know if you go back much
further in time, the fossils become simpler, the organisms are somehow simpler.
So that's where Lamarck his ideas came from.
So his ideas were not super popular.
And then after Lamarck, there were other figures.
There's a Scotsman named Robert Chambers who wrote a book basically saying that somehow God
created the world so that all living creatures evolve in a certain way.
But his book, while very popular, was also mocked by so many people because Chambers
didn't really have any evidence whatsoever for this idea.
And then Darwin came along and he was doing his research, and it took him I mean, after
doing a lot of research with the certainly he went on this long boat trip with the HNS
beagle and basically did a lot of observations of tons of different animals and similarities
and differences in animals.
So it was basically looking at the kinds of
similarities and differences among animals in different places that could possibly explain
something about more fundamental about where they came from or that they've changed over
time.
But, yeah, he noticed things like he noticed
kinds of similarities and differences between different animals that did not quite make
sense if you would think that God designed every different organism to be perfectly fit,
its exact environment right there, which was the predominant view among a lot of scholars
of scientists at that time.
So that didn't make sense, basically because
of the similarities of different animals.
Things like the fact that Marsupials, you only
find them in certain parts of the world close to where Australia is in that area.
But even though those identical types of environments, if you know, in the new world,
if you look in almost places which have almost exact identical environment, you have
something different.
So it made sense that certain animals might
have migrated nearby to different places and changed in that migration.
And then eventually he came across this idea.
He started thinking about how animals, when
it's difficult for animals to live in a certain environment, a lot of animals die and
there's a lot of variation.
He was also impressed by how much variation
there is among when animals reproduce.
And if you look at the children of a certain
group of animals and if you look at their descendants, how much every little attribute
that they have seems to be a little bit different, and that he was basically by
looking at that fact and looking at the fact that a lot of these don't survive in
challenging environments.
Perhaps most of them don't involve survive.
Then he looked at, well, this must be some sort of natural selection.
And he was aware of what was called artificial selection, that breeders, when they wanted to
treat, get the right kind of dogs to use, they were always selectively deciding which dogs to
breed with which other dogs in order to try to change their dogs in a certain way.
And that clearly worked.
So clearly, the dogs we had somehow people
over thousands of years, we have changed dogs.
The nature of dogs.
Blair: True.
Fred: Significantly so.
He was impressed by that and many other
countless other animals that breeders have changed.
So basically, that's how we came up with natural selection.
Blair: Okay, that was a great summation, frankly.
Fred: Thank you for that.
Thanks.
Blair: And of course, now to counter evolution, we have creationism and intelligent
or intelligent.
Martin: Design, so called intelligence.
Blair: Yes. Right.
Who are the hucksters today promoting that?
And Christianity.
They say that Christianity actually laid the
foundation for the birth of science, and science and faith are compatible.
Fred: Oh, well, that's tying two very different things together.
Let me talk a bit about intelligent design first.
Sure.
The idea of Darwin's theory of evolution, but
first it had a few ups and downs, certainly since he first came out.
In fact, Darwin himself, backpedaled on know, after Lord Kelvin, had basically looked at the
Earth, the nature of the Earth and the heat flow within the Earth and concluded that the
Earth couldn't possibly be that old because assuming Earth was molten anyway, there were
certain ups and downs.
And at a certain point, genetics, the idea of
Mendel's discoveries had to be brought into the fold.
And that didn't happen later.
So there wasn't the clear idea of evolution as
a whole.
And the whole Darwinian was called the
Darwinian, the synthesis of Darwin into a really complete theory of evolution that
probably didn't happen until the 1920s.
Blair: Oh, I see.
Fred: And then at a certain point during the 20th century, people started discovering more
of these ideas about evolution and then you have this reaction against it among a lot of
people against evolution because of course, it certainly challenges the whole biblical view
of the origin of humanity and Adam and Eve and all that.
Blair: Just a bit.
Fred: Just a bit.
Yes, of course.
The most recent thing which had come back up in the I think it was bigger in the 1990s was
this idea of intelligent design.
Earlier, I guess there was what was called
scientific creationism, which basically tried to portray these views of God creating
everything as somehow being scientific.
The idea of intelligent design was that I
think it comes down to what one scientist called it irreducible complexity.
He said that evolution is good.
It can explain things if you're talking about
small, very small changes over a certain period of time.
But if you look at certain mechanisms, biological mechanisms, and some of them seem
so complicated, there does not seem any conceivable way that very small changes over
time could possibly have led to these changes.
And one of the most famous ones was the
bacteria flagellum.
So this is kind of like a tail on certain
bacteria that can wiggle and propel the bacterial cell, propel it around.
And this thing has kind of a it has kind of a thing which allows it to rotate.
So it's like a little bit amazing little mechanism, kind of a motor.
And so one scientist, I think his name was Michael Behe, if I remember correctly,
promoted this idea and he talks about this.
He said, well, this is obviously too
complicated for evolution to do.
This is an example of there must be some
intelligent designer that designed this to be the way it is now.
Other people after that came along and looked at it and said, well, yes, the flagellum is
pretty complicated in this way, but if you look carefully, look at the pieces.
His famous example also was the mousetrap.
He said if you look at the pieces of a
mousetrap, you have the piece that holds the cheese and you have the piece that the big
spring that flips over all these pieces.
If you had a process which could just change
one piece at a time, there's no way you could actually create something as complicated as a
mousetrap because it's only valuable if it's a complete mousetrap.
If you have half a mousetrap, it's not going to catch any mice.
If you have the pieces, if you have all the pieces except one in a standard mousetrap,
it's not going to work at all.
So this was the idea where the bacterial
flagellum was like was supposed to be kind of like this mousetrap type thing.
But other people, other biologists came around and said, well, wait a minute.
Just because a mechanism seems to let me see how they argued this.
They basically said just because a particular if you look at the bacterial phagellum, it has
a couple of parts, and it turns out some of these parts actually have use for other
purposes for certain bacteria.
So there's actually the piece which is sort of
the rotating motor part is very pointy.
Well, it turns out there are other organisms
which have a piece which is almost just like that, and it doesn't rotate at all, but it's
used to inject itself into a cell of something it's trying to attack, and it's injecting
itself.
So basically the idea is that Beh wasn't
looking hard enough to try to explain where these things came from, where these parts came
from, and that these pieces, even though you might not have had to complete all the pieces
that led to the flagellum that each other pieces could be seen as actually useful and
actually life enhancing for that thing, but not necessarily doing the same thing.
I don't know if I've butchered that.
Does that make sense?
Martin: In a really great sense.
And we definitely have to do follow up.
It's so fascinating to listen to you, Fred.
Fred: I'm sure with some more time, I could explain that a lot better.
Blair: That's fine, but you're doing fine.
You're doing fine, really, honestly.
And so the second part of that question was, who are the hucksters today promoting that
Christianity laid the foundation for science or at the birth of science?
And so, yeah, I think one of them is like is his name Rodney Stark or stark, yes.
Fred: Yeah, rodney Stark.
I think he's one of the worst.
He's an academic.
And others like him have basically tried to
argue that it was Christianity which was necessary for the birth of modern science and
you needed the Christian worldview in order for science to be born at all.
Well, first of all, he says he actually tends to minimize or deny that there was any such
thing as science in ancient Greece.
Blair: Oh, really?
Fred: Yeah.
Blair: Okay.
Fred: And he says, well, basically that doesn't really count as science.
What really was important for science is the modern development of the modern scientific
method, which somehow was based on this idea of a biblical law, or it was based on the idea
of a natural law.
But if you think of a law well, law, what does
the word law come from? Well, it comes from things that people make.
It comes from people write laws.
Right.
That's where the word law comes from.
So he thought the idea of God writing these
laws that the rest of the world must sort of fall in line with is inherent in the whole
idea of a natural law that scientists are trying to find.
And if I think I can find just look, find a quote from him.
Blair: I will find take your time, please.
Fred: Yeah. He writes that he says, Christianity depicted God as a rational,
responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being in the universe as his personal creation, thus
having a rational, lawful, stable structure awaiting human comprehension.
So that's what he writes and he argues.
Blair: But he skipped over the Old Testament.
Fred: Yeah, exactly.
And he also gives example.
He certainly likes to quote certain scientists from the scientific revolution, I mean,
including Isaac Newton or Robert Boyle, the chemist, people like that did like to I'm they
talked about how religious they were and they talked know, they were excited by God's
creation and they were studying God's creation.
And some of them even said studying the natural world is a religious experience.
For me, different people said that.
But if you look at what were they really doing
when they were studying the natural world? They were making observations, they were using
logic to trying to understand these observations.
They were putting together plausible hypotheses and trying to test them.
And if you look at what they're doing, doesn't have any real connection with the religious
worldview.
The Bible presents God as somebody who likes
to act a lot and likes to intervene a lot and does all sorts of things.
And so I think Stark really doesn't have an argument to stand on.
Blair: Agree. I agree.
We're coming up on the hour mark, so let's
end, if we can, with a positive.
Now, of course, Martin and I are both longtime
objectivists and we admire Ms. Rand and Dr.
Peacock and others.
But her identification of the primacy of existence versus the primacy of consciousness,
I think is going to be, if it isn't already, a breakthrough in science.
What do you think of that?
Fred: Oh, absolutely.
In a breakthrough of way that we think about
reason.
True.
And how reason works.
Certainly among my target audience, I think
that is probably the most controversial view of my book, because the main sort of thesis of
my book is that the conflict between science and religion ultimately is well, it's reason
versus faith, which is widely accepted and known.
But I think more fundamentally, it comes down to the primacy of existence versus the primacy
of consciousness.
And that a faith based view of the world is
basically accepting the primacy of consciousness, that God's consciousness, that
some consciousness has created the existing world, whereas the scientific, the reason
based view ultimately is based on what Einran calls the premise of existence.
That existence exists, and it's the starting point for everything.
Blair: Right.
Fred: And that consciousness, it's an awareness of things that exist.
And ultimately consciousness doesn't create things that exist.
I mean, it guides our minds.
Our consciousness guide us in taking action in
the world, which in that sense changes existence.
But it has to start with an acceptance of things as they are, existence itself.
Blair: Yes. I don't know if I want to call it a rebirth, but certainly there's a burgeoning
interest again in Aristotelian ideas in some universities, unfortunately not very many.
But do you see any positive signs of this yourself?
Fred: I'm not personally aware of it.
But I've heard that too, that certainly in
certain philosophy departments, certain scholars have more interest in Aristotelian
approaches and Aristotelian ideas in philosophy.
And I think that's to the extent that is occurring that's wonderful.
Yeah.
I do not know how much of an impact that's
happening anywhere outside of those philosophy departments then.
Blair: That's true.
What do you conclude or what is your
conclusion about science in the 21st century? That'll be my final question as we look ahead.
Fred: Yeah, I'm not sure if I have any firm conclusions about where it's going at this
point.
The good news is that for the last century or
so, most scientific work has in some sense been decoupled from religion.
So there's a lot of scientific work being done which is not being impeded by a religious
approach which has been basically going on for maybe about two centuries.
Although you could certainly argue there are certain sciences which have religious
influences on them.
There are some mystical interpretations of
modern physics that happens, although I don't think many physicists today take any of the
mystical approach very seriously.
So that's good news.
And then certainly in terms of medicine and medical ethics, that's where there's more of a
threat to religion.
The religious approaches are still used a lot
there a lot of people are using religion as their framework for understanding any kind of
issues in medical ethics and of which many more will come up in the future.
And also I have a chapter talking about certain what I call religious like elements of
the environmental movement.
And I think that's probably going forward
that's probably the most of the threat that I see going forward where people are looking at
untouched nature apart from human interaction.
Untouched wilderness, wilderness in itself.
Blair: Environmentalism?
Fred: Yeah, the whole environmental view of intrinsic value, the intrinsic value of an
untouched world.
That seems religious in an important sense.
Blair: It's a major threat, actually.
Fred: I see that as a big threat going forward.
Yeah.
Martin: And I think you definitely have to come back and talk about that.
And as Blair said, we will end on a positive note.
So please, Fred, please say where the listener could find your works and where you are in
cyberspace.
Fred: Yes, sure.
Well, first let me mention I do have a substac
blog just called Sileronscience.
Blair: Very good.
Fred: Substack.com. That's Siler. That's S-E-I-L-E-R.
That's where I'm writing now.
Try to come out with something new at least
once a month.
Don't always succeed.
And my book again is God Versus Nature the conflict between religion and Science and
history.
And it's being sold on Amazon and there are
also electronic copies.
I believe it's available.
It's available, I know, in Kindle and also some other forms of ebooks.
I believe I saw it on books.
Blair: Good, good.
Fred: And so I think there are some other places that's available.
Blair: Well, all right, ladies and gentlemen, today our guest has been fred Seiler, author
of God Versus Nature.
Fred, thanks for manning the Foxhole with us
today.
Fred: Okay, well, thank you for having me on.
It's been a pleasure.
Martin: Thank you very much.