How do the arts and sciences reveal the genius of God?

Is the world a meaningless churning of random intersecting events or a beautiful place of genius that reveals the reality of God as the ultimate Genius? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt joins The Denison Forum Podcast to discuss this central question of his book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature

When we encounter, discover, or help to create things in our world that express the unmistakable qualities of depth, harmony, clarity, and elegance, how do we explain them? What are they pointing us to? 

From great literature to music, to mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics, the majestic fingerprints of an all-powerful, good and majestic creator are all around us—if we have the eyes, ears, and heart to receive them. 

It just may be that breathtaking beauty and order will lead us to the greatest discovery of all.

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Topics

• (01:57): Guest introduction: Dr. Jonathan Witt
• (04:52): Dr. Witt’s journey of faith and intellectual exploration
• (08:05): Critique of Evolutionary Theory
• (10:13): The intersection of science, art, and faith
• (15:44): The influence of Christianity on modern science
• (21:10): The philosophy of Scientism vs. True Science
• (24:57): Exploring the book: A Meaningful World
• (33:27): The Periodic Table and the search for order
• (37:52): The genius in nature and art
• (45:30): Mathematics: The language of genius
• (52:06): Theological reflections on suffering and genius
• (57:31): Conclusion and further resources

Resources

• Ask Us Anything: [email protected]
• Read the prologue to A Meaningful World.
• A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Dr. Jonathan Witt
• The Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture
• Your Designed Body, Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman
• The Wonder of Water, Michael Denton
• How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
• Subscribe to The Daily Article by Dr. Jim Denison
• Stand. Engage. Transform. summer campaign.

About Dr. Jonathan Witt

Jonathan Witt, PhD, is Executive Editor of Discovery Institute Press and a senior fellow and senior project manager with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His latest book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (DI Press, 2018) written with Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola. Witt also authored Intelligent Design Uncensored (IVP, 2010) with William Dembski, and A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (IVP, 2006) with Benjamin Wiker.

He is also the author of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot (Ignatius, 2014), written with Jay Richards.

Witt is also the lead writer and associate producer for Poverty, Inc., winner of the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award and recipient of over 50 international film festival honors.

He also scripted three other documentaries that aired widely on PBS and were translated into multiple languages for airing in countries around the globe: The Privileged Planet (written with Lad Allen), The Birth of Freedom, and The Call of the Entrepreneur.

Additionally, he scripted two Acton Media DVD curricula carried by Zondervan, including Effective Stewardship, and he served as the lead writer for The PovertyCure DVD Series and the PovertyCure initiative, which includes a content-rich website, more than a million Facebook followers, and a network of 400+ poverty-fighting organizations from around the world.

Witt also has provided editing or deep editing work for several successful books, including three New York Times bestsellers.

Before returning to work full time again with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Witt served as the managing editor for the news and commentary site The Stream, and as a research fellow for the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Witt’s academic essays have appeared in various periodicals and he has been interviewed by numerous regional and national radio programs. He is a regular annual speaker for Discovery Institute’s summer seminar on science and culture and has spoken at universities on a range of topics connected to political and economic freedom, cultural renewal, and the arts.

Witt previously served as a tenured professor of literature and writing at Lubbock Christian University. He has a Ph.D., with honors, in English and Literary Theory from the University of Kansas.

About Dr. Mark Turman

Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.

Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.

Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.

Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.

About Denison Forum

Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited. 

Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Hi, friends, this is Mark. Welcome back to the Denison Forum Podcast. Before we dive into today’s episode, we wanted to share some exciting news and a quick update. We’re taking a short summer break for a few weeks, but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We’ll be presenting some of our most popular episodes featuring incredible guests like Dr.

Steven Meyer, Alistair McGrath, and others. We hope you enjoy these encore presentations and get a chance to revisit some of the powerful conversations that we’ve had. We’ll be back in late July with brand new episodes, bringing you fresh conversations designed to equip you to think biblically, live wholly and serve intentionally.

And let me ask you to mark your calendars in August. We’re thrilled to announce that the podcast will be rebranding under a new name, the Faith and Clarity Podcast. We’ll be sharing more details about this exciting change in coming weeks, so stay tuned. [00:01:00] Thanks for supporting the podcast and for being a part of our community.

We wish you a fantastic summer and always remember that Jesus wants you to live by faith, not by fear. Now let’s get to this encore presentation. Welcome back to the Ness and Forum podcast. I’m Dr. Mark Truman, your host and executive director of Denson Forum. We appreciate you joining us for this conversation, for every conversation that we have here on the Denson Forum podcast about truth, about culture, about the intersection of faith, and what’s going on in our world today.

Answering hopefully questions that you have here in the fall, we’re dealing with some of those issues that maybe you and your family may be encountering as kids go back to school, as college students start off into a new semester. Those things about where faith intersect with education, where they intersect with things like science and math and.

History. We’re having those kinds of conversations [00:02:00] today, and our guest today will be Dr. Jonathan Witt, who is the executive editor of Discovery Institute Press, and a senior fellow and a senior project manager with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of a number of books including The Hobbit Party, the Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got and the West Forgot That was written with Jay Richards is also the lead writer and associate producer of a documentary called Poverty Inc, which was the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award recipient, and has also been viewed and awarded 50 international Festival honors.

He additionally scripted three other documentaries that have aired widely on PBS and have been translated into multiple languages airing around the world. Wits academic essays have appeared in various periodicals, and he’s been interviewed numerous times in both regional and [00:03:00] national radio programs.

He’s a regular speaker for Discovery Institute’s Summer seminar on science and Culture, and has spoken at a number of universities on a range of topics connected to political and economic freedom, cultural renewal, and the arts. Whitt previously served as a tenured professor of literature and writing at Lubbock Christian University.

He holds a PhD with honors in English and literary theory from the University of Kansas. Today we’re gonna be talking with Dr. Whit about his book, A Meaningful World, how the Arts and Sciences Revealed The Genius of Nature. His book was written with Benjamin Whitaker and or Benjamin Weer, and gives an incredible insight into how the magnificence of our world and our pursuits academically point to this, this reality of genius, which ultimately points back to the [00:04:00] ultimate genius of God.

So we’re excited for you to be a part of this conversation today. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Jonathan Witt. Welcome to the Dennison Forum Podcast. We’re glad you’re here. I’m glad to be here. We got a a lot of ground to cover. And just to remind our audience we’ve been focused on educational type topics here in this season of the year as people go back to school, as college students, high school students all across the ages getting back into their classrooms, getting their textbooks, getting their assignments firing up their computers, getting ready for what all of this school year is going to mean both academically and socially.

And so we wanted to talk to Dr. Witt and some others about how things like science and faith and today science, art, and faith how those things are intertwined and how they intersect. And so as we get into that Dr. Whitt wanted to see if you just tell us a little bit about your own journey of faith.

How that worked [00:05:00] out, and then how you ended up doing what you do now at the Discovery Institute? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Great question. I, I sometimes joke that I, I get, can get testimony envy because you know, there are these, you know, beautiful dramatic, you know, Paul on the road to Damascus testimonials. I was raised in the church and as a, you know, kid, I, there was never some moment when I thought, oh man, I’m an atheist.

I’m gonna run away from God. I did have a period where I became, you know, acutely aware of my sinfulness. I would say as I grew, it was, for me, it was more getting a stronger sense of God’s grace. That was key for me in terms of intellect the intellectual part of the journey. I one thing I, I didn’t struggle with was as I began to see some of the evidence.

Nature and, and the history of biology that, of certain things that maybe didn’t fit as obviously into a certain ways of interpreting [00:06:00] Genesis. That wasn’t a huge faith struggle for me because by that time I was in college, I was taking a lot of literature courses. I was at a Christian university. I actually had some good nowadays, you know, you talk about going to a Christian university doesn’t necessarily mean that your professors are going to be helpful for your faith, unfortunately.

But one of the things that, that I found helpful is I was taking what I was learning about literature and, and how poetry and that sort of thing worked and seeing some things in the Bible, realizing that the Bible uses poetry and that sort of thing, and I. I wasn’t one of these people that, oh, Genesis is poetry, so none of it’s literal.

I didn’t go down that path because so much of Genesis really strikes me as, you know, as God’s telling, really giving us some facts about life. But I, there was a flexibility as I came to some of the particulars in Genesis. So for me, it wasn’t a [00:07:00] make or break faith issue. For instance, whether the earth was 6,000 years old or much longer, you know, I, I saw, oh, I could see how a particular reading of Genesis, you know, might account for, for either possibility.

So it wasn’t a real concern of mine. And even the possibility that evolution was true wasn’t a big concern of mine. One of the reasons for that was I had a, a brother-in-law who was a medical he, he was in med school. He, he was really committed to mission work. He was very faithful Christian, and he himself as he was exploring and wrestling with evolutionary theory.

He had some professors that said, you know what? God wanted to do it that way. He could have done it that way. And so he actually started exploring evolution with a pretty open mind. He’s you know, I know, I believe God did it, but maybe he used evolution. As he dug further and further into it with an open mind, he didn’t really even ask to around.

He wasn’t gonna try to go into being a PhD in biology where there would’ve been enormous pressure for him to accept the kind of full Darwinian [00:08:00] story. He was going into med school. There might’ve been a little pressure, but he just kind of went in with an open mind. And he, but as he, he explored it, he, he came to, to realize that the, the case for blind unguided evolution of all life was extraordinarily weak and that there was a lot of bluffing involved.

And so he, he, he recommended a couple of books to me and I read those. And that started my journey of being quite skeptical. Of modern evolutionary theory. E even if there are certain elements of it. Yeah, polar bears probably did evolve from brown bears. Micro evolution. But the big picture of mindless unguided evolution, microbe demand it just for me, it fell apart on the evidence.

So while that wasn’t a make or break issue for my faith, once I saw that evolution had failed, it, it actually became another source of strength for my faith. Because if evolutionary theory fails, you really, you’re out, you’re outta [00:09:00] luck as an atheist. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist public atheist, he, he put it this way, once Darwin and his theory of evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, I think he was exaggerating.

But his point is you need evolutionary theory. To be a, an atheist that can in any way kinda have a leg to stand on. ’cause you’ve gotta explain the extraordinary intricacy of the, the living world of animals and plants of the molecular machine you we’re discovering in cells. You’ve gotta have some other explanation than a designer.

And if that, if that fails, there’s really no other game in town other than a creator. Mm. So anyway, so I was a, a professor for a while. I eventually started working for the Discovery Institute where kind of the hub of the intelligent design movement. And so that’s allowed me to bring both a kind of a literary aesthetic.

’cause my focus was literature, aesthetics, that sort of thing. And then of course, working at [00:10:00] Discovery Institute, intelligent design, helping edit books, co-author some books. I’m rubbing shoulders with some brilliant scientists, so I had this rare opportunity to be very cross-disciplinary. So that’s, that’s been really exciting.

Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And that’s really one of the uniquenesses of, of this conversation and of the book that we want to talk about is just how close and how intertwined those worlds are. Particularly the world of literature, the world of of the humanities, the world of history, the world of theology, and how those and the natural sciences are actually deeply, deeply woven together.

And that’s one of the things that drew me for this conversation and to this particular work of yours. But before we get into that maybe it’s related to that. One of the things you say early on in the book is that this book that you’ve written, a meaningful world and we’ll get to the subtitle in just a second, but you describe it as an antidote and you mentioned a couple of the big names in [00:11:00] science that really seemed to have dominated the conversation for.

Somewhere around a hundred to 150 years, starting with Darwin. And then the presence of Sigmund Freud in the early part of the 20th century. And now this group rec represented by Richard Dawkins, sometimes referred to, oftentimes referred to as the new atheists who really came into prominence triggered in some way, possibly by the events of nine 11 in 2001.

And then you had the, the kind of meteoric rise of the voices of these atheistic scientists of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer. Mm-hmm. A number of others who became very aggressive, very militant in their approach of atheistic ma materialism, naturalism. I think it was Christopher Hitchens who went so far as to say that religion is a virus on the hardware of humanity that needs to be eradicated.

We’ve talked about [00:12:00] that some here at the Denison Forum. But it really does, you, you can see it in popular culture, you can see it in movies, you can see it in other aspects of culture that it’s almost a given that from Darwin to Dawkins, they’re, they’ve been largely unquestioned in a lot of ways for around a hundred or so years in our culture.

Why do you think that is? How do you think we got to that kind of maeu that we’re operating in today? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. It’s a very complex question. I think there are a lot of threads. I would say that Darwin’s theory of evolution while it falls apart on close scrutiny, it was maybe the first to offer at least a superficially plausible explanation for the origin of.

All these amazing plants and animals we have around us that, that didn’t invoke a, a creator. And there were forces already in place in western society that, that were eager to [00:13:00] move toward atheistic or at least agnostic point of view culturally. Huxley, he formed the X Club a friend of Darwin’s.

He, he wasn’t even fully convinced by Darwin’s theory. He thought natural selection was too restrictive if you had to, if you had to build things using natural selection. He, he didn’t see how it would work, but he, he didn’t see any other game in town. And he had this program of wanting to move culture away from Judeo-Christian religion, kind of free it, you know, of the shackles of religion.

And so he glommed on to Darwin’s theory, even though he, he didn’t see it as completely credible and became a very effective proponent of it. He was called Darwin’s Bulldog. Famously he’s a, was a pretty effective debater. And so I think there were just a lot of forces that wanted something like that.

And then, you know, how did, how did they kind of march through the institutions? That’s I think it was in Antonio Gosky, I may be misremembering his name, but he was a, a Frankfurt school Marxist, who talked about the need to move through the institutions of Western culture rather than just [00:14:00] say, oh, let’s try to take over the, the government.

He said, you need to move through the universities. You need to move through the, even if you can get into the seminaries, do that. And so that’s been there, a very aggressive program. And, and to some degree may, maybe Christians were kind of asleep at the wheel. We, we wanted to, you know, baptize people. We wanted to, you know, convert people.

We want, we wanted to tell people about Jesus, which is absolutely crucial, important. But, you know, I think two minutes, we forgot that, that, I think it was Kuper Abraham Kuper that said there’s not one square inch of all the creation about which God does not cry mine. And I think there, there’s been a wake up call.

For Christians and other, other theists of, of, of goodwill that we need to be more proactive about culture generally. You know what, you know, do we have Christians in Hollywood? Do we have Christians writing novels? Do we have Christians that aren’t just running for office but are you know, trying to shape how, how we think about politics and political [00:15:00] economy?

And so I think that’s the good news. I think, I think there’s kind of a wake up call that we need to be proactive across culture. We need to be salt and light in, in many areas and not just inside the church building. 

Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, and it’s, yeah, I mean, even just yesterday I sat down after work with my wife and she started reading to me the testimony of a popular Hollywood figure.

Someone that everybody would recognize and started sharing the story of his faith that was published in a recent magazine and. Just becoming aware that there is no environment where Christians are excluded or should be excluded, and as you said, a great wake up call. I’d like to also ask you to comment, just reframing history a little bit.

Like I said, if you, if you know Dawkins coming in the latter half, particularly in his influence in the latter part of the 19th century, but if you take a longer look I had a part of my conversation with your colleague Steven Meyer about this, that really the modern scientific [00:16:00] movement, even the scientific method that is predominant in the fields of science today, if you go back 500 years, you find out that, you know, the modern scientific movement that started around the 15 hundreds was actually initiated by very very dedicated Christian people who were wanting to discover.

More about the majesty of God through what God has created and what God has enabled us to discover. Can you kind of reframe that conversation of history and remind us of that? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Absolutely. Yeah. That, that’s a, just a, a wonderful story. And I I, there was a period where I was working for another think tank that has, has some overlap with Discovery Institute, and we did a documentary called The Birth of Freedom that talked about the Judeo-Christian influence on the rise of the good things in Western culture.

Obviously since Western civilization has run by humans and humans are fallen, there’s been all kinds of atrocities. But if you compare Western civilization, you [00:17:00] know, its rise compared to every other major civilization history. You know, they would get, they did amazing things. And the birth of science is one of the things we cover there.

And so that, I would recommend that as a, as a good introduction for I don’t have time to read a book. The birth of freedom, freedom. It also looks at the rise of, of representative government the rise of, of economic freedom and how, how many people that’s managed to lift out of poverty globally.

But yeah, those guys, they to a man, they were Christians or might have been some that were, you know, kind of theists may, maybe not like Newton may have been, not a, a completely orthodox Trinitarian, but, but to a man, they were all theists who believed in a rational loving God who created the world, and humans are made in his image.

And so that those, those two things combined meant, hey, we could, we could go and study nature carefully and uncover. Hidden depths. We talk about nature being a work of genius in our book, A [00:18:00] Meaningful World. And we say that there’s these different qualities, I’m getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here, but one of those is depth.

There’s a depth to any work of genius. You don’t just, you know, read Shakespeare’s ham once, oh, I got it all. Or go to a really great deep film. Oh, I got it all in the first try. No, you know, there’s depths and depths and layers and layers to it. They saw nature as a work of supreme genius, so they expected there to be hidden depths mysterious things that wouldn’t immediately reveal themselves to them.

But because they’re made in the image of the creator, they thought, Hey, if we study it carefully, maybe we can uncover the some of that hidden order. They also believe that God, because he is rational, that maybe there’s a hidden elegance there. And Kepler, he, he, he was one of the famous early astronomers who.

One of his discoveries, you know, pretty much sensed the case for a, a heliocentric model of, of the solar system for a long time, you know, frankly, everybody thought the [00:19:00] sun went around the earth and everything went around the earth. But, you know, Copernicus first and Galileo argued, you know, the sun’s at the center of the solar system and Kepler, he came up with these three laws of planetary motion and he, he seized upon the, the ellipses as the shape of the rotation instead of a perfect circle.

Some people said the ellipses, that’s kind of messy, that’s not as elegant as a perfect circle. But he stumbled and he was searching for it upon this very elegant mathematical formula to describe the, those orbits. And he, and he said, and this is a paraphrase, when he, when he made this discovery, I was thinking God’s thoughts after him.

Hmm. And so what, what are he talking about? He’s thinking, God he thought of God as a mathematician. He thought, God, there would be an elegance to God’s creation. You know, you look out with your eyes and you see a lot of messiness, death and decay and, and you know, manure turns into soil and worms going, there’s a lot of messy stuff.

But he said there’s gotta also be in addition to all that complexity [00:20:00] and depth, I’m thinking there’s probably some, some hidden elegance there. Some, some order if, if we can do mathematics as humans, think how, how much more of a mathematician God is. So they went looking for that hidden mathematical order and they found it.

So that, that’s one of the spectacular stories of the history of science and it, and it flips on its head. The, the, the kind of modern myth that Christianity is somehow opposed to science. Christianity is the, is the, is the soil in which science was born. 

Dr. Mark Turman: And that, that Christianity in particular has no fear of science.

It actually celebrates it, as you said. ’cause it’s right. The, the discovery of God, the thinking of God’s thoughts after him. And to see that thread is to me it’s just really the importance of a larger, better reading of history. It’s rather than kind of the soundbite type approach that we take to so many things in our world today.

And, and it really gave the foothold to the new atheist, to the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world [00:21:00] to really mischaracterize faith broadly and Christianity specifically. But, but let’s go back a little bit to the title of 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: the Yeah. Just quick to kind of put an out on that. Our core isn’t with science, it’s a, that’s a search for truth about the natural world.

Our world is with scientism. Which is this philosophy that dresses itself up as just truth seeking science. But it’s really a philosophy. It’s an atheistic, materialistic philosophy, posing as objective search for truth about nature. 

Dr. Mark Turman: Would you yeah, thanks for bringing up that term. That’s a, that’s an imp important term in this conversation, and a distinction that people need to be aware of the difference between legitimate science and scientific pursuit and that of scientism as what might even be described, or would you describe it as a false religion, an idolatry in the context of a Christian terminology?

Exactly. Yeah. Would you put it in those con in that context? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah. Because it’s not just [00:22:00] a, a, a way of kinda looking at the world. It, it does, it is a substitute religion. You think science is gonna solve everything. And it’s not just any kind of science. It’s science. Yolk two. Materialism to this idea that ultimately all there is is matter and energy.

Your soul isn’t real. The idea of, of an immaterial creator isn’t real. Love. That’s just glands chemistry. There, there’s not anything authentic there. Good and evil, those are just constructs. So Scientism has a has a materialistic philosophical ideological substructure and, and it’s a substitute religion.

Dr. Mark Turman: Lemme, lemme get you to chase a rabbit with me on that topic for just a second. And that is, do you think that the, the shared experience that we all had over the last three, three and a half years relative to COVID and the COVID pandemic? You know, there was oftentimes this this clarion call and then [00:23:00] criticism of, just trust the science.

Just trust the science. Do you think the i ideology of scientism has taken a hit and a step backward because of the journey through the pandemic and that, you know, the world was grappling with something that we had long talked about as a possibility, but now it was upon us and science couldn’t readily and quickly explain it and solve it.

Do you think that’s kind of hurt the movement of scientism or affected it in any way? I hope 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: that it has caused a lot of people to, to realize, just ’cause somebody in a white lab code or the head of some, you know, scientific branch of government says, science says that what is really happening is a particular fallible human being is saying, here’s what I think.

And rather than let carefully lay out the evidence in front of you, I’m going to make a appeal to authority. And that that should raise our [00:24:00] baloney detector. Why is, you know, why is he making this questionable appeal to authority if he can just trot out really powerful evidence for what, you know, for what he’s saying?

So yeah, we, we saw a lot of flip flopping that I think it should be educational. That, that we need to be not be let, let around by the nose, by somebody just claiming scientific authority, 

Dr. Mark Turman: right? And one of the, one of the healthy signs of a healthy person and, and a healthy scientist for that matter would be someone who says that it’s okay to say, I don’t know.

There, right? There just were times when all scientists need to be able to say that with the proper kind of humility and especially when something of a na of the nature of a, hopefully once in a lifetime, once in a Millennium global pandemic that we can say, you know what? There was just a lot we didn’t know and.

Now we know a lot more, but we don’t know everything that we would like to know. And that’s, that’s always the journey of, of what of what life and science is all about. Let, let’s go back to the book a minute. [00:25:00] The book is titled A Meaningful World, and then the subtitle, how the Arts and Science Revealed the Genius of Nature.

Give us the backstory of what prompted you to write this book in the first place. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Great question. I was working by then, I was working at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. That’s the hub of the intelligent design movement. And so that’s some important context because the theory of intelligent design in a nutshell, it says that there are things in nature that a.

Of having been created by a designing intelligence. In other words, they didn’t happen by some lawlike, you know, ma magnetism or, or something random like floods or earthquakes or tornadoes. That there, there was a, a planning for thinking designer at work putting that together. So certain things in nature, it could be the, the, the molecular outboard motor we call the bacterial [00:26:00] gel.

That Michael B makes a, a really powerful argument. It has the, the earmark of design. It could be the fine tuning of the laws and constants of, of physics and chemistry for life. That’s such a problem for atheists that the, the name for that issue in physics is the fine tuning problem. They just call it the fine tune.

It’s not a problem to a theist but to some people it’s a problem. ’cause why would these, why would gravity and all these other be just right to allow for stars and planets to form and, and hundreds of other ways? Steve Meyer probably got into that little bit. When you talk to him, you can, you know, find his stuff online or get his book.

The Return to The God Hypothesis. He goes into depth about that. And many Nobel laureates have said Fine tuning points to a designer. So intelligence, right? That’s, that’s where, where Id kind of stops, says, look, there, there’s a designing intelligence. But we said Ben Wyer and I said, you know, we don’t just have a uniform experience of what intelligent agents [00:27:00] can do and can’t do and what, and what an intelligent can do beyond what say a tornado can do.

We have uniform and a rich experience of what. Geniuses can do, you know, a higher form of intelligence. And since I had a background in the arts, and Ben Wyer had some background in that as well as he was, he’s also a, a kind of jack of all trades shameless generalist like myself. I said, let, let’s, let’s look at some of the iconic works of genius in, you know, Western civilization.

See if we find some common themes, characteristics, and then see, go back into nature and see if we find those. And so and so we did we found, you know, some common characteristics. We, we bolded down to four and then we show how, whether you’re looking at chemistry, we’re looking at, at cosmology, whether you’re looking at biology, we find these characteristics of genius.

So we kind of took it to the next level, if you will, took the intelligent design argument to the next level. 

Dr. Mark Turman: [00:28:00] Let’s go down a couple of those roads because just to kind of give people a framework of what this, this book and this conversation is about, it’s, it, it might be expected by people to say how science reveals the genius of nature, but the combination of art and science as the, the revelation of genius of, of this higher level of, of learning that points to the ultimate level of knowledge and understanding that we would find in place in God.

And, and let me just kind of set a little bit of a framework for this part of our, our conversation is this it, it just kind of startled me when I, when I went from the title into the first part of the book and the, the whole discussion about how Hamlet as this exquisite piece of literature actually.

More. I think the book quotes what you say in there is Hamlet has been more studied than any other piece of literature [00:29:00] except for the Bible. That’s right. Yeah. It’s, it’s extraordinary how much, and which is, yeah, it is extraordinary for me just to hear that. And but just to go back in and, and to say, okay, as an expression of something that we find in the world and in and in the human endeavor to find something of this quality, of this magnitude and of this as you said, depth and exquisite nature, how does that point us and reveal these principles of genius, that point, ultimately back to God?

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah, that’s, so when we, we used Shakespeare, you know, we could have gone to lots of different places as examples, but you know, we, we had to get it all in one book. And so we mainly focused on a couple of plays by Shakespeare. And then just kind of briefly, you know, pointed to some other works of genius that, that also illustrated these points.

But hamlet’s where we start and, and we show it, it illustrating these [00:30:00] four characteristics that we boil down of genius. There’s works of genius, have a depth to them. You don’t just, you know, read, you know, read it once or, or go you know, look at a, a, an amazing genius painting and just, oh yeah, I get it, I’m done.

There’s layers and layers of meaning and beauty there that if, if you keep studying it there’s a harmony to it. Harmony involves the artful relationship among a variety of parts. A diversity brought into happy association, if you will. We the, the easiest example is, is musical harmony.

You know, when you get mm-hmm. Four different parts and they’re all blending together it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a beautiful thing, but they don’t blend together. It’s, it know a scary thing. The then in, in Shakespeare, you know, what, what does a play by Shakespeare have to do with harmony? He brings these very disparate elements into harmony.

He, there’s comic elements in, in Hamlet. There’s, and of course, tra it’s a tragedy. So as you expect, there’s tragic elements. There’s elevated language, there’s very earthy language, you know, sometimes even [00:31:00] body. But these elephants, they’re not just, oh, I’m getting tired of the, the dark parts. Let’s have some fun and let’s go over here and have a little body.

Oh, let’s have some elevated language. Tho those different aspects, they inner penetrate, they strengthen each other. It’s, you know, kind of a two plus two is five kind of thing. So there’s this rich harmony there. Then the elegance there’s an elegance in the play, and I won’t go into depth there, but you, you can see elegance in.

Certain types of, of poems where, where the, the rhyme scheme just neat fits neatly together. In nature, we see elegance, and I’ve already kind of alluded this with Kepler’s three laws of motion. Everybody’s familiar, even if, you know, not one in a hundred people understand it. With, with Einstein’s special theory of relativity e equals mc squared.

I mean, isn’t it extraordinary that there’s this far reaching probing insight into physics that can be so compactly expressed, so elegance you know, it’s, it’s the emphasis there on bringing of a unity out of something [00:32:00] complicated. So we see that in Shakespeare. We, we also see clarity.

And clarity isn’t like newspaper, like a good newspaper. It’s very clear and easy to read. That’s not what we mean by clarity. Clarity comes from the Latin claris. It means bright, shining, illustrious. Evident. Lemme give an example that probably most people on this radio show are familiar with the 23rd Psalm by David.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want, he makes me lie down in green pastures, you know, et cetera, et cetera. This beautiful psalm why did he hit use all these metaphors and, you know, that’s, and it’s gonna be hard for a 10-year-old kid to get it because he, you know, doesn’t know about shepherding and, and metaphors can throw ’em off.

Why didn’t he say, why didn’t David say The Lord takes good care of me? He won’t he’ll give me everything I need water and other stuff. He’ll always be there for me, even in tough times. That’s clear. It’s clear, but there’s no radiance to it. [00:33:00] There’s, there’s no, the power the, the shining illustrious quality is gone from it.

And so works of genius have that, that clarity, that radiance about them. So then we took the, we took those, those four depths, clarity, harmony, elegance, and we say, okay, now let’s turn to nature and find those. And of course, I’ve already mentioned how the, the founders of science, they expected depth, they expected elegance, and they went and found ’em.

Another great example is this this Russian chemist from the 19th century. They, they were starting to build the periodic table of elements that, you know, probably gave a lot of us nightmares when we’re forced to, forced to learn it and others dreams and, you know, fell in love with it. The, the few few of us that, that really got into chemistry 

Dr. Mark Turman: I could still see it. I could still see it on the wall of my seventh grade chemistry class.

Yeah. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: For so much. No. But once you start to get it, even if you don’t get all the, the, the depths of it, it’s wow. There’s the, the, there’s a, there’s an order, there’s a pattern to it, you [00:34:00] know, the, the, those columns aren’t just kind of random. Oh, let’s put ’em all up here and we gotta put it on a poster.

And so we’ll kind of put, make it rectangular, you know how it’s not quite, everything’s even. Mm-hmm. Those columns, the, the, the elements in those columns tend to share characteristics. I mean, they’re each distinct, they share characteristics. And what Mindle did is somebody before him John Newlands said, I wonder if there’s a pattern an octave pattern, like every eight.

Element repeats and, and has something in common maybe, but then it didn’t quite fit. And nevermind, and I give up on that. But a Mendel leave who was a theist believed in a, a, a wise creator. He said, no, I think there’s something here. I think there’s a, there is a pattern. I think this law of s may be real.

And so he stuck to his guns and he said, you know what? If this law of octa’s real, there should, should be an element here that’s missing that we haven’t found yet. And over here, there should be one that’s missing, that should fit in this column. Which, what, how did, how’s that doing [00:35:00] Science? It’s, it’s kind weird.

It’s not New Years. I, oh, it’s totally you gather evidence and you experiment and you, and you have observations and then you come to conclusions. He was doing some of that, but he also had this idea that God, the creator of the, of the periodic table s was an orderly God, and there had to be some hidden order.

He stuck to his guns. And because of that, they started turn, they started turning up the missing elements. Gallium in 1875 was the first thing it fit. It was like a puzzle. It fit right in where he predicted it would be. So that’s just one of many examples of how scientists seeing nature as a work of genius went out, had that framework, and it helped them do science better.

So we go through the book and look at different areas and look at that, whether it’s depth, harmony and, and that’s, since we’ve written it, we could do it. We could do it afterwards. Now, particularly in biology where we said we, we thought we’d given you a good taste of the depths of biology and biochemistry.[00:36:00] 

We were just getting warmed up because of the last 15 years. They’re discovering things like in, in DNA you’ll get stretched to the DNA and you can move it over to a different, slightly different reading frame and it’ll. Create another, it’ll have some other function or, or, and you can read it backwards and forwards and it’ll have two different functions.

So I imagine a written human code that, oh, I’ve read it front ways now I’m gonna read this section backwards. And oh, it has a really important meaning too, and or software that did that sort of thing. So it’s just off the charts ingenious stuff that they’re, they’re discovering. 

Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. So let me, let me get you to define a couple of terms and then I, I, I got another question for you.

Okay. But just, just so I know that I’m on the same page with you give me the, give me the working definition of how you’re using the word genius. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah. Genius would be artistic gen. Genius would just be, is loosely termed as somebody that’s really brilliant. But it really has a little bit more formal definition in bo both when you think of [00:37:00] artistic genius and scientific genius.

Of doing something deeply original as well as deep, extremely difficult. And that requires a lot of intelligence. So you might have somebody that’s brilliant but if they’re not creating something new, they’re not having a breakthrough in the stricter sense of the word genius. You wouldn’t, you know, call them a genius.

So Einstein was a genius ’cause you had this extraordinary breakthrough. There might be somebody with a, a higher IQ that could score a little higher on an IQ test than Einstein, but that IQ test wouldn’t make him a genius in this narrower sense of the word. It would be these people that have this ability to make these great creative leaps.

You know, Shakespeare is a genius ’cause of the, the creative just distinct way that he, he did his plays, but then of course there was also a greatness to the artistry. It wasn’t just that they were di different, distinct, fresh. Yeah. Okay. 

Dr. Mark Turman: So if I, if I follow you correctly, then these qualities, the, particularly these four qualities Yeah.

Of genius. As we [00:38:00] find them reflected in, in any part of our created world become reflections of, of God as the ultimate genius. Yeah. The ultimate genius. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yes. And they, yeah. And they help and they also help us grapple with some things. ’cause when you, you approach a work of genius, if you, you do it with the right mindset.

Like when I first come to Shakespeare in high school, I didn’t get all that. The, the language is 400 years old, right? It’s like being thrown on a black diamond ski slope and, Hey, is this fun? You know? And you’re, you’re, you’ve never skied before. No, it’s not fun. It’s scary and weird and I don’t know what’s going on.

For, for a lot of us, that’s our experience of Shakespeare in high school. We dip in two or three weeks, assume that kids can pick up, you know, 400 year old English, and if not, they’re stupid. Which, no, it’s, it’s almost a foreign language at this point. But if you stick with it and you have, okay, surely all these people down to the ages that have found this amazing depths and riches in Shakespeare if I stick with it and you know, you have some [00:39:00] aptitude, some people, you know, are good at different things then you’re, you’re gonna uncover some, some amazing stuff there, and it’s gonna start clicking and you’re gonna you’re gonna go, oh, I see why he did this, or, or, or, you know, why he didn’t just use the simpler way of saying this.

Or when you come to, you know, poetry in the Bible, oh, I see why all this poetic language that made me scratch my head at first I see now what, what the, what the writer was up to. So you bring that patience, that humility to the work, and it can make all the differences. It’s the same with when we come to nature you know, like, why does the earth have to have earthquakes?

You know, if God were a loving, good God, he wouldn’t have any earthquakes. Maybe, but maybe God has purposes and reasons that we don’t know about. And scientists, by the way, have discovered some purposes. We can circle back that a little bit if you want purposes for our active geology that that leads to earthquakes.

And then there’s theological answers to that too. You know, why, why doesn’t God make our lives completely free of suffering and, and challenges, you know, would that really be good for us? [00:40:00] Falling creatures? I mean, there’s probably, there’s a reason he had Adam and Eve leave the, the Garden of Eden after they sinned, right?

It wasn’t just ’cause he was grumpy at them. He knew that having everything, you know, e easy street for people that were fallen and sinful was not what was best for them. Hmm. I digress a little bit, but, but when you No, that’s great. But when you, when you think, Hey, this is a genius, I need to approach it humbly and rather than I’m smarter and better and wiser, and what’s this idiot doing?

Bring that humility to it. You’re gonna learn more. You’re gonna discover things. It’s just, it’s gonna be a more joyful, interesting journey. 

Dr. Mark Turman: And, and as a process of revelation, I just, you know, it’s hard to have this conversation, not be from my chair, thinking about Romans one and what Romans one tells us about the, the, the, the reality of God being revealed on so many ev all levels of life.

And that the reality of it is, is that we are bumping into expressions and reflections of God’s genius all the time. [00:41:00] Yeah. Even without 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: science. 

Dr. Mark Turman: And, and we may not appreciate them. And I, and as you are kind of walking through these qualities, it makes me think along these lines of, you know, when you read a great novel or you see a great work of film, you know, I.

I think of a couple of Stephen King films that come to mind actually, when I think about depth, and I’m like, oh wow. You know, if I go back and think about that movie again, or I think about that novel again, or I go back and watch that movie again, I’m like, oh, I didn’t see that before. And that, that idea of depth and layer is in there as it pertains to a great story.

If you, if you talk, talk about harmony and, and as you, as, like you said, we probably almost resonate with that one quickly because of we know when a piece of music is not done in harmony, it’s painful to our ears. And we’re like, oh, that’s just, that’s just not good music. I just, I just don’t want to be around that.

That’s not good music. It doesn’t sound [00:42:00] right because we have this internal sense of what harmony and, and the intersection of, of harmony might look like. Clarity. Your example about the 23rd psalm is, is really helpful. I gotta tell you the Dr. Whit, the one I’m struggling with a little bit is elegance, is wrapping my, my understanding around this quality of elegance as an expression of beauty, as an expression of genius.

Can you unpack that one just a little bit more for me? Is it simply unity or is it more than unity? 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah, that was when, when we formulated these, I was struggling a little bit. How do we distinguish harmony and elegance? ’cause they’re so close to the way I finally, you know, told Ben. I think there’re really two, there are two, you’re coming at the same thing from two different angles.

And it’s kind of the, the emphasis is more. So elegance is, is a type of harmony, but the, the emphasis is on a very compact unity among a diversity. You know, I [00:43:00] gave the, the example of, you know, you’ve got all these planets coming around. The sun. And they’ve got, got different orbits and some are out far and near, and they’re not all exactly on the same plane, though.

They’re very close to the same plane, interestingly. But then Kepler comes up with this, this, these laws, these three very elegant laws that describe all that diversity. And so that would be a example of elegance. We see in nature. Are you familiar with the, the Fon Nazi number? Yes. A little bit.

It’s mm-hmm. It’s, there’s this Fon Nazi number. The number is, I’m trying to remember how it’s like. You get it by adding the last two numbers. One plus two is three. Two plus three is five. Three plus five is eight. Anyway, then there’s this number that comes outta that, a ratio. And we see that the gold, the golden er rectangle uses the Fon Nazi number.

We see spirals all through nature, that, that use this fib Nazi number, the, the, the shell of a Nautilus the spiral of [00:44:00] galaxies the number of seeds in in sunflowers. They, they might, they might, they’ll have a fib Fon Nazi number. It might be, you know, one, or it might be a bigger sunflower, but it’s always gonna have this fib Nazi number.

Typically, or almost always, there’s hundreds of examples. So that would be an answer, example of elegance in nature where wow, sudden there’s this. This Dibon Nazi number cropping up all over nature. Eugene Wegner he was a, a science and thinker, and he, he talked about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics for the natural sciences.

And that’s just like the, the fine tuning problem. It’s only unreasonable if there’s, if there’s not a god in heaven, if there’s not a creator. But if God, if the Creator, God is a master mathematician. And when he was creating this elegant universe, and there, there’s a documentary, by the way, called the Elegant Universe.

I don’t think the people that made it were believers but they, they, they see the elegance in, in nature. So you find that that mathematical elegance cropping up all over the place. [00:45:00] 

Dr. Mark Turman: So talk about that. I’m glad you brought up math. ’cause I’m, I just, I’m sitting here imagining, you know, my my young granddaughter learning learning her numbers and eventually learning her mathematical or multiplication tables and ultimately long division.

I’m thinking about that kid that’s encountering algebra or calculus for the first time. Have had some exposure to the English professor John Lennox who is a world renowned mathematician. It seems like so many things come back to the beauty and genius that is revealed in mathematics and so many things, even theologically that come back to.

A connection to, and even an anchoring within mathematics. And if you, you know, to the person, the average person that may be listening to this, if you’ve ever had that joy of balancing and reconciling your checkbook and doing that regularly and having some problems with it, and then figuring it out and the joy that [00:46:00] comes through that.

Yeah. Or if you’re an accountant and you’ve ever drafted a budget for a company and then the, that budget actually worked itself out in, in real time and in real business. And then you are able to reconcile that, then you’re touching on some of the genius of mathematics. Not to mention the connection between mathematics and something like music.

But can you touch, touch upon how these qualities of genius particularly express themselves mathematically, not only what you were just talking about, but perhaps in other ways as well. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: We, let, let me back up a minute. I thought of exam elegance. In biology, we, biology is often so sophisticated and complex.

We, we don’t, elegance isn’t usually the term, it’s like dizzying sophistication or something like that. But when Watson and Crick were trying to discover the, the structure of the DNA molecule, they implicitly, even though I don’t think either of those guys at the time [00:47:00] were, were believers, but they, they inherited this cultural tradition heritage of theistic science that said, look for elegance, look for harmony, look for death.

And they would reject that as they kept doing to do these toy models. Of what they thought the, the DNA molecule shape like, and, and kept, you know, comparing it with what little bit of microscopic evidence they were able to glean at the time. And they would reject possibilities that were too klugy, too inelegant.

Hmm. And when they, when they finally hit upon that, they got some a view of an x-ray crystallography image by a female scientist in another lab. That’s a different story where, where they misbehaved a little bit there. But then of course that other lab couldn’t, couldn’t figure it out from that.

At least at that moment they couldn’t. Maybe if they’d had longer. But Watson Creek took it back and they looked at it and there was this kind of cross thing, and they came up with, they said, what about a double helix? Take a, a picture, a ladder that’s twisted. And, and so the, that gives you this double helical structure.[00:48:00] 

It says, what if that was there? And that would also kind of help explain how DNA copies, so the, the two parts could, could come apart and then they could attach and it would of course be very sophisticated copy, but at least we’d have the first inkling of how that might be happening. But it was the elegance of it that, that, that was a big part of what caught their attention to say, let, let, let’s, let’s double down and, and, and, and, and explore that option.

So anyway but you ask about, did you ask about mathematics and music? Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah. 

Dr. Mark Turman: And how, and just how mathematics is so much in expression of genius and in multiple, across 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: multiple areas. So yeah, one of my weakest areas in terms of, of expertise is music, but is probably, anybody knows who, even if you’re not a musician, you know, that music theory is just rife with mathematics.

And, you know, you get, you get the the different octaves by, you know. A string that’s, you know, a wire and you, and you loop it in two and, and, and then half it and you get roughly an octave and, and [00:49:00] that c note and then a c note later, they sound good together. This, there’s something common about them.

And then that’s just the tip of the iceberg about how much, how, how mathematical music theory is. Most people who are really good at music, they just pick it up. They may not even know math. But there’s mathematics, you know, richly under that. And of course, chemistry derived with mathematics.

Physics is almost all mathematics at this point. Even, you know, before Einstein, you know, Isaac Newton’s hi. His great landmark work was just, you know, rich in, in mathematical equations cosmology, mathematics, understanding of thermodynamics the, the different laws of thermodynamics, which is now helping us understand things like blood flow and, and how different things in the body work.

One one book I’d recommend if you’re really you’re not as into kind of arts and sciences, but you’re like, I like biology and, and human. There’s a book called Your Design Body that’s written by a physician and a systems [00:50:00] engineer, and they take a systems engineering perspective to to the body.

And there’s so much harmony there. It’s unbelievable and in places elegance, but the harmony of these interacting systems and some of that some of the breakthroughs in understanding how fine tuned the human body goes back to you know, it requires a, a mathematical analysis. How, how, how certain things are being kept in these very narrow ranges.

Some of the chem, the chemicals in our body and why they need to be kept in those narrow ranges. So yeah, mathematics is indispensable to so many fields of science. Yeah. 

Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It just makes me, makes me think if you’ve ever gotten the a lab report from your doctor at an annual physical, you know, how did they come up with these ranges that, you know, all these things in your body needed to be within this number and that number.

And when they’re not, then they start going looking for causes and, and problems. You Yeah. And this, 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: this book, I meant, of course, I want you to go out and buy my book but if you buy a second book Yes. After you Bought A Meaningful World by Jonathan Witt and Ben [00:51:00] Weer take a look. If you’re interested in human biology at this book, your design body, they, they go through and.

We take a lot of these for granted. Oh yeah, my, my phosphate level or, you know, whatever my iron level’s in the right zone. You know, of course it is. No, your body has to be doing all these ingenious things to keep all of those at just the right level. Like a even a cell, you think, oh, a cell’s got x amount of stuff in, in it, and it’s got these ratios.

On the outside of the cell, the ratios are completely different. So how is it maintaining this very di these very different ratios that it needs to, you know, ho homeostasis is the word, right? If it loses homeostasis, it becomes like its environment. When you become, like your environment, you become dead.

You know, when you die that your body, you know, ashs to Ashs, dusted dust, all that hardworking, ingenious stuff that’s maintaining ho homeostasis between the individual cells, all the different organs of the body that that quits and it starts to, you know. Return to room temperature and in a whole lot of other ways, like the environment it’s that [00:52:00] genius of the, our design bodies that keeps it, keeps it going as long as it does.

Dr. Mark Turman: Just fascinating. We could, I just feel like we could, I could continue to just ask questions all day long, but as we get ready to wrap up and just kind of think, I want to, I want to go back to what your colleague Steven Meyer was talking about and what you referenced a little while ago about earthquakes and other things like earthquakes within our experience.

Dr. Meyer alluded in our conversation to how we might understand the presence of miracles as they’re described in the Bible, as they’re described in the life and work of Jesus. And he said, you know, perhaps a better way for us to understand those kinds of things and answer to Dawkins and others would be that if we, if we accept the idea of God and then we accept his ability to intervene in his creation.

That those expressions of miracle are not really the interruption of physical laws and the way things normally operate. They’re actually a, a [00:53:00] glimpse of the restoration of them. That when just for instance, Jesus healed a person, he was not interrupting natural processes as much as he was picturing the resetting of them the way they should ultimately always be.

And we would go on to say, we’ll be in the kingdom of God. That’s beautiful. Talk about that from the standpoint of, okay, how, how is that possibly a reflection and an, and an an expression or an answer to the presence of things? You know, this common idea of if, if there is a God and if he is a genius, and if he is good, then how can he let things like a pandemic, how can he let things like cancer?

How can he let things like a hurricane or an earthquake happen? How do we, how might we think about those things? Yeah. In a, in a cohesive, reasonable way. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah. I think you, you come at it at two levels. One is scientifically some of the things that have been pointed to is that’s pointless. [00:54:00] It has no, you like earthquakes.

That’s point. It turns out are active geology is crucial to our earth being livable and habitable over thousands and, and millions of years. The, the way our, our, the plate tectonics continental shelf re recirculate things and there’s a, a great book called the I’m trying to think of the wonder of water where, where Michael Denton an Australian geneticist gets into all the ways that active geology.

Including water and all the ways water’s done help us. So that’s one example. You know, you talk about Richard Dawkins can play well, a, a wise God wouldn’t have made the human eye the way it is. It’s backwardly wired and we’ve got a little tiny little blind spot in our eye. Most of us aren’t even aware of the blind spot.

It’s so tiny and, and easy to ignore. But as it turns out, there’s good engineering reasons for the quote unquote backward wiring of the eye that, that dawkins just ignored. ’cause he, he was so quick to jump on. And critique the wiring of the eye improve, [00:55:00] improves the oxygen flow. So it ultimately improves visual acuity.

And you know, engineers get this very quickly that they know that any, any kind of complex system, there’s gonna be trade offs. And you can’t have, you know, you can’t have a, the sports car, the best sports car in the world, that’s also got the most hauling capacity. You know that you’re gonna need a pickup for that.

So there’s trade offs. So he ignores all that, and he found something he didn’t quite understand, and he jumped on it and criticized it. Whereas if he’d said maybe there’s a reason for that now. So that’s the scientific, you know, be, be humble. Maybe there’s a reason for it. Then you get things like what about diseases where little kids, you know, die?

Or they go blind and, you know, that just seems terrible. And it is. But then you have to realize, you’re also asking a theological question when you say, why would a good God allow suffering and pain and death? And some people unfairly, they ask a theological question, but then they, they won’t allow a theological answer.

They won’t allow you to [00:56:00] say, okay, you’re talking, you’re asking about God and his nature. God has revealed himself to us. Through his word, through his son Jesus. And he is given us resources to understand why a good God might allow suffering. It has to do with, and it’s not a simple answer, it has to do with he made free creatures.

He made humans free and they fell into sin. There’s indications he made angels free and some of them fell. Maybe the, it seems to be the source of Satan and all the mischief he sowed in the world. He knows our hearts. I talked about earlier about Adam and Eve being kicked outta the garden.

It wasn’t just ’cause God was having huffy ’cause they took some of his fruit off his tree. He knew that to restore them, they had to, to enter into suffering and, and be challenged and be, and be humbled so that he could bless them in a greater way. But, but those are theological answers. Of course.

There’s, you know, you, you could have many shows, you know, probing and plumbing, those, my main point here is people that ask. Good theological questions. [00:57:00] They’re ones we should all wrestle with and, and concern ourselves with. Should though be willing to hear theological answers, should be willing to go to tho that mode of knowledge to, to get answers.

And it’s the, it’s that scientism that false philosophy that ask a theological questions is, oh I don’t wanna hear a theological answer. Hmm. 

Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. They wanna, they wanna skip categories at times. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking science is gonna solve everything, and if you can’t solve well, that proves that there’s no God, no, that, that’s not good logic.

Dr. Mark Turman: Dr. Witt, thank you. It’s such a fascinating conversation and such a, an important insightful and yes. Challenging book A Meaningful World, how the arts and Science revealed the Genius of Nature. I. Would encourage our audience to pick that up. And, and other work that you’ve done, if they wanna track and follow more of what you are doing these days, where can they find you besides the bookstore?

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Yeah, I would go to discovery.org. That’s Discovery [00:58:00] Institute. And, and you’ll see a section for Intelligent Design. You can go to the fellows there, you’ll find my page under, under the senior fellows there. And then of course, there’s a lot of other great material. A lot of other great SI talked about rubbing shoulders with some brilliant scientists.

It’s just been so exciting. Michael, be Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer others. So it’s just a great resource. discovery.org/id. 

Dr. Mark Turman: All right, we’ll put that in the show notes as well. And just want to thank you, but also thank our audience for being a part of the conversation today. If this has been helpful to you, please rate review us on your podcast platform and share this with your friends, your family.

Really a lot for us to think about, a lot for us to learn, and a lot for us to celebrate about the beautiful design and genius of God as it, as it is revealed around us and in us and all around us. And again, Dr. Whitt, thank you for your time today. 

Dr. Jonathan Witt: Thank you, [00:59:00] mark.