Egnor vs. Shermer: God, Science, and the Search for Truth
ID The Future listeners now get to enjoy two episode a month from our sister podcast Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. The Mind Matters News podcast features interviews from experts in computing, engineering, science, and philosophy who bring sanity to the conversation about natural and artificial intelligence. And although the Mind Matters News podcast will not often explicitly discuss intelligent design, it regularly explores the nature of intelligence, the origin of information, and the things that make us uniquely human, concepts that are central to the theory of intelligent design.
On this episode of Mind Matters News, host and neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor welcomes Michael Shermer, historian of science and founder of Skeptic magazine, to discuss Shermer’s new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. Shermer describes his book as the culmination of over three decades of skeptical inquiry. He emphasizes a commitment to a philosophical approach known as fallibilism—the idea that beliefs should be held with varying degrees of probability based on evidence. Shermer suggests that the universe may be uncaused or explained through concepts like the multiverse. He cautions against what he calls “God of the gaps” reasoning, particularly regarding the origins of the genetic code. Just because science has not yet fully explained a phenomenon, says Shermer, does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation.
Dr. Egnor offers a philosophical and theological counterpoint to Shermer’s skepticism. He argues that moral law and natural laws are discoveries that suggest a transcendent mind. Egnor also holds that the intricate mathematical laws of physics that govern the universe are evidence of a mind. Egnor challenges materialist and Darwinian explanations for complex biological information. He shows that Darwinian proposals suffer from circular reasoning and a lack of empirical evidence. He views materialism, atheism, and Darwinism as outdated and spent explanatory forces and questions their ability to fill scientific gaps in our understanding. God’s existence, argues Egnor, should be treated as a straightforward scientific theory derived through reason, an inference he says we can draw based on the evidence of nature’s regularity and complexity.
Dig Deeper
- Both of these men argue their cases in recent books: Shermer’s Truth and Egnor’s The Immortal Mind.
- More conversation with Dr. Egnor: