Sy Garte | Life’s Deeper Logic

Garte: 

So just the very fact that we are here, that we are purposeful, agency driven and moral creatures, that by itself is a pointer to God, and that is the moral argument. But more than that, now, if we look at biology, we’re seeing that this is true not just for people, it’s true for all of life. And so that’s telling us. Yeah, that’s an even better pointer to God because it’s in all of life.

Stump: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. Our guest today, Sy Garte, returns to the podcast to talk about his new book, Beyond Evolution. Sy was a biochemist by training with lots of technical papers to his credit, and more recently, he’s written several books on science and faith, as well as continuing to serve as editor in chief of God and Nature, the quarterly magazine of the American Scientific Affiliation. In this new book, Sy explores some of the recent discoveries within the field of evolution that go beyond the stereotypical descriptions of random mutation and natural selection. This science today has begun to reveal a process that’s infused with purpose and meaning. And it’s not just humans. All life, even down to bacteria, show signs of learning and memory. While none of this proves the existence of God, Sy argues that it points towards something deeper than blind chance, maybe toward a creator who brings meaning into the world. Sy admits that some people will hear this as controversial, and he’s not trying to fuel the conflicts that have so long dominated discussions of science and faith. Instead, he’s driven by curiosity and hopes that everyone who engages with these ideas might take a more careful look toward the creator that this amazing creation points to. Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

 Well, Sy Garte, welcome back to Language of God. It’s good to have you with us again.

Garte: 

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Stump: 

You were last on the show in the fall of 2021, episode 92, where we heard a good deal of your story. So we won’t repeat that. And we ended that episode with having you preach a short sermon from your book, The Works of His Hands, a kind of testimony of your conversion coming out of communism and finding the love of Christ. I actually went back and listened to it again this morning and still find it really powerful and moving. So I encourage our audience to go back and give it a listen too. But here we are, three and a half, almost four years later. Catch us up. What? What have you been up to?

Garte: 

Well, another book came out after that called science and Faith in Harmony, which is kind of like a devotional. 44 short chapters about how science and faith are not in conflict, but they don’t—the reason I use harmony is because they don’t play the same notes. They say different things, but what they say is harmonious. So that’s where the title came from. And so that came out in early 2024. And I was already starting to write this book.

Stump: 

The new one, the Beyond evolution.

Garte:

Beyond evolution. Yes.

Stump: 

Tell us a little bit about this. I think the writing life is interesting in the sense that you pour yourself into a book and, at least for me, often wonder whether there’s anything left to say. But you clearly have more to say. So tell us about the development of this new book.

Garte: 

Yeah, I had more to say. I don’t know about after this, but we’ll see.

Stump: 

We’ll dig into some of the detail in a little bit, but start maybe just with an overview of the ideas that it came from. Give us, give us something of the origin story of Beyond Evolution.

Garte: 

Well, it really came from two sources, and it’s really about two things. It has two major themes in it. As the title says, one of those themes is about evolution. And what I’ve noticed in a lot of the arguments and debates, both by scientists, Christians and people who are just not terribly well educated in either. Is that there’s really a lot of that debate is just beside the point. And some of it is because people don’t really understand what evolution is and what it says. And that’s actually true on both sides of the debate. And I also began thinking that why has this become such a bitter controversy in many circles, and particularly particularly within the church, where there are people who feel that if you halt evolution, you’re not worthy of being called a Christian. And of course, I don’t have to tell you about that. You’ve lived it. And on the other side, there are people who think of evolution as this amazing scientific basis of all biology. And, you know, the equivalent of things like Newtonian mechanics or even thermodynamics and chemistry and physics. And I have actually published a couple of papers is related to this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution is not that big a deal. It’s certainly not worth having huge divisions about. And so that’s one of the things that motivated that this book and the first two chapters cover that area. Maybe the first two and a half. The other thing that evaded me to write the book was just my reading of some literature, including some review articles, and then later an actual book that was published in 2023 showing that unbeknownst to almost anybody, including many scientists, many biologists, there are some new and incredibly interesting discoveries going on about the very nature of life, the very basic nature of life, especially.

And this is what I find fascinating, because it’s something that I was first interested in many years ago. Especially a return to looking at things like purpose or teleology. The Greek word for, you know, the end cause and agency and even cognition that these qualities which are known to be very important in metaphysics but generally ruled out in most science, are actually omnipresent in all of life, including including the most basic forms of life. Yeah. And that’s a fact. I mean, there are some very good review articles. And as I mentioned, a book was recently published called Evolution on Purpose. That’s a title that would never have been published even five years ago, and it was published by MIT press. The authors and the editors are very well known mainstream scientists. As far as I know, at least among the ones I know, none of them are Christians. This is not a Christian apologist book like mine is. This is a book of mainstream science moving the field forward in a way that hasn’t happened for a very long time. So that made me think people have to know about this. When I say people, I mean regular humans, not scientists. 

Stump: 

Good. Okay. I want to dig into some of those things here in a little bit. But maybe we start even by getting clear on some of the terminology just of evolution. When people hear that, they kind of reflexively think of maybe what’s more technically known as neoDarwinism, which itself from the neo is a development from what Darwin said. So maybe we can even get a little brief historical development of ideas, the evolution of evolution, maybe. So give us just a quick synopsis of what did Darwin say? How did neoDarwinism amend that? Right. And then the importance of these ideas of your talk, you’re talking about now here of taking us beyond evolution as understood in those ways.

Garte: 

Right. Well, actually, the Evolution of Evolution is the title of my second chapter.

Stump: 

There we go.

Garte: 

So, yeah. And that’s and there is some there’s quite a bit of history in, in the book because that’s important. We do have to know these things. And what Darwin did was come up with the realization that there is variation in all species of, of life, all kinds of life. Some are bigger. Some are stronger. Some have more hair or less hair. And so that’s. That was well known. That was nothing new. But what he put that together with was the idea that not everything that is born, not every single individual that’s born, has an equal chance of survival. And this had already been determined by other people. And he just put this together with the idea that, you know, there’s selection. And of course, selection was something he knew about because it’s been around in human societies for thousands of years. And we that’s why we have one, you know, grapes that make wine and why we have all kinds of animals that are, you know, we’ve kind of bred for the correct purposes. And so he called that natural selection because what he said was, well, if an animal gets longer hair, It’ll do better in the cold.

So if the environment turns cold and some animal has longer hair, they’ll live longer and they will eventually predominate in the population. What Darwin did not know was how that would work. He knew that one of the things that was critical, in fact, I always like to point this out is that in The Origin of Species, Darwin says something about the importance of reproduction that it’s critical for evolution to occur. But he had no idea how reproduction occurs. Nor did anyone else, of course, at that time. But he just knew that was important. But more than that, there was no real mechanism. And when The Origin was first published, it made a bit of a stir. But that stir eventually died down, and biological biologists became less interested in it because it didn’t have a good mechanism. Everything changed, however, when Mendel’s laws, which had been discovered, you know, much earlier, had been discovered around the time Darwin was first publishing his book. But it had not gotten any attention, and nobody knew about it until it was rediscovered around 1900 by some Japanese scientists.

Stump: 

I even remember an anecdote, I think it’s true, that Mendel had sent Darwin some of his papers about this, and they sat on Darwin’s desks and had never been opened. Have you ever heard that story?

Garte: 

I haven’t, but it probably, it makes sense. So what happened then was Mendel had discovered this thing called a gene, which seemed to be a physical thing. Nobody knew what it was made of, but it seemed to be something you could actually measure. And that seemed to be the particle of inheritance, as it was called. And so what happened was several very good scientists, biologists put together Darwin’s ideas of evolution and the new genetic theories, and that was called the modern synthesis. And it was also called neoDarwinism. Now, what that said was not only is there variation, we know how that variation occurs. It occurs through mutations in whatever these genes are made out of. But they’re different genes that cause different phenotypes, which means characteristics. And so that’s the mechanism by which you get these changes. And then natural selection comes in. And those genotypes, those particular DNA sequences are selected for that give the selective advantage to the life and mating and growth of the particular type within a population.

Stump: 

Yeah. And that’s, I think, really where we get the kind of cultural understanding, at least the one that I received, which is that evolution is just random mutations of the DNA and natural selection over a really long period of time. Now this held sway for a long time, that this was the understanding, right?

Garte: 

Well, even the random nature of mutations was not known until the 1940s. And it was done by some experiments by some very famous people. And it turned out that that’s not actually completely accurate. In 1988, about 40 years later, some experiments were done showing that at times you get mutations that are actually not totally random, that actually seem to occur to help the organism survive. That was very controversial, but it has since become standard. Lots of experiments have shown this is true. And there’s a mechanism known for it. At least one mechanism. There may be some more now, which I’ll get to.

Stump: 

So I want to make sure people understand this point, because this is remarkable compared to the view of evolution that many people have received.

Garte: 

Absolutely.

Stump: 

So that these mutations, the things that change from generation to generation, are not just random willy nilly, but are in response to the conditions that these organisms find themselves in.

Garte: 

It can be at times. Remember that most mutations do not occur and then immediately get selected. For most mutations occur, and they just sit there and do nothing for a long time until the climate changes and gets colder. And then if one of those mutations make you have longer hair, that is then selected for it doesn’t happen right on time. But there are some situations where especially microorganisms will find themselves in deep trouble, and they have mechanisms in their DNA replication processes that will allow a very high rate of mutation in specific areas of the genome. Those areas that can help the organism survive. So it’s like it’s called non-random or stress directed mutations.

Stump: 

Yeah. That’s really remarkable.

Garte: 

And it sounds kind of weird, but we know the mechanism for it. It’s fairly complicated, but it’s real.

Stump: 

So I was at a conference maybe three years ago that was not a religious conference, but a conference of people with some evolutionary biologist there. And one woman was telling me about a study where this sort of thing was happening. And I may get the details wrong, but it was something to the effect of this was even in humans, that people who were in areas where there were more mosquitoes infected with malaria, that the rates of mutation for sickle cell, which, you know, can be harmful but is helpful when you’re dealing with malaria. Rates of mutation for sickle cell were higher in those areas where people needed it than they are in others. And she said, we’re nervous to publish this because we’re nervous that the intelligent design community is just going to seize on it and say something. And I’d like you to talk about that element of this a little bit, because one of the things I noticed in the pre-publication version of your book that was sent to me is the range of people who are endorsing it. This is not just people like me that are endorsing your work here. There are people who don’t accept evolution, who are endorsing it, and from the intelligent design community. And I’m curious, your response to the sort of widespread application of that compared to the way evolution has been talked about in, in our circles prior to this and the influence?

Garte:

Well, I’m very happy about it. I had I recently had a conversation hosted by Sean McDowell with Doug Axe from the Discovery Institute, and I—what happened was I decided—I had just read Francis Collins recent book, The Road to Wisdom, which talks about how one can and probably should argue, or at least discuss things with people who don’t agree with you. And I kind of try to put that into place. And I think we were fairly successful. Doug and I actually had a pretty good conversation, and we met later and had continued it. And yeah, we don’t agree about evolution, but we now each know why the other one doesn’t agree. And there are many other things we do agree about. So that’s kind of the Francis Collins model for how to move forward in this sense. And I think it’s a good way to proceed in general in the church. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, I wanted this book to come out. I hadn’t read Collins’ book at the time I wrote this book, but I would have certainly included it if I had.

Yeah. I understand the conversation you had with that woman very much because what’s happening in biology is a lot of things are starting to look like they are not as consistent with what you could call the neoDarwinian paradigm, which is what you very well described it earlier, is just, you know, it’s random mutations followed by natural selection. And then in a population over time and that’s it. No, that’s not it. It, you know, this whole idea of non-random mutations and by the way, this book has a lot of references. Which is tricky to do when you’re writing a book for the general public because you don’t want to scare people. But I felt I had to come in there because there’s nothing in this book that is outside of mainstream science. So I am quoting every time I say something that sounds outlandish and crazy and maybe comes from you think comes from the Discovery Institute or someplace like that. There’s a reference to a mainstream scientific publication.

Stump: 

I think it’s worth noting that none of these people in this new science beyond evolution that you’re talking about, none of them are questioning common ancestry, right? 

Garte: 

No, no, no. The basic theory of evolution, the basic Darwinian idea of evolution is never going to go away. It’s obviously real and true. And in fact, one of the points I make in the book, I even have a figure on this, is that actually nobody disputes the basic idea of evolution. I have a figure showing a phylogenetic tree from Answers in Genesis Young Earth creationists, and that figure is almost identical to a figure. This is just showing cat evolution to a figure from mainstream science. The only difference is that they start at different places. In mainstream science, it starts down with, you know, other carnivores and go all the way down to the first cell. Whereas in Answers in Genesis it starts at the flood. So you know, it starts at creation and then there’s the flood, and then things evolve after that in almost exactly the same way that it’s held by mainstream science. So the basic idea of evolution is not in dispute. What’s in dispute is that evolution by this mechanism can explain everything that happens in biology. And I don’t know how many people actually say that. I think that’s kind of a more of an atheist trope than a biologist idea because it’s clearly— . Well, it certainly hasn’t been shown that evolution can explain everything in biology. And of course, the other thing which we were starting to talk about is this idea of evolution itself evolving. And that’s really important because in the last ten years or so, there’s been something called the extended evolutionary synthesis.

Stump: 

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. I was at a conference of that about ten years ago in London and—

Garte: 

The Royal Society meeting.

Stump:

I was there. And the relationship of some of that work to what you’re talking about here now is fascinating. So explain a little bit there.

Garte: 

Well, what started to happen was there were many things that just didn’t quite fit with our with this standard that we now call neoDarwinian paradigm. And so people began exploring these. And one of the things, for example, is that there are some organisms which actually act on the environment rather than the environment acting only on them. It’s a two way street, and that became a field known as niche construction, where you know, you have evolution occurring, it’s still evolution, but it’s occurring not only because the animals, like beavers, get a mutation, but the beavers are actually making dams, which changes the environment and therefore changes the selection pressure. So it’s much more complicated than the original idea. And there are other aspects of it. James Shapiro invented something called natural genetic engineering, which has to do with how the—and this is also worked on by Dennis Noble. Both of these people, by the way, are editors of the book I mentioned before, Evolution on Purpose. And what that is about is about how the fact that the genes are not really the only thing that determines what happens in living cells. Sometimes the cell itself, the physiology of the cell, controls what happens with the genes. So again, there’s a feedback which is very complex between these two things.

Stump: 

Okay. So sometimes the shorthand for this debate has been yes, the general principles of evolution are obviously still valid. And the experts are debating and arguing over the mechanism by which this happens. But I even wonder if that word mechanism is now a little bit problematic and that it evokes a machine. And one of the big points that I take from your book is that life is not a machine. And you’ve already used in the introduction of this some words like goal and purpose and decision, and these things that have even typically been reserved for conscious thinking beings. But one of your points is that this extends throughout all of life. I wonder if you might give us some examples of how brainless even single celled organisms make decisions and have goals.

Garte: 

Yeah, well, that’s the second main theme of the book and I go into quite a bit of detail on it. And you’re right. Mechanism implies that everything is easily understood by applying what we know is the biochemistry of life. In other words, the chemistry and physics that apply to living things. And we know that all living things obey the laws of chemistry and physics. But there are some areas where we don’t see how that works. And that’s another theme we’ll get to later. But what’s been happening? Aside from the extended evolutionary synthesis, which I think I wrote a paper about that for the ASA Journal about in 2017 that’s kind of been absorbed pretty easily. There’s still a lot of controversy about some aspects of it. Is it really true? And it’s not just one thing. It’s a whole branch, a whole series of different areas that, you know, people are looking at. And it includes things like epigenetics. It includes things like convergence, Simon Conway Morris’s ideas that there must be some laws of evolution we don’t know, because we get the same eyes in mammals and octopuses, which are not related at all. So it looks like there’s something else that we’re missing, something that is determining what actually happens.

But that’s all very interesting, but what is more interesting to me, and much more revolutionary and radical, is what’s been going on in that area that you just mentioned, which is the forbidden words of teleology, agency, and even cognition in organisms that weren’t supposed to have any. There was a whole controversy about using the phrase the turtle, and I mentioned this in the book. The turtles came ashore “to” lay their eggs and it was changed to the turtles came ashore “and” laid their eggs. So there’s no causation there. In other words, this is just a mechanism that is automatic. And it wasn’t a purpose of the turtle to come ashore. And even Ernst Mayr said, that’s ridiculous. Come on, guys, you know clearly, that’s why they came ashore. And, of course, we know that animals have purposes. It’s obvious. I mean, mice run away. They don’t want to get eaten. Cats go hunting because they’re hungry. I mean, animals do things for a purpose, but, you know, that can be broken down if you really want to, into well, they’re hungry because evolution has allowed pain to occur when you haven’t eaten food for a while. And that is what the mechanism that drives animals to seek food because it hurts when they’re not eating.

Okay. That’s a mechanism, right? As you said. But things get a lot more complicated now because for the last, oh, I don’t know, ten years or so, but very quietly, there has been discoveries. There have been discoveries made that single celled organisms, including bacteria, actually act with a purpose. And that purpose may be as simple as to stay alive. You know, they go and look for food. But sometimes it’s more interesting. There are groups of bacteria that when they get together in a large enough group, they all know they’re all together because they’re signaling each other with biochemical signals that bind to receptors. And they say, oh, there’s a lot of us here. Yay! And then they each one puts out a tiny amount of fluorescent light. The result is a burst of light in the atmosphere, because you’ve got 17 million or whatever number of cells doing it at once. Or they put out a toxin that kills something that’s approaching them. They do it when they know they’re all together. So they are perceiving the outside world, which is not surprising. And they are acting for a reason.

Stump:

Yeah. And I want to make sure people hear the difference between something like that. The turtle coming ashore to lay eggs, the bacteria that’s called quorum sensing, right, that are saying, hey, everybody, I’m here. And when we hear enough of us, then we’re going to make the light or the biofilm or whatever. That’s very different than saying the moon orbits the Earth. I mean, to create tides. No, that’s. No, that’s like an incidental right where these are not incidental. These are not you know, you can’t just say the turtle comes ashore and it lays eggs and— 

Garte: 

And isn’t that nice.

Stump: 

—and think that you’ve understood the situation.

Garte: 

Right. Well, the way I put it is, you know, volcanoes erupt, but not because they decided to do it for any reason. They just, The forces build up and boom.

Stump: 

The agency part of that is what’s really interesting to me and fascinating. But the big question that brings us back is, well, how does matter do this though? How do just these little particles of matter assemble such that they can do this? Because we’re not going back to the vitalism right where it was? Here’s a lifeless matter, and the life is some other external force that gets injected into it somehow. So how do you talk about these little material critters that have agency when they’re just matter, following the laws of chemistry and physics?

Garte:

Well I’ll give you one more example, and then I’ll answer your question. Sort of. The other example is there are bacteria that learn. Now, what do I mean by that. An experiment was done. I’m not sure if I have it completely right, but an experiment was done where it was found that if bacteria have a lower oxygen level, they go through a change so that they are able to survive on lower oxygen. Some metabolic changes genes are turned on. Enzymes come in metabolism changes. They survive on the lower oxygen. Now, if you take these bacteria and you raise the temperature where they are, and then you lower the oxygen and you do that several times, the bacteria will begin making the change after the temperature goes up, but before the oxygen goes down, because they have learned, much like Pavlov’s dogs.

Stump: 

Classical conditioning.

Garte: 

Yes, they conditioned, they have learned that this is something they need to do. And if you stop it for a while, they’ll forget. Probably what it is is that they die and others come around and they had and they’re even. And so nobody knows how this works because. I mean— we don’t know. Nobody knows the mechanism yet. What has been found is that a lot of the molecules involved a lot of the signaling molecules, the receptor molecules, other molecules involved in turning on various genes seem to all interact at one end of the bacterial cell, in an area with a lot of fibrils and various things. And that’s been called a nano brain. This is crazy. Okay, but this is all real. I’m not making anything up here.

Stump: 

Yeah. Go ahead. You’re going to answer my question.

Garte:

I’m going to address your question. The answer is we have no idea. But here’s, but see, here’s the point. Yes, they are obeying the laws of physics and chemistry. No question about that. But that’s not all they’re doing. There is something missing. And this is if you wanted to give the motto for this book, it’s there’s something missing and we don’t know what that is.

[musical interlude]

Stump:

Several times in the book, you appeal for the development of new laws or theories in biology that will help to explain this. I worry whether particularly an appeal for law does bring us back to mechanism, or at least mathematicians, and isn’t one of the fundamental insights here that life is different and doesn’t work that way? Yeah. Maybe we also need to change what we mean by law or causal explanation or something in there?

Garte:

Well, I will tell you that a few months ago, I published a paper along with Perry Marshall and Stu Kaufman, called The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.

Stump:

Play on Wigner.

Garte: 

Play on Wigner. Exactly. On purpose. And it’s gotten a little bit of attention, actually, because it’s fairly controversial. But I think we make a very good case. And by we, I mean mostly my two co-authors. But the title was mine. So I’m first author anyway. But what you just said is completely true, Jim. Not only that, but Roger Penrose, not a Christian and not a dummy, is one of the smartest people who’s ever lived, has said that consciousness, human consciousness, is not computable. And he proves that using Gödel’s theorem. And that’s all I can tell you about it, because it’s way over my head. But I trust Penrose.

Stump: 

So this brings up another really interesting topic here, though, because previously we some people have appealed to things like consciousness and minds and souls in order to explain how we have agency, how humans have agency, and then everything else. It was just automatons happening mechanistically. So now we’re undercutting that to some degree, right? And so then I want to ask you, how does consciousness play into this for us? And as you go down the scale of other kinds of creatures. Where? How? How do you understand the relationship of consciousness to brains? And even now to what you just called nano brains? There’s certainly a move. There’s certainly a movement afoot for things like panpsychism that we have to see consciousness extending much further in into the natural world than we have previously accounted for. But how do you understand these things?

Garte:

Well, I see it a little differently. I think the cognition that we’re talking about is not consciousness. I would be very surprised if it turned out bacteria were conscious, and I don’t know how they would be able to tell us they are. But you know, that would be a real problem because every antibiotic, every antibiotic would be, you know, mass murder. We don’t want to do that. So, okay, that’s a little flippant, but what I’m trying to say is that consciousness is not the same as cognition. Cognition is sensory awareness, and acting on that in a way that can be mechanistic. Consciousness is—I have a chapter on that in the book. Consciousness that other things that make humans, you know, unique, uniquely unique. I don’t know where I got that phrase, but thank you. And what is consciousness? I mean, again, nobody knows. I mean, this has been true forever. You know, it’s the hard problem. It’s the hardest of all the hard problems is consciousness. And again, we can’t even define it. We, you know, I mean, Daniel Dennett decided, okay, this is just too hard. It doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing. Talk about a cop out. I mean, you know. So Yeah, we’re conscious. We don’t know why. We don’t know how. I do discuss some interesting theories. One by a very smart philosopher named Marco Mazi.I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he’s got some really good, interesting ideas about this, but we don’t know. 

This is an area that, you know, theologically, we can come up with a very good answer. We’re made in the image of God. And, you know, God is clearly conscious, is clearly all seeing, all powerful. And we’re not all seeing, but we’re seeing a little bit. And, you know, by seeing, I mean seeing and understanding, you know so that’s a mystery. And the idea that consciousness is purely brain chemistry that evolved through, you know, natural selection to me know, does not work. And I have a whole discussion about why that is. So I don’t think we know, and I don’t think we can get any further on that without, again, some new stuff. And, you know, in science, if you think about it, there have been many hard problems, like how is it possible that the speed of light is the same whether you’re running away or running towards it? Nobody had a clue how that worked and you couldn’t describe it by physics. It needed a new thing. It needed relativity, which is brand new and changes the whole picture of physics completely, not to mention quantum mechanics, which is even crazier. And that’s what we need in biology right now.

Stump:

Okay, so we won’t require you to give a fully developed theory of consciousness that might be setting the bar a little too high.

Garte: 

Just a bit.

Stump:

I want to drive our conversation, though, to the next sort of state. I’d love to keep talking about just the science of this, because I think it’s really fascinating. But I want to move on and remind everybody of the subtitle of your book, which is How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God. So I want you to do two things here. I want you to talk, to make those connections a little more explicit. How are these things you’re talking about pointers to God. And secondly, I want to distinguish pointing from proof maybe and and see what you think about the, the weight of this evidence, these arguments that you’re providing and and what that ought to make reasonable and rational people conclude as a result.

Garte:

Well, the first thing to say about that is that science doesn’t prove anything, ever. Especially not God, because God is outside of the scientific realm. So, however, you know, Dawkins has said that if you look at the universe carefully at bottom, there’s no purpose, no meaning, no good or evil. And I think that’s wrong. I think if you look at the universe and you see ourselves, you know, there is purpose and meaning and good and evil and we’re part of the universe. So this idea that, you know, there is nothing beyond the laws of physics and chemistry, it’s not a scientific statement, it’s a philosophical statement that I think is wrong and I think can be proven wrong. So where does God fit into this? Well, there are two ways to answer that one. And most scientists of Christian faith, and I know a lot of them, will agree that our job as scientists of Christian faith is not to scientifically prove God, but to show that you need something beyond what we now know scientifically. And a lot of that something—and you can get this from the philosophers of John Lennox, the philosophies of John Lennox and William Lane Craig and and others—a lot of that looks a lot like God. It looks like the thing that is missing is some entity that will bestow upon life these crazy things like purpose and agency, and not just on us, but on the beginning of life. There’s no way, there’s no reason to think that the bacteria we see today are, you know, not reflective of the original cells that first came into being. So if that’s the case by pointers. And I use pointers in the same way that Francis Collins did way back in Language of God. He talks about pointers, not evidence for God. I like to say there’s evidence too. But basically a pointer means if this is true, then the idea of God is strengthened. If this is true scientifically, that points to the idea of God as not being purely imaginary and purely a matter of faith and hope and, you know, theology. But it might actually be real.

Stump: 

Is it fair to say, on your view, that in the neoDarwinist paradigm that Dawkins was largely working under, where all there is is random mutations and natural selection over a long time, is that atheistic view of pitiless indifference that Dawkins sees at the center of the universe, is that more reasonable to to think under neoDarwinism? Does it?

Garte: 

Yes, I think it is. And I think that’s one of the reasons that many very devout Christians feel that evolution is bad, because it does allow for a purely deterministic, purely mechanistic, naturalistic universe without any purpose or design or, you know, meaning or morality or anything else. And so just the very fact that we are here, that we are purposeful, agency driven, or use agency and moral creatures, that by itself is a pointer to God. And that is the moral argument which I’ve heard, you know, philosophers make you know about it much better than I do. But more than that now, if we look at Biology, we’re seeing that this is true not just for people, as you’ve said, it’s true for all of life. And so that’s telling us, yeah, that’s an even better pointer to God because it’s in all of life. And you know, we don’t know. Now I said to you before that we need new theories or laws. And you mentioned the idea of mathematical laws. And I agree, they probably won’t be mathematical and they may not even be equations, but that’s okay. We can say scientific stuff without equations. People do that all the time, or at least without using an equal sign. Okay. Because equal signs are very hard in biology. Even now it’s very, very hard to make an equal sign. Even in straight, strict neoDarwinian evolution, we can’t define fitness. It has no definition that isn’t circular. So, you know, that’s tough. But if we come up with a theory that makes sense, that scientific that has evidence for it. What I’m saying. And of course, this is only a guess, and perhaps a hope, that that theory will be a very strong pointer to something divine, much like some of the ideas in new physics are pointing in the same direction.

Stump:

So let me ask how you assess the rationality or even the reasonableness of people who don’t accept that. Then I’m curious about the weight of this evidence and how compelling it is to me, but I’m already predisposed to like it and to accept it, right? So is the claim here that this evidence is so strong that people who don’t see what it’s pointing at are being irrational.

Garte: 

No, I don’t think so.

Stump:

That’s tricky for a lot of people to understand. So maybe unpack that.

Garte:

I’ve been thinking on how to put that. 

Stump:

Evidence and pointers that are not proofs. We already said they’re not proof.

Garte: 

Not proof.

Stump:

But that rational—and this is, I mean, I love this question in epistemology of whether different things can be rational to different people, or whether the same thing can be rational to one person and irrational to another, because we’re not talking about truth or not. There’s one truth the way things are, but rationality is a lot more complicated and dependent on other variables within our lives. The other things that we believe, right?

Garte: 

Well, I think you’ve answered the question. I mean, that’s right, I agree completely. Rationality is tricky and that’s why I say no to your question, because people will say, well, that’s irrational. They feel it’s irrational. I don’t. I think, you know, this idea that there’s going to be a—because I still hold to science. I still think science is a great way to describe the natural world. And the natural world includes, being a theist, what we call the creation of God. That’s part of the natural world. So there has to be a connection between the two, is what I feel. And I’m thinking that the evidence so far is saying, yes, there is. Now I  should point out that the authors of this book I mentioned, the book titled Evolution on Purpose, are not Christians, so they’re not using these arguments at all in the way I am. In fact, people, you may remember this since you were at that meeting, people who were proposing the Third Way or the extended evolutionary synthesis actually put out an ad saying, this is not a proposing intelligent design or theism or anything like that. This is purely scientific biology, which tells you how, you know how much this whole area has sort of, I would say, devolved into, you know, these bitter fights on all sides that people have to actually deny that they’re saying anything about God. But I don’t have to do that because I am a Christian, and I’m very happy about it and proud of it.

And so what I’m saying is, if you are a Christian and you’re wondering about science, does science say anything that makes me that I should rethink my belief in God. The answer is absolutely not. And if you’re wavering, if you’re someone who’s thinking, I don’t know, it doesn’t sound rational to me, you know, read the book and read the references, or look at the references and see where I’m wrong. Because I’m not. At least I’m not wrong in terms of telling you what the data says, in terms of whether it’s rational and in terms of my speculations about further future ideas and theories. I may be completely wrong there, that’s clear. Whenever you want to say something that may be true in science, 80% of the time, you’re wrong if you don’t have any data yet. But that’s okay. That’s part of my belief is that that will happen.

Stump: 

Good. Yeah, that’s really helpful. Do you worry or should we worry that this argument in general might be taken as a kind of God of the gaps argument, where. So you talked about the moral argument a little bit ago. I personally think that the existence of goodness is a good argument for the existence of the divine. The existence of moral behavior by humans—this is another one of your chapters in the book—i’m less persuaded that the argument there is, we can’t explain it evolutionarily. Therefore, God must have just given it to us. I at least think there’s continuity, that there is an evolutionary story to be told about the development of our moral capacities. I think it’s radically different in humans than it is in others. I don’t think other creatures are morally responsible for the things that they do. But I think there’s an evolutionary story to be told there. Is your account further on that in that regard, in that it does sort of sound like a god of the gaps of science can’t explain this, therefore God must have stepped in and did something different. And do you worry about that? maybe we shouldn’t even worry because maybe God really does such things.

Garte: 

Well, first of all, I completely agree that a lot of our moral behavior is evolutionarily derived. I mean, we know that most mammals have the same maternal instincts that we have—maternal and paternal. Well, paternal is a little trickier, but maternal for sure. I mean, we take care of our kids and so do elephants, and so do the, you know, tigers and things. And so, yeah, there’s there is a evolutionary basis to a lot of human behavior, including moral behavior. And I agree with what you just said is that, yes, that’s and by the way, that’s true for a lot of human characteristics. They all, you know, they all have the basics coming from our primate ancestors. But then things are added on. So, you know, we haven’t talked about—. 

Stump:

That’s what I’m trying to write about right now. 

Garte: 

Exactly, why do you think I know this? So yeah, that’s true. But when we get to the high points and it doesn’t take a lot to see that. I mean, you know, there are films that show incredible sacrifice, bravery, self-sacrifice, amazing love that make us tear up. Why? You know, show it to your dog. He’s not going to start crying, you know. I doubt it anyway, but there’s something else again. It’s that there’s something more that we can’t put our finger on. So that is a gap and now I’m getting to your main question, which is God of the gaps, which I have addressed so many times. I’m not saying we don’t know, therefore God. The closest I come to that is when I talk about the origin of life. Because the origin of life is really the part of life, even more than morality, that is absolutely stuck and has been stuck forever. We almost had a solution which was RNA world, and that looked really good. Now it doesn’t unfortunately. I mean, I’d love to get the answer, but it’s not RNA world for several good reasons, which I discuss in the book, but they’re very technical. So what is it? Well, I’m convinced here more than anywhere, that this is a gap.

It doesn’t mean that God did it, although I think God did do it, but it does mean that there’s a real gap here, and it’s not going to be filled by anything related to what we know about chemistry and physics. Let’s say chemistry. That’s what counts. All the chemistry has been tried. We’ve made a lot of progress and a lot of very small areas. But the key thing, you know, maybe go back to what you said before, that vital spark, which we don’t believe in anymore, but there’s something there that’s missing and we don’t know what it is. And I think we’ll find it. And by the way, I’m not alone in this. James Tour, who’s not a fan of evolution, has said the same thing he has said because he’s a big opponent of modern origin of life research. And he has said, I’m not saying it can’t be found. I think there will be a solution, a chemical solution. But I think if there is a chemical solution, it’s going to be something so outlandish, so new and so different. Much like the new physics that will look at it and say, oh my God, this had to be from God. That’s my guess.

Stump:

Okay, good. We’re running out of time here. I want to ask one more question that’s related to this discussion of evidence. And this time, apply it to the science of evolution. And someone doesn’t have to accept evolution in order to be a Christian and follow the way of Jesus. Right? That’s not a theological claim. Given our current cultural situation, though, I’ve been increasingly wondering whether giving people a pass on that is contributing to undermining truth itself and the disrespect of science in our culture. So I wonder if you’d reflect a little bit on the evidence that there is for evolution, for the science and what that says about people who accept or don’t accept it? We’ve already covered the rationality can be different, right, depending on your background and experience. So I’m not saying that everyone is irrational who doesn’t accept it, but how far does something like that go when we’re talking about empirically, you know, compelling truths? I would go so far as to say the rationality of people who think the Earth is flat is in question. But where where do you put something like the science of evolution and related to the very gracious way that you describe this in your book of we don’t need to fight about this, but what do you make of it in terms of the relationship between the evidence that there is for it and how compelling it ought to be to people who will open, you know, open their eyes and look at that evidence.

Garte: 

Well, I have a strong sense that in the general public, and I’m not talking now about scientists who disagree, but in the general public, I think there is a tremendous amount of misinformation about what evolution actually is and what it actually says. So I give an example in the book of someone online who said that this whole famous example of the black moths, that’s not evolution, because none of the moths, none of the white moths turned black. It’s just that the black moths survived when the white moths were eaten. And I said, yeah, that’s evolution. That’s how evolution works. What people don’t understand is a very simple fact about evolution. And it is this no animal or plant or creature ever evolves. Never. No goat ever gives birth to anything other than a goat. No human ever gives birth to anything other than a human. Chimps. Everything. What evolves are populations. Only populations evolve. They change with time because in the population, those who were a little taller do better than those who were shorter. And pretty soon the whole population gets taller. That’s evolution. And you’d be surprised. I will bet you that 80 to 90% of the people who don’t like evolution scientifically don’t understand that.

Stump:

That’s a really important point and one that I need to be cognizant of, because sometimes even in discussion with people who who say they don’t believe in God, I’ll, I’ll often say, tell me about this God you don’t believe in, because I’m not sure I believe in that one either.

Garte:

Right.

Stump:

And you’re saying the same about evolution. Tell me about this evolution you don’t believe in. I’m not sure that I believe in that either. That’s really helpful. That’s a helpful way to put it. Well, Sy, it’s been really fun talking. Maybe just in conclusion, tell us what’s the next phase in the evolution of psych art here? What are the topics that build on what you’ve done? What’s next?

Garte:

What comes next is promoting this book. I’m hoping to as many people, both those who are in the sciences and theologians and theologians read it and as well as the general public because I think there’s a lot of new stuff. And I will just say this, I was going to say it at the beginning. This book will be controversial. In fact, I don’t think there’ll be anyone who will agree with everything that’s in this book, but I strongly recommend it because if nothing else, it will get you thinking and you may get upset. And if you do, that’s fine. I’ll be happy to hear from you and discuss it. But it’s—I’m hoping that this book will open some new doors, and perhaps my main hope is that somebody really smart and probably younger than we are will read it and say, you know, that’s interesting. A new theory on teleology and agency explaining things like reproducibility and all that. Let me work on that. And that will be the new Einstein.

Stump:

Well. Very good. I pray that it will be so.

Garte:

Amen.

Stump:

Thanks, Sy, for your work and for this book in particular, and the engaging conversation we just had. May we have many more.

Garte: 

Amen to that too. Thank you. Jim.

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