Eavesdropping in the Platonic Academy

Eavesdropping in the Platonic Academy

Daniel Witt

“In my view, creationists and Darwinists are the same.”

At those words (as I recall them), I sat up a bit straighter in my chair. It was summer of 2016, and I was an innocent biological science major, just at the end of my sophomore year in college. The lecturer was Richard Sternberg, a research scientist with two PhDs in biology (in evolutionary biology and in theoretical biology). And I couldn’t fathom what he might be talking about — what two views could be more different from each other than creationism and Darwinism?

...In Sternberg’s view, materialist models of life are theoretically unworkable. In other words, it is not merely that an influx of information was needed in the distant past, as most creationists and ID proponents maintain. It’s far more than that. For an organism to develop and reproduce at all, it needs a continuous input from an “immaterial genome.”
After the lecture, I cornered Sternberg and interrogated him. I wanted to know if (a) he really meant it, (b) if I had misunderstood him, and (c)… wasn’t this vitalism? 

Sternberg clarified he did mean it and I had not misunderstood, but that he was not a vitalist according to the common usage of the word — someone who believes in a “life spark” or universal “life force.” Rather, he thought (or suspected) that living organisms receive some sort of information input from what might be called a neo-Platonic soul — essentially a non-physical blueprint, to which the physical morphology of a developing organism conforms...