Former Militant Atheist Biologist Debunks the God vs. Evolution Myth
Inside This Episode
Can science and faith really coexist? Former militant atheist and biochemist Sy Garte says yes — and he’s got the evidence to prove it. In this eye-opening conversation, he explains why evolution doesn’t disprove God, and how new discoveries in biology point to purpose, design, and meaning in life.
Sy Garte's new book, Beyond Evolution
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: Is evolution actually a threat to the Christian faith? And why are so many believers still divided over Darwinism?
Today, biologist and former atheist, Sy Garte, makes a bold claim: evolution doesn't undermine Christian faith. It might just help support it. He shares how stunning discoveries in modern biology are pointing more clearly than ever toward the reality of God.
Dr. Sy Garte, welcome to Maybe God.
Dr. Sy Garte: Thank you, it's great to be here.
Eric Huffman: So glad you're here. Thanks for making the time. You've been a very busy man, writing books and giving talks, and you're everywhere on YouTube these days. And so we're honored that you would make the time.
Before we get into the weeds, and I'm looking forward to getting into the weeds with you about recent discoveries regarding evolution and implications they have for faith, I think it would help if our audience just got a chance to get to know you a little bit, and a little bit about your background, because it's fascinating. Just tell us about your upbringing and how unique it was compared to the average Christian story these days.
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, it's pretty unique. I was raised in a family that were Marxists and atheists going back three generations. So I grew up with absolutely no religious background, no belief in God. In fact, pretty much I would say a hatred for the whole idea of anything related to religions, spirituality, anything that was not materialistic.
My father was a chemist, very materialistic scientist. So it was natural, of course, that I sort of followed in his footsteps. I majored in chemistry in college and then became a biochemist. I went to graduate school in biochemistry because I liked life and I wanted to learn about the chemistry of life.
I became a research scientist, and I eventually became an academic. I worked at three different universities, including NYU, New York University, University of Pittsburgh. Published a lot of papers, did a lot of scientific research. And that was my outward life.
But inward, things were troubling me. I had come to the conclusion, first from actually things I was studying in science, like the modern physics, that the pure materialism I had absorbed as a child didn't really mesh with things like quantum indeterminacy and the uncertainty principle, various things that were true, scientifically true, but hard to understand from that reductionist, materialist point of view.
The period, I'm a boomer, so in the late 60s, 70s, there was a lot of new age stuff going around, and it kind of caught my attention, some of it, because I didn't... I had a gap. There was something missing. I didn't know what it was at the time. Now I know, of course, it was a sense of the spirit, which everyone has, even if they deny it.
And I tried to fill with various things. You know, I don't know, I don't know what I did. Nothing really was satisfying. I looked into Buddhism. I just didn't get it at all. Still don't. Well, that was very popular at the time.
I guess I began calling myself an agnostic. I was no longer a firm atheist. I just didn't know. And I frankly didn't care. I was very involved in my career doing science and things.
Eric Huffman: Okay. Let's back up a little bit and talk about how your upbringing might've shaped your worldview, especially in terms of religion and faith. You said that it's not just that you didn't believe in God or religion, but that you hated it.
Dr. Sy Garte: Oh yeah.
Eric Huffman: What was that about? How do you trace that back to? I mean, was that having been raised in a Marxist home? What was the hatred?
Dr. Sy Garte: Pretty much. I mean, my view was that religion was the opium of the people. I mean, it was evil. It steered people away from what they should be doing, which was, I don't know, organizing a revolution. It's hard for me to even remember these days. But, you know, it was a bad thing, besides being completely false and nonsense.
Eric Huffman: And religious people were just useful idiots.
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, exactly. And uneducated, not very smart. I didn't know very many religious people, if any. But that was my view. As I got older, of course, I got involved in other things and I just put all that away. But that was my general background idea.
Eric Huffman: Sure. You mentioned that early on in your career, you started sensing a gap between what you were finding in your work and the strict materialism that I'm assuming was sort of the go-to narrative for someone in your line of work. Materialism being, I don't want to dumb it down too much, but am I correct in saying it's the idea that all that exists is what we can see and perceive in the universe. The material world or universe is all that possibly exists. Which is in itself kind of a religious claim, if you think about it.
Dr. Sy Garte: Oh, it definitely is.
Eric Huffman: What were some of the weaknesses in that worldview that you first began to notice and be bothered by?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, as I mentioned, I had to learn a little bit of quantum physics when I was a chemistry major. We had to do the calculations of the Schrodinger equation, which we just did automatically without thinking about it. But later, when I got older, I started reading about it and philosophical things about quantum mechanics. It was very weird. Everybody agrees that it's weird. I mean, no physicist will ever say, Oh yeah, it's quite simple. It's just like thermodynamics or mechanics or anything else. No, it's strange.
I also read a few other books. I read a book by Teilhard de Chardin, who was a genuine, sorry, a Jesuit priest who wrote about something... I think it's called the emergence of man or something like that. And that gave me a whole new look into humanity and I realized that it was true and it was not explainable by anything I knew of. The way human creativity, human consciousness, many things that didn't fit with the evolutionary narrative at all.
And so I had a lot of questions. I really didn't know what was going on. I probably would have stayed that way up until now, except that, and this is jumping ahead a bit, but I now know that the Holy Spirit had mercy on me. And I had, I would say three or four dreams, which I couldn't not understand at all. I don't know where they came from. I didn't know what they meant, but they were very powerful. To this day, I can still see them in my mind.
Eric Huffman: And these were during your agnostic phase, so to speak?
Dr. Sy Garte: The first one was during my agnostic days, and I had no idea what it meant. I wrote about that in my first book, which is called "The Works of His Hands", about these dreams and my reaction to them.
Eric Huffman: Tell me more about at least the first couple of dreams you had and how they've stuck with you.
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, the first dream was that for some reason, I was hanging on to the edge of a cliff with my hands and I was about to fall down, and I didn't know what to do. I couldn't pull myself up. So I started yelling, just "Help! Help!" You know, I didn't know what to do. And I heard a voice say, "Just let go," which I thought it was crazy because obviously I would fall.
But eventually I was losing the grip anyway so I let go. And as soon as I let go, the whole world turned 90 degrees. And instead of hanging down at a cliff, I was lying on the ground, holding to a boulder. And there was a man standing there. And I understood that that was the man who... it was his voice that had said, "Just let go." And then I woke up and like, "What? What was that?" It was a terrifying dream. I'm afraid of heights, but-
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. Sy Garte: You know, it wasn't until many years later when I started considering faith that I realized what I have to let go of. And it was an awful lot.
Eric Huffman: Wow. So at the time as an agnostic, you just sort of... I mean, you were disturbed by the dream, impacted by the dream, but you weren't at a place where interpreting the dream was something you were ready for.
Dr. Sy Garte: I had no idea how to start. I didn't know what it meant.
Eric Huffman: What did it do to you as a scientist? I mean, I'm assuming your world viewer construct had been, you know, you follow the data, follow something empirical, provable, testable. A dream is none of those things. And yet you were, you know, sort of brought to your knees by a dream. How did that land with you at the time?
Dr. Sy Garte: It was strange, but I put it away. I mean, scientists are well-trained to only dive deeply into things which they can work on. So there are many, many, many mysteries that we don't touch.
Eric Huffman: Right, sure.
Dr. Sy Garte: Why does someone so love me and not the other person? Or why do I feel this way? That's not amenable to scientific analysis, along with so many other things. So we don't let it bother us, more or less. Sometimes we do, but then we know that science is not going to be the way to approach it. So I just put that away. I never forgot it, but I put it away.
Eric Huffman: Sure. And then other dreams came later, I guess.
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, I'll tell you one more, which came later. And at that point, I had already been thinking that God might be real. And I had already gone to one or two church, maybe one church. I don't think I'd looked at the Bible yet, but I was starting to think about this idea now, maybe God, in fact.
Eric Huffman: I like it.
Dr. Sy Garte: And this dream was I was walking, and I saw a walled... I knew it was a walled garden, and I knew there was something really good inside, but it was a very high wall. And I tried to climb it, and I couldn't. It was very tall, very slippery, and I couldn't, I kept walking around to see if I could find an easier place. And I got very frustrated and upset.
Eventually, I ran into a man who said, "What's the problem? Why are you so upset?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to climb over the wall, I need to get in, and I can't." And he said, "Why not use the door?" I looked, and there was a door, and I walked in.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Sy Garte: And I woke up. And when I woke up from that dream, I knew who that was.
Eric Huffman: Did you?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, that was Jesus. No question about it. And that had a major effect on me.
Eric Huffman: Did you read anything back into the first dream at that point?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yes, I did. And what I realized about the first dream, which was now quite clear to me, was that I had to let go of so much, not just my upbringing as an atheist, as a Marxist, my upbringing of hatred of religion. Yes, of course, all that, but so much more. I had to let go of feelings of anger, of things from my past that had been haunting me for so long. It was huge.
The third thing was not a dream. I was awake, and I was in my car driving alone on a long trip and I was listening to the radio, and I heard a Christian preacher. And you know how they are. They're horrific speakers. I pulled the car over, and something told me, I said, "Gee, what would it be like to preach like that?" And I turned off the radio and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, I had a vision of me preaching to a small group of people outside somewhere. And I gave them a little sermon. Fortunately, I wrote it down afterwards.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Sy Garte: But I'm not going to give you the whole sermon. It was quite short. The main point of it was, I said to them, and this was the punchline, I said to them, "If any of you think that God doesn't love you, look at me. I know that Jesus loves even me. And if He loves me, how could He not love anyone?" I broke down. I started crying. This huge weight came off of me and I just felt massive joy and relief. And everything that I was supposed to let go of just went.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Sy Garte: And I said out loud, "I believe."
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. Sy Garte: I have been a Christian ever since.
Eric Huffman: Brother, that is awesome. And that's a great sermon. I think that'll preach because I always said that I'm the worst sinner that I know. And I mean it. I know a lot of sinners, but I'm the worst one because I'm most acquainted with my own sin. I am most acquainted with how unlovable I really am at my core, at my worst. And yet Jesus loves me. And that seems to be what the Spirit laid on your heart that day.
Dr. Sy Garte: It did.
Eric Huffman: Wow. I'm picturing a sort of a spectrum or journey that you went on from atheist to agnostic to I guess there was a phase there where you said, "I was sort of prone to think of God as maybe God, right? And then Christian." I guess somebody else might look at that spectrum and say, well, why not just stay as a deist, as a blind watchmaker? There's a divine designer, but he's not a personal being involved in our lives. Or why not some other religion? What would you say to that person about your decision to land in the Christian family rather than some other place?
Dr. Sy Garte: I went through that. I looked at other religions. I looked at Judaism. My great grandparents had been Jewish but I had had no religious upbringing at all. But I thought, "Well, okay, I'm theoretically, technically Jewish. Why don't I look into that?" And I did. It was kind of a little bit better than Buddhism, but not much. I didn't feel a connection to God. It was, you know, a lot of rules, laws, rituals, I don't know.
Eric Huffman: Traditions, yeah.
Dr. Sy Garte: Not my thing. And the answer as to why I... and I also looked, as I said, into Buddhism and I even read a little bit about Islam, but not much. But the thing is, what really got me, because when I started thinking about God and being religious and all, eventually I started reading the Bible. And I had a really hard time with the Old Testament. I just didn't make much headway.
But when I started reading the Gospels and the Book of Acts, the figure of Jesus was amazing. Remember I knew nothing about any of this. This was all new to me. And yeah, my first reaction was, "No, that's impossible. Miracles like that don't happen." But then, you know, eventually I just got brought into it. You know, I started with the Book of Matthew and it just swept me away.
I think that I actually started believing in Jesus Christ as God and the Messiah before I really was fully a theist. You know, I think, I think that is what brought me really strongly to faith. I never went through a deist phase. I mean, maybe I did, but I didn't know what to call it. I was always thinking, "Maybe, seriously, maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't. I guess I'll find out or whatever. I don't know. I'm not going to think about it."
But when I started looking into Jesus and then I started going to a church, a friend of mine brought me to a church, which is another interesting story because I was terrified. I'd never been inside of a church and I didn't know what they were going to do to me. I'd heard horrible things. And it was wonderful. This was a Catholic church and the sermon was all about love. I was completely astonished.
Eric Huffman: I'm fascinated just because of who you were at that time and what your life was built on. Your career, its trajectory and success and all of the ambition wrapped up in that. Did you feel like there was something that you risked losing by pursuing open public faith in Jesus Christ?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, after I came to faith that day on that highway, after I came back down to earth, to my senses, I remember clearly asking myself, now what? Do I have to give up science? Do I have to change my entire outlook on the world? I didn't know.
And the answer, of course, was no, not at all. In fact, as you know, my mission now, this is my third book, all of which are targeted to people who are stuck because of this big, big, huge, giant lie, which I call a lie from Satan, that science and faith are in conflict.
Eric Huffman: So in your most recent book, "Beyond Evolution", which is fantastic, I encourage everybody to pick it up, it's coming out this month, August 2025, you talk, you spend a lot of time on this issue of science and faith sort of becoming at odds, whereas they began more as really cozy bedfellows. They became at odds over time. And I just wondered if you could walk us through a little bit of the background and history as to why that's happened.
Dr. Sy Garte: Sure. Well, first thing to say is that actually modern science, as we know it, came from a Christian background. All the original scientists were Christians, and they were devout Christians. It wasn't just that that was the standard religion. So everybody was.
People like Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, Jules, so many others, wrote more about theology and faith than they did about science. So, you know, it was considered part of their worldview to believe that there was a good way to study nature using the scientific method as God's creation, and God's creation. So there was no split at all. They merged very well together.
The last part of the 19th century is where that began to change, and part of it was because of a couple of books that were written by people who were anti-religion, were pro-science, although they weren't really scientists. And they put out this thesis that science and faith were in opposition to each other.
And then we also had, of course, Marx, who was an atheist. We had Darwin, who was not an atheist, but whose theory seemed to suggest that we didn't need God to explain how life worked, that turns out not to have been true, but many people thought. And then eventually Bertrand Russell, a philosopher in the beginning of the 20th century, was a very strong atheist.
And it began to grow. And of course, as we know now, the real boom in atheism came in the early 2000s with the New Atheist Movement. That has apparently died.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, it has.
Dr. Sy Garte: That's a whole other topic for discussion.
Eric Huffman: A rather ignoble death. But going back to before that, you're talking about Bertrand Russell and others that seem to want to co-opt the scientific movement as a way of deconstructing Christianity and its cultural dominance in the West, does the church bear any blame for taking on a sort of victimhood narrative, or like anti-intellectual strain historically? Do you think that further deepened that chasm?
Dr. Sy Garte: I think that's possible, but I don't really know enough about that. I know that people have written about that possibility, and I know that there are churches today that are very strongly anti-science, and that's unfortunate.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Yeah, I have another question about that in just a second, but before we depart from this topic, you've also written in this book, "Beyond Evolution", about the constraint that it puts on good science whenever there is an anti-religious bias from the start, and how some scientists aren't being good, honest scientists, or biologists in particular committed to following the evidence wherever it leads because of their predisposition against the possibility of God. Can you just speak a little bit more to that phenomenon?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, that's very important, and I do stress this quite a bit in the book. There is an ideology in science. There always has been, there always will be. The original ideology was Christian. It was Let's understand God's creation.
The ideology in science began to change at around the same time. And one of the principles that was very important was, of course, that we are only studying nature. We cannot study, by the scientific method, supernature. That's true.
But that brought with it some weird things, like we can't talk about purpose because there's no purpose in the natural world. Things happen because of the laws of nature, the laws of physics and chemistry. So no volcano ever says, I think I feel like exploding today. It's buildup of pressure. It can all be understood by scientific principles. So the idea of purpose was ruled out of science, and that includes agency. In other words, a volcano cannot do what it wants to do. It doesn't have that power.
Th problem is that that same prohibition, which is ideological, was incorporated into biology. And that's absurd because we know that purpose and agency exist in some biological creatures like ourselves. What's in my book, which knocked me out, I couldn't believe how incredible this is when I started reading recent literature, which most people don't know about yet, is that both purpose and agency extend throughout all of life.
It's not just us and animals and the kind of creatures we know who do things for a reason. It's bacteria. Little tiny bacteria have purpose, agency, and this is even crazier, but absolutely true, they have cognition. They remember, they act as a group for a purpose. They think, well, they don't think, but they come up with solutions to problems. It's astonishing. And we know how this works chemically. We know how it works biochemically.
For example, the communication between different individuals, they don't talk, obviously. They don't wave their flagella. What they do is they send out chemicals, which then bind to receptors on other bacteria.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, they communicate.
Dr. Sy Garte: That binding tells them there's a friend of yours here.
Eric Huffman: Why does this matter, though, to the bigger conversation about science and faith? You do emphasize the importance of purpose and cognition in your work, but what does that tell us about the bigger question of a designer? I suppose some of your ideological opponents might say, well, yeah, that stuff is, again, the product of natural selection over many millennia or what have you.
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, it could be, but here's the question. It's not so much what it tells us. It's what it's demanding us to answer. How did that happen? And what it relates to, in fact, and I have another chapter in the book on the origin of life. And the origin of life is, to me, the existence of life as we know it, which are entities, which are physical things that have agency, purpose, and cognition, all of it goes against the rules of physics and chemistry.
And that's why it has been impossible for chemists to come up with a feasible scenario that life could have started directly from chemistry and only the laws we know. And I'm echoing James Tour, who has talked about this, and many other scientists who, in fact, even some who are heavily involved in science, in the science of origin of life, and have come to the point of saying, we don't know if we'll ever know.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Yeah, to me, I'm limited in my scientific knowledge and expertise. I am well aware of that, and I think most people are. And for average, ordinary people like me, I think the most important thing I've heard you say or seen you write is that the argument for God's existence isn't really founded on the question of evolution, even though evolution is what takes center stage. It's more about origins than it is evolution, but we talk about evolution nonstop and talk very little about the miracle of origins.
We've had Dr. Tour on the podcast a couple of times before, and of course, he blew us away. And I can see why you guys have some fascinating conversations when y'all get together. But why is it that origins matter more than evolution does?
Dr. Sy Garte: Okay. So it turns out, and this I make the strong case for in the book, evolution is not the central thing about life. It's not the central principle. It's a theory which has a huge amount of data to support it, but it has no law because it's a tautology. Once you have a living organism that can reproduce with high accuracy, evolution is automatic. But until you have an organism that can reproduce with high accuracy, evolution is impossible. And I published a paper showing that. It's not the first paper to show that, but many people have.
So the fundamental point about life, why life can evolve, is that it is able to reproduce itself with high accuracy. And we know how that works. It's one of the most complicated, complex systems of anything that exists in the universe. It involves ribosomes, a genetic code, lots and lots of proteins, incredible stuff. It's called protein synthesis. The whole appendix of my book is explaining how it works and how that could not possibly have evolved because you need that to have evolution. So it's impossible for that system to... so how did it develop? Spontaneously? No. And if you think it could, read that appendix and you'll say, no, this couldn't happen by itself by chance.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. You present it as a chicken-or-the-egg problem, right? I mean, I'm going to dumb it down, but the original whatever needed evolution to exist, and evolution needed that to exist, and which came first. And yeah, there's no scientific answer on the record right now, but they try. What are the alternate explanations for origins of life other than a designer, a divine designer?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, you know, the alternative explanation is some natural thing, but the number of theories is huge. I mean, some people talk about, oh, life started in small, warm ponds that had dry and wet cycles because wet and dry cycles can make polymers. But you could take all the polymers.
See, so much of the origin of life is chemistry. What Jim talks about, Jim Tour talks about is how we can't even explain how we got all the chemistry, but even if we got all the chemistry, can make anything. We can make every protein. We can make every DNA strand, lipid. We can make all the biochemicals of life. We can't make life. What do we do with them? We put them all together, nothing happens. We make a membrane, we put them all in the membrane, nothing happens.
Eric Huffman: Right. And I've heard other theories about, you know, alien life seeding life on this planet or something as though that's some sort of a, an answer to a question when it really just answers or asks more questions about where the alien life came from and other kinds of seemingly uh supernatural explanations that are sort of shrouded in science.
Speaking of Dr. Tour, I want to kind of get into the weeds about what this conversation around the origins of life and evolution have done to the church in terms of our disunity and the way we fight over these things, Dr. Tour seems to be less comfortable with the idea of evolution being a viable mechanism for human life having appeared. You seem more comfortable with the idea of evolutionary processes eventually post origins, obviously post supernatural origins, evolution may be carried us to where we are today. Could you talk a little about the difference in how you look at this versus a Dr. Tour?
Dr. Sy Garte: I mean, I think Jim is still somewhat... he often says he's not a biologist and, you know, leaves it at that, but I think he's still thinking about the evolution issue. As am I, as is everybody. But my view about evolution is that we have no idea how life started. It was not by evolution. It couldn't be. Evolution is a property of living organisms only. So it doesn't tell us how we started.
It also doesn't cover the end part of evolution. It doesn't tell us much about humanity. Now I think that it's fairly clear that human beings are hominins. You know, we belong to the ape family, but that's not who we are. We are creatures who can talk to each other on the internet. I don't think any apes have ever been able to do that, you know, from scratch.
We are creatures who produce music that's just, you know, heavenly. I mean, there's no other word for it. We believe, we have faith, we love, we create, we're artists. Where does that come from? Now, you will hear that it comes from evolution, that it was... oh, I didn't even mention morality. We know what good and evil is. Nobody else does. No other animal does.
Now, how do we explain all that? Well, some people say, well, you know, if you're good to your kin and your friends, then that's better for you and you'll do better. And that's selection. That's called a just so story. And there's no way to explain all the other things I mentioned.
Dawkins will try to say something like... Oh, I forgot the term he uses, but it's something that... it's a change that happened in relation to another change that was selected for.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. Sy Garte: That doesn't sound like science to me. When people ask me, well, do you believe that God created anything or is it all science? And I say, no, I think God created the universe. That seems very clear to me. I think God created light. And I think God created humanity.
Eric Huffman: And how He did it is a matter of debate. And I sense you wanting to just urge the church and Christians to, in regard to this conversation, to focus more on origins than evolution, because evolution and that debate is tearing churches apart. And I think that is fundamentally true. I mean, I think there is a huge dividing line, almost as clear on liberal and conservative churches, pro-LGBT, you know, traditional sexuality churches. Young Earth creationists and churches that are open to evolution as an explanation of how we got here. There is such a dividing line among churches and denominations. Why do you think this is where we are? How have we gotten to the point that evolution has become such a fiery topic in the church?
Dr. Sy Garte: That's a great question. I don't know well how it happened. I think what has happened is that some people, on both sides of the issue, have put much more of a burden on the question of evolution than it can hold. For example, some church leaders have decided that if you're holding to evolution, you're not really a Christian. It becomes part of this cultural war that we are constantly in.
On the other side, some people will say, "Well, if you deny evolution, you're an idiot, and you make Christianity look terrible, and you're stupid." Both of those things are wrong. Evolution is trivial. It is minor. It doesn't matter. It is not important. Nobody gets hurt if you believe or don't believe in evolution.
Eric Huffman: Exactly. One workaround that I hear a lot lately is Christians will say, "Well, of course I believe in microevolution because species evolve within themselves, but macroevolution, jumping one species to another, I can't go there." That seems to me, based on what I read of your work, an oversimplification. A dualism that doesn't need to exist. Could you talk a little bit about why that's the case?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah. The reason that's the case is that almost nobody understands what evolution really is.
Eric Huffman: Right.
Dr. Sy Garte: That includes both the proponents and the opponents. It is a very minor thing. You may remember, if you saw this in the book, I have a story of someone online who wrote an argument against evolution. He said the moths that were observed during industrialization evolved to be darker. He said, "Yeah, but no moth ever changed from white to dark. Nothing happened."
Well, that is exactly right. No organism gives birth to any other organism but itself. That is absolutely true. The reason is, the reason of this misunderstanding is people think that evolution is like Pokémon evolution, where creature evolves. No. Never.
What evolves is a population. So if you have a thousand moths, or a thousand, whatever, birds of a kind, none of them evolve. But the whole population, slowly over time, gets something different. It gets bigger, it gets smaller, it gets hairier, it gets better eyesight. It gets black instead of white. And the ones that do that live longer. They have the selective advantage. And so the whole population evolves. It was never a first whatever. It's a population that evolves towards a new form.
Now, if people understood that, okay, that's no big deal. That's kind of logic.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, I could play devil's advocate and say, well, but that calls into question Adam and Eve. If there was never a first human, then what do we do with Genesis?
Dr. Sy Garte: This may shock you. I believe Adam and Eve were real. Creation by God. What I don't believe, because of the scientific evidence, is that they were the very first humans.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Dr. Sy Garte: There's a very good book by a friend of mine named Josh Swamidass called "The Genealogical Adam and Eve". And he paints a picture which is possible, it's scientifically valid, he's not saying he believes it's true, but it's scientifically valid that God could have created a single couple, 6,000 years ago, even, that eventually, that were human, in the sense of being biblically human and have all the qualities we have. And eventually, every one of us, with time, is now a descendant of that couple.
So Adam and Eve could have been, this is the genealogy part, which I also know something about, Adam and Eve could have been an actual... now, did that happen? There's no way to know. Who knows! But it is not scientifically valid to say that the creation of Adam and Eve is impossible.
I think it falls on the same category of the resurrection of Jesus. Lots of people say, no, the resurrection is impossible because you know, people don't rise from the dead. Yeah, people don't rise from the dead, but Jesus wasn't just a person, He was God incarnate. And if you believe in miracles, which I do, God can do whatever He wants with the laws of nature. So if God created Adam and Eve, that's fine. And it does not go against any scientific principles. So I'm free to believe that.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. So just to be clear, what is your message to Christians who feel threatened by conversation around evolution and who get a little bit, you know, a little bit of a tingle down their spine whenever somebody starts talking about evolution because in their view, evolution is a threat to the Bible. What's your message to Christians that might be listening right now?
Dr. Sy Garte: Read my book.
Eric Huffman: That's great, it's a win-win.
Dr. Sy Garte: Some chapters are directly related to this. First, I explain what evolution really is and what it is not. And then I talk about why it is absolutely nothing to say about faith, God, Jesus, the Bible, none of... in fact, I even make the case that there are parts of the evolution theory that go very well with parts of Genesis.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, just to go one step deeper into the hole here of this evolution conversation. If it's true that God chose evolution as a mechanism for the development of all life, including human life in one way or another, I guess, how would we reconcile that with our understanding of God being all good and all loving? Because my understanding of the natural selection process is that it is fairly brutal. And it results in 20% more or less of pregnancies ending in miscarriage. It results in extinctions of entire species. It's the predation question, the survival of the fittest, I guess. I know that's not a term everybody loves. But just how do we account for the brutality of the evolutionary process if it is really of God who is love?
Dr. Sy Garte: Okay, well, I have two answers. One is the most important answer is I don't know. I don't know the mind of God. And I don't know why God does what He does. You know, the big argument, everybody agrees that the most important argument for atheism is the problem of suffering and evil, right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. Sy Garte: Now, I don't even like that argument very much. I'll just take a little aside here because, yes, there is suffering in the world. And you could say, okay, but that's nature. Nature. God wanted a natural universe. He could have created us all to live in heaven from the beginning. That would be nice. But for whatever reason, He chose not to. He chose to create a natural world ruled by natural laws.
And if you have a world ruled by natural laws, you have to have predation, for example. You can't have a world without predation because of just ecological balances and things. You have to have earthquakes because you have to have tectonic plates if you're gonna have a world that will sustain life. There's so many things that people think of as natural evil and evil that are required for us to be here.
Hugh Ross has, you know, "Improbable Planet" and many of his other books talk about this in detail. How all the things we need to have a planet we can live on, we have. And some of those things have negative side effects.
The other thing I like to say about this problem of evil is, see, I grew up not expecting the world to be good at all. I grew up as an atheist thinking that everything is terrible, that the world is bad, that people are being exploited. When you talk about the glass half empty or half full, I'm amazed there's any water in the glass at all because I think the problem of good is just as difficult to understand as the problem of evil.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Dr. Sy Garte: Why did that person tell me to go ahead of him in line? Trivial thing. But he did. Why did he do it? You know, he saw I was tired. He saw I wasn't doing well. He said, "Go ahead, go in front of me." We don't think of that as a big deal.
Eric Huffman: That's interesting, yeah.
Dr. Sy Garte: We all do that. We all do stuff like that. We'll even do that with people we might think are our enemies. Why do we do that?
Eric Huffman: It's the next book title for you, Dr. Garte. The Problem of Good by Sy Garte.
Dr. Sy Garte: The Problem of Good.
Eric Huffman: I haven't read that one yet. That's fascinating because, yeah, I don't know if it's just a sense of entitlement that we have in our highly privileged Western minds that, of course, good should come our way. We're pretty good people or whatever, but nobody thinks about good as a-
Dr. Sy Garte: It's unusual. It's unexpected.
Eric Huffman: It really is.
Dr. Sy Garte: And as Christians, we know we don't deserve it. You know, every time a blessing comes to me, I pray, Thank you, Lord, for this undeserved blessing.
Eric Huffman: Amen. Earlier, I asked you what you would say to Christians who get up in arms about evolution. Another thing I've noticed in doing this podcast is there are a lot of people out there deconstructing. Former Christians that were raised, I've noticed, especially those raised in conservative evangelical American churches that were told early on in life that evolution is a myth and it will be proven false by science itself in our lifetime and all these pretty bravado laid-in arguments about creationism.
Coming into adulthood, going to college, realizing that parts of evolution are true, and then coming to the conclusion that because evolution is true, Christianity can't be true. We've been watching recently the conversations going on in the culture, especially one recently between Alex O'Connor, famous atheist, and a guy named Rhett. What's Rhett's last name? McLaughlin? Rhett McLaughlin.
Dr. Sy Garte: I've seen that.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, where he talks about that being the first domino to fall in his path away from Christianity. What would you say to somebody like that who says, I can't believe in Christianity because I've understood now that evolution is true? Besides, read your book.
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, what I would say is, you know, yeah, evolution is a scientific theory that is true. So, you were told incorrectly, probably by two people. One might've been a pastor in a church who said to you, evolution is false, and those who believe in evolution cannot really understand or be Christian or whatever.
And the other person who might've said that to him might've been a professor at college who said, If you don't hold to evolution, you're an idiot. And if you're a Christian, you have to drop that because Christianity is wrong and has nothing to do with reality. So, hearing from both sides, that's pretty convincing.
Me and a lot of other folks, by the way, I'm not the only one doing this work. There's a lot of us. Besides Jim Tour, there's Steve Meyer and Michael Gwilin and a whole bunch of people who are saying, all of this is false. You can be an excellent Christian. You can be a great servant of Jesus and be a complete scientist and believe in all the science that we know is true.
And if you're a scientist or a science major, you can believe in Jesus Christ and not give up one part of your scientific worldview because the whole thing is a lie, that there's any conflict between the two.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, and it sounds like another example of the fallacy of putting the cart before the horse, the cart being evolution and the horse being origin. And even for somebody like Rhett McLaughlin, if he would stop and consider origins as strongly as he's considering the problem of evolution, then he might end up in a very different place.
You just said something that caught my attention. That a scientist coming to faith in Christ doesn't need to give up any part of his scientific worldview in doing so. Have you felt like you've given up anything that you used to hold dear as a scientist, your principled scientific approach? Not one bit.
Dr. Sy Garte: Really? My faith has actually stimulated me to look into areas of science that I hadn't been doing. And I would say that, in the last five years, I've published about six or seven mainstream scientific publications. These are not articles, but papers in journals, in mainstream peer-reviewed journals on areas that I never would have worked on before.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, and just for our audience, so they have some perspective, we kind of alluded to this earlier, but your conversion to Christianity in its entirety, like your baptism, didn't happen decades ago. This is fairly recent, right?
Dr. Sy Garte: I think it's 13 years ago.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, just 13 years ago. And so, you know, your story doesn't quite line up with the trope that you often hear of these conversion stories happening in early adulthood. That's interesting to me.
Just to sum up here, as we sort of land the plane, what evidence have you found in your scientific pursuits for a divine designer that you found compelling from a scientific point of view?
Dr. Sy Garte: So that's a very interesting question, and it relates to a slightly broader thing, if I may, which is that, you know, often I've heard many famous atheists say, there's no proof for God. There's no scientific proof for God. And they're right. There's no scientific proof for anything because science does not deal in proof. It's only a function of mathematics and logic. Then they'll say, there's no evidence for God. And that's false. Now, evidence is not proof. Evidence is anything that leads to a particular conclusion.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. Sy Garte: I mean, the conclusion may not be true, but the evidence is there. And you might just find out that it's wrong. It doesn't do what you think it does. What is the evidence? There's so much of it.
First, we start with physics and cosmology. Why is there a universe? What started the Big Bang? Why are the cosmological constants that determine the nature of the universe so perfectly fine-tuned to allow for planets and stars? Without that, we wouldn't be here. There wouldn't be any life.
Then the big one for me as a biologist is, why is there life? There should not be life. If this were a world ruled only by physics and chemistry and nothing else, there wouldn't be life. Now, there could be a law, a theory that we don't know yet. And I make this a big thing of this in the book. I say there could be a law that we don't know that explains how life could arise from chemistry. It's nothing we yet know and we don't know what it is.
But even if that's true, I am absolutely convinced that if we find such a law, it'll be a lot like finding the quantum theory, which did not fit in to the atheist perspective of the time. And this new law, which explains why life can exist, will also be a pointer to God, in my view. So that's some of the evidence for a God.
And then, of course, there are all the logical, the Kalam argument, the various logical, philosophical arguments. But I'm talking about scientific evidence. And it's there. If you go into more detail, I mean, again, you can go into the geology and the planetary history that Hugh Ross does. You can go into things like the origins of genetic code. Where did information come from? Nobody knows.
I mean, the first example of information in the universe is the genetic code. And it's no accident that atheists are now, which is crazy, even Richard Dawkins thinks it's crazy, are denying that the genetic code is actually a code. It's just chemicals.
Eric Huffman: Why would they come to that conclusion?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, it's if there's a code, they know that the existence of a code is strong evidence for a d-
Eric Huffman: Ah, confirmation bias.
Dr. Sy Garte: Yes. So if you have a code, it sounds like you must have a coder, someone who produced that code. Codes don't arise spontaneously. The tree rings are not a code. They give us information, but they only give us information because we have learned that tree rings tell us about the age of the tree. It's not designed to provide information. It's just an accident.
The genetic code is designed to provide information. It is a language. If you have, you know, CCC, that tells the cell, put a glycine in this protein right here.
Eric Huffman: I think the most-
Dr. Sy Garte: Where did it come from? We don't know.
Eric Huffman: The most interesting thing about this topic we're on right now is that most people don't understand how rapidly it is growing, the breadth of awareness and knowledge of the possibility of God. Justin Brierley, our mutual friend, has written and spoken a lot about this surprising rebirth-
Dr. Sy Garte: Absolutely.
Eric Huffman: ...of belief in God. And so much of it is driven, at least in part, by scientific advancements and not just in, you know, religious evangelism. I mean, people that are in laboratories are discovering what you've discovered over your years of research, that there is a lot of evidence pointing toward a designer.
I suppose your adversaries in your field might say, so much of your story is traced back to personal, unverifiable, emotional experiences that can't be, you know, tested in a lab, that are not empirical. And so as a good scientist, you should have known better than to fall for those sorts of things. What do you say to them about the value of experiential knowledge, let's call it?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, notice when I gave the evidence, the scientific evidence for God, I didn't include any of that. I included actual scientific evidence.
Eric Huffman: Right.
Dr. Sy Garte: And people have said that to me, and not only directly to me, but in thousands of comments on my videos.
Eric Huffman: Oh, I'm sure.
Dr. Sy Garte: And what I say to them is, I don't agree with you that personal experiences are not valuable. They are totally valuable because we are human beings. You know, if you're an AI robot, maybe that's true, but I don't think you are an AI robot. So, you know, being human is why we're even having this conversation. If we were not human, we wouldn't be having the conversation. There would not be any issue of God. I don't think I've ever seen a dog or, you know, another ape pray to God. So the whole concept of God is a human thing.
And what does it mean to be human? What it means to be human is to have human consciousness, the ability to be everything that we are, creative, emotional, willing and able, and unable to avoid having personal experiences of the kind that we all have, that I have had, that they have had, okay? Everybody has had these.
And, you know, you can see the problem with this new atheism when people like Dennett say consciousness is not real. Human consciousness is not real, it's an illusion. Well, he has to say that because if consciousness is real, how does he explain it? You can't explain it. Just like you can't explain the genetic code based on pure naturalism.
So everything that they can't explain, they're now saying is not real. Sam Harris says free will is not real.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, right, I've heard that.
Dr. Sy Garte: Come on. I mean, what does that even mean? I mean, it's absurd. And so what I think has happened is that the new atheism, by becoming so militant and so crazy, has revealed that it's based on absolute nonsense the unreality of everything that makes us human. Consciousness, free will, you know-
Eric Huffman: I don't know how it's defensible because somebody that tells me that consciousness is not real, I just immediately think, then why should I trust that the product of your consciousness being that statement you just made is even real? It's self-refuting. Clearly even for a small-brained human like me, I can see it.
What about finally the more broad claim that you hear a lot that people like you and me are just basically guilty of perpetuating the God of the Gaps theory, that we're just filling in gaps in our knowledge with our idea of God instead of waiting for science to answer those questions?
Dr. Sy Garte: That's one of the most difficult issues. The way I approach it is to say, yes, it's a mistake to use God of the Gaps. It was Christians, by the way, who first identified that.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, I forgot the man's name, but it's somewhere in one of my [00:57:07] drummers, I think. Anyway, the point is that filling in God because of what we don't know is a very bad idea. But that's not what I do. I prefer to fill in God with what we do know.
For example, the origin of life. I don't say God created life because we don't know how it happened. I say, I believe that God is the creator of life because we do know that chemistry can't do it by itself. But I also leave room in the book and in my views that perhaps it wasn't God. Perhaps it is a law of nature that we don't know yet. But if it was, it's still God because God is the author of all the laws of nature, physics, chemistry, and if necessary, biology.
So, however you wanna phrase this, if you believe that God is real, there are no more gaps because God, then you believe that God is the divine creator of all. And it's just a question of figuring out how you show that.
Eric Huffman: And in science becomes a joyful pursuit of understanding this God.
Dr. Sy Garte: Amen.
Eric Huffman: And rather than an opponent of theology, it becomes a pursuit of it. I love that. That's what I hope people will see through your work and others like you who are fighting the good fight. Yeah, it was Henry Drummond, Scottish evangelist, who coined the phrase God of the gaps and said Christians should stop plugging God into every perceived. That's interesting. I never knew that, that a Christian was the one that came up with that phrase.
This has been fascinating, Dr. Garte. I just wanna close with one sort of word of wisdom from you to people that are students or raising kids who are students in a world where so much of modern education, especially higher education, seems to be awash in evolutionary materialism, let's say, which is a step beyond what you're proposing. Obviously, it's more like the idea that nothing exists outside the physical world.
I had an experience recently where I was walking through the Museum of Natural Science here in Houston, and yeah, the narrative proposed in the exhibits about evolution were that evolution explains everything. It is the unified theory of all understanding.
What do you say to parents and students who are sort of drowning in these waters, especially who are Christians, and trying to thread that needle?
Dr. Sy Garte: Yeah, what I would say is, and I say this to everybody, actually, is when it comes to evolution, turn it off, turn off, turn off the noise. There's so much noise about it because of what you said: it has become a flash point in the culture war. It should not be. It's a simple scientific theory with very few implications about anything else.
And it makes sense and it's true, but it doesn't have any implications for your faith or anybody's faith. It doesn't have any implications for philosophy. It doesn't hurt anybody whether you agree with it or not. You decide what you want to do with it. Don't listen to the hype on both sides because it's made up.
Eric Huffman: Trust God. Love the Lord. Love your neighbor.
Dr. Sy Garte: Amen.
Eric Huffman: I've heard that somewhere before. That's fascinating. Well, you are a fascinating man and I hope everybody watching can get your book. Not just the most recent one, but you've written several now and I think you are a voice that truly needs to be heard right now.
If people wanted to find more of your work online, where would they go for that?
Dr. Sy Garte: Well, my website is very easy. It's sygarte.com. My name, which luckily is unique.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, it is.
Dr. Sy Garte: And on that website, you'll find links to, well, three of the books, actually four, I have a chapter in a book called "Coming to Faith through Dawkins", edited by Dennis Alexander and Alistair McGrath. And there are 12 chapters in there, and I have the first chapter in that. So you can find that. You can find "Works of His Hands" where I discuss my journey in detail and "Science and Faith in Harmony".
Eric Huffman: Awesome. All right, Dr. Sy Garte, thanks so much for joining us on Maybe God. Thank you to everybody that's been watching and listening. I hope you'll leave your comments and questions below before you go, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Dr. Garte.
Dr. Sy Garte: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.