I was just listening to the fantastically lucid new interview with physicist Brian Miller on ID the Future. Dr. Miller and host Andrew McDiarmid discuss the immaterial genome theory being developed by biologist Richard Sternberg. His research, in turn, is the subject of my new book, Plato’s Revenge. It occurred to me someone should clarify that the release of my book, and the release of Dr. Michael Egnor’s book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, co-authored with Denyse O’Leary, were not coordinated with each other in any manner! 

Yet the two books describe the existence of an immaterial realm, impinging on the material, dictated not by theology but, respectively, by mathematical biology and neuroscience. In the context of organismal development, says Miller, the agency at work could roughly speaking be identified with a soul. The fact that the books appeared, from two different publishers, almost back-to-back is purely what psychologist Carl Jung would have called an instance of synchronicity — or meaningful coincidence.

Why Meaningful? 

Egnor, Miller, and Sternberg all argue that ancient ideas going back to Greek philosophy — Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, in Dr. Sternberg’s case, or as mediated by Aquinas, in Dr. Egnor’s — find confirmation in modern science. (That’s the Timaeus that Plato is holding in Raphael’s famous fresco, above.) As these earlier thinkers anticipated, something not of this physical world is operating behind the veil of life and nature. This thesis represents, I believe, the next frontier for intelligent design. If Egnor and Sternberg are right, that spells the end of any notion that material stuff alone can explain life. That is the meaning. 

A similar hypothesis is also on the horizon coming from biologists like Michael Levin unconnected to the ID community. As Miller notes, Dr. Levin uses language about Platonic forms parallel to Sternberg’s, yet independent of any influence of one scientist on the other. More meaningful coincidences. For bonus points, as I’ve mentioned, in a recent paper Levin cites, in his final endnote, Jung’s little book, Synchronicity. Listen now to Miller’s conversation on ID the Future: