Editor’s note: John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream, is a longtime student of intelligent design. So when he learned that David Klinghoffer of Discovery Institute had published a new contribution to that discipline, he hurried to get hold of it. Here’s his interview with Klinghoffer about the new book, cross-posted from The Stream with the permission of Mr. Zmirak.

John Zmirak: I really appreciated your effort in  Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome to translate some highly technical science and complex philosophical ideas into language that an English major like me could understand. In this interview I’m hoping we can boil things down even more for the sake of busy people reading on their phones, so they can be inspired to go get your book and read at greater leisure and in more depth. I’d like to ask you first to lay out in stark terms the startling claims of biologist Richard Sternberg, in the manner of an “elevator pitch” for a movie. Then we can go into greater detail. 

How do Darwinist materialists see the function of DNA in the organization of life? Is it like a long row of dominos, and after the first one falls the rest just click away according to deterministic rules? Or is random chance somehow generating from a single cell a complete baby human being or animal?

David Klinghoffer: As materialists, they are forced to say that all the information necessary for the construction of a baby, or any developing creature, is located in a material medium, DNA, along with associated material structures in the cell: this is respectively the genetic and epigenetic inheritances. DNA makes RNA, which makes proteins which make you or me.

Bremermann’s Limit

JZ: So all the information — not just to build but to maintain and keep alive a complex animal — is supposed to somehow be locked in the cells. Is that mathematically possible? How much information are we talking about, and how many supercomputers would be required to process it over how many years or centuries?

DK: Seemingly, it’s not possible. Richard Sternberg finds that the operations of a cell are transcomputational, in the sense that they break what’s called Bremermann’s limit. Hans-Joachim Bremermann was a 20th-century computer scientist and mathematician. If you were to imagine the earth itself as a supercomputer that has been operating as long as there has been an earth — so, about 4.5 billion years — with every atom processing bits of information, what goes on in the cell, in the nucleus, would exceed that limit of computability by a lot. Not even close. Various scientists have sought to define the “physical limits to computation,” and the information processing that occurs in the nucleus of a cell breaks that.

JZ: If indeed there’s no way such vast libraries of data are contained in our body’s chemicals, what alternative does Sternberg suggest? Who in the past has made similar arguments? How far back does the battle between materialists and “idealists” go?

DK: It goes back to the ancient Greeks. Plato, in the Timaeus, the Republic, and elsewhere, imagined a realm outside time and space where immaterial “forms” reside that provide the informational patterns that shape our world of matter. Aristotle, who followed Plato, held a comparable view. These could be dismissed as old myths, were it not for the fact that new science is pointing to something “tantamount,” in Sternberg’s language, to the immaterial forms.

A Cosmic Mind

JZ: How do you counter the argument that positing such a mysterious, immaterial “force” or matrix to explain physical processes is just the “god of the gaps” maneuver, which grabs any hole in scientific knowledge and tries to claim it as proof of God’s intervention? What acquits Sternberg’s theory of that charge?

DK: You mean he’s making a Plato-of-the-gaps move? That’s one reason he speaks of these patterns of information as being “tantamount” to the Platonic forms. It doesn’t really matter if they are identical in a strict sense to what an ancient Greek philosopher dreamed up. For practical purposes, though, they amount to the same thing.

Another scientist, biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University and Harvard, who’s not a proponent of intelligent design, has come to a remarkably similar conclusion. He wrote in a recent paper that he “makes no effort to hew closely to the specific views of Plato, Pythagoras, Whitehead, or others who have supported related positions in the past, but focuses on those aspects of the idea of non-physical forms that seem the most helpful for driving forward advances in research.” The Platonic model is “helpful” in understanding reality, in “driving forward” research. So we’ll go with it and call it Platonic, provisionally, because it sure seems like that’s what it is. We’re not being Platonic “fundamentalists” here.

Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

JZ: If Darwinist materialism sees the whole universe as a line of deterministic or random dominos falling, most who believe in intelligent design seem to think that there are vast distances between the dominos, where a divine finger must have come in and shifted them to keep them toppling. Hence, we say that mathematically there’s no way random mutations can explain the emergence of dozens of new types of creatures in the relatively brief Cambrian period. So it’s more likely that some intelligent designer input vast new information to make that possible. Likewise with the emergence of man himself — a vastly more complex creature than his supposed primate ancestors. Is that a fair summary?

DK: Yes, there have been periodic explosions of complexity — biological “big bangs,” far from being limited to the Cambrian explosion alone. The late paleontologist Günter Bechly and his colleague Stephen Meyer analyzed 19 such fossil explosions, and Bechly, a neo-Platonist himself, compared them to patterns being “downloaded from the cloud.” It’s a useful analogy from our familiar technology.

A Different Focus

JZ: But Sternberg seems to be saying something quite different — that all the movements of the dominos are dependent at every step on influence from outside. So it’s less an intelligent designer than an operator or a pilot, who keeps all these material systems in existence and working to plan. Do I have that right, or is there a clearer way of putting it?

DK: I think Sternberg is articulating a type of intelligent design, but rather than focusing on acts in the past — those explosions of complexity over the course of hundreds of millions of years — his focus is the operations going on in life right now. It’s intelligent design in the present tense, not only in the past. That’s not to say that other ID proponents would disagree with him, but the emphasis of the argument is different. In fact, something I’ve been finding since my book came out is how many ID scientists writing and researching today agree with Sternberg’s immaterial genome.

JZ: How does this vision of life as constantly dependent on the influx of information from a higher Intelligence compare to the Christian notion of the Logos — of Christ as the wisdom or divine reason responsible for creation? Speaking from your own tradition, how does Sternberg’s theory relate to the Jewish mystical concepts you wrote about in the book?

DK: The Christian Logos, as I understand the idea, is similar or identical to the divine wisdom personified in the book of Proverbs, which is certainly not located in, not limited to, our material realm. That’s a way to explain or understand the Platonic forms. Jewish mystical tradition seeks to grasp how an infinite God could create “space” in existence for a finite cosmos. The theory is offered by the kabbalists that the infinity contracts to create that space. Sternberg sees his idea of the immaterial genome in similar terms, the contraction of the infinite within the finite. With that, I think, Christians will also see parallels with their theology — the infinite contracted within the finite form of a man.