Subatomic particles, biological cells, and whole planetary and cosmic environments could only have been the product of incredibly complex design, all built on the mysteriously non-physical bases of energy and information. Armed with his background in mathematics, and contemporary research about DNA (among other things), Pedersen gives us to understand why the Neo-Darwinists are no longer able to credibly argue their position. At a time when the world is bereft of meaning, when the nihilistic, materialist, relativist and atheist worldview is plaguing the hearts, minds and souls of people everywhere - the profound implications for how we view life, the universe, and ourselves may be revitalized with a true understanding of what science is actually telling us.
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Ken Pedersen: ...Clouds of hydrogen then may become a galaxy. A galaxy's information rules are such that they will create stars, the stars' information rules are such that they will create this 'star dust', and then star dust creates everything else, including us. It's all digital processing, absolutely totally amazing.
Harrison: Welcome back to MindMatters everyone. Today we are joined by Ken Pedersen. Ken is a retired electrical engineer. He has a strong background in information processing, mathematics, and modern physics. He's the author of two books and the one we will be discussing today is Modern Science Proves Intelligent Design: The Information System Worldview. So we're going to delve into this book.
First, welcome to this show Ken, it's a pleasure to have you on.
Ken: Okay, pleasure to be here, I'm glad to be here.
Harrison: So we were just talking before the show on the story of how you kind of got into this. I mentioned that I kind of got into these topics about 11 years ago reading a philosophy book actually, by Thomas Nagel - Mind and Cosmos. Thomas Nagel, a famous atheist philosopher who, like Anthony Flew that you mention in your book who became a theist but Thomas Nagel didn't become a theist but wrote a book totally dismantling and demolishing the materialistic world view. So that kind of started me on this path and then getting into some information theory, and in my own mind trying to fit it all together.
So could you give a little bit of information on your background and how you came to the main ideas in this book?
Ken: Okay sure. First of all, I'm a PhD in electrical engineering, which for those who don't know, that's eight years of math and science, basically, throughout the 1960s. I got my PhD in 1970. As I mentioned to you earlier, I did a lot of reading in philosophy even in my high school years and in college. So I got a scientific education and a background in philosophy, and the philosophy at the time was all scientific materialism. The popular philosophy that they taught in college, and just about everywhere, is that the universe is an accident. It's a meaningless accident, and it's a meaningless materialistic accident.
And that is the foundation of atheism. So when I came out of college I was a solid atheist, I was absolutely committed, (chuckles) and I stayed that way for 25 years until I came to a slow realization by similar things you'd been going through, that science itself had discovered the structure of the universe. It had discovered the structure of quantum mechanics, it discovered the structure of the cell and it discovered the structure of neurons in the brain. And all these things were digital processing systems.
The beauty and complexity of all this was way beyond anything that could possibly been by accident. And that's not just a feeling, it's a mathematical fact. You go look at the DNA program, it's 3.2 billion instructions which is equivalent to 6.2 billion digital instructions. There's no way in the world that that could accidentally happen. Even with the functions of the proteins in your body - it's like you winning the 'power ball lottery' seventy million times in a row. The math doesn't support an accidental universe at all, it just could not possibly happen.
This realization came to me by my late 40's, and unfortunately I had raised three daughters telling them that I was an atheist and they should be too. So as pittance, I wrote the first book which was Jenny's Universe that explained the design of the universe that science had found, in my lifetime, but in the 70 years of my lifetime - I'm 76 - but in seventy years, science had found the design of the universe.
There's a lot of things we don't know. We don't know what energy is, or what life is, or what consciousness is but we know there is a design to the universe. It was way too complex and it was way too beautiful, and curiously enough it had nothing to do with matter. It's all information and energy, all of it, all the way through, layers and layers of information processing.
Anyway, to make a long story endless here I guess, I was an atheist and I slowly realized I was wrong. I wrote the first book for my daughters and never intended on publishing it. A friend of mine who had published books read it, and then gave it to his agent. Then three weeks later I had three offers to publish the book, which was kind of amazing. It got published in England by Ode Books, I got published in Germany and in Poland which I thought was pretty good for actually writing a note book to explain to my daughters why I had converted from atheism to intelligent design.
That's my background. I retired from Raytheon, I was in charge of their advanced programs laboratory which was your search and development laboratory. I had eight hundred people working for me for about the last fifteen years of my career. We did all the tactical missiles. Well, 95 percent of the tactical missiles for this country came out of my lab. So my background is really systems engineering. People here think electrical engineering means I fix TV's or something... that's not true at all. I'm a systems engineer who works with technology who puts together systems, and we worked on the most exotic systems in the world and it was a really exciting career.
Harrison: You describe in your book just a bit of that background and how it plays into the ideas in your book, and all the different technologies that have been developed over the past several decades like you mentioned, and you were researching and developing the top of the line systems in radar and imaging, and pretty well anything you can imagine you were working on. So you've got this electrical engineering, systems engineering background where you see the construction and the function of information processing systems. I think that that background allowed you to see the corollaries areas in the natural world and in the mind too.
Ken: I want to amplify that point. That is exactly right. In my job, I had lots of engineers and scientists working for me, a lot of PhDs in science and especially in physics working for me. A systems engineer is almost the reverse of a scientist. A scientist gets specialized in one particular area and drills down deep, deep, deep and would have to, to make progress in that area. But it's a different world view, it's a different perspective on life. I never designed a board, but I designed systems. You got to look at the technology and put systems together. So one person is looking at it from a reductionist standpoint, looking to try and find the most elemental pieces of that science, and the other person is looking at it from more of an emergent standpoint of 'how can you build a system'.
It's a very different perspective. People don't understand that but it's a very different perspective. That's not to say that there aren't generalistic scientists, there are some but not many. There is a different perspective between the scientific method and systems engineer. And you explained it very well just there, that's very impressive, thank you.
Elan: Something I find so interesting is that we've been looking at another book called Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall...
Ken: I've read it.
Elan: ...who is also an electrical engineer as you know - that's his background - and...
Ken: There's a theme here isn't there. {laughter}
Elan: There certainly is! And he speaks so much to what you're saying about having this kind of 'step back whole systems' point of view where you can use your knowledge of the technology that you've worked on to apply that to how much larger things could work. Now the thing is, while he focuses mainly on the discoveries in biology, DNA, cells, and those subjects, you take an even broader view Ken. And what I so appreciated about your book was how you applied this to the macro, to galaxies. At one point you said galaxies are gigantic information processing systems and I'd never read that before, but it was always a question in the back of my mind because if the ideas are valid for biological entities, then why wouldn't it also apply to much larger systems of information?
So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how galaxies are these gigantic information processing systems.
Ken: Let me start a little before galaxies for you okay? The thing that really convinced me, the thing that really just blew my mind when I finally realized it was that the physicists had discovered quantum mechanics. They discovered three essential quantum fields - the electron, the up-quark and the down-quark. I'll get there, believe me {laughter}. The thing that blows your mind is that there's no matter there. It's just energy, there's nothing material there, it's energy and information. And the incredibly, incredibly beautiful thing is this digital information.
The electron has about five variables and they're all digital - charge and spin, and so forth and so on. And so the up and down quark are the same - they have a charge but they also have other things. I'm not going to go into physics. But my point is, it is a digital information processing system. Now here you've got these little tiny clouds - and they are tiny - that have digital information and they communicate with each other just like logic circuits in a computer and they change their information state. And by doing this they make protons and neutrons, the quarks do, and then they make atoms. Atoms are actually these little digital computers. All an atom does is monitor the state of its electron and its outer shell. And that state can only be in specific values, and that means it's a digitally quantized information processing system.
So these atoms monitor that state and they exchange information with other atoms with radiant energy so that the interaction of atoms is a digital processing system. Some atoms can share an electron and you get molecules. Molecules are arrays of digital processing systems of atoms. So the entire world of quarks, atoms, and molecules are made by three layers of digital processing - very beautiful, very exact, very precise, very sophisticated, unbelievably complex digital processing systems.
Now, what do they make? Well the first thing they make is galaxies. So when you get a cloud of hydrogen and helium, the laws of gravity are such that a galaxy is made. Now why do you have to make a galaxy? Well if you're thinking about why you've got to make a galaxy, you're going to design a universe, hydrogen and helium aren't going to do you any damn good at all. They're just little tiny atoms. You've got to get to bigger atoms to make things like us. The only way to get to bigger atoms is to smash them together in a fusion engine that's controlled by gravity.
The purpose of galaxies is to create stars, and that should be obvious -- galaxies are made out of stars. The purpose of stars is to smash helium and hydrogen together to make all the atoms that we live in our reality. We've got ninety two stable elements and another eighteen or twenty unstable elements that they found. But you had to have stars to smash all this information together into this form, and once you get that form those atomic elements are an alphabet that you can build molecules with.
So the beauty of the galaxies and the stars is that they are absolutely necessary steps to get from quarks and atoms to stardust and planets. And they process the information. If you look at it from layers of processing, you get the quarks and you get the protons and you get the hydrogen atom, then you get clouds of hydrogen. Those are all different layers of sophistication. The clouds of hydrogen then become a galaxy. A galaxy's information rules are such that they will create stars, the stars' information rules are such that they will create this stardust. And then stardust creates everything else, including us.
It's all digital processing, absolutely totally amazing. When I realized that, I thought 'Oh hell, I've been an atheist all my life and I've been totally wrong!' But anyway, that answer was longer than it had to be.
Elan: Not at all.
Harrison: That was great. I want to get back to something you said, maybe get into some of the details for some listeners that may not be familiar with some of the basic terms that you use like 'information' and 'information processing', digital computing and things like that. Maybe I'll give my understanding, the picture that forms in my head for how to describe some of these basic things and then you can tell me what you think and if I'm totally wrong. You made a couple points. one about the importance of discrete states in, for instance, the atom, and also in the subatomic particles like quarks and electrons, and about the different characteristics that these subatomic particles have. You mentioned things like mass or spin or charge or whatever.
There's a point in the book where you describe a chaotic basic state in the universe where there's just chaotic energy where there's nothing stable, nothing repeating, it's just chaos. So in order to have a stable universe - a cosmos - we need something that is repeatable and stable. This is where information comes into play, because in a chaotic universe there is no information...
Ken: There's information but it's not repeatable.
Harrison: Right, okay.
Ken: There's information about what's there. But the question is, can you build something progressively more complex? And you cannot do that unless you have discrete digital steps, they will not be repeatable, but go ahead.
Harrison: Right, so within this chaotic information, to build something stable like that, something more complex, you need characteristics. The way I've come to understand information from reading guys like Bill Demsky, is that one way of describing information is what he calls, I think, a reduction of uncertainty. What that means basically to me is that out of all these possibilities you have to reduce it to saying 'it is this and not all of those other things'.
So for instance, with electrical charge it's either going to be 'this or that', positive or negative, or in an interaction between positive or negative where the charges cancel each other out, it's going to be zero. So you have plus one, minus one, zero. Those are the only three options you have. So like you mentioned, it can't be a continuous thing. You can't have an infinite number of possible charges between those values because that raises infinitely exponentially the possible number of combinations that you have and it will be very difficult to get anything stable and repeatable because...
Ken: It would be impossible to be stable, absolutely impossible. You have to have discrete states. That's why you look at the beauty of quantum fields and atoms. They're designed to have these discrete states, and that is the only design possible in the universe that can give you repeatable things. You need repeatable atoms, you need repeatable molecules, to create anything larger.
Harrison: And that's what we see. We see at the smallest level what seem to be a very limited number of discrete states for the small subatomic particles, and then they combine and you get, let's say, an atom. And now you have an additional number of discrete states in the orbital shells of the electrons, and that leads to an exponentially larger number of possibilities of atoms, and then those atoms in their interactions have certain information based rules. So 'If I interact with this' or 'if that has this feature I will interact in this way. If it doesn't have these features 'I will not interact in this way', right?
Ken: That's right but they have a very simple rule. The outer shell, depending on the size of the atom they may have one, two, three, five, eight electrons in them, but they can only exist at a very specific discrete state which means that when light or radiant energy hits them, they can only accept a discrete package to jump from one state to another. So the whole interaction of radiant energy in atoms is all discretized, it's all digital processing.
I apologize, I'm getting off the theme here.
Harrison: No, that's fine.
Ken: But my point is that the rules are elegantly simple, just beautifully, beautifully simple. Even when you form molecules, two atoms share an electron, basically, which we don't quite understand how they do it, but they do it. And that's a discrete thing. It can only happen between very specific atoms that need that specific discrete value shared. You get down to a very simple set of rules that build atoms from quantum fields and molecules from atoms, and then they build everything else. And they're all based on this digital processing that's going on between the quarks, the electrons, and radiant energy. It is a digital processing system that builds everything in this universe. It is just beautifully simple, beautifully elegant, unbelievably precise, and it was discovered within my lifetime.
A young man discovered quarks I think in '49' or '50', and now I'm 76 years old. This all happened within my lifetime. Our knowledge base in 1900 was a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what it is today. The world views like scientific materialism and atheism are based on that knowledge base from 1900. Nobody has digested this knowledge based on the last seventy years, and the beauty and complexity of that and how it totally shatters the accidental universe world view.
Harrison: Well you have. {laughter}
Elan: And on that very point, one of the main arguments that are given by those with the accidental universe worldview, is that there are these multiple universes and that of all the multiple universes you argue, they say that it just happens to be this one where all the accidents aligned and came into the proper order to somehow miraculously form us and reality as we know it. It's a very flimsy argument, when you look at it.
Ken: That's one of the main arguments I raised when I wrote the first book because I thought that was the absolutely craziest thing I had ever heard of. But let me tell you, the multi-universe folks, and there are lots of them, that is their last hope right now. The bright atheists realize that what science has discovered, the probability does not support an extant universe in this world.
So think what they have to do. They are desperate people. They say 'Well okay, it doesn't make any difference what we discover, how complex it is, how beautiful it is, how focused it is. It doesn't make any difference because everything happens somewhere else.' It's a desperate stand by people who realize that their whole worldview up until now has just been shattered. So they say 'Well God, we must have an infinite number of universes, infinite copies of you, of anything possible.' Can anybody believe that?
I'm not saying there couldn't be other big bangs or whatever. Why in the world would they have different laws, different this, different that, and oh by the way, why would they be there? Why is the universe designed to have multiple 'big bangs'? It all comes back to intelligent design. The multiverse is the desperate grasp of the atheist to try and justify his atheism. Pure and simple.
Harrison: One of the remarkable things about the universe that I think you describe really well in the book over a progression of these chapters, because the bulk of the book is these 16 chapters on these 16 miracles or mysterious emergences of this information processing, either information processors or digital rules, and as you...
Ken: Harrison let me interrupt for a second. When I was writing the book I was debating whether to make it 16 layers of information processing, or 16 layers of mysteries and miracles. The 16 layers are really the progression of more and more sophisticated information processing, all the way up to a network of conscious minds, from this network of cores, all the layers in there. In fact, I'm still torn whether I did the right thing because mysteries and miracles do not really resonate with a lot of the scientific community. But, that's the way I wrote it. {chuckles}
Harrison: There comes a point where you can't really tailor things to an audience that won't believe it either way, right? So there are people that, no matter which one you chose, they wouldn't read it. It's like if there's a reception to the information then I think it's their own fault if they'll balk at the use of the word 'miracle' or 'mystery'.
So the progression that I wanted to talk about, which you alluded to in one of your last answers, is that because the universe is this nested system of information processors and processing - one built on top of the other and made possible by the ones below it - each one is dependent on the other. So throughout the chapters of the book, you often say, 'If we take things up to this point and we just look at this point in the development of this information processing system, there's nothing inherent in the system itself to imply that it should go any further. So we can get to galaxies, and we can just leave it at galaxies. Why do stars need to even form?' It seems like when you have the whole picture in mind, you get an idea of the purpose-driven nature of the cosmos, that each one is predicated on the other, and each one seems to, in some mysterious way, imply the other. It's an implication that you can't see just by looking at the lower layer. You can only see it once you have the higher layers.
Let me try and rephrase that in a different way, in case I'm not being clear enough.
Ken: No, I think you're being very clear. That's good. But go ahead, rephrase it if you want to.
Harrison: I just want to say one more thing. So, if you see a human, the human with all of its powers and possibilities, is only possible because of looking down at the structure of the brain, the structure of cells, all of the systems in the body like the circulatory system, the spinal, muscular, etc., all the organ systems, all those need to be there. Those are made possible by the DNA and the cells which are irreducible. There is nothing in physics or chemistry to necessarily imply the emergence of cells and DNA, but they make use of the rules of chemistry. So the rules of chemistry allow for the emergence with the possibility of cells, and the same thing going down.
So you go all the way down. I'm just basically repeating what you said earlier in a different way. When you get down to the very bottom of quarks and electrons, somehow those very basic rules allow for all of the things above. And to think that that's just a happy accident, that those few specific information rules and those tiny clouds of energy somehow allow for all of these levels to just accidentally accumulate on top of each other and build and incorporate the rules of each level underneath them, when you see it in those terms, for me at least, it's unbelievable that people can believe that that is accidental, that there's no actual purpose in the universe and that that purpose isn't everywhere, in each of those levels - one built on top of the other.
Ken: That's right. You could study chemistry forever and never ever, ever get the idea that a cell is possible. We still don't know what life is, we don't know what consciousness is, we don't know what energy is by the way. There are lots of miracles and mysteries in this 16 layers. But one thing you said is all the rules are at the lower levels, certainly all the rules at the lower levels support the emergence of all this, but there's actually layers and layers of more and more sophisticated rules on top of that. These rules emerge, you know. Why do they emerge this way? Why is chemistry able to create eyeballs? It's an incredible thing to have just the right elements and molecules there that you can create this translucent eyeball with the lens, focusing and muscles... my god! You can never, ever anticipate.
My thought is that, and you're getting to things I don't discuss in the book, but it isn't just a matter of creating the rules down at this level. Whoever did this, created the rules in all of the levels. Whatever did this, whoever did this.
Elan: Along those lines, what you point to ultimately, as the highest form of emergence is consciousness, creativity, the superpowers of the mind...
Ken: You have read the book. You weren't lying. {laughter}
Elan: With some interest. And that these powers of the mind, these abilities are the kind of ultimate fruition of intelligent design, that our ability to even become conscious of, and aware of ourselves as the designed, as a product of a designer, is inherent in the design, Ken, which was fascinating to me, and I hope you can say that better and flush that out a little for us because I think it's one of the most interesting points you make in your book.
Ken: You said it very well. But taking the 'system' into perspective, say you were going to design a universe, you could design one that has galaxies and stars and suns and gorgeous planets. You could design one that even has life with plants, with gorgeous plants on it. You could design one that has animals frolicking around, beautiful. If somebody doesn't look at that, and understand it and consciously appreciate it, if somebody isn't actually able to interact with that, in a free will manner, not a robotic manner - I love my dog. There's things about my dog that are very robotic. We go on the same walk every day, I feed her the same food every day, she loves me. If that was all the universe was, it would be meaningless, it would be pointless. But once you give it free will and imagination, learning and curiosity, and emotions, all of a sudden you've got meaning. Stop and try to think, if you didn't have free will and you were robotically controlled by some instincts, and you didn't have emotions and you couldn't care about anything, would the universe have any meaning at all? Would there be any purpose? The answer is fine, might as well not be here. Nobody would care, nobody would know.
So yeah, I think free will and emotions are the absolute apex of what could possibly make this thing have meaning and purpose here. And to get there you've got to have some pretty sophisticated senses, a remarkable memory, an unbelievable learning capability and you've got to have an imagination. I'm a computer scientist. I've built systems that have sensors. I've built all kinds - radar sensors, laser sensors, infrared sensors, you name it. It's incredibly hard to do! And we then try to interpret the imagery coming from that. In my line of work, we try to find the tank, try to find a ship, try to find the com visual, all that nasty stuff. But anyway, that is incredibly incredibly hard to do. We've spent thousands and thousands of people for the last 30 years doing it. And we are still in preschool compared to what your eyeball and your brain can do.
You wake up and look out and you know everything that's in your field of vision. You know what it is, you know its history, you know its meaning to you, and you know if something's out of place immediately. Try to teach a computer to do that, that's absolutely impossible. My point being that you got these very sophisticated sensors. You got a memory that will remember a whole lifetime that not only remembers but automatically classifies - 'well, I'll never remember this, I'm not going to remember that, this is priority this is not'. You don't do that, it does it somehow, automatically. And from that you learn.
Now, we can actually understand from computers how senses kind of work, so we're building cameras and we do this and that. We don't understand how the brain turns that into a living color or picture that we understand. We understand how memories work because we build memories into computers. We understand digitally how memories can work. Your memory works because something changes the structural design of neurons. The neurons actually encode your memory just like we encode memories in digital chips.
We understand how learning works because we can teach neural nets to learn. I mean we are in the infancy of doing that, but structural changes in the neural net cause you to learn, there's no questions about that. Imagination, free will, curiosity, emotions, we have no idea. And it's worse than that of course because we have no idea what consciousness is. We have no idea why we can see in living color and surround-sound in this world. What does the brain do to do that? To say that's sophisticated is absurd. It's way way beyond sophisticated.
I was at the forefront of applying stuff to computers and putting them in noses of missiles, most of the designing stuff we've ever done! We were in preschool. We couldn't even comprehend at all how in the world the brain takes in information coming in and converts it to this colorful thing we see. It gets even more interesting because - I always lose my wife about right here - there is no color out there. It's just wave lengths, it's just digital information coming in on the wave lengths. There is no red and blue, there is no sweet and sour, there is no pain. The only place any of that stuff exists is it takes the information in - there's real information out there - it takes that information and it paints this picture for you to perceive. And that by itself is pretty damn amazing!
To say that that is the top of this image processing chain? Well hell yes it's the top of the image processing chain! Nothing else comes close to it. Nothing comes close to it. You start with two or three quarks down there talking to each other and you end up with people discussing things like this.
There's something in the book I want to say for whatever audience we have, is that you look at the brain and people don't realize how complex it is. There are a hundred billion neurons in there and they're all digital complex. They either turn on or off based upon the input they get and where they're at in the brain or the nervous system. So you've got these digital logic circuits that can turn on and off about 200 times a second and all that digital processing is at the neuron level. Think about this - the neurons are cells. They're made of molecules, they're made of atoms that are made of quantum fields. If you took the quantum fields, the electrons and the quarks, and expanded them to the size of a marble, about half an inch in diameter, then an atom, depending on the atom, would be hundreds of miles in diameter. Think about that.
You've got these tiny little marbles in there, that somehow create the forces that this atom obeys. It creates the information rules this atom obeys and it's a hundred miles in diameter with these tiny little marbles of energy in it. Of course they're not really marbles, they're pervasive these fields but we don't understand how it happens.
And then you take the atoms to make a cell, like a neuron, a neuron would be thousands of miles long, if electrons were the size of marbles. It would have thousands of inputs and perhaps hundreds of outputs, and they're all netted together in this hundred billion neurons that create your brain. And then, the size of your brain -- and people just absolutely don't believe this until they go through the math - would be 15 million times larger than our solar system out to Pluto.
So you've got all these thousand mile long neurons and these little tiny marbles, quantum fields, and they're constantly doing digital processing. The quantum fields can make a quantum decision at about 10 to the 30th times a second, we don't know exactly but it's about that. This means that it's a trillion, trillion, trillion basically, times a second. So you got all these little marbles in there making these decisions that fast. Then the atoms are making decisions. Again we don't know how fast the atoms they make decisions either, but that's what runs our computers. We think we can get it up to 10 to the 20th or 25th or something, which is a trillion, trillion.
All that is going on constantly with all those little marbles in this 15 million times bigger than our solar system brain of yours, and in all of that there's these neurons that are making decisions 200 times a second. The result of that is you can sit down and watch a football game and drink a beer. Isn't that amazing? {some chuckles}
Elan: That was a conception I was trying to grasp for myself when I was reading your book and I appreciate you flushing that out more because it really gives gravity to the idea that there are these very, very tiny digital elements or machines inside of a vast scope of greater information processing, that does have some informational input into this much larger context.
Ken: Yes, well it's based on that. It all builds in layers, all the way from quantum fields to you and I sitting here talking. It's layers and layers of complexity of digital processing. And then you go through the math -- I'm basically a mathematician -- you go through the math of the probability of that happening by accident and it's absurdly impossible. It's not just impossible, it's absurdly impossible. And we haven't even talked about DNA yet, I don't know if you want to go there or not.
Harrison: Sure. Yeah let's get into DNA.
Ken: Probably everybody knows, we discovered DNA in the 1950s, again well within my lifetime, I was at least 10 years old by that time. All of this has happened very, very recently. People aren't digesting the impact this should have on worldview. But we discovered DNA in the 105-s. It's a digital memory. It encodes information in 4 byte - well it's got four letter steps so it's 4 byte arithmetic. It has 3.2 billion ladder steps so that's 6.4 binary instructions. You've heard of base 4 or base 2, it's 6.4 binary instructions which is how we use our 'thinking' in computer terms.
Six point four billion binary instructions, that's just a number. If you took that and tried to publish it in a book and put fifty 1's and 0's per line and thirty lines per page, two hundred pages per book, that's twenty thousand volumes. So a single little dot inside that single little nucleus has equivalent to twenty thousand volumes - twenty thousand volumes of digital information.
We are learning, and learning is going rapidly but it's painful because up until the 1990s, even 2000s, they have discovered how DNA encoded proteins. So you actually have 20 amino acids and you have an address for each amino acid, and a small portion of the DNA actually encodes the sequence of amino acids which you have to put together to build any specific protein, and there are 20,000 proteins in the body. So when scientists first discovered this back in the eighties and nineties, they actually said that these little protein coating sections were genes and everything else was junk DNA. Well the protein coating section was less than 2% of the DNA information, but for tens and twenty years still some biologists still call the rest of DNA junk DNA, they call genes just a little tiny part of code for the 20,000 proteins in the body.
From an information systems point of view, that's ridiculous. It's naïve, it's absurd. It takes a hell of a lot more information to build your body, your mind, and your capabilities, than a string of proteins. In fact it's been proven that that is like 1.5% of the DNA. There must be a hell of a lot more information in that DNA.
That was obvious to me 25 years ago, and that was one reason I wrote the book. I was so upset that the biologists were still calling the rest of DNA junk DNA. I didn't change their mind, obviously. I was ranting in the corner. But recently they have changed their mind because what they have discovered in the course of all of these genome experiments and all the research going into this area - there's a tremendous amount of research in this area - they've discovered that RNA reads at least 80% if not 90% of the DNA, which means it reads it and uses it in your body, which means 90% of those 20,000 volumes, which is some 18,000 volumes, is actually a digital program that defines your body, your shape, your capabilities, and somehow the cell reads that and builds you. You emerge from all that.
There's still tremendous confusion in biologists - and I know and talk to a lot of them and most of them don't agree with me. I say the information for your design has to be in the DNA, and they say there's junk DNA, there's information outside the DNA, there's information outside the cell. I don't think so. When you're conceived, there's one cell, where's the rest of the information now? All the information that's going to create you is in that cell. Anyway, I'm wandering far afield here.
But anyway, recently they discovered that RNA reads at least 18,000 volumes, 85% to 90% of that DNA. And they're finally admitting that, which is a huge admission for the biology community, because it comes back to the information system. There has to be that much information inside that DNA.
The other remarkable thing about DNA right now is that it's a remarkably sophisticated program. We are just starting to understand a little bit about DNA, and I really mean a little bit. People think it is giant steps, but we are way, way, way at preschool understanding DNA. But the remarkable thing is how sophisticated the program is. It's obvious that characteristics like your eye color, the shape of the head, the fact that I've got this big bald head and so forth, isn't one gene. Different parts of the DNA code have to cooperate to create characteristics in your body. We've proven this by different diseases where you have to have several different genes screwed up and so forth and so on.
It's not just a linear code like a programmer like me or somebody else would write. It's a code that somehow cooperates and interfaces with the self and talks to itself. And that's not the really sophisticated part of it. The really sophisticated part of it is that you have I forget how many different kinds of cells in your body and I'm going to misquote a number here but I was thinking it was 3,000, but maybe more. But each cell is different, and each cell, a skin cell, a muscle cell, a neuron, an eyeball cell, each cell reads a different portion of the DNA. But before I say that, I've got to back up a second. The DNA is just a memory, that's all it is, it's just a memory. It's not a computer. You've got to have something that reads the DNA and acts upon those instructions. That's what computer systems do. That's what we design our computers to do, our digital processors do. We have a memory, we have something that reads the DNA and acts upon it. That's what a digital processing system does.
So what reads the DNA? Well the RNA molecule reads it and then it travels around the body. So the computer system is actually implemented in the cell itself. The structures inside the cell that build proteins and do the defensive things and do the waste control and do the nutrient thing, all read the DNA and act. So the cell itself becomes the digital computer. The hardware that reads the software that's stored in the DNA. So the whole cell is a digital computing system.
Now the really amazing thing is this DNA - you've got these 18,000 volumes of instructions - the skin cell reads a different portion than the muscle cell, and different skin cells read different portions. So they adapt and read different portions. Not only are these little cells computers, you effectively have 3,000 different computer systems - the different cells are a different computer. It's reading a different part of DNA.
And it gets worse because every cell, say a skin cell, has chemicals inside of the hormones, nutrients and waste and whatever else, so the state of that computer is time varied. So you have the DNA being read by these 3,000 (I say 3,000, that might not be the right number) time varied computers. Whoever wrote this code didn't do the simple thing like we would do and write the code for one computer. The code works in 3,000 different time intervals. And they created those computers. The code created skin cells, it created neurons. The code was so sophisticated, so smart, so intelligent, that it could take that first germ cell and create all these different computers and then program each one differently.
Now if you're a computer scientist and think you're going to do that, forget it! This is like playing inter-dimensional chess and 'N' is a number we don't know how big it is! {laughter} It's incredible, it's absolutely incredible! But I've still got biologists that will argue with me that, by god, there's junk DNA and by god it's all an accident, survival of the fittest did it all. Impossible! Absolutely impossible!
If you take all the cells that ever existed on the face of the earth and said let them clip their DNA and make a positive change in their DNA once a minute - you can actually do this. You collect the biomass that existed for three billion years and give it a healthy margin, you're being very generous - and the total number of probable trials is like 10 to the 60th. That's a huge, huge number. The number of trials to create one protein is like 10 to the 240th! It would be impossible to create one protein, let alone create your body, your mind, everything else, and oh by the way, create three thousand different cells that read this.
The claim that this is an accident is so mathematically absurd that these people ought to be ashamed of themselves. They aren't ashamed of themselves, they say 'oh well, I've got a multiverse somewhere'. In the multiverse, everything happens.
Anyway, that's a desperate place for them to hide. And when they hide there, the one thing you've got to recognize is that they are throwing out everything we learned about science. Science has learned all of this in the last 70 years. They are throwing all of that under the bus and saying 'Oh it doesn't matter'. So they claim science supports them and they're actually throwing out everything because science doesn't support them. They're saying it doesn't matter because there's infinite copies of you out there. We're having this conversation in 50,000 different languages and 50,000 different universes or an infinite number of universes. Absurd, absolutely absurd!
Harrison: I'm not a programmer but I want to ask if this analogy might be somewhat accurate, based on what you were saying. We have all of these different cell types, like thousands of different cell types, and the information for differentiating and specifying each of those cell types is in the one DNA code. It's all shared in that one DNA code. Would it be accurate to say maybe that it would be like having a hard drive with a single code that has the instructions for 3,000 different operating systems that run some programs that are the same between them, but also have programs that are unique for each of those different operating systems?
Ken: It's exactly something like that. It's exactly something like that. In fact let me just give you one more analogy. We build autopilots for missiles and the missiles sense what their velocity is, where they're going, about ten different things. And depending on what they're sensing, they'll switch to a different autopilot routine, which is equivalent to what you're saying. So the DNA does that, but the amazing thing about DNA is again, you only had that initial one egg cell and that DNA just gets replicated. You've got the same DNA that you had in your mother's womb, in that one cell. So that one cell had to not only program that hard drive, it had to create these 3,000 different systems! I mean, that just blows your mind when you stop and think about it. But it's not just that. It's not just that, my god, I'm amazed, but apply mathematics and probability to it and it's impossible that this was an accident.
Harrison: Well just like you said, it would be impossible for the computer that I described with that hard drive to just pop out of existence, you know, accidentally. Right? And that computer that a human might design doesn't even approach the level of complexity that's in a single cell.
Ken: That's right.
Harrison: It's totally crazy, yeah. Well I want to get back to one thing you briefly mentioned and discussed in the book in various sections, and that is radiant energy. You talk about photons and how they are carriers of information. Could you describe what you mean by that because it applies from the very bottom, from these subatomic and atomic processes, all the way up to our own vision. So could you just tell us about light?
Ken: Yeah, I can tell you what I know about light. Actually, we've been focused on the quantum fields and atoms and molecules. That's only a part of them. They are in a sea of radiant energy. We are in a sea of radiant energy right now. And radiant energy goes all the way from high frequency of sound all the way to light, x-rays and infrared, and it's all radiant energy. Radar systems and so forth, it's all radiant energy bombarding me right now. And of course we all know this. We can encode information and send it into televisions and radios and radar systems. Your eyes take the radiant energy from the information coming from radiant energy as color, and give you the perception of the world.
But the thing that you've got to understand is that it isn't just molecules, atoms, and quarks. You are awash in this sea of radiant energy and what does radiant energy do? It provides energy and information to molecules, atoms, and quarks. So you've got this complete system where you've got these entities out there receiving and processing information, and they are awash in a sea that is providing them constantly with energy and information, and the energy is primarily in the form of heat because without heat, they stop. Color is information, radar information.
The amazing thing is the band width goes over hundreds of gigahertz if not thousands of gigahertz and as an engineer we can come in and slice out any piece of that bandwidth, like we do with radar systems and infrared systems, and process the information in a very tiny piece of that bandwidth. And it's just a couple cycles wide and something that's thin as billions of cycles long, and there's information in the whole damn thing. It's kind of amazing. Did that answer your question?
Harrison: Yeah, well that kind of approached it. But there's so much more to it. Right? At one point in the book you call light something like a super efficient way of putting information into minds. I assume that can happen in various ways. First of all, just through vision.
But I want to start at the bottom though, because when you have subatomic particles and atoms, and they receive a photon, as you describe in the book, that photon has to have - and we alluded to it briefly at the beginning of the conversation - that photon has to have a particular frequency. It's characteristics have to be exactly matched to what that atom or particle expects or how it's programmed to respond to a very discrete set of information characteristics.
So it has to be finely tuned so that that photon gets shot at this atom and then, based on the profile of that photon, it will do A,B, or C. It will absorb or split or merge, whatever, with another atom or whatever. With that similar process of information transfer, you have a source of information, you have the medium through which it's transmitted and you have the reception of that information, then you have the processing of that information where it's actually transformed into something, which then transforms the information processor itself to change its own state. That process is universal throughout creation, so that's what happens with our vision.
So all the way up to vision now, we have light, we have photons, we have photons and light reflecting off of surfaces and shooting highly specific varieties of information and energy into our eyeballs that then gets translated into neural signals, that then somehow miraculously and mysteriously get transformed into, like you said, color. So just visually there's a whole sea of information that we receive just in any split second that our eyes are open, but it applies on all levels. So we have light hitting our skin and it's doing things to our biology, and light's hitting plants and they're engaging in photosynthesis.
What expands my horizons is looking up into the night sky and realizing that there's all of this information from the entire visible slice of the universe that's impinging on our world, on the earth at any given time. It's just this infinite sea of information that is all being somehow received by everything. It's an interactive system where every part is influenced by all these other parts, and each part in itself is a highly specified information processing unit that, based on its own rules of construction, will respond to some slices of that information and ignore others, and take some as important and valuable and transmutable and others to ignore.
Before we started recording Elan was mentioning how in the book you can read your passion in the book, and your own wonder and awe at the Universe. Just that vision of light for me that you describe in the book gave me a little bit about that, just to think that all of these photons are packets of energy and information, and at the bottom of it, that's kind of what everything is, but it's so much more than that at the same time.
Ken: That's exactly right. It's a complete system, and it's a beautiful system. We've been talking about quarks and atoms and molecules, but you've got to wrap the radiant energy around it. Radiant energy is what makes it work. Without that, if you didn't have radiant energy and heat and the information coming into these atoms, we don't know what they would do. If they went to absolute zero, we don't know what they would do. Radiant energy is the fuel, both in terms of the energy they're doing and the information so that they can progress up this chain.
There is one other thing I'd like to talk about. I'd like to talk about what impact this has on worldviews and values and so forth because this is where I really cratered, when I realized this. I said 'Oh hell, I'm not only wrong about science, I've been wrong about my worldview and wrong about my values' which is kind of eye opening for somebody who thought he was bright when he was 45 years old. But anyway.
The big question in life is why are we here? What's going on here? I open the book with that passage about Katie, my 3-year-old granddaughter who thought she was living in a story book and we said 'No you're not'. She looked at me and said 'What is all this stuff?' I thought that was kind of a remarkable insight for a three year old, you know. What is all this stuff, we don't know what all this stuff is.
Anyway, where was I going? I got to Katie and I forgot where I was going. Hang on for a second.
Harrison: The worldviews and changing of values...
Ken: I've got to reboot. {laughter} The philosophy in science or the basic questions are why are we here, what should we be doing, and how should we treat each other? Those are the three basic questions. Science can't answer any of them. Science can answer the design of what's going on. They can't answer the 'why'. We do not understand energy. We don't understand why is energy here, and why does it take the form of these three little quarks, and radiant energy. We do not understand mysteries and miracles. We don't understand any of those transitional layers. You made the point earlier, you would not anticipate the transition to the next layer of any of the layers. And we do not understand why they transition. We just do experiments and say 'Oh they do transition', and we think we understand.
We don't understand why they transition. We don't understand why galaxies were designed to build stars or why stars were designed to give stars. We don't understand why. We have this reductionist scientific method going backwards that says 'Well that's how it happens, that's how it happens.' But with each step there's no clues as to why it jumps to the next step. When you look at the next step, it's clear that the next step anticipated everything that came before - so your point. The next step absolutely needed everything below it. The brain absolutely needs these quarks, these little marbles doing the thing they're doing.
My point is that science is a magnificent tool. I love science. I'm not anti-scientific. This book should be attuned to what science has accomplished in this last 70 years. But science can't tell us why. The science can't tell us how we're going to treat each other, and science can't tell us what to do. For that you need values. And somehow we have been built with inherent guides. Our emotions and our free will - and there are people who dispute this - but there's one section of the book that goes through this. When you look at the religious philosophers and natural philosophers, the materialistic philosophers and so forth and so on, all of them come back to the fact that there's a basic set of fundamental rules for the way humans should interact. It all comes back to love and compassion, and trying to do the best you can, and using this brain, these super powers we've been given and blessed with, to actually learn and achieve and progress.
I look at my career and we went from not having computers, basically, to computers on a chip, you're carrying a super computer in your pocket now. It's been a remarkable, remarkable 50 years. And humanity did that. The progress we've made in the last 50 years - we've been around for a hundred million years, supposedly - the progress we've made is absolutely amazing! It was all because of these super powers we've been blessed with that we can actually understand this stuff and actually put systems together to do this. It's not like it was an accident that that happened. Why does math describe so much? Why can I do so much with mathematics? Why can I understand so much of what we just talked about with mathematics? So that's where it all came from.
Why, given that, can I then go build these systems? When we wanted to build a better radar, we could go find a material for an antenna, we could find the material for this, we could find the material for that, we could find materials for faster computers, we could find the elements. All the pieces were laying there. It was like a challenge put in front of us. It was like 'This is your challenge. We put you here with this capability. This is a challenge. You go use this challenge to progress as fast as you can.' Why would you do that? The sense of achievement in doing something like that is fantastic. It's exciting! It's just wonderful.
I come back to this simple-minded belief, I guess. What good would it be to create a conscious creature if you didn't create an environment that could challenge you? If you didn't create a playground he could play on? So not only did God create these - whoever that is, by the way, I'm not picking on any one god, but the intelligent designer, let's call him God - created this thing we've been talking about that just blows your mind. But we got us here and we have the remarkable capability of communicating with each other so that I don't have to go back and learn everything from basics. I can go and take a PhD course and learn just about everything humanity knows. So we become one big learning mass of networked minds. We have a continuous capability to learn and progress and talk to each other, and utilize all these tools, all this playground 'he' built into the system to challenge us to go be the best that we can be and to progress as far as we can, to build these societies, build these computers, and build Zoom for god's sakes!
And we've done it, and we're doing it. We're doing it faster and faster, and god only knows where it's going to go, I can't imagine. I was a pretty smart guy but when a friend of mine opened a computer shop I thought 'That's the dumbest thing in the world. People don't need computers' back in the 1970s. {laughter} I mean we can't anticipate where we're going.
My point is that the whole thing has been structured like a huge playground, a huge adventure land for us with new rides, and we go ride and get smarter and start thinking about the next ride, and build the next ride and ride that ride, and we keep on doing that. It's an analogy I like because it's an analogy that 'it was built for us'. It's so obvious that it was built for us. It's more obvious to a systems engineer who's lived in the last 50 years than probably anybody else, because we have built things that are unbelievable. This thing we're talking about. It's the direct result of all the work we did on miniaturized electronics for missiles research.
Anyway, my point is you get down to values, and there's all sorts of things. The atheists, in our society we have a cultural war now, we have a cultural war between - people are going to get irritated with me - the left and the right. I classify the left as atheist left and the right as spiritual right. Now there are different classifications, so there are some spiritual people over here and there are some atheists over here. I understand that. These are broad generalities. We have a cultural war going on right now. The people on the left are atheists so they believe it's a meaningless, purposeless reality. So we're the victims. They paint this as victims. And unfortunately this is the state religion. This is the state religion we teach in our schools, that you are a victim of an absurd meaningless accidental reality and because of that, everything is relative. There is no such thing as truth.
Well I'm a systems engineer who just built a whole generation worth of systems, and I'll tell you there is truth. If there wasn't truth, you couldn't do that. But anyway, so over here they're telling you that there's no truth, everything is relative, your truth is what you think is true, but don't let anybody judge you. This sounds absurd but I've got grand kids and they're in college, you know what I mean? It's impossible. You can't judge these teenagers! 'You believe that grandpa? Well, you're old. You're going to die off, and we're going to take your place.' That's the relativists. 'We're going to take your place.' I'm afraid they might. That was one of the reasons I wrote the book, that was the reason I wrote the book.
So anyway, you've got this cultural war going on and you've got these people who basically have no values. And the values they have are the values that they make up, but they can make up any damn value they want. They can decide rioting and looting is good. They can decide murder is good. They can decide whatever they want is good. They have no morals, they have no grounding, they have no sense of values. But you go back and read philosophy - and I've read a lot - both spiritual philosophy and secular philosophy - and they all come back to something close to the Christian ethic, that love and compassion and striving and setting goals and working hard, that's why we're here. And creating families is why we're here, the nuclear family.
Black lives matter and bless my heart, all lives matter but the black lives matter organization, part of their charter is it wants to destroy the nuclear family. Can you imagine that? The entire western cultures were built on the nuclear family. It takes crazy young teenagers who don't have a thought in their head, makes them parents and all of a sudden, my god, their whole life changes. And they will make every sacrifice in life to make sure that that child has a good life and has every chance in life.
That is the fundamental unit of a society, just like a cell is a fundamental unit of life. If you don't have that nuclear family where people have values and want to protect their child, want to protect their community, want to protect their family, want to protect their nation, want to protect the world from these crazy relativists who have no values, my point is, I didn't create that. That was somehow built into the system.
This nonsense that there are 47 different genders, you know, there's a man and a woman and a family, and children. That's the basic unit of a society just like a cell is a basic unit of life. Intelligent design, everything we've been talking about, intelligently designed all of this - who we are, what we should be doing, what we should value, how we should treat each other - and those values are slipping away in this crazy society that we have right now. It's dominated by these, basically atheistic socialist leftists intellectual group who've been around for hundreds of years and finally they're getting a voice here for I don't know what reason. You can read this stuff 300 years ago. They had the same thoughts back then. They've tried it on five or six different societies. They've all been an absolute total disaster. This will be a disaster too.
Elan: So everything you just said Ken was one of my last questions for you, and you flushed it out really well. It's really incredible to think how an understanding of intelligent design, or not, feeds into these different worldviews, and feeds into the nihilism and relativism and existentialism of an entire portion of the population that is untethered, that is unrooted in values, that has no sense of wonder for why we're here and how we came to be and what the universe is and what may exist that may be higher than us. And on that note, I was wondering if outside of the scope of your book you might comment on any speculations you have, any thoughts you might harbour on the idea that there is a kind of a spiritual hierarchy or level of intelligences that are responsible for the insertion of information at these incredibly sophisticated levels that we're just now realizing the implications of, if you have anything to say on that.
Ken: Yeah I do, and this is so personal for everybody that it's easy to cross somebody's line here, but I do believe this whole thing has been intelligently designed, which means there's an intelligence of design. It couldn't possibly have happened by accident. I believe that, back to the point I was making earlier with Harrison, is that it's not just the rules at the quark level, the rules at the higher levels were inserted. I believe that there's some form of evolution happened but it was guided. It could not have happened by accident so I believe that there was active involvement in the structuring of these rules, an active guidance by an intelligence. I think it had to be that way. I don't think some intelligence created the rules at the quark level and turned it on and then went away. You get up to DNA and that doesn't work. Because when you get to DNA there are things happening that the fact that the quark rules were written one way couldn't happen, unless they were guided.
But it gets beyond that. Do I have a personal god? I would like to say I do. But you've got to appreciate, I was 46 years an atheist, so I've been on both sides of this fence and really strongly on both sides of this fence. My wife has a personal god. She prays, she has experiences, she really feels it. I believe in a god that has created this and guides it, and obviously has a compassionate heart because I think it's absolutely beautiful. I can't imagine a more beautiful life than you could live if you try to. People can live pretty miserable lives, just witness what's going on in Seattle right now.
I believe that the Christian ethics are absolutely inspired. Going back to the chapter on philosophy, I think everybody who's gone off and tried to define how to interact with people comes back to a version of the Christian ethics. In the book I talk about religions having a story and having a set of values. Every religion has a different story to try to convince their believers why they should be in that particular religion. And there are only what, fifteen thousand religions in the history of mankind.
The story tells them why they should behave in a certain way. Well, if you take this story part of all the religions, just go look at the rule part of the religions, they are 99% the same - how to treat your family, how to treat your neighbor, how to treat people with compassion and love - basically every religion has some form of the ten commandments.
So I don't think that's an accident. I think god designed us that way, designed reality that way. Does he influence us? This gets highly speculative and non-scientific, but yeah I think he does. I look at America and I think how did this country happen? You look around the world today and there's more than half the world lives under dictatorships, and probably half of them are brutal dictatorships where people have no freedom. They have no freedom, they can only do what the government tells them. How did this little shining light on a hill happen?
Again, I'm getting far afield from your god question but I guess the answer is yes I believe that god exists. I believe that god created this thing. I believe he interacts with it. I believe it's possible for a person to have a communication with god. But I don't necessarily believe in all the stories of all the religions. I believe that a lot of that is manufactured by man. But I do believe in the rules and the morality that they express.
Harrison: I think that was really well put, Ken. And to tie that in, maybe right before we close because I think we'll stop talking in just a few minutes, but to tie that into your previous answer about worldviews and the lack of values in certain world views and the accidental universe world view, in any information rule set there are certain things that work and certain things that don't work, right? Certain things that are possible and certain things that are impossible.
Ken: Absolutely right.
Harrison: And when you get up to the level of complexity of a human society, there will be a similar dynamic of play where certain things work, certain things don't work. So the way you describe morality in the book is as a multi-generational experiment in morality building, or testing reality. So a world view is an amoral system as a way of testing reality. And the world will very quickly demonstrate to you whether your world view works or not, because you'll come up against a brick wall if it doesn't work.
And I think that's what history tells us, that's what we can see when we study history. First of all, we can see which worldviews survived and how well they survived and how well they thrived and we can see these universal values throughout history that have hung on because they work. And then we can see the trends of philosophy in worldviews that make a really concerted effort to butt up their heads against the brick wall and that's when we see the communist revolutions in the 20th century and revolutions even before then, before communism per say, before Marxism, where there is a confrontation with reality that results in a destruction of information.
In very literal ways you have the destruction of actual information in the forms of knowledge, of books of learning, of intelligent people, of people who provide their societies with values and information. You have the destruction of property which is informed matter, basically, that we have formed into a particular shape, a meaningful shape. There's the destruction of monuments and statues throughout all of these revolutions over history. And then the destruction of life and societies themselves.
And if anything, I think that is the sign that these varieties of worldviews which have a lot in common with each other over the years, are deficient world views. They don't jive with reality, that they don't jive with the information rules, the moral rules which is a type of information rules which you say in the book. There is something about them that doesn't work, and it doesn't work in obvious ways that the people who adopt these philosophies and worldviews don't seem to care about or realize when they either read history or ignore it.
Ken: Well I totally agree with you that there's an exception that you can't ignore and we've kind of ignored it and that it's a fact that evil does exist.
Harrison: Yes.
Ken: When you get something like a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao, or any dictator, the system has been tilted toward the evil side. You get almost these psychopaths running the world, and that's a real possibility. I mean China's got two billion people and they're run by a dictator. If you watched that thing on TV last night about the blind dissident talking about his torture under the Chinese regime, they have no respect for human rights or freedom.
The things we've been talking about today are the optimistic side of human nature, and I believe the system was designed that way. And I believe that America is a beacon of hope that we can progress down that path. It would be very easy for evil and power to win, and of course it has won in the past. In most places it's won. Throughout history it's been the dominator people who control society - the powerful. This is one of the very few places where that isn't true, it has not been true, and we're actually a very small percentage of the world's population.
The reason I wrote this book was to try to make young people think about choosing between their worldviews, between the spiritual world view and this relativistic accidental universe, atheistic worldview. I think we are at a critical point in our culture, I think we are at a critical point in the world. I think we could easily slip, we could slip in this election into the socialist side of reality. And if we slip into that, then what happens? It's very scary.
So I agree with everything you're saying and we've been portraying this positive 'By god, everything's getting better and better and better'. If evil and power win out, things will get worse and worse and worse. Happy note to end on.
Harrison: Well if anything, it's an inspiration to take a look at our worldview, and see if it might need some revising. So if that's the case, then for our viewers and listeners I recommend checking out Ken's book. You can get it on Amazon.
Do you have any website that you'd like to recommend or just head to Amazon to get the book?
Ken: Just head to Amazon or Archway Press. I think they both sell the books. No I haven't done a website, in fact I'm a little bit limited there. I need to figure out how to do more social media type of advertising the book.
Harrison: All right, so that was once again Modern Science Proves Intelligent Design: The Information System Worldview by Ken Pedersen.
Thanks Ken, it was a blast talking with you.
Elan: A real pleasure.
Ken: I had a good time, thank you very much. I really appreciate it, and I was very impressed by your insights into this whole area. Thank you.
Harrison: Great, thank you, and have a good day and we'll be in touch.
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