Last week, I was a guest on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, from midnight to 2 AM. This is a nationally syndicated overnight show with 600 affiliates. I had lots of fun and I got to say much of what I had wanted.
George has been interested in intelligent design for a long time. He also seemed to be very interested in my new thriller, Oppenheimer’s Demon, which includes a subplot involving intelligent design. There were a lot of great questions from the listeners. A few call-ins may have come from the fringe of outer space. One person asked if I could describe God. Not having seen him recently, I was at a loss.
Image source: Discovery Institute Press.That Ankle-Locking Design
This was my fifth appearance on C2C. Maybe my sixth. Since I have already discussed the cosmological, the anthropic, and the DNA code topics on the show on past occasions, I shifted to more of a layman’s approach, using common sense items such as complexity upon complexity and all or nothing. Bats, for example, by the millions around the world would be falling from the roofs of caves if that ankle-locking design, an ingenious all-or-nothing proposition, had not come about all at once. Birds would be crashing into trees while learning how to land on branches, and their eggs would be rolling away while they learned how to make safe nests. In addition, baby swallows and weavers might still be falling through upside -down nests, monarch butterflies might be crashing into the Caribbean, and the albatross still circling the South Pole.
Oddly, the interview was audio-only, but on Zoom for “clarity of sound.” My computer screen showed two giant, stacked rectangular images; the upper one was blacked out and the lower one showed me seated at my desk. I am extremely grateful for the two hours, despite having been forced to watch myself talk and do whatever else people do when being interviewed. Throughout, George remained “behind” the other screen, reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Talking to myself this way was mildly distracting.
Early on, I emphatically stated that Darwin is dead, figuratively and literally, and his theory of evolution belongs in the dustbin of history. I compared the theory to the child’s story about the emperor with no clothes. There are no proofs, no facts, in this theory, after nearly two hundred years. Yet we teach evolution as fact. I also pointed out that natural selection is actually part of life’s intelligent design. Evolution lacks foresight.
The Illustration of Childbirth
I used childbirth to illustrate, pointing out how many parts of the process could not have evolved by tiny, time-consuming (meaning millions of years), successive steps. There was no stage of human development where only a placenta was delivered. Whether it was a boy or girl was irrelevant.
As has been recently discovered, the human baby sends chemical messages to Mom saying, “I’m ready. It’s time to leave home.” Mom silently agrees and sends chemical messages back to start the engines rolling and control the descent. The amniotic sac ruptures, pelvic muscles correct the baby’s body so the head (usually) goes first. The head will, by design, turn sideways to clear the pelvic bone bridge. Cells from the newborn have already passed through the placenta and traveled to Mom’s heart, lungs, pancreas, and immune system to guard her health for years to come. Once outside, the baby is designed to start breathing while a valve near the baby’s heart simultaneously closes so that blood can now be aerated in the lungs. How did all this happen? Without these simultaneous steps, not always successive, the baby would be stuck inside. And so would we all, long before the Stone Age.
A discussion in the novel argues against the linear evolutionary progression of fish to reptiles to mammals to humans. In man, it’s known that the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right controls the left — so called contralateral control. In all of the species before mammals, most of the control is straight down from the left brain to the left side and right brain to right side. That leaves a serious question. How did millions of nerves suddenly flip sides 180 degrees? There is nothing small or successive (Darwinian) about this.
Finally, we discussed coincidences and their possible theistic significance. Coincidentally, I had several to relate.