Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and this is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I've talked before on this podcast about my personal journey to treading a more Judeo-Christian theology path in my life, inspired by my almost 25 years in Brazil working with Norberto Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy. That was a surprise. I fully expected a deep psychological dive into my own psyche and a continuous analysis of my actions and motivations and successes or failures.
Psychoanalysis is, of course, Keppe's field, and he's a master there. But because Keppe deals with the inner life of the human being, that inevitably leads those who are serious about discovering what's going on with them to delving into the more spiritual parts of their lives, those inevitable questions of purpose and meaning and even life after death. In philosophy, that's an understanding of cause and finality.
Where do you come from? Where are you going? And that journey has been banalized in our modern world. The origin of ourselves today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. You can follow us on Spotify, our podcast, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Most of our episodes are there.
And I'm available at rich at richjonesvoice.com. I would love to hear from you. Calvin Smith, he's a fellow Canadian, passionate about these questions as well. Calvin is the executive director of Answers in Genesis Canada, a Christian apologetics group. But Calvin's got a very interesting approach to all these where do we come from questions. And he took his questions to AI in his Conversations with Grok series, pretty fascinating stuff.
He poses some interesting challenges to the app Elon Musk says has more knowledge than all the world's PhDs put together. Okay, hyperbole. Musk wants us all to eschew human relationships and fraternize with robots and chatbots, so take that with a huge grain of salt. But Calvin Smith goes on some interesting journeys in his Talks with Grok series. Check it out on his YouTube channel.
It's Answers in Genesis. That's the title of his channel name. Calvin, is defending traditional Judeo-Christian values a challenging one today?
Calvin Smith: I definitely think so, yeah. I mean, you know, it's amazing how the Western world really was founded on, you know, Judeo-Christian values and Christian principles and the scripture, really. But yeah, there's been, you know, specific attacks against the authority of the word of god. And a lot of people have just said okay well that's no longer the authority so we're going to make up our own new uh you know version of what we're going to base our society on.
Of course not everybody agrees. And as soon as you get a situation where um the majority of the people in a culture no longer adhere to any one you know broad standard um then i think that's contributing to the chaos that you see throughout the western world right now. Yeah
Richard: i was quite fascinated Calvin with the series of interviews you do with grok yeah the the ai that's apparently more intelligent than all the scientists put together as elon musk says.
Is that what he is that what he claims that is
Calvin: that was his claim yeah i uh you know i continue to experiment with uh with ai since i did that series. And coming up now in july of this year i will redo the original talk with grok episode that i i did which kind of blew up and you know went viral at least for the type of material i put out on on youtube.
And just to see that if i will get the same results see if it's been tweaked see if it's been changed you know that was one of the reasons i did it in the first place. I wanted to see how this would be perceived and and if there would be changes. And what i've noticed recently is i get far better results sometimes just doing a quick Google search than using these AIs chat or rock for direct information.
Because it seems to me that whoever's programming these AIs have come to see that the most common usage for them now are companionship and mentorship or therapy.
Richard: Therapy advice. Yeah. So
Calvin: it seems like they're pouring more effort into developing that end to it because that's where most people are spending their time on it.
Richard: What I was really interested in your series was how you were – I'm going to get to the couple of questions you asked.
But you would propose like looking at things only with strict logic, mathematical probability, and observational science. And you would get a very specific answer which we'll get to in a minute what you were talking about. But later when you went back and said "forget all that just pretend i'm a normal guy asking you the first question" and you got a completely different answer you got the traditional high school science answer i guess we yeah
Calvin: i'd refer to it as consensus science like what what the mainstream you know narrative is out there.
And it just goes to show and one of the reasons again i did the series if you don't already know the answers to the questions you're asking um you know you're just going to get fed the uh the party line so to speak. And so it's incumbent on people to do their own research and really to think things through and not hand the authority of what you believe over to some yeah you know
Richard: let's let's come back to that difference i think it's important but let's let's lay out what what you did first.
You wanted to find out the chances of abiogenesis or chemical evolution, which is the traditional science idea that life can begin from the chance meeting of chemicals in this big stew in the right conditions, and out of that a sudden spark of life will occur.
Yeah. So so this is what you're beginning to ask. Right. So now lead us lead us through the process of what you're talking about there. Sure.
Calvin: Well, really, I was testing it to see, you know, what the probabilities were. If you if you just go by what we observe, not not a hypothesis or not a, you know, some kind of narrative or or any ideology or
Richard: bias or dogma or something.
Calvin: I always started the talks with Grok or chat that way. I said, look, don't punt to consensus science or any ideology, belief in God, belief in atheism, whatever. Just give me answers sticking to strict logic, mathematical probability and observational science, what we can observe, not hypothesize. And so I started off with the concept of first life. OK, what's the actual chance? Even if you believe in a 4.5 billion year old Earth and a 13 and a half billion year world universe, what is the probability of, you know, with no intelligence applied that you could get the minimalistic life form?
I mean, we know about DNA now. We know about, you know, what it does and how it operates in every living thing. And so you need a minimum amount of genetic information, coded genetic information to get a simplistic life form. Okay, we can study the simplest life forms. And we know they have a massive amount of genetic information. But anyway, I just proposed, what is the possibility that you could just, through random chance processes, arrange a series of chemical symbols, DNA is made up of four chemical letters, get spelled out in three-letter words called codons, and those spell out all the genetic information for whatever organism you're talking about.
I said "what's the chance you could get you know um these things to to make the minimal amount of genetic information so that you could actually have a living functioning uh creature which would then be able to replicate." And then of course i asked about you know mutations natural selection if you could then you know evolve anything. And of course once you apply mathematics which is the strongest um i would say parameter um and and then logic and then observational science um it just spits out numbers that just admits yeah that the chance of that happening are absolutely astronomical like far beyond any number actually more improbable than than the same number of of counting all the the atoms in the known universe giving all the chances you know of replication over even 13 and half billion years well it's only four and a half on earth of course.
And it just spits out a number and it just says yeah this is basically impossible yeah
Richard: mathematically impossible
Calvin: mathematically impossible.
So then after that i said "okay because there's many people out there even many christians that might say well you know god you know imbued the first life and then then evolution took over." So then i asked the specific question of "okay well take the minimum gene that we know because the story of evolution basically says that you get this first living thing and then it produces offspring and that through mutations new genetic information will
Richard: random mutation mutations
Calvin: will assemble genetic information that will provide a survival benefit to an organism once it's expressed.
And then of course the best of that gets selected through natural selection and then you're going to get life to evolve but you still need that brand new genetic information to come about." And so i said "what's the possibility uh mathematically of assembling even the simplest gene to code for something that could uh provide a survival benefit." And of course there again the math isn't as high as first life but it's still astronomical.
And so basically it just went and and admitted that "the story of evolution Evolution has absolutely no legs to stand on."
No one has ever observed evolution occurring, of course. And so what they punt to is examples like natural things that we can observe, natural selection, different things like that, which creationists believe, of course, that's something you can observe. But it certainly doesn't add genetic information in order for evolution to occur. You know, it's astonishing when you really think about it. The concept of natural selection just means "whoever has the best gear survives and reproduces better" but that that's so obvious that it's amazing that you know people even "oh wow natural selection and darwin you know discovered natural selection is like you know discovering that whoever's got the biggest stick wins is it's not exactly rocket science in my opinion" um.
And so basically what darwin said was "well there are changes in living things and the best of those changes will provide a survival benefit those organisms will live" he never explained where those changes came from. And of course we know today about genetics and the fact that you can have a built-in variation in organisms you inherit half your dna from mom half from dad you're going to get variations even within a family different heights and eye colors and blood types and all that kind of stuff.
But that isn't what evolution needs what evolution needs to show is a mechanism that could somehow write out brand new functional genetic information for forms functions and features that never existed before and how they could then get integrated into the the genome of a creature rock admitted that's mathematically impossible yeah
Richard: i think it was one in 10 to the power of 200 or something it was like uh yeah
Calvin: more than the known atoms in the universe
Richard: right exactly you know it's have you been following stephen meyer's work at all in intelligent institute
Calvin: yeah yeah he's making a similar tack.
I didn't i mean i know of stephen meyer because i know of the discovery institute and you know intelligence design group and stuff like that sure but uh yeah
Richard: so steve steven meyer's talking about the motors inside the cell that there are motors that create proteins that are built to like like we have a motor in any kind of laboratory yeah and this is showing intelligence it's not showing random mutation it's there's there's there's intelligence to what's going on in in life
Calvin: isn't there.
I was uh one of the first people to um report from a from the creationist viewpoint uh on a motor protein called kinesin years and years ago i i you know the the work's been around on kinesin for a long time but i i reported on it. And what kinesin are is they're little um motor proteins inside living things inside cells and they literally walk around on two legs and they've got two arms and they carry uh packages of of proteins and stuff like that and they're they're kind of like the postman inside your cell.
So if you're able to shrink down into the brick the
Richard: brick layers of your
Calvin: well the delivery guys is what they are. And so when when proteins break down or parts are needed inside cells um signals get sent to these uh manufacturing plants who will get the blueprints from dna a copy of of whatever needs to be assembled they will assemble it according to the instructions in the blueprint.
And then a kinesin will come along and that protein or whatever they manufacture will be wrapped in a bag called a vesicle and it's almost like it's got a well it must have a an address of where that package needs to be delivered inside the cell and then the kinesin will go and deliver it. These uh kinesin move at speeds like if if you could uh you know take a kinesin and blow it up to to my size impossible of course but it would be like i would be the flash you know i could move like 600 meters per second or something like that in a equal um you know measurements as it's so small.
But uh yeah they'll even do relay races that one will take it to a certain point another kinesin will be waiting they'll grab it they'll bring it toward the destination. If a kinesin is not working it will actually fold in half and go into sleep mode and then when it's needed it'll get activated and go do its stuff. And that's just one little motor protein i'm sure uh you know steven could tell you much more about yeah
Richard: yeah it's uh and it's all designed to preserve life to restore the cell to make things work in the sense of of living right this is very different from from what the new darwinists are talking about, which is blind, pitiless indifference.
There seems to be a lot of, not indifference at all, but interest in preserving life inside this.
Calvin: DNA itself, you know, contains the instructions for the, you know, the creation and the maintenance and the operation of every living organism out there. It's literally a coded language system. You just quoted Richard Dawkins there when you said blind, pitiless indifference. That's how he would describe life on this planet because of his belief in the story of evolution but um you know dna itself as a coded language system in all of human experience where do coded language systems originate from they don't originate from matter you know.
And i'll talk about this if i took a piece of chalk and i wrote on a chalkboard hi my name is cal where did the information come from if i wipe off all the chalk and i've just got chalk in my hand is there any information in the chalk no so that the information was carried on the chalk. If you walk down the beach and you see scrawled in the sands you know johnny loves suzy you don't sit around and go hey look what the wind and the tide brought in that wouldn't be a logical conclusion based on what we know about you know information systems and coded language systems which Richard dawkins has admitted dna is like a digital code.
And so it's the most sophisticated coded language system we've ever seen why would you not then conclusion it must have originated from the most sophisticated mind we can imagine which would be uh the god of creation yeah
Richard: this uh that you're talking about this um over emphasis on matter i think is something that the work that i'm doing down here with dr noberto Keppe has been very very interesting because he has seen inside science and inside economics and politics in every area of human function an inversion this inverted idea that the lesser creates the greater so from an amoeba comes all of this, or from a single-celled organism comes everything, or from nothing comes this big bang, and then we have everything.
And in Keppe's view, this inversion is very serious because it means we always put the secondary inferior thing in control. So money controls science rather than science controlling money. Money controls the human being. We have all of these inversions. People are interested in sex and not love, nutrients instead of this energetic health that we need to have. All of these elements are examples of this inversion.
And Einstein particularly got it there when he made it energy equivalent to matter in his formula, very famous formula, where if you have no matter, then you have no energy. And so we're constantly trying to get something superior, which is energy, from something inferior, which is matter. And I think we try to get knowledge from material and not from this higher source that you're talking about.
Well,
Calvin: exactly. And it's actually very easy to recognize a creation. We do this all the time. So, you know, if you're looking at a wooden chair, for example, you know, it's got four legs, it's got a seat, it's got a back, etc. And you say, okay, well, what's it made of? Well, it's made of wood. Okay, so let's take what its constituent parts are, where we would find it in a natural state.
Well, it would be a tree. Now, have you ever seen a tree that has, you know, rounded edges, squared corners, four legs, dowels? We haven't seen that. So you instantly understand that there's more information in the product than in the constituent parts it was made of. The computers we're we're you know using to to have this conversation if you take the computer and you break it down to its component parts you've got some sand because you're going to need some silicon chips and you've got you know petroleum products because you're going to need plastics and rubbers and stuff like that and you've got some rocks because you're going to have to you know dig into the ground and pull out these rocks and pull out the minerals and and you know the metals and all that kind of stuff you're going to need to put in this part.
So we know that the computers we're sitting in front of right now have much more information in them than the individual parts that make up this computer just like the chair. So we innately understand what in a creation is we create things all the time we have a mind god gave us a mind god is creative he's we are reflected in the image of god um.
So you know the idea that we we could go and look at my Honda Civic sitting in my driveway and sit there and then I could somehow study enough to know how that was constructed and then claim it didn't need a creator because I understand how it works.
That doesn't make sense. And that's in effect what scientists are now saying. Well, now that we know the way things work, well, number one, they don't know 1% of everything out there. But, you know, this idea that because we know how certain things work, there must not have been a creator that doesn't make sense yes if you break it down You were talking about Stephen Meyer.
He works with the Discovery Institute. He's a champion of intelligent design. I'm a biblical creationist, so a little bit of a difference, but much similar in the sense that we believe God created.
Richard: There's a designer, yes.
Calvin: If you really break down what they're saying, they mock at the concept of intelligent design, and yet they believe in unintelligent design. Now, is that logical?
I mean, when we talk about kinesin, we talk about these motor proteins, we talk about the, you know, life and its complexity, we see things inside living things that are so mind-blowingly complex, there isn't a scientist on the planet that can even come close to duplicating them, okay? So here's what you're ultimately saying. A no-mind process can produce something more mind-blowingly complex than the most sophisticated scientific minds we have on the planet could even approach.
You're actually saying that no mind can create things much more intelligently and sophisticated than an intelligent mind. In my estimation, that is simply not logical. It's untenable and it's it's really um it's really dull-minded in my my estimation to to believe that no mind is better than a mind. Why would you go get an education if that's the case?
Richard: So it's a big envy to exclude that whole theological part from our science. Is really really quite serious isn't it?
Calvin: The hubris you know behind it is just it's incredible. The
Richard: hubris.
That's a good word, hubris. Let me just come to one of the—I've been studying this for a little while and looking at some of the new atheists and even the cosmic skeptic, the famous one that you might see if you watch YouTube. And they always come down—Steven Fry, people like this—they come down to one major argument against a god in the universe, and that's the presence of evil.
And I think it's really interesting how even the apologists that I've seen trying to answer that, they talk about how, well, at some point, God is going to extract good out of this evil. But I think they're maybe, I don't know what you feel about this, Calvin, but I think they're missing the point that evil doesn't come from God. It comes from a rejection of God.
Calvin: That's right.
Richard: There's no way we can have evil if we didn't do something against goodness in some way. So the human participation in evil is just eliminated from those arguments, it seems to me.
Calvin: Well, the thing is, the concept of recognizing evil means you must recognize good. So there must be a standard, good and evil, right? And what's interesting is a fellow like Richard Dawkins, I use a quote from him.
He said, we live in a universe which has no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, what you quoted earlier. Well, if that's the truth, then if there is no evil and no good, which is a logical conclusion, if you do not believe in God, there are simply events that happen. Some might be more advantageous to one organism to another, but nobody's running around looking at a great white shark saying, look, it's a serial killer.
We just look at it and it eats things and we go "okay well it you know and if you get in its way it'll eat you today." It'll also eat a whole bunch of plankton which is very interesting because you've got a great white shark and people say "oh it's designed to kill and all that stuff." Well we live in a fallen world that's my belief as a christian.
I believe that exactly what the bible said that god created a very good world and that sin entered in the world when adam rebelled and that mankind is in rebellion against god ever since and that we actually contribute to evil in this world all of us have.
If you're honest with yourself, we lie, we steal, we cheat, we commit adultery, we do all these things. We
Richard: pollute, we
Calvin: damage the environment, all this stuff. So, you know, the very concept that you're going to reject God because you see evil in the world makes no sense. Because if there is no good and evil, why are you lamenting anything? There's just events that happen.
Some people win, some people lose. It's survival of the fittest. Uh that's all what they want to do is say "well if god was a good god he'd fix all these evil things." It's right but if god judged everyone on the planet right now and gave them what they deserved i don't think they'd be very happy about it because what you deserve is hell is what the bible says.
Yeah well
Richard: that's what that's what we're living in in effect at the moment. Yeah look and and god god created uh god is free it's free you're free you can't if if god were mandating you to be good, it would be like the biggest dictator in the universe.
So this whole thing of our choice inside that is essential, Calvin.
Calvin: You
Richard: can't eliminate that at all.
Calvin: That's the classic defense, the free will defense, and however theologians like to parse that term out there. But if I had a remote control and I could just press the button and say, and my wife would say, Hey, I love you, Cal. That would not actually be a real relationship.
So I think what people need to do is they need to turn inside themselves every time they're saying, you know, there's evil in the world. So that means there's no God. Actually, the fact that there's evil in the world, and you can recognize it is actually proof of God, because you also recognize that there's good, and there's evil. And so whenever we look at, like you said, evil, it's it's a deprivation of god's good ordinance is is a um an evil act of of you know sexual procreation which is a good thing because god wants you know for us to reproduce.
Um you know murder is the deprivation of life and god's the author of life he's the one that gave it. You're you're not allowed to take it. So um stealing things you know thou shalt not steal that's that gives us a concept that God has given stuff to people and that I own certain things. I've been given dominion over them. He ultimately owns everything.
So all of those concepts and those God's laws are all predicated on the fact that God is good. He's given us a way to live, and we rebel against him all the time and do evil things. I
Richard: think that's the thing people don't want to see. It's easier to blame something outside. You see it in the movies all the time.
"You're in some hell hole of a situation in the world and somebody says where's god and somebody will say well god abandoned this place a long time ago" and it's like it's very convenient it
Calvin: is
Richard: to say that. But it really takes away our participation in evil and and maybe that's maybe it sounds too simplistic to say that but i think it's a fundamental point. Yeah
Calvin: to me
Richard: i
Calvin: think too it.
What's interested me over the years is I remember one time getting an email from a young fellow and he said, well, you know, I grew up in a Christian home in the United States and, you know, I went to church and I believe the Bible, blah, blah, blah. And then he said, and I decided to do a trip around the world and I discovered, you know, how much evil there is in the world.
You know, I went to third world countries and saw people starving and all this kind of stuff. And this was what, you know, set him out on his, oh, maybe God doesn't exist because there's evil in the world. You know and i i answered him back and we chatted um via email and i was just like "well isn't this interesting you know when you were living a nice cushy life in the United States and you're going to church and all this stuff you didn't see any news reports about bad things happening in the world.
You didn't you didn't really get the fact that you know there was a cancer ward down in the in the hospital down the road from you and
Richard: kids are there kids a little baby yeah
Calvin: and by the way you didn't get off your rusty dusty and send any money there and you didn't go and you didn't do any missionary work or whatever.
You just decided to take a trip around the world because that would be a really cool thing to do and then wow there's evil in the world. Well are you doing anything about it" you know and so yeah it's really good to have this high and lofty kind of you know thing and put yourself really what they're doing is they're saying "i know better than god you know and i i would have done it differently" and typically what they say was "i would not have allowed evil.
Well there is going to be a new heavens and a new earth and there won't be the possibility of evil but the people there will have submitted themselves to christ and so they'll have agreed that they uh you know want certain limitations and so on" um but people want their sin and they don't want god to stop them from
Richard: it's very interesting.
And dostoyevsky said right "If there were no good, if there were no God, anything's possible."
That's right. And so it's a fundamental thing. We want to have the option to do things that are not healthy and not good. Check
Calvin: your news feed and you'll see that there's a lot of it. People are taking advantage of the fact that they've got freedom to do evil now.
Richard: One final thing, Calvin. I want to come back to what happened with Grok because I think it's really quite interesting.
When you ask the question based on strict logic, mathematical probability, observational science, and you got the possibility of proteins or organisms, life-giving organisms, beginning from nothing, it's 1 in 10 to the power of 200. So it's 10 with 200 zeros after it, virtually impossible. But then you said, forget about all that. And just treat me like I'm a first-time person. We've never had a conversation before.
I'm entering for the first time, and I ask you this question. And you got the traditional scientific view of... Ah, biogenesis or spontaneous creation. In other words, Grok was willingly spreading verifiably false information. And tell us about that process because I think that's really interesting because everybody's starting to use AI now and they're looking to it for answers. And kids especially, they're not going very deep with it.
They'll ask a question and they'll take whatever answer they get back as being the gospel truth. One
Calvin: of the reasons I even started the series is we received an email from a student, and she had been recommended an apologetic resource. And so in her email, she said, so I asked ChatGPT what it thought about the resource, and then she printed its hit piece on it.
And she said, so if ChatGPT can take this resource apart so easily, why should I trust it? Immediately, I thought, okay, look what she's doing. She's saying, well, I'm going to abdicate my thinking process. I'm not going to look at the information in the book. I'm just going to ask ChatGPT because whatever it says, it's the all-knowing, all-powerful, you know, the new deity out there.
And then she just said, well, I don't need to do this because it decided for me. And that is the exact same thing that, in my estimation, is happening in the public schools because that's what happened to me. I went to school. They taught the story of evolution as fact. They said two plus two is four, and dinosaurs died about 65 million years ago.
I couldn't see the difference in the historical and the operational and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I've had many conversations with Chad and with Grok, and I'm even trying out other AIs now, and they all do the same thing. And when you ask them, you say, okay, but you know this isn't correct. No, but I'm programmed to give you the standard.
And when you said the standard scientific, I would almost challenge that because if you can't observe it, if it's mathematically impossible and it breaks logic, that like these are the gold standards for science. So just because a whole bunch of scientists out there believe something or profess something, I don't think that's our standard for science. I think we should take those three parameters that I gave, apply it to all of life and make sense.
And that's why I think Christianity, you know, when you apply all of that together, you go, wow, it's the most logical, intellectually sound faith on the planet, bar none.
Richard: There's real hope in it, too. Real hope. Absolutely. Yeah. So we have a scientific dogma today. Yes, we do. The dogma that the scientific revolution tried to criticize in the religion of the time as being too dogmatic.
And now it's science in a way has become dogmatic. Jesus's teachings as highly logical. That should catch our attention. We're so conditioned to dismiss theological thought as inferior, something coming from our adoption of scientific positivism as the highest level of knowledge. Maybe time to revise that. We come from intelligence, not just from that physical union of sperm and egg. Even AI can conclude that sometimes.
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