Listen: Justin Brierley and a “Mind Behind Matter”
“Something has changed in the past few years: an openness to purpose, agency, even a Mind behind it all,” says the very fine interviewer Justin Brierley in the latest episode of his “long form” podcast documentary series, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. I highly recommend the new episode, “The Logos Behind Life: The dissident scientists discovering a mind beyond matter.” It’s like an in-depth and really high-quality magazine essay, with Brierley interviewing a range of thinkers whom you don’t regularly see in direct dialogue, from Stephen Meyer to Denis Noble to Roger Penrose to Paul Davies to William Lane Craig and others.
Not all are religious believers. And as Daniel Witt pointed out this morning, Denis Noble still considers himself a Darwinist — though his “nemesis” Richard Dawkins denies him the title. Noble’s view is that there is purpose or agency at work in the cell that makes use of the information stored in DNA, as we would the information in a library, which is the reverse of the traditional neo-Darwinist view of Dawkins where the “selfish gene” is in the driver’s seat.
It would be interesting for Brierley to talk with biologist Richard Sternberg who doubts, on mathematical grounds, that the information for life could be stored in a material genome at all. A memorable ID the Future Podcasts with him points to the “gaps in the computability of what happens in the cell, which could help shed light on how machine-like organisms are or are not, how evolvable they are, and whether artificial life is possible.” Anyway, do enjoy Justin’s series which is up to 20 episodes now, and shares the title of his recent book on the same subject.
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