On a classic episode of ID the Future for Labor Day, we’re again spotlighting the book Science After Babel. Author, philosopher, and mathematician David Berlinski concludes a three-part conversation with me, teasing out various elements of the work. We discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remains before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Berlinski: Life Shows a “Kind of Intelligence Evident Nowhere Else” in Nature
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