The new ID the Future conversation with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger sparked another thought with me. The subject is Sanger’s conversion to Christianity, thanks in part to ID scientists like Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, something that Sanger has also written about at length here. I was particularly moved by his discussion about reading, or studying, the Bible for the first time as an adult (this was 2019).

There is something thrilling about looking back at a previously neglected text or personality from the past and finding that — wow! — it or he speaks to issues in my own life in the present, questions that bother me, with a remarkable pertinence. 

Bedtime Reading

Sanger says he started in on Scripture as “bedtime reading.” He writes:

When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and — to my shock and consternation — coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew?

I’m not a Christian, but yes, that matches my experience in a number of ways. It seems to be a thing: We discover to our surprise that the way to understanding can be by going “back to the future.” Over the weekend I found an article in the Wall Street Journal about political conservatives, including our old Discovery Institute colleague Chris Rufo, who have found startling relevance in the thought of an Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937). The article, “Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist,” says Rufo is writing a book inspired by Gramsci and his political thought, How the Regime Rules. Fascinating.

Meet Intelligent Design’s Favorite Pagan 

Another “back to the future” case is ID biologist Richard Sternberg who points to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogue Timaeus as an important guide in his own realization that DNA, the physical genome, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the biological information that drives life. As I relate in my book, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, Sternberg has gathered scientific evidence of an immaterial counterpart to the material genome, outside time and space, that really runs the show. The radical thesis explains much that the familiar understanding of DNA does not. And Sternberg is not alone. The Harvard and Tufts biologist Michael Levin, not an ID advocate, has independently come to a very similar conclusion. 

Our neurosurgeon colleague Michael Egnor finds insights about the mind versus the brain in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, as he and science writer Denyse O’Leary write in their forthcoming book, The Immortal Mind. I could cite other examples.

Inspiration for scientific and intellectual creativity from drawing on the wisdom of the past, whether the Bible, Plato, Antonio Gramsci, Thomas Aquinas: all “can sustain interrogation,” to borrow Larry Sanger’s words, offering “shockingly plausible” insights to guide our own thoughts. “Who knew?” Indeed.