Origins: Luck Ain't Science

Most people pride themselves on their rationality and good [music] judgment, scientists included. They would never depend on luck to buy a house or a car without researching the [music] true value of such a costly purchase. Yet when it comes to questions of origins, [music] where science spills into other areas of human life, such as the possibility of God's existence, luck reappears to save the day. Discover what industry makes billions of dollars off the belief in luck, and how evolutionary theories of origins are routinely dependent upon luck [music] to explain the stupendous complexity of all living systems. Coming up on today's edition of Origins, Luck [music] Ain't Science, with Dr. Paul Nelson. >> [music] [music] >> Hello, welcome to Origins. I'm Ray Heippo. We have a fascinating show for you. Today's guest, Dr. Paul Nelson, is a philosopher of biology who has been involved in the intelligent design debate internationally for over three decades. In 1998, Paul received his PhD from the University of Chicago in the philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory. Since 2004, he has been a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and more recently adjunct faculty in the Science and Religion program at Biola University. Welcome to the program, Paul. >> Great to be back. >> Luck ain't science. I like the sounds of this show. >> Luck and science and we're going to look at a distinction between what we do with skill and intelligence and what we say is a product of chance. So, let's do a demonstration. >> Okay. >> I want you to roll a double six. >> Oh, that's easy. I'll get it on the first try. All right. I got one. >> [laughter] >> Good try here. Okay, I'm struggling a little bit. I always take a little bit to warm up here. Okay, I I'm good at sevens. If we were in Vegas. [laughter] Uh, there's another seven. >> I should have put my money on seven. I don't think it's going to happen. >> Yeah, one more. Nope. We could be here all day, I think. >> So, there's math that governs this. If you think about, uh, you know, two six-sided cubes that are well-balanced, that have, you know, distinguishable numbers, there is a well-worked out mathematical theorem for when you should expect to see double sixes. We didn't. We could be here all afternoon, actually. Um, I want to take this into biology and then back so we can begin to understand the difference between chance and randomness and events that require intelligence. Uh, I don't believe in luck. Uh, theo- theological reasons, but also just for practical reason. I mean, we've got crossed fingers here. We've got a lucky horseshoe, wishbone, a lucky rabbit's foot. And I have to say, I feel sorry for the rabbit that gave that up. And a, you know, a four-leafed shamrock, a four-leafed clover. Believing in luck is what makes casinos work, right? There would be no casinos if human beings didn't believe in luck. So, we've got three games here that you can play in a casino. Poker, roulette, craps. All right. Now, why does the casino distinguish this kind of game from the other two? >> I don't know. >> It's a game of skill. Poker players, really good poker players, know how to estimate probabilities. They know how to bluff. They know what the hands are likely to be on any given deal given what's already been dealt. So, they are using their intelligence to distinguish outcomes and using that knowledge to improve their odds of winning a hand. That's how you get to be famous as a poker player and make a lot of money. The other two games, roulette and craps, are genuine chance games. There is very little you can do with your skill or intelligence to change the outcome. We just saw that with you trying to roll double sixes. You're just going to have to stay here rolling those dice until you see those two sixes come up. >> Yeah, it's it's governed by pure mathematics. It the dice has six sides and they're flat and they're equally spaced and weighted and everything. So, you know, one in six for each dice, put them together and you've got one in 36. >> Yeah, it's physics. It's physics and randomness that are running the show. So, the distinction we're operating with here is events caused by intelligence, like, you know, building a laptop or writing a poem or writing a musical composition or being really, really good at poker. Versus events caused by physics where there is no agent. There's no intelligence involved. And this distinction is deep. It goes deep into human rationality. We find it not just in the in the West, but in all human cultures. And we find it going all the way back to antiquity. It's, I think, part of the basic cognitive apparatus that we're given as human beings to be able to say, "That event required a mind. That event could have been caused by physics alone." >> And we don't even think about it, right? But, but, but we we understand that if we see a structure or we see something that makes sense or something like that versus, you know, what starts to rain or something like that. >> We normally in in in everyday human existence, we are constantly making this distinction. So, a few years ago, I went to hear a friend give a lecture at University of Chicago and I came back to my car, the passenger side front window was broken and I looked inside and the McDonald's bag was still there and the tattered road atlas of Chicago was still there. What wasn't there was my Garmin GPS unit and the cable and the little leather bag. The last thing I would do confronted with that pattern is sit down on the curb and start running through all the natural processes that will get only the valuable objects out of a Honda Odyssey. >> That would break your window and remove these things. Well, maybe it was a small tornado and maybe an animal ran through or >> [laughter] >> Just as I sketch that example, people will say, "Well, that's that would be fundamentally crazy, right?" You know that someone broke into your car and stole the Garmin. So, this is not something that we can count on in science because it defaults to basically to randomness and a belief that events can happen without any causal story behind them. And so, here's what casinos want you to believe. That you come up to this machine and you've got your quarters and you believe in luck, which means you're going to put the quarter in and something is going to happen that's good for you. Well, not that time. Let's try it again. Like this. >> Going to have to keep spending money. >> Going You're going to keep putting the quarters in. Hey! Cash. >> Yeah, only one in every hundred times or something. [laughter] >> The fact is, these machines are built not to do that. Their a payout percentage is set, which means mathematically, if you keep putting in your money, money that you win, you put it back into the machine, given a certain length of time, the expected payout will be zero. >> You're going to lose money. >> You're going to lose. The machine will have all your money and you will have none. >> Which is why they build casinos. [laughter] Casinos count on that fundamentally irrational belief in luck and they're going to take your money because you believe in something that doesn't exist. >> Somehow you think you're going to beat the odds. You're going to be the one, even though the machine is set up to make money and take money away. Somehow you're going to hit it at just the right time and you're going to beat the system. >> Right. So, ask yourself, what is it the casino wants you, the player, to believe in? >> It wants you to believe that you're going to win. You're going to have luck. >> You're going to have luck. This thing that doesn't actually exist. That's how they make money because they know how a machine like this works and they've set it up very carefully to give you the illusion that it's going to pay off for you. When in fact, mathematically, it is certain that it will not. >> It is designed. It's not There's no randomness about it. It is designed that you lose more than you win. >> You lose more than you win and over the long haul, this will have all your money and you will have none. But, I have a deeper way to think about this up at the board. >> I can't wait. Take us up to the board. >> Sounds good. So, think about a pair of dice. They're well balanced, exquisitely balanced in fact, exis- expensive to make, six sides, numbers on each, and the casinos make sure that the dice are as close to perfect as they can be because they really count on you not knowing what the dice are going to do. Right? I know that some people who play craps think that there's a way you can set the dice before you roll them that will increase the odds of getting a seven or whatever. It's an illusion. Here's the math. This shows you the distribution of ways that you can win, let's say getting a seven, you've got six different ways of doing that. So, sevens are much more likely to come up in any random roll. What's not likely? A 12, we tried it earlier, or a two. There are only two faces that have to show or that must show for you to get those numbers. Now, this is mathematically certain and then this is what the casino counts on. The casino wants you to believe that you can affect these outcomes. They know that you can't and that's how they make money. So, this woman sitting there, probably in Vegas, putting her money into that machine, if she stays there long enough and keeps putting her winnings back in, in other words, maybe she does hit the jackpot, she should take that money and walk away from that machine immediately. Don't keep playing. The casino doesn't want you to do that. They want you to stay there because these machines are designed to pay out less than you put in. Over the long term, that means that they will eventually have all of your money and you will have none. So again, I want to stress this. Casinos count on you believing in this, whereas they use that. And they're going to win every time. You can't beat the house is the saying in Vegas. All right. This is mathematically certain. Never bet against mathematical certainty. Revenues like this don't come from luck. They come from the careful design of one-armed bandits and roulette wheels and crap games to take your money. Well, how about something like the origin of cells? What should we count on there to govern our thinking? I'm not going to count on luck. I'm going to look at the actual functional complexity of living systems and let that instruct me. So, we can take a a look at any cell. What you see here are multiple functional systems, all of which are necessary to give viability, to give the living state. And they're composed of many parts, proteins in this case. And you can ask, how do those proteins come to be in cells that we actually know? Not hypothetical cells on the early Earth, but the cells that we actually know. Well, there's an interesting puzzle right at the core of the biology of any living thing, and it's a closed-loop. It looks like this. DNA, this wonderful double helix, is the main storage of information. It's like the play-only tape or the read-only tape. DNA, however, is chemically inert in terms of what actually needs to be done in the cell, the jobs that have to be performed. So, it's a great storage medium, not very good for doing things. For that, RNA, another nucleic acid, is much better, but even RNA can't do all the jobs. For that, you need proteins. Now, if you look at this relationship, you need DNA to give you RNA, but you need RNA to give you proteins, and proteins are necessary to get the information out of DNA. This kind of closed-loop pattern is diagnostic of intelligence because to have any function at all, you need all the parts co-present at the same moment in time. This has been a puzzle for evolutionary theory since this was discovered. Really, I guess you could say, you know, well over 50 years ago. Eugene Koonin is an evolutionary biologist at the NCBI. He came to the United States from Russia when Russia fell apart. He's a biologist for whom I have a great deal of respect. I read just about everything he publishes cuz he's so interesting. He looks at this closed loop and says, "We've got a problem. We evolutionary theorists have a problem. How are we going to explain the origin of that closed loop?" And he said, "It presents us with a paradox. To have the system at all, you need its parts, but the parts are produced by the system itself." And he said, "This puzzle defeats conventional evolutionary thinking." So, he's looking at the evidence for what I think is design and saying, "Well, I can't accept design, so what do I have remaining?" And he's got a paradox that he's got to deal with. The second paradox is he says, "In order to have the system, you need the system." So, these are twin paradoxes that are very closely related. So, he's looking at this puzzle and he says, "How am I going to solve the problem?" What he does not do is give you a chemical pathway. No, what he does is he resorts basically to luck. And I say this again with full respect for for uh Professor Koonin. What he invokes is a multiverse. You know, you can win any lottery if you buy all the tickets. Just buy them all, one of them's going to win, and you can get the money. Now, nobody does that because it defeats the purpose of the lottery, right? You going to have to put in a lot of money to get the same amount of money back or less. So, the multiverse hypothesis says, "We inhabit one of these universes. And the laws that we know that govern chemistry and so forth are present in that universe, but there might be an infinite ensemble of universes where we just got lucky and that DNA closed loop DNA RNA protein closed loop system got up and running just by chance. So, he invokes a multiverse. Basically, it's luck. Right? When you look at the mathematics, it turns out to be I'm winning the lottery by buying all the tickets. But, there's actually no knowledge there to be conveyed. Biology class would be over in the time it takes to write this on the blackboard, and then everyone could go home. Now, what's interesting about this puzzle that Koonin is trying to solve by invoking a multiverse, it was well known to one of the founders of molecular biology, Jacques Monod. So, in the 1960s, Monod wrote a book that was published in the early '70s called Chance and Necessity, and he confronts this problem there. He comes to the same conclusion about the closed loop. He says the genetic code itself is encoded in DNA, but it needs proteins to function at all. And he says, we get in this circular relationship where all the parts need to be jointly necessary for function. How is that ever going to get up and running? So, this problem already is present in the 1960s, well before Koonin, I think, was a working scientist. Monod is looking at the same puzzle that Koonin is trying to solve with the multiverse. What's Monod's solution? He invokes chance. He invokes randomness. He says, our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. The Monte Carlo game is roulette. You cannot beat the wheel at roulette. Right? It's physics and chance. This is considered classically a game of chance, not a game of skill. So, what explains our existence as far as Monod is concerned? This. To me, this is the end of science. Again, if I write luck on the blackboard, the class is over. There's nothing more to be said. I'm not giving you any knowledge that you can take [music] out into the world to explain things. At this point, when a scientist appeals to randomness, he's giving up the game. They both rejected intelligent design. Brilliant molecular biologist. Jacques Monod was a Nobel laureate for his work. Eugene Koonin, one of the brightest scientists I know, yet what is clear evidence to me of design, they rejected [music] it. And the question is, why? And again, there's a backstory to that. >> We'll have to hold you right there. [music] You don't want to miss this backstory. Stay with us. Welcome back to Origins. [music] We're talking to Dr. Paul Nelson, who's been sharing about how luck ain't science. Paul, I love the distinction you're making between luck and the laws of probability. Because a lot of times we think, "Oh, you were lucky." But no, the laws of probability determine, you know, if I roll that dice enough, I will get the double sixes. It's just going to take a while. >> Uh, you know, two six-sided cubes that are well-balanced, that have, you know, distinguishable numbers, there is a well-worked out mathematical theorem for when you should expect to see double sixes. We didn't, and we could be here all afternoon, actually. The deeper distinction for science is what do we know and what are we hoping is true? And I think we can see this when we look at how leading molecular biologists responded to the evidence that I think clearly indicates design. It looks like this and it's a closed loop. DNA is the main storage of information. RNA is much better, but even RNA can't do all the jobs. For that, you need proteins. Now, if you look at this relationship, you need DNA to give you RNA, but you need RNA to give you proteins and proteins are necessary to get the information out of DNA. This kind of closed loop pattern is diagnostic of intelligence because to have any function at all, you need all the parts co-present at the same moment in time. Only they rejected that option. And the question is why? Why did the clear evidence to me of, you know, causation by a mind, why was that unpersuasive to them? So, we can see this when we ask the question was it a scientific move or a philosophical move? And I think reality tells us the reasoning is not scientific. It's not based on the evidence. It's based on a philosophical choice. The exclusion of design was philosophical and we can see this clearly when we think about this rule of methodological naturalism. That's 10 syllables. It's the kind of phrase that gives philosophy of science a bad name, but it's a very simple rule. It says the statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes. >> Wow. >> Natural there means based on physics. So, your you've got a brain, I've got a brain. The naturalist would say your brain is running not because you have any real agency or free will. Your brain is running because physics is controlling it. And what's most striking to me when I think about this question is when I look at the work of people like the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, when he confronted clear evidence of design. So, if you go to his classic master work Chance and Necessity published in 1970 and then in English translation in 1971, there's a beautiful thought experiment that opens that book that when I read it as a college freshman just swept me away with its its suggestiveness and the the the intuitions that were baked in. Imagine you're an alien. So, this is a thought experiment. We're doing a lot of them in these shows. You're an alien intelligence and you put together a probe and send it to our solar system. Maybe you're off in Alpha Centauri or some other part of the Milky Way. And you send the probe and it comes down as it turns on its instruments is something that you have nothing corresponding to on your home planet. This, a honeybee and a honeybee hive. You've never seen an insect. You have no idea that such things could exist, right? And you turn on your instruments and you see this hive with hundreds or thousands of honeybees and the precision of the of the uh honeycomb pattern there. What would you naturally infer from that evidence? >> Well, that something made it and designed it and it got for a purpose. >> Exactly. And Monod recognizes this. He says living creatures are strange objects. In their structure and performance, they act projectively. They realize and pursue a purpose. Something that we don't see in physics. We don't see in chemistry, but we see in abundance in biology, is that living things are purposeful. They have goals and aims. The bees want to keep their colony alive. They're doing specific functions towards an end. And Monod, from this, he says, "Powerful evidence, is it not, that these creatures are the products of a deliberative, constructive, and highly sophisticated order of activity." That is a design inference. But, Monod was an atheist. Right? So, the evidence points clearly in one direction, and he goes in the other. That's not science. At that point, philosophy, a philosophy of what you're willing to let the evidence tell you, is taking over. And I can remember, as if it were yesterday, when I read this, and I realized he is moving off in a different direction, away from the evidence, not because of the evidence, but because of what a philosophy is telling him. For Jacques Monod, living things appear to have been intelligently designed, yet he rejects that. And this is a case where even though I was trained in the philosophy of science, I think the philosophy of science has to be pushed off to the side of the road. If a philosophy is standing between you and nature itself, she is that philosophy is hindering your ability to see nature for what it really is. >> You know, like you said on the one slide, they're setting the deck. They're They're excluding anything but physics as a cause. Therefore, what are they going to find? Physics. >> physics and ultimately luck. Because physics physics itself is rule governed, and the physics of these dice tell us getting [music] a double six is not as likely as a seven. That's a physical conclusion. >> Thank you for being on the program, Paul. It's always a treat. We want to thank you for joining us. On [music] today's program. We looked at how some of the most intelligent scientists who have ever lived seeing the complexity [music] and the interconnectedness of the myriad of parts and functions for even a single living cell appeal [music] to the concept of luck for an explanation when the evidence conclusively demands a creator. If you think of it, it fulfills the scripture that says though they had the knowledge of God, they did not acknowledge God but became futile in [music] their thinking which just goes to show you that we know what the Bible says is true and the proof really is all around you. If you enjoy Origins, we [music] sure could use your help to keep this creation television program on the air. Your support both prayerfully and financially [music] make a big impact. So, let's work together to reveal how awesome our creator truly [music] is and we'll see you next time right here on Origins. >> Thank you for watching this edition of Origins. For a DVD of this series, you can order online or send a $12 donation to cover shipping and handling and write to Origins program number 2605, Cornerstone Network, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148. >> This presentation was made possible by the faithful [music] prayers and financial support of you, our Cornerstone family.