Intelligently Designed: A conversation with Daniel Reeves

This week on the Love Better podcast we are talking about the beautifully made world we live in and the science that proves it.  This is a conversation with my good friend, Daniel Reeves, Christian, biologist, and Educational Outreach Director for the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA.

We talk about the work he is doing, the impact a Christian worldview has upon science, what Intelligent Design science is, and how our views on the science, God, and the world He made touches every aspect our life.

"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"

New episodes drop on Tuesdays.

Transcript

Ep. 6 - In His World: A Conversation with Daniel Reeves

Scott Beyer: I’m Scott Beyer, and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone.

One of my goals with this podcast is to introduce an audience I love to people I love.  I’d like you to meet Daniel Reeves.  Daniel is a long-time friend, lives in Bremerton, Washington and is everything you could possibly hope for in a Christian friend.  He’s kind, patient, and quick to listen.  He’s also an avid outdoorsman and an old school naturalist.  It is common to see Daniel drawing little sketches of mountains and wildlife in a bespoke journal.  Which makes his day job a natural fit – Daniel is currently Director of Educational Outreach for the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA a think tank dedicated to science that approaches the world from an Intelligent Design approach.  If you’ve ever heard of names like Michael Behe or Stephen Meyer – that’s the Discovery Institute, and Daniel’s right in the center of their efforts to talk about the science that points to a Designer.

Daniel kindly took some time out of his day to talk to me about the work he is doing, the way the science has impacted his faith, and the confidence we can have in knowing our world is one designed by a good God.  One of the surprising things to come out of this conversation was the impact worldview has on not just the science, but the policies.  I love Daniel, and he makes me better for spending time with him.
 

Scott Beyer: Hi Daniel. You are a science guy. Can you tell me a little bit about your science background and what you're currently doing?

Daniel Reeves: Yeah, so I have been interested in science as long as I can remember. As early as elementary school, very interested in natural history and catching all sorts of critters and that sort of thing.

It was only natural that I studied biology in my undergrad degree on the east coast. And then spent a year in Australia studying there as well marine and tropical biology. I then went on to work with the epa, the U S D A studying, especially the ecology side of biology, looking at the way that things like invasive species impact an ecosystem or the ways that human made pesticides would impact an ecosystem, things like that.

And I had a couple of other kind of career sidetracks along the way, but eventually made it here to Discovery Institute where my focus is on educating the public, especially young people when I have the opportunity on the just incredible design and purpose and beauty of nature and how it points to a Designer.

Scott Beyer: When I first heard that you were now working with the Discovery Institute based outta Seattle, that just seemed like such a natural fit.

What does the Discovery Institute do as a whole, and then what specifically as educational Outreach Director, what you're doing there?

Daniel Reeves: Discovery Institute is actually a pretty broadly minded think tank here in Seattle. But I'm working specifically with the Center for Science and Culture. It's one of several centers here at the institute, and the focus of this center is to advocate for the fact that there is this evidence of design and purpose in nature.

And to also explore the impacts that has on culture and the way that, many of our policies when it comes to things like public health or education or, really any number of different things are grounded in some kind of scientific system of a worldview, I guess you could say.

And so if your worldview is one where you believe that the the universe and especially life and humans are designed with purpose, then that really informs the way that you create public policy and the way that culture as a whole what's the way to put it? Basically the way that culture is formed out of that worldview.

So that's what the center is all about, is trying to persuade people that this really matters. That getting this right, understanding nature and where it came from origins, that it really matters and it really has consequences for everyday life. Even if you yourself, aren't interested in science or don't follow scientific findings, the impacts of those findings and those discussions really touch everyone.

Scott Beyer: So what's an example then of a policy that is maybe currently affected by a non-designer worldview? That would have a different outcome. , if the worldview took more of a designer that, that we were designed, that the world that we lived in has designed for purpose.

Daniel Reeves: Ooh, that's a good question. This may seem like a random thing, but I think it gives you a sense of how the scientific understanding impacts the policy. There's a technology that's been in development for many years now.

CRISPR Cast nine that's used for gene editing. And you can find hundreds of publications on this technology and potential uses of the technology for editing genes and genomes of various species. You can. , take a gene from one genome, for example, and put it in the genome of another species.

And this is typically used in things like genetic modification. A technology like that has the power to do a lot of good. But it also has the power to do a lot of damage. And there are a lot of people concerned about, what people might do with crispr cast nine technology and. When you understand that life is designed with purpose and then you approach a technology like this, what you do is you say, how can I use this technology to fix something that was designed to work a certain way, but has. At some point in the, course of human history or natural history has become broken or damaged.

So you're approaching it from the standpoint of trying to repair an original design or an original purpose for the gene or for the function or the organism. When you're doing that you have an actual standard. Of what you are seeking to accomplish and it constrains your use of the technology.

So you're not using it, for example, to just do a trial and error type thing. Let's just swap out some genes from various different species and see what happens. What could be the worst that, you know could happen, right? Whereas from, yeah, exactly. That's exactly where

Scott Beyer: right?

Daniel Reeves: went

Whereas, from an evolutionary worldview where you do think that all life came about through a trial and error process, and that kind of process can actually be very uh, creative and constructive and that sort of thing. You would say, why not? What's the danger? You might create a few monsters along the way, but what's the big deal?

This is what evolution's been doing for millions of years. And coming from an evolutionary worldview, you have no constraints on the I don't, maybe I shouldn't be so harsh just to say no constraints. You have far fewer constraints on the appropriate use of that scientific technology. And that's just one small example of where a policy around the use of a scientific technology is going to be very different.

If you think that life is designed with purpose or if you think that life is the product of just a random process.

Scott Beyer: It's scientific ethics then, right? And what, hadn't thought of it in the context of what you're talking about, but what's ethical is the exact opposite. in, depending on your worldview. It the way you use that the CRISPR technology if we are a accidental process, then making accidents to further the process is ethical.

But if we are designed then that, then it's unethical because you shouldn't just treat it that way.

Daniel Reeves: I'll mention another example too, because, maybe if someone isn't familiar with gene editing or something, this one may not be very tangible. But, if you think on a broader scale the way that evolution has happened, according to evolutionary biologists, typically speaking in a neo Darwinian kind of framework, is that the way that. Came to where we are today with all the advanced species that occur on planet Earth, including, especially humans, is by discarding all sorts of previous forms of intelligence, previous forms of Biodiversity, basically. And so as a result, the extinction, so to speak, of certain species is just a necessary evil along the way to something.

Bigger and better, something greater. And it's this, idea that evolution is basically taking things and tinkering with them and making them better all the time. And so as a result, if you want this process to continue and you want it to produce even higher life forms, then you would have to say, for example, that humans.

Really ought to go extinct, that we ought to, give rise to some greater life form. And, homo sapiens should become a thing of the past eventually. And you actually see that coming to play in conversations about, say, conservation. Or for example, when you're trying to protect one species at the cost of a human civilization.

This has come up many times in the last several decades, and if you think that humans are just one other species on planet Earth along the way to some greater species, then again, you have very few ethical constraints around what is proper. When it comes to public policy and whether it's whether it's okay to talk about things like population control and even some, I don't know how far we wanna go down this rabbit hole, but

Scott Beyer: dark, can, it can get pretty dark. Yeah. Yeah. And again, , it all comes down to worldview.

Can you summarize specifically what Intelligent Design means in a scientific context? 

Daniel Reeves: Sure. I can give a very lay level definition first, and then we could explore more of the scientific definitions that go into it. But basically the idea is that it's a concept that in your study of the natural world, you can find that there are things that are best explained by.

Intelligence that they came from a place of, or a source of intelligence rather than some undirected or unguided accidental process. And just to give a goofy example. If you thought about a, let's say a a person living in a remote part of. The jungle somewhere. And there have been some reporters that come in from the first world, Western world and they accidentally leave behind a, an iPhone in the jungle.

And these folks have never seen such technology before, but they pick it up and they look at it and they play around with it. And The best explanation for that device is not that it was the result of some accidental process. But rather that it was created by some form of intelligence a creator, an engineer, something like that.

And you wouldn't have to know all the particulars of who created it. You wouldn't have to speak the language. Of the person that wrote on the back Made by Apple in California, you would just be able to observe the complex arrangement of parts that produces some obvious function to know that it was designed.

With purpose as opposed to, arising by chance. And so that's of the basic idea of intelligent design is that there are certain things in nature, not everything, but certain things that you can look at and say, the best explanation from a scientific standpoint is that there was a intelligent designer behind this 

Scott Beyer: and for you and I we both take a Christian biblical worldview, but is it fair to say that intelligent design doesn't actually even go that far? It doesn't go so far as to say it's the God of the Bible. It just says this is a. A world that re would require something supernatural, something beyond the natural world of intelligence to create it.

I, is that a fair way to put that?

Daniel Reeves: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that this is something that is, is often challenging because, Christians will often hear of intelligent design and what they first notice is that there's no use of the term God. Or they're often is, an avoidance of the term God or certainly of the Christian God, Jehovah or Christ or really any other God.

And. Their first reaction is to say, oh, is this something different than than the faith that I have in God? And what you identified is that it's really something more foundational. It's not in opposition to faith. It's just more foundational than faith in a particular God.

It's just saying at the very, basic foundational level, there's clearly. A designing intelligence behind nature. And in order for you to pursue your curiosity further to say, who is that designer? Who or what or whom, who is, that you would have to bring in other fields of study, other searches of truth, things like theology, philosophy.

To be honest, there are actually other. Certain fields of science really hard sciences that can lead you in that direction as well. For example, archeology is an example that comes to mind for me. If you study archeology, which I think we'd all agree is a science, a field of science, it will lead you to some basic facts about Christ and who he was and what, or how people experienced him in his time on earth.

And. There are fields that can get you to those answers. Fields that, are searching for the answer of who the designer is. But in terms of biology, biochemistry, and these kind of, natural sciences, you typically are just laying the foundation for, there has to be some kind of intelligence behind these complex designs.

Scott Beyer: It's the start of the conversation, not the end. Yeah. Okay. In my experience. And maybe yours is different, and if so, I'd love to hear that too. But in, in my experience, when I begin to talk to people about science the general view I seem to get as that, to view it through the lens of there being a God you're in the minority. Does the Discovery Institute where you work do they get some pushback of being like pseudoscience or something like that? Why do you think that is? What, why is it that we often get that feeling that good science would never believe in intelligent design?

Daniel Reeves: Yeah, so to start with the first question, we definitely, get a lot of flack for. Our approach. And it has been called Pseudo-Scientific by many, including whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry on Intelligent Design and Discovery Institute. If you read those, you'll see the word, pseudoscience or pseudo-scientific and. Without digressing too much on this it seems to me that most of those people if I'm assuming the best , which I will if I'm assuming the best case scenario, most of those people are simply misled into thinking that the argument is what is often called a God of the gaps argument, which basically says that, if we can't.

Understand materialistically or physically how something came about in nature, then it must have been God. It's like anywhere you have a gap in scientific knowledge, you plug in God and you say, there must have been a God. And so they misunderstand the arguments in favor of intelligent design for some kind of God of the gaps argument and therefore they, resort to calling it a pseudo-scientific theory.

But the irony is that if you really look at the history of intelligent design as a concept and you go back to the scientific revolution, what you actually find are a group of scientists who were almost unanimously inspired by their faith in God to study nature in the first.

And then even more than that they built the scientific framework, the modern scientific framework around the assumption that God had to exist. In other words, like he is the only explanation that makes sense. And one of the illustrations of this is that there were three common analogies or I guess metaphors that were used by some of the founding fathers of the scientific revolut.

That we still use today to a greater or lesser extent. One of them is the idea of nature being like a clock, something that's very regular and predictable, and therefore you can perform the same scientific experiment over and over again, and you should get the same result if your method is is sound.

And so that's a core principle in scientific research is that you. Basically repeat your methods over and over again and make sure that you're getting a consistent result. And that's based on the assumption that nature is like a clock and you. Where does a clock come from, right? It's something that is designed by a clock maker to be regular to be predictable.

Another analogy that was given one of my favorites is that nature's like a book. And so there are scientists like Robert Boyle and others that talked about nature as though it's a book where you can, flip through the pages and find revelation. Of the designer. And so just as you can flip through the Jewish and Christian scriptures and find revelations from God so too, you can go look at nature under the microscope go observe a field of wildflowers, whatever it may be, and you can find a revelation of God there.

And so they would talk about the two books of Revelation scripture. And the study of nature science. And so that was another analogy that indicated their belief in a designer. And then the third one that I think we actually use, it's the metaphor that we use the most often without realizing it, is the idea of laws, of there being laws of nature.

And so we talk about laws all the time. We talk about the law of gravity and boils law and all these other laws. No one seems to stop and think about the fact that, how can you have a law without a law giver? These things are not givens. They are, or they are givens. They're given by somebody.

And it's just fascinating to go back and actually read the way that these scientific revolutionaries wrote because they all believed that there was a designer behind nature. And that's how they framed the whole approach to science.

Scott Beyer: man, I love that. I, of all of those analogies, that third one, I don't know that I've. Thought about

that and, but you're right, we talk about scientific laws all the time. Laws have a law giver. It's baked into the language we're using

Daniel Reeves: Exactly. Yeah.

Scott Beyer: historically. The view that you and I would take, the view of the Discovery Institute is based off of the it's the one that holds up the test of time, right?

Like it's the common one. It's just the modern era that we've become the pseudoscience guys,

Daniel Reeves: Yeah, it's just, I think it's it's unpopular right now, but you're right that when you zoom out and look at the history of thought on Origins, it's actually the one that has, like you said, has stood the test of time. I was just today actually, Kind of doing a little bit of reading on this and how the roots of intelligent design as a concept.

Predate all sorts of things that people want to associate it with. They want to associate it with Christian fundamentalism or biblical cr creationism from the 20th century. And when you actually go back and, follow the trail of where this concept came from, you can go back as far as early Greco Roman thaw, you can read Plato's syllabus or Cicero's on the nature of Gods.

You can also go back into ancient Jewish thought and and of course early Christian thought and find that those concepts are there, but they're not coming from specifically a appeal to. Divine revelation or a special revelation through, say, Jewish prophets or something. They're actually, even those early Jewish and Christian thought leaders were appealing to nature and appealing to science.

And people like Paul in his letter to the Romans when he says, we are all without excuse, because God's invisible attributes are clearly seen in the things that he's made. He was not appealing to some Jewish. Scholar or prophet or something like that, he was appealing to the common knowledge that we all have access to through our observation of nature.

And so it's interesting because even the Jewish and Christian philosophers, if you will, or writer scholars who used intelligent design kind of concepts, even they were appealing to a scientific. Evidence or, line of logic or something as opposed to some direct revelation from God, which would be more religious or spiritual.

Scott Beyer: And as we have. Grown in our scientific knowledge. A lot of that going back to just the, creating the framework of the scientific model of you have a hypothesis, you build an experiment, you have a control, you have a variable. And then the instrumentation that we have now, right? So now it's not just looking at stuff with your naked eye.

Now you have a microscope or you have a telescope or you have an electron microscope. You can see things that you couldn't see. The naked eye before and measure things and infrared and whatnot the scientific data has exponentially increased. So as that's happened, we've turned the volume up on scientific discovery.

In your view, is the evidence stronger or is it weaker for intelligent design? The more data that we have,

Daniel Reeves: Definitely stronger . you know, The way I see it is that for someone who is untrained in, the natural sciences who doesn't have any kind of education in say biology or something like that, they can look at, for example, the design of a Of an oak tree and just with their naked eye, they can see, this incredible beauty.

They can see incredible function of the way the seeds are designed to distribute. They can see the way that it creates habitat for other creatures they can see. There's so many things that you can see just with the naked eye and conclude that there must have been a design and a purpose behind that tree.

but then when you zoom in, it doesn't matter how far you go, , you can go all the way down to subatomic, quirks and things. And you still are seeing that same principle of design and you're seeing the same principle of things working together in a way that indicates foresight, that you know someone new ahead of time, the way that things would need to interact on a very small scale, the smallest scale that we can.

Today, all the way up to the largest scale of the universe and the ways that the laws of the universe would have to be governed, to use that analogy again that you'd have to govern those laws and set those values. Things like the constants of the strong nuclear force in the week, nuclear force and gravity, that all of those things, even at the highest scale, would have to be set in a very particular way for there to be that oak.

And so it's fascinating because it allows someone who doesn't have a training in, biology or something to conclude the exact same thing as the person who is looking, light years away into other galaxies or the person who's looking through an electron microscope at, the smallest inner workings of nature.

It really doesn't matter how far you go, you see the exact same patterns of. The inner workings of nature and the foresight of nature. So I actually think that it has just continued to corroborate these early kind of design arguments made by Greco Romans and Jews and Christians, thousands of years ago.

It's just corroborated that over and over again the further we dig.

Scott Beyer: So the data reinforces, it it doesn't, to use the scientific terminology, the, as the data comes in, it's not breaking the hypothesis, it's reinforcing it.

Daniel Reeves: And it's actually it's funny because, there are times when, we're on the leading edge of some scientific discovery, and there's all these unknown questions, right? Every discovery that we make opens up a myriad of new scientific questions. and the cool thing I think about intelligent design as a scientific concept is that it gives you a sort of optimism and hope as you continue the scientific progress because you know that the trajectory has continued to confirm.

Your hypothesis for thousands of years. And so there's really no reason to doubt that with one more discovery, that it's all gonna come crashing down as opposed to the reigning paradigm of materialistic science that, oh, this can all be explained away by random processes. The trajectory of that worldview has been in decline for a long time, and.

So every new discovery from genetics, from biochemistry, from just about every field has been heaping up the challenges on especially Darwinian evolution. And so every new discovery is actually a little bit of a a nail biter for evolutionists because it's, oh dear. Here's one more thing that we have to try to explain with some kind of add-on corollary to.

Darwin in evolution that we have to expand our modern synthesis to try to explain all these new discoveries. Whereas like I said, with intelligent design you have this hope and this assurance that the evidence will continue to favor your hypothesis.

Scott Beyer: So the thing with science is you're always learning new things. The arguments that I love the best 20 years ago are not the ones that I love the best now because, not because they were bad arguments, but because it's like better ones come out. I like those ones more if.

If you had a few minutes with somebody and had to give, top two or three arguments for design for God's existence through science, what ones would you use? What are your favorites?

Daniel Reeves: Ooh, that's a tough one. I typically try to learn a little bit about where. This person's interests lie because, depending on their field of interest there's really an example for everyone, . And I like to try to meet people where they are, but without knowing, where someone's coming from.

If I wanted To give the latest and greatest or the, maybe one of the most recent examples of evidence for design and nature. I'd probably talk about the systems biology revolution, and I have my wife to thank for this because she is a biochemist and she has been following this trend of, big data in biochemistry and the way.

In order to understand the vast amount of data that's coming out of genetics and epigenetics and all these kinds of things, you have to take a systems approach of looking at how does overall system function, how do subsystems function, how do sub subsystems function? How were each of these levels of systems meant to interact with higher or lower levels?

And it's fascinating because in order to. Tackle those new questions. In biology, biologists have begun to turn to engineers and to say, how do you do this? How do you understand a huge, a factory or even something like a, I mentioned an iPhone earlier. How do you talk about such a complex machine in a way that takes into account all these different subsystems?

And it turns out engineers for years have been using. Models and softwares O P M object process modeling to be able to describe the top level functions of something like an iPhone. And then all of the sub-functions of the the screen and the battery and the All these different components that go into making the iPhone work.

And so it's exciting to see the way that biology has embraced these engineering models because biologists realize that nature is full of. Engineered things that are made up of subsystems. And so in order to understand that you need this kind of modeling approach. So that's something that I, would share because that helps people realize that if you would assume that an iPhone with all of its, designed software and hardware and everything had to be designed by someone with great intelligence greater than most of us have, then why would you not assume the same thing of far greater technologies around us or literally us our bodies, for example?

Why would you not assume that of our own bodies 

Scott Beyer: so the biologist now are going to the engineers saying how do you make stuff because we need to understand our field

Daniel Reeves: Exactly. We talk about reverse engineering something. If you find. Something that's been clearly engineered and you want to understand how it was engineered. You of take it apart and you model it as you go to try to understand what the thought process was.

And that's essentially what biologists are trying to do when they take engineering software and modeling techniques. They're trying to essentially reverse engineer nature by modeling it and then going back and saying, okay, why was this thing modeled the way it is? It's almost trying to get into the mind of the designer to say, now why did the designer create, this biochemical pathway or this subcellular system, or whatever it may be?

Why did he design it this way? There must be some function, which of course, all of us intelligent design proponents, Are saying yeah, that's what we've been saying all along. But it's exciting to see that outside of the intelligent design community, there are scientists all over the place that are starting to use this engineering kind of concept, to describe biology.

Scott Beyer: Yeah, one of, and it does seem like the same as when you're talking about using the term laws or this idea of engineering you end up stumbling upon design language. And you're using it, whether you mean to or not. One of my favorite things to do with my kids when I take 'em to the zoo is all the different plaques that talk about the different animals.

And they'll say, this animal's adaptation is designed to and I just pause and I go wait a second. Designed to, that sounds like it was made with a function and they can't help it. It seems 

Daniel Reeves: it's totally unavoidable. Yeah. I mean there have been some really entertaining examples of this, where you have someone. You know, Holds to a materialistic or they say, that they hold to a materialistic view of nature. But in trying to describe one of these complex systems in nature, they, of course, like you said, they're using words like designed or they're using teleological language, like function, purpose, things like this.

And there have been some. Entertaining examples where they literally will say, they were intelligently designed, and then catch themselves with an audience of, hundreds of people and say, no that, that's not what I meant. , I take it back because they're, they're stumbling across something that is just totally, like you said, totally unavoidable.

Scott Beyer: As you have been, Doing this scientific work and steeped in it, right?

So you're not only doing it, but as you mentioned, your wife does it and you are around, names like Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe people who've done some very robust work in science. Has this impacted your faith at all?

Daniel Reeves: Absolutely. Yeah. It's I think the biggest thing for me is that when you have a foundation of faith in. A designer. Starts to inform all of the questions and doubts that you have in your particular faith. And so as a Christian, as I'm trying to understand, these Christian scriptures better as I have questions, it's constrained by the fact that I am so overwhelmingly convinced in a creator of the universe.

It kind of constrains your options. So I'm trying to of think of an example of that, but for example, if you're as a Christian, if you're struggling with a concept of resurrection, right? That's a very Christian concept, and it's something that, a lot of us grapple with. What does it mean?

How is that possible? It's so miraculous and outside of our, frame of reference that sometimes we have doubts surrounding things like resurrection, but when. Have studied from a scientific standpoint, the way that everything came about through a miracle, that there is no natural explanation that could account for the world around us and ourselves.

When you have that foundation, then it helps you realize then what is resurrection? It's nothing, if God can create life in the first place, how hard is it for him? Restore life, resurrect life. And so there's a lot of things, in particular Christian faith, Christian theology, that are really grounded in our faith in a creator and in a designer.

And so that has really helped me to navigate some of my own questions and doubts in my faith, and given me a lot more peace and stability in my.

Scott Beyer: Yeah. Are there any scriptures that you view differently now or that you feel like have been opened up and maybe, you know how sometimes there's a verse that you know, I see this differently than probably most people do because of my own personal connection to it.

Daniel Reeves: Yeah, I definitely think so. I mentioned Romans one earlier and how Paul talks about the evidence available to all, that is seen in his creation. There's another verse where Peter is writing and he says that basically people deliberately overlooked the fact that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed.

I think he says out of water and through water by the word of God. When you're not, in this conversation all the time, you might read right over the fact that it says they deliberately overlook these facts about nature. But for me, I see that all the time. I see people that appear to be deliberately overlooking evidence that's right before their eyes.

It's available to everyone. They're deliberately overlooking it because they understand the implications and they're not ready to accept them. And so that's a verse that for me, I, have a newfound appreciation for Another one that comes to mind is just the creation account in Genesis and how it has so much more meaning when you understand just what it took to not only create all these different types of, organisms and life, but to create them in such a way that the end result is a functional, stable.

Biosphere a system of, ecosystems that balance one another and that, they don't expend more energy than they create. And, there basically there's all this balance that resulted from the creation, the initial creation of life, and of the biosphere. That's something that I just have an immense amount of appreciation for now.

I don't think I would've had without having studied biology. 

Scott Beyer: I look at life a lot of times nowadays through the lens of a parent. and your kids as they grow up, they have interests in different things, right? You have some kids who are more interested in English or art, and then you have kids who are more interested in the sciences.

And I think one concern that parents sometimes have is if my kid gets interested in science, then they go off to school and they're gonna lose their faith. They're. Get in some college class and they're gonna tell 'em all about Darwin and how we came from nothing. And and so then they're gonna just fall away from the Lord.

What would you say to that? What's your advice? To both a young person whose interest in science and then to parents who are raising kids who have interests in things from lizards and dinosaurs and to any other field in science.

Daniel Reeves: Yeah, so I think the the first thing that comes to mind for me is the way I experienced this as a young person interested in studying science, and that is that there, there were a lot of adults in my life who, in the church in particular, who were afraid of where that might lead me, and the conclusions that I might come to if I went and studied biology at a secular university, which is what I ended up doing.

And. I can't say that did me any good for people to express their concerns that I might lose my faith by studying science. If anything, it set up a false dichotomy in my mind to say, you either pursue truth in science or you pursue truth in scripture or in faith, or something like that.

And it almost made it seem like, there are two sources of truth and you have to decide which one you're gonna pursue. , but there was, I remember there was one insightful person in the church at the time who came to me and had overheard these conversations and he said, I want you to know that if you study biology in college, your faith will only be.

Made that much stronger. And he said, to help you prepare yourself for that, I want you to read this book. And he handed me a book that was probably a little over my reading level at the time. I was a, I think a junior or senior in high school. But he handed me Michael B, he's. Darwin's Black Box, and that was the first book I had read related to Intelligent design.

And I read through that whole book. It is a great book. And in fact it's many per many people's first book on the subject. I've learned, but it really, it's amazing how, even though I couldn't understand all the ins and outs of that book as a under or as a high schooler, Took away from it. This central concept that life is complex, it's irreducibly complex, and there has to be an explanation for that.

And when I went and studied biology the concept just showed up everywhere I looked. And so it planted a seed in my mind that then grew into, what it is today that I'm just fully convinced. Intelligent design is the only scientific way of talking about this kind of complexity That makes any sense.

And so what I encourage parents and teachers and Leaders in the church. What I encourage them to do is not to tell young people not to pursue science, but rather to encourage them to pursue science and to encourage them to go in with their eyes wide open to the things that they can expect to hear and see as they're studying.

And for example, we have a book that we published years ago. It's called Explore E. And it goes through many of these lines of argumentation for Darwinian evolution, things like homology things like that. And it, it basically says here's the evidence in favor of homology. You look at the human hand, you look at a bat wing or a porous fin, and you see a similar arrangement of bones there.

And so short looks like potentially these could all have shared a common ancestor. And then you flip the page and it. , but here's the evidence against homology that when you actually look, for example, at the genomes of these various organisms that you know, what you're seeing is vastly different information that had to come from somewhere and for example, vastly different arrangement of muscles to power those same bones that you think are so similar.

. And so it goes through all these different lines of evidence and basically provides the evidence for and against. And I think at the end of the day, if a student were to read through that book, they would be left thinking that the evidence is, far more lacking than anything else. And so that's what we encourage.

Parents and teachers especially private homeschool teachers to do is actually don't fail to teach evolution to your students before they go off to college. Teach evolution better and more than they would hear otherwise help fill in the gaps where, they're not gonna hear about all of these evidences against the theory 

Scott Beyer: give them both sides of the argument because they're probably only gonna get one side later on. Whoever that was that handed you that book, I'm very thankful for them cuz I think the world would be a, a sadder place without Daniel in the scientific world and is there anything I missed?

Daniel Reeves: I think this has been great. I really can't understate just how important these concepts are. I think a lot of people might think that, I can do with or without science, I have other interests. Science isn't my thing, and that's okay. We don't have to be, interested in science.

But what you do have to realize is, in our society where science is such a source of authority I, if not the ultimate source of authority in Western culture, you have to realize that scientific ideas have a huge impact on everyday life On. Vaccines is a recent thing or on how you understand sexuality, how you understand gender ideology.

So many issues that we all care deeply about and want to understand and want to know how to navigate as a Christian. All of them are grounded in some kind of scientific ideology. And so at the end of the day, we all should care at least a little bit about, what that ideology is and making sure we get it right.

Scott Beyer: Fair point. Fair point. Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and talk about things that matter. Scien this. Science matters and who the science points to matters to. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you, is there a pathway that they should take to do that? How would how would be the best way for that?

Daniel Reeves: Sure. Yeah. The easiest way is just to email me d reeves discovery.org.

Scott Beyer: Okay, great. Thank you so much and thanks again and I appreciate all the work you're doing every.

Daniel Reeves: Thanks, Scott. You as well.

Scott Beyer: If you've listened this far, hopefully we've done something to help make your life a little bit better.  Would you mind returning the favor and helping us by subscribing to the podcast through your favorite platform?

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And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”