Does Science Point To God? - Stephen Meyer at Dallas Science Faith Conference 2020

[Music] for those who were here last year we had just an extraordinary and experience you may remember that Eric Metaxas kicked off our conference last year with the Socrates in the city style interview with me and during the interview there was a camera woman who was stage right or stage left from us I don't remember and some folks noticed that this young woman was was visibly moved during the interview and Eric is a very funny guy and we kind of wonder what what was so moving and later she wrote us a very nice letter explaining what was going on and and it was moving to her to hear a discussion of evidence that supported belief in God because during her college years she'd experienced exactly the opposite and repeatedly so she'd been a biology major and this is what she said to us in in this very moving letter she said throughout my college career professors would constantly lecture that based on the evidence that they had proved there there should be no way that anyone in class could believe in God they'd argued that the science that science was proven that God was hence a myth I was not equipped to present a valid opposition and debate I was desperate to find a commonality between my beliefs and my scientific education see a young woman had lived in cognitive dissonance for a long time and found that just listening to a discussion of some of the evidence that supports the reality of God from the natural world from our scientific study of the natural world was it was a huge encouragement to her and I hope this lecture will be same for you today at the same time it's not hard to understand how many young people have come to the impression that science properly understood undermines belief in in God and that is in fact is the argument of a whole spate of books that hit the public that the big presses starting in the aughts the oh six oh seven oh eight years and continuing right up to the two sick 2016/17 with it death of Stephen Hawking the perhaps most prominent of those books was known it was titled The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and in it Dawkins made the argument that many of the other books made that science properly understood does undermine belief in God and the reason for that is that the most powerful argument for God's existence was always the design argument and the reason for that is the design argument was based on publicly accessible observable evidence in the natural world and Darwin says and yet since dark Dawkins argued since since Darwin we've known that there is no evidence of actual design only the appearance or illusion of design his 1986 bestseller the blind watchmaker on the first page had the memorable quotation biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose keyword obviously appearance or illusion okay now Dawkins has gone on and pressed this argument in various places and one of the most memorable statements of his his claim about science undermining theism comes in a later book where he says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no design no purpose no evil no good nothing but blind pitiless indifference and I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna evaluate that proposition today in the lecture but to begin I'd like to just contrast the perspective of Dawkins and the New Atheists with that of the Bible writers in the Hebrew Bible and the Psalms it says that the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands in the New Testament you get a similar view st. Paul says that for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature eternal power and some of the older translations is rendered as wisdom I rather divine nature is rendered as wisdom have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made from what we can observe in the natural world around us now obviously it's not to surprise the Bible writers and the New Atheists disagree about what science can tell us about the reality of God but it might surprise you to know that the early founders of modern science in in virtually every one of the major disciplines had a very different perspective this is the front piece or title page from one of the earliest works of modern biology by a 17th century biologist John ray the title is the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation this is quite simply a paraphrase of the Romans one passage that I just read this was for Ray not only the inspiration for doing science it was what he was finding when he looked at biological or living living living organisms and there are many many examples of this in the in the period that historians of science call the Scientific Revolution there's a wonderful quote from Johannes Kepler one of the first great astronomers and he said that in doing his astronomy he was merely thinking God's thoughts after him and he went on to say since we astronomers or priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature it benefits us to be thoughtful not of the glory of our minds but rather above all else of the glory of God there's a wonderful book by the Baylor and formerly University of Washington historian of science Rodney stark called the for the glory of God which is about the the founding of modern science in this period known as the Scientific Revolution notice too in Kepler's quotation the the use of the word the book the metaphor the book of nature one of the ways I was able to discern the Christian foundations of modern science which many historians now affirm is in the metaphors of these early scientists use they were all theological this book of nature is meant to reflect the idea that just as God has revealed himself through the book of Scripture he has also done so through the book of nature and Kepler was one of the one of its readers another metaphor that was commonly used in this period of the Scientific Revolution was the metaphor of a clock or of a mechanism a grand mechanism Robert Boyle the great chemist I used this he's in nature tis like a rare clock where all things are so skillfully contrived that the engine being one set moving all things proceed according to the artificers grand design and this tradition of what is sometimes called natural theology but is also there was also a theology of nature involved reached an almost majestic rhetorical heights in the works of Sir Isaac Newton the passage I have on the screen is from the general skolem to the Principia it's an appendix that Newton attached a few years after the publication of his great work describing the universal law of gravity with all the mathematical precision that he was able to bring to that task and in this appendix this general skolem Newton explains that the the laws of nature which he has described now beautifully in the most important law for him gravitation are an expression of God's constant ordering of the world he actually alludes to the passage in Colossians 1 in this general skolem but he goes on to say that these laws of nature by the way law the laws of nature is another theological metaphor there are laws there's an orderly concourse to nature because there is a lawgiver the order is a manifestation of the orderly character of God so that's three metaphors all theological that are giving rise to this scientific way of thinking the book of nature nature is a clock or a grand mechanism and nature is a lawful realm but Newton goes on and presses the argument of it further and he's talking about the solar system and he says though these bodies may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity they could by no means have first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws thus this most beautiful system of the Sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being capital B and here he makes a design argument in arguably one of the greatest works of physics ever written years ago I've told this story before I won't tell it in detail but years ago I testified before a group called the United States Commission on civil rights and they were investigating whether or not there was a viewpoint discrimination in the teaching of biological origins and science in our public schools and I cited Newton as an example of someone who accepted the idea of intelligent design my opposite number said well that's true he accepted he had intelligent he did accept intelligent design but he took great pains to keep his religious ideas about intelligent design out of his scientific writings and I offered this quotation as a fairly decisive counter-argument to that claim this is right in the general Scalia McGann arguably to the Principia arguably one of the greatest works of science ever written so this raises obviously a huge question how did we get from Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens and Bill Nye the Science Guy and Neil deGrasse Tyson and this whole array of of spokespersons for science who are saying that science properly understood undermines belief in God how did we get to those folks from Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle and Johannes Kepler and the whole pantheon of great scientists who got this enterprise going well there's a there's a very interesting story and there's a story of a shift in worldview and it begins in the roughly the 18th or the 19th century the very beginning in the 19th century we've had prior to that what historians of ideas called the Enlightenment and philosophy and during the 18th century and in the 19th century we get a perspective arises in science that that scholars call scientific materialism and I'll talk a bit more about that in a minute but one of the first great manifestations of this thinking came in a work of physics by a French physicist named Pierre Laplace and Laplace wrote a book called the celestial mechanics that attempted to do precisely what Newton said could not be done in that quotation that I just read to you which was to explain the origin of the solar system by reference to gravitational forces alone Newton had made essentially what scientists today call a fine-tuning argument that the forces the there was a delicate balance of gravitational force between all the different planets and then the Comets passing through and the Sun that kept the whole system stable and it's so quite a remarkable feat to get all those those forces balanced and he said it had to be finely tuned from the beginning to make that possible Laplace advanced an explanation that he thought could explain the origin of the universe without such fine-tuning it's now doubtful that he succeeded but at the time it seemed very impressive and he was later called into the palace of versaille to receive commendation from none other than the emperor napoleon he publishes his book in 1799 he has this encounter with Napoleon in 1802 now they're very various reports about this encounter but one of them at least tells the story this way that Napoleon commends him thanks him for showing up the British with his book that's better than Newton's and that was a joke because you know there was a little and it's he between the two countries and in any case but then he says you know but Newton wrote extensively about God and his scientific work and yet I see no mention of of God in any of your scientific calculations or descriptions and Laplace is said to have puffed himself up and said see it or I have no need of that hypothesis that was my French accent I apologize the earliest account of this encounter comes from a historian named Herschel who's who says who did not include this quotation but described the encounter very much along this line is it that Laplace was very much the secular scientist who was going to do away with the god hypothesis now whether that exact quote was said or not it certainly captured the spirit of the age and there were many other theories during the 19th century especially theories about origins that dispense with the need for a creative intelligence or designer or God of any kind in geology there were new theories about river deltas and canyons and mountain ranges that referred all very good theories but they referred to slow natural and slow gradual and purely naturalistic processes no no need for a design hypothesis there in biology more strikingly we've already heard about Charles Darwin and his work on the Origin of Species and in 1859 he attempted to explain the origin of new forms of life by reference to the unguided undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations in modern biology textbooks today his theory is often described in exactly those terms this is a quotation from a popular college text by Douglas Fatuma in evolutionary biology and he says this he says by coupling the undirected purposeless variations to the blind uncaring process of natural selection Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life superfluous unnecessary Darwin had no need of a design hypothesis in fact as Dawkins has correctly pointed out Darwin was attempting to explain adaptation the adaptation of organisms to their environment the appearance of design without reference to an actual designing intelligence natural selection was thought to be an unguided undirected process that had no that showed no evidence of a intelligent guidance of any kind now Darwin's Darwin's theory was extended very quickly soon after that John West has already talked about the Descent of Man and how we use it to explain the origin of human beings and but others evolutionary scientists in the late 19th century extended it in the other direction to try to account for the origin of the first life the simplest living cell and how it might have come together as a result of a few chemical reactions to then get the biological evolutionary process going and so by the end of the 19th century there was a nearly seamless account of where human beings had come from and everything in the natural world had come from all the way back to the origin of our solar system Laplace explained the origin of the solar system the geologists explained the origin of the great geologic features on planet earth Darwin explained the origin of new species and then the origin of human beings as well and other chemical evolutionary theorists attempted to explain the origin of the very first life and so you had this seamless account from the solar system all the way to the present that required no action of a divine or designing intelligence of any kind purely undirected natural or material processes could explain where everything came from now as a result of this synthesis in science all these theories of origin there arose what scholars refer to as a philosophy known as scientific materialism or a worldview I mean familiar with the term worldview Wow excellent ok when I used to teach about worldview with my freshman college students I define a worldview as a personal philosophy or lens through which you interpret reality especially about fundamental questions when I was in college I was a physics major and one of the reasons I ended up majoring in physics was my dad was an engineer and when I was heading off to college II said listen whatever you want to major in is find it you don't have to be an engineer like me he knew I was kind of not mechanically adept and so he said but when you get to college please take at least two years of college math because if you don't take the math you're going to be limited and what you can major in so I took two years of college math I said sure dad I'll follow your advice and by the time I got done with the two years of college math it our small College about all you could major in was either math or physics and I think math or physics was what my dad won because it was as close to engineering as you could get in any case I was always interested in these worldview questions these philosophical questions and I would sneak across campus every every term and sign up for at least one philosophy class and in my junior year I was taking a course called atheistic existentialism which was you know the existential despair of Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre the idea that you know that life is meaningless and when we die we rot and we have to create our own value because there's no God to confer value on us and and it was a lot of existential despair and I was wallowing in it and I was doing very well at existential despair and I got an A in the class I my grade slip came home at at Christmas time my dad intercepted as he always did even into my college years wanted to talk about the grades over dinner one night he's reading from the from the grade slip and it says atheistic exa and he butchered the pronunciation on purpose to make the point that it wasn't a valid class and what in the blank he says is atheistic what Juma thinking and then he reads the grade and it's an A and then he reads the next grade and it's theoretical mechanics which was my most important physics class that term and he paused for dramatic effect looked over his glasses and he said be and he gave me that look which in our family minute is now time for offspring to give a count of offsprings behavior and I got super defensive and I said dad dad dad dad I know these these these philosophy classes don't mean anything to you but they're important too because that's where you weren't learn about worldviews and every dad everybody has a worldview I mean you have a worldview a world is just a lens through which you view reality and interpret reality if you don't have a worldview you can't understand where people are coming or why they use the words they do to describe their their perspectives on politics and culture and and he cut me off and he said son you don't need a worldview you need a job [Applause] apologies to people who heard the story last year but I was told I couldn't cut it out so I tried to tell him that that was a world view that it was materialistic but you know I didn't get very far I ended up putting together a resume and just like that I was here in Dallas working in the oil industry in any case the worldview that has dominated our 20th and now early 20th century especially in the elite culture the knowledge culture the law schools the courts the media the universities especially the science departments of many universities and research institutes is a materialistic one and one of the things that I used to teach about world news is that every worldview has to answer certain basic questions not questions like who won the World Series or who's gonna win the next election or what's the formula for salt world use answer questions like what's the nature of a human being or more even more fundamentally what is the thing or the entity from which everything else comes and materialism answer to that question that foundational question philosophers sometimes call that the question of ontology it just or a writer on worldviews James I are just used to call it the prime reality question what's the thing or the entity of the process from which everything else comes how do you think materialism answers that question wait first how does theism answer that question it's God and and in classical judeo-christian theism it's a personal God with a mind and intentions and and even feelings and interest in loves in materialism the answer to that question is matter and energy and our our late colleague Philip Johnson of the University of California Berkeley Law School used to explain it this way he'd he gave an inverted paraphrase of the the ja9 prologue the book of John in the New Testament where it says in the beginning was the word he says no no in the materialist view it's from eternity past there was no beginning and from eternity past were the particles and the energy and the particles and the energy arrange themselves to become more complicated chemicals and those chemicals arranged themselves to become flex living stuff the first cell and that complex living cell a cell then started to evolve by undirected Darwinian processes and that produced all the forms of life we see today including human beings and eventually one of those forms of life namely human beings conceived of the idea of God so in the theistic worldview God is at the beginning as the prime reality and God creates and then shapes matter to bring about all the forms of life we see today he's a creator and a designer in the materialistic world view it's matter and energy are there from eternity past there is no beginning and eventually the idea of God arises but only as an idea only an illusion in the mind of human beings you could not have two more diametrically opposed worldviews and those are the world views that are in contest today in our Western culture though in the elite culture to this point and over the last hundred years or so one of them has been clearly winning and that's the materialistic worldview it is the dominant worldview in the knowledge culture now the story I want to tell this morning is a story of the impending reversal of that worldview I say impending because it's not been fully realized yet but the scientific evidence that's been coming online over the last century and especially in the in the very recent decades is in fact overturning scientific materialism it has implications that are decidedly non materialistic and instead I think point in the opposite direction not only to intelligent design which I've written about before but even to a designer that has the attributes that Jews and Christians have always ascribed to God and that's what I call the return of the god hypothesis and that's what my new book will be about now I want to give a sketch of the argument of that book and the story of that book in the time that we have remaining in fact I tell a fair bit about this history of science that I've already discussed in the book as well one way to think of materialism I used these little worldview diagrams I used to be a terrible well I still am I can't draw and I when I get to the chalkboard my students would made a lot of fun of me so they converted me to PowerPoint in my early years in teaching and this was one way of conveying the materialistic ideas the blue circle represents the physical universe that thing on the long string string represents a pendulum too to depict the laws of nature they're regular action and then outside of the universe in a theistic worldview you would have the idea of a transcendent God who brought the universe into existence but in materialism there is no such entity matter and energy not only are the things from which everything came they are all that really exists they eventually when we die we will rot and return to our elemental matter and energy now this worldview encountered an unexpected challenge in the field of astronomy starting in the teens and 20s the nineteen teens and 20s some of that began with a man named Edwin Hubble Hubble was interestingly a lawyer who went into astronomy at a very propitious time they had just started building these large domed telescopes at Mount Wilson in California in particular this is a picture of Hubble in his viewing station at Mount Wilson looking out the big dome and he began to use new photographic technology to scan the heavens and he was able with these big telescopes to collect on photographic plates far more light that had ever been collected before as he observed these little dots in the night sky and this is one of the his first photographic plates of this of what was then dubbed a spindle nebula he also was finding other interesting astronomical phenomena little tiny points of light that people thought might be stars we're now revealing intricate structure this is a spiral nebula now this was very significant because Hubble's beginning in his observations about 1924 four years before there had been a big debate at the Smithsonian between two groups of astronomers one group led by an astronomer named Harlow Shapley who thought that the little tiny nebula that we were seeing in the night sky were just stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and others a strong another one another astronomer Eber Curtis held a different point of view he said that the spiral nebulae were actually Island universes that they were galaxies beyond our own Milky Way galaxy and so there was this debate among astronomers are we the only galaxies or are there ones beyond our Milky Way as well and Hubble's discoveries coupled with some other advances in astronomy in particular some pioneered by Henry at eleven an astronomer at the Harvard Observatory were enabled Hubble to settle this question Leavitt had used a kind of star known as a Cepheid variable to come up with a very sophisticated way of measuring distances to distant galaxies and her work coupled with another astronomers insights an astronomer named hertzsprung enabled Hubble to crack this mystery about whether we were the only galaxies or there were ones beyond because using Levitz method and hertzsprung method Hubble was able to measure the distance to the Andromeda nebula now called the Andromeda galaxy because what he determined was at that Andromeda nebula was nine hundred thousand light-years away from us and yet at the time the measurement for the extent of the Milky Way was three hundred thousand light-years if it's nine hundred thousand light years away in the whole Milky Way is only three hundred thousand light-years across then clearly that's beyond our galaxy and represents another galaxy and in fact over the years astronomers have discovered that Hubble didn't know the half of it in fact what astronomers have discovered if one of his students in fact Allan Sandage was crucial to this research and Standage will figure in our story in a minute but astronomers discovered that the visible universe has some 200 billion galaxies this is if you see the little square on the box I'm going to amplify it to give you a look at what astronomers call the Hubble Deep Field you think this might be something like a a quadrant in the sky the size of a dime held at arm's length I'm just guessing but a little tiny quadrant in the night sky and it reveals galaxies galore so the first major thing that Hubble discovered was that number one there are galaxies beyond our own number two they are Hubble and his students they're numerous there everywhere we live in an enormous universe and people up until the 1920s had no idea of this only during the last hundred years have we had any sense of the scope and size of the universe but Hubble discovered a third thing and again building on the the work of earlier astronomers he and a colleague named hummus in' discovered that the light coming from these distant galaxies was redder than it would otherwise look whether what looked its spectrum of frequencies in the light was shifted towards the red end of the ultraviolet spectrum you know if you shine light through a prism it separates into the different colors the red light corresponds to the longer wavelengths and if an object is moving away from us the wavelengths of that light or it also happens with sound will stretch out you know the Doppler effect was sound if you've got a train going by and the train whistle goes mm the pitch lowers that's because the sound waves are stretching out and then they sound lower to our ears the same thing happens with light if an object is moving away the light will stretch out and it will look redder to our eye than it should look and what astronomers were discovering in the 1920s was that the light from these distant galaxies that Hubble was discovering was red shifted as if each of those distant galaxies was moving away from us now as scientists began to think about this they realized that this discovery had a profound implication about the origin of the universe in the first place if all the galaxies are moving away in the forward direction of time that implies that the universe is actually expanding and getting bigger and bigger but then think about that theoretically think about it in your mind's eye what's happening well if the universe is expanding in the forward direction of time what about the reverse direction of time what if you back that time clock up already to go back a thousand years or a million years or a billion years or however far you want to go back at some point all that matter all that expanding space is going to be congealing to a place where that to a beginning to that expansion and arguably a beginning to the universe itself now this was mind-blowing and all that all the thinking about this is happening in the 1920s and this turned out to be a very troubling idea for a famous physicist with really bad hair Einstein in the 19-teens had devised a new theory of gravity known as general relativity and in his theory he showed how matter could bend space and that implement that implied that to get if the universe today if history of gravity was true and the universe was just a static entity not expanding or contracting that it should have collapsed back on itself and the universe should just be a clump of matter with no space so he realized that if if his theory was true then there had to be something opposing gravity that could account for the existence of empty space between material bodies and that implied that the universe was dynamic that something was there was an outward push going on but he didn't like that idea because if there was an outward push going on in the forward direction of time then again that implied a beginning so Einstein posited what is now known as the cosmological constant he proposed that the outward push of gravity and or the outward push against gravity and the pull of gravity were perfectly balanced and he suggested that that out he gave a value to that outward push that had an that was exactly calibrated to portray a universe that was in static tension neither expanding nor contracting now there were a nearly infinite range of values he could have chosen for that cosmological constant that outward push but he arbitrarily chose the one that would imply the universe is static and not expanding now in the 20s he was confronted on a in a cab with a faint by a famous Belgian priest physicist named father George's lemaître and Lamont rotolo about Hubble's evidence and so a few years later Einstein at the invitation of Hubble went out to Pasadena to the Mount Wilson Observatory and here's a picture of him there's a famous newsreel stuff from 1931 Einstein looking through Hubble's telescope and he then later announced to the media and had an interview in the New York Times where he explained that Hubble's evidence had convinced him that he was wrong and he told the New York Times the universe is not static in fact he acknowledged that it had a beginning and later acknowledged that his arbitrary choice of values for the cosmological constant was the greatest mistake of his scientific career because he didn't allow the evidence rather he allowed a philosophical pre predilection an assumption a presupposition to dictate his view of what nature must be doing rather than letting nature itself tell him I'd like to say the heavens talked back to to Professor Einstein now Einstein wasn't the only one who didn't like the idea of the universe having a beginning the famous physicist row physicist the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington said philosophically the notion of the beginning of the present order is repugnant to I should like to find a genuine loophole I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang the expanding universe is preposterous it leaves me cold he was British now notice what's going on here in in that this is a theory that in psychology they call the theory of denial what what's what why isn't he what why doesn't he like this he says philosophically it's philosophically repugnant that the universe should have a beginning in a later physicist explain what's so philosophically repugnant about the beginning Robert Dicke of Princeton University said an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past if the universe is infinitely old then before the solar system we can posit elementary particles and before the elementary particles we can posit an energy field and before that we can just say it's always been here we don't need to think about what caused the material universe to come into existence but if the material material universe had a definite beginning then it becomes very difficult to posit a materialistic explanation for the origin of matter because there was no matter before the matter came into existence and that's what was troubling people now the implications of what came to be known as the Big Bang Theory became even more troubling because of developments in theoretical physics starting in the 1960s some of you may have seen the little film theory of everything about the life of Stephen Hawking and many of you would know I assume of Hawking and his amazing story the physicists confined to a wheelchair because of the his affliction with ALS Lou Gehrig's disease in his graduate years his PhD years the disease started to overtake him he was working on black hole physics and he was applying Einstein's theory of general relativity to to black holes realizing that if there couldn't be places in the universe where matter is densely compacted that space gets so tightly curved that nothing can get out not even light that's the idea of a black hole one day he had the idea that black hole physics might apply to the origin of the universe itself because he began to think about that back extrapolation we were talking about if the universe is expanding outward in the forward direction of time and all of the matter then there's you wind the clock backwards all the matter would have been more and more and more densely compacted as you go back in time till eventually it would get so densely compacted that space wouldn't get so tightly curved that the matter would get more densely compacted and the space will get more tightly curved and eventually you get to what he called a singularity a beginning point a beginning point in time and arguably even a beginning point in space perhaps now Einsteins this is all based on Einstein's theory of general relativity and I put one of the field equations here because John West is going to have a little test afterwards the great thing about math is it's always telling us something about nature that you can put into words and the great physicist there won't be a test by the way the great physicist John what Wheeler said that what Einstein's theory was saying is that matter tells space and time how to curve and space-time tells matter how to move and Einstein's theory then implied that if matter is getting more densely compacted then you'd get to this place where space will get so tightly curved that you get to a beginning a beginning and time in a beginning in space now there are some potential loopholes that can be exploited and what later came to be known as the singularity theorem but I'll talk about those in the Q&A if they come up there's a something called quantum cosmology that's been proposed to try to get around this but as the the bottom line take-home is that from both from theoretical physics and there were other developments something called the board Guth the Lincoln theorem that was based on special relativity as well as this theorem of Hawking and later Roger Penrose you have theoretical physics in observational astronomy converging on the conclude it's best we can tell the universe had a beginning I was in conference here in Texas in Dallas in 1985 it was a conference that I'll tell a bit more about later but it changed the direction of my life as I first encountered some of these amazing evidences and at the conference one of Edwin Hubble's in fact Edwin Hubble's Prize student his successor at Caltech Allan Sandage spoke Sanders was a well known agnostic and a secular Jew and agnostic and the conference was set up to discuss the origin of the universe the origin of life and the origin of consciousness from both a theistic and a materialistic perspective and there were great scientists on both sides of the question I came assuming that Sanders was going to speak with the materialists and agnostics and he surprised many people in the audience when he ascended the podium and insisted on sitting with the theists something had happened in his lecture on the origin of the universe he explained some of the evidence that I've been talking about and much more for the idea that the universe had a beginning and at the end I remember him staring into the camera I had the footage of this event later and he said describing the evidence for the beginning and he said here is evidence for what can only be described as a super natural event there is no way this could have been predicted within the realms of physics as we know it and what what Sanders was getting at was what I alluded to earlier if the material universe has a beginning then you can't invoke matter to explain its origin because matter is the thing that needs explaining something beyond nature something beyond physics must do that and Sandage at this meeting in 1985 explained how this had led him to some very serious soul-searching he knew what the evidence was pointing to but he didn't want to accept it and that began to cause him not so much to question the evidence but began to question himself what is it about me I pride myself on my scientific objectivity he said and yet I don't want to allow the possibility this that this might be pointing to a transcendent cause there's a No argument he announced at that conference by the way his conversion to belief in God and in fact to Christianity there's an ancient argument called the cosmological argument that goes like this everything that begins to exist must have a cause the universe began to exist the universe must have a cause and since every cause is separate from itself that cause must transcend matter space time and energy the medievals said and we call that cause god this argument has been resuscitated because the second premise always the most controversial one the universe began to exist has been confirmed by scientific evidence it's also oddly reminiscent of something that might have occurred to you the first words of the Bible are in the beginning so this ancient affirmation in the scripture has been confirmed by modern science there's also many affirmations in Scripture of the idea that time itself has a beginning that time is a created entity and that's exactly what the new physics of Einstein is saying that the universe that space and time are linked and at the beginning what began was space and time as well as matter and energy one of the physicists who played a big role in the confirmation of the Big Bang Theory who won a Nobel Prize for his work on what's called the cosmic background radiation man named Arno Penzias put it this way he said the best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses the Psalms and the Bible as a whole now remember the quote I used at the beginning of lecture the universe we observe has exactly the properties we should expect if there is a bottom no design no purpose nothing but blind pitiless indifference leading cosmologists are now saying that the evidence we have is exactly what I'd expect if I were a theist in fact if I were a biblical theist we have evidence of that the universe the material universe had a beginning now it turns out that there are other unexpected things that have been discovered from the standpoint of Dawkins's scientific materialism one of those other discoveries has occurred in the area of physics proper and it's sometimes called the evidence of fine-tuning or anthropic fine-tuning or cosmological fine-tuning it's the idea that many many separate parameters the strength of the different physical forces gravitational force electromagnetic force the force is operating at the atomic and nuclear level that the strong and weak nuclear forces the expansion rate of the universe that we just talked about the speed of light many different parameters or features of our fundamental physics have just the right strengths just the right values to allow for the possibility of life a physicist that I encountered in my PhD years in Cambridge Sir John Polkinghorne used to use a wonderful visual illustration he to get this across sometimes physicists by the way refer to our universe is a Goldilocks universe all the forces they're not too strong not too weak not too not too not too fast not too slow everything is just right to allow for the possibility of life and poking horn used the visual illustration to get this across he said imagine that you're flying around in your spaceship on Star Trek The Next Generation and your spaceship docks at this very special space station that's has the sign universe creating space station and inside you go inside and there's the universe creating machine itself and you look at all the dials and the knobs and the sliders for all the fundamental forces and the ratios between the forces and you realize that they have very precise settings but yet they could have been different each one could have been set a little bit one clicked this way one click that way and because you're physicists of course you are you pull out your pencil you start to make some calculations and you realize that if any one of those forces or rates or speeds had been a little tiny bit different one way or another that life would have been impossible in fact the universe would have either rika elapsed or it would have gone to a he'd death or something catastrophic would have happened he said what do you make of encountering all those strange coincidences that make your very existence possible and then he said in his understated British way when I interviewed him one time he said well I don't say that the atheist is stupid I just say that theism provides a more satisfying explanation in fact many previously atheistic or agnostic physicists attribute their conversion to theistic belief to this fine-tuning evidence one of those is Sir Fred Hoyle who initially opposed the Big Bang strenuously because of its obvious theistic implications but upon discovering one of these fine-tuning factors himself actually several he came to the conclusion that there must be a transcendent mind behind the universe and his famous quotation is a common-sense interpretation of the data suggest that a super intellect is monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology to make life possible I love the way the Monkees always get into the origins stories even if it's physics now there's a third area of science that has contributed to this challenge to materialism and to what I call the return of the god hypothesis and this is the evidence of design that's been uncovered in biology I won't talk much about this our colleague Michael Behe is here but you may know that he's made famous these many many discoveries of people in biochemistry and molecular biology of miniature machines inside cells this is a still of an animation that we had rendered of a little molecular machine called the bacterial flagella motor it's a rotary engine with rotors and stators and oring Zanda bushings and drive shaft and a whip-like tail that functions like a propeller it can change directions on a quarter of a turn in some species going a hundred thousand rpm one way and then a hundred thousand the other unbelievably efficient little machine there are many such machines in cells turbines sliding clamps you name it it's a little robotic walking motor proteins we have animations of them on many of our websites my site Darwin's doubt has a number has a whole playlist of these animations of these tiny miniature machines and B he's made a famous argument about how these machines betray a property he calls irreducible complex that suggests that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutation is not sufficient to build these in a gradual way I'll let him explain the argument for my purposes that's a variant I think it's a very powerful argument for design but it's also exposed the basis of another argument for intelligent design and that's the one that I've worked on these miniature machines are made of molecules called proteins and present this this particular protein is that little hook protein that kept the propeller in the right place in the flagellar motor that I just showed ok and each one of these proteins are made of smaller subunits called amino acids and for the amino acids to fold up into the right structure they have to be sequenced exactly right and let me just illustrate quickly I talked to a science teacher before class before the lecture she said she'd gotten some of these snap-loc beads to use in her class so I'm helping this toy company out they're getting a lot of sales I need a royalty so this is just a simple illustration I stole these from my kids when they were little these snap lock beads represent the different protein forming amino acid each snap lock bead represents an amino acid there are 20 different protein forming amino acids and for these long they link up into chains and if they're sequenced properly the forces between the amino acids will cause the change to adopt particular three-dimensional shapes and if they get very precise shapes then they can perform very specific functions like holding a whip like propeller and the right in the right space in the right location and that raises a deeper question what tells the amino acids how to get lined up properly so that they can form proteins that do all these important jobs in cell's proteins catalyze reactions they've formed the parts of molecular machines they process information they do all these jobs but you can only build proteins if the amino acids are arranged right and that raises the big question how causes the amino acids to get arranged properly and this was the great discovery of what's now known as the molecular biological revolution this is the 1950s and 60s the answer of course is DNA and the information is inscribed along the spine of the DNA molecule you may recall that in 1953 Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule they discovered that it had a beautiful double helical structure five years later in 1958 Francis Crick put forward something that was even more profound it's known as the sequence hypothesis and it was the idea that the letters in the DNA code or the chemical subunits along the spine on the interior of the molecule you see the ones that are labeled AC G and T those are for chemical subunits that start with those letters and the strange thing that Crick proposed which turned out to be true is that those chemical subunits called nucleotides or nucleotide bases are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters like in a section of software's the zeros and ones that is to say it's not the shape of those chemical subunits or their chemical properties per se that allows them to perform a function in DNA it's their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention that was later discovered and that is now known as the genetic code in other words we have genetic text and genetic code inside the cell and that genetic information is used to direct the cell's protein assembly machinery to produce those proteins that fold up into the specific shapes that allow them to do all the amazing jobs in the cell so the big discovery is that the foundation of life there is information there is digital code the our famous redmond washington entrepreneur Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program only much more complex than any we've ever created it's directing the construction of proteins inside the cell the engineers may be from with the cad/cam technology where engineers will use digital code to directly assembly in mechanical parts like for example where to put the airplane rivets on an airplane wing at the Boeing plant something very similar is going on inside the cell where digital code and DNA is directing the construction of the proteins and protein parts that service those molecular machines extraordinary now I first encountered all this evidence at that same conference in 1985 that I mentioned to you I was a young scientist I was working in the oil industry I was doing digital signal processing of seismic data for a big oil company I attended this conference about the origin of the universe the origin of life and the mind-body question and in this session on the origin of life there were three scientists on the podium who will be with us at one o'clock this afternoon Charles Saxton Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen and I see Roger just in front of me I heard these three scientists speaking and another scientist who had a very similar perspective his name was Dean Kenyon Kenyon had been the leading chemical evolutionary theorist during the 1970s he had formulated a theory of how you got to the first living cell from the chemicals in the prebiotic soup with apologies to Calvinists here he his theory was known as biochemical predestination and the idea was that the chemicals would by forces of chemical attraction arranged themselves into DNA and proteins and then from there you get cells and off you'd go at this conference Kenyon announced that he no longer accepted his own theory he openly repudiated it instead instead said that he thought that the evidence of design in the digital code in DNA made him think it was time for the Philosopher's to reopen the question of natural theology is there a mind or a God behind all the complexity we see inside living cells now at that conference I first met Charles Saxton dr. thaks and he was one of the other presenters on the theistic side of the origin of life discussion he and his co-authors had just written a great book called the mystery of life's origin you'll hear more about it this after noon and in mystery they showed chapter and verse why these ideas of chemistry producing code would not work you can't get from the chemistry in the prebiotic soup to the code that you need to build the first cell and in an in a philosophical epilogue they propose that maybe we're barking up the wrong tree instead of trying to explain the origin of life by reference to chemistry and physics and material processes maybe the information in life is pointing to what they called an intelligent cause is that a possibility after the conference a mutual friend introduced me to Charles Charles and I hit it off and I began to go after work to meet him to learn more about this fascinating origin of life question I had been just recently married and alas my long-suffering new bride kept wondering where on earth I was what was taking me so long to get home from work and we didn't have cell phones and days those days and I'm terribly absent-minded and I'm afraid I was very light sometimes so it was a problem but we got it worked out and Charlie began to mentor me a year later I went off to grad school I wasn't yet fully convinced by his idea of an intelligent cause but I was intrigued and I wondered was it possible to make a scientific argument for the idea of intelligent design and oddly the scientists that I found most helpful in this regard was Charles Darwin I began to study his method of historical scientific reasoning because Darwin was concerned to figure out how do you decide what happened or what caused events to happen in the remote past and he had a method of reasoning that later scholars called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation if you want to explain an event the remote past you posit a bunch of possible causes and then you affirm the one that would best explain the event well that's really good except how do we decide which one is best well it turned out that Charles Darwin had a mentor as well whose name was Charles the great geologist Lyle and Lyle had a criterion that Darwin used in the later historical scientists have use to decide which among a set of competing hypotheses was best and that idea hit me like a thunderbolt one day as I was reading the title page of his book the famous book the principles of geology being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface by reference and this is when the light went on by reference to causes now in operation how do we decide which of a group of possible hypotheses is best the one that posits a cause which we know is sufficient to produce the effect in question let me give you an example I went to college in Eastern Washington out in the Palouse country the rolling hills where you have wheat fields in eastern Washington day you can still find occasional little white patches of powdery stuff if you weren't around on May 18th 1980 to see where that white powdery stuff came from you would have to use a forensic or historical style of reasoning to figure out what what caused it so you proposed multiple competing hypotheses maybe it was an earthquake maybe it was a flood maybe it was a great storm maybe it was a volcanic eruption of those four possible causes which one is the best which point provides the best explanation the volcano why because we woke a Mount st. Helens yeah we've seen volcanoes produce that kind of thing and we don't see earthquakes or floods or storms doing so in other words our knowledge of causes now in operation of presently acting causes allows us to reconstruct what happened in the past and then I asked myself a question what is the cause now in operation that produces digital code that produces information I realize it's a mind go back to the Bill Gates quote digital code in software comes from programmers soon after I posed this question I came across a passage in a book on the application of information theory to molecular biology it was written by an early pioneer in this field named Henry Cuellar and on page 16 of this little book he said in an offhand he said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity conscious activity is the using Lyle's terms the in our uniform and repeated experience it's conscious activity that generates information and I got to thinking is that right and then I realize of course it was whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source where the it's ultimate source whether it's in software code or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal when we get back to the ultimate source it always comes to a we realize it comes from a mind not a material process and this is the argument I developed in the book signature in the cell which extended the philosophical epilogue of the mystery of life's origin twenty-five years later so where are we let's let's pull all these threads of evidence together we've had three main three main huge pieces of evidence that have come to us about biological and cosmological origins first the material universe had a beginning second the universe has been fine-tuned for life from the beginning third we have evidence of intelligent design in life indeed infusions of information of digital information since the beginning now let's use that method of multiple competing hypotheses and apply it at the worldview level which of the metaphysical hypotheses or worldviews best explains this ensemble of evidence we've seen that materialism doesn't explain any of this all of these evidences are challenged to materialism you need a mind to explain code you need a mind to explain fine-tuning and you need a transcendent something possibly a mind to explain the origin of the material universe itself but there are other worldviews there's deism there's pantheism there's panspermia that's the idea that space aliens might have been the designers and there's theism let's look at each of these in turn materialism doesn't cut it for the reasons just mentioned but what about pantheism pantheism is the eastern philosophy the idea that God and matter are coextensive that God is in all the material things and the material things are an extension of God that Brahman is Atman and not man as Brahman is the way it's said in the in the Eastern philosophies but there's a problem with using the pantheist of God to explain the origin the universe because the pantheists that God and the material universe are coextensive they're one in the same if the material universe comes into existence then that means that the pantheists that God would have come into existence at that time - and in other words the pantheus that God isn't transcendent and so it doesn't stand outside the universe in a way that would allow it to function is the cause of the universe in addition the pantheous that God is not a mind or a person to whom you can pray or converse it's an immaterial mystic unity that binds everything together and so it can't explain the fine-tuning or the evidence of digital code either well what about D ISM well deism is the idea that there is a transcendent God who does have a mind but that God put the universe in motion at the beginning and has had nothing more to do with it ever since that conception of God might explain the evidence of a beginning it might even explain the fine-tuning but it couldn't explain the evidence of design that we have coming down the timeline well after the beginning of the universe the infusions of information into our biosphere that make life possible well what about this very odd idea of space alien designers I don't want to ridicule it too much because no less a personage than Francis Crick proposed this in a book in 1981 Richard Dawkins you may know even floated the idea in an interview at the end of a film called expelled in 2008 it's the idea that well yes there may be a Dawkins put it a signature of design inside the cell but that must have come it might have come from an intelligence he told Ben Stein but that would have had to have been from some other being out in the cosmos which itself was the product of undirected evolutionary processes that's an inadequate explanation on its face because if that other being is the creator of the information that made life it still have must be biologically rooted and this thus must also have been the result of information and the ultimate origin of the information is not accounted for on this hypothesis but it's at least in principle possible that maybe there's a designer inside the cosmos but the one thing for sure that the panspermia hypotheses can't explain is the origin of the universe that makes it's very life possible or the origin the fine-tuning that makes life possible all of that would precede the existence of any designing agent within the cosmos ourselves or ET and so when you look at these this ensemble of evidence as a group only classical theism with the idea that there is a God that transcends the material universe but which is also intelligent and also active in the creation that he otherwise sustains and upholds only that conception of God can account for this whole ensemble these three great evidences we have about biological and cosmological origins the universe had a beginning it was finely tuned from the beginning it has experienced infusions of information into the biosphere on planet Earth since the beginning and so not surprisingly a number of scientists and historians and philosophers of science have noted as Frederick Burnham has done that the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years and this is the case I make in my new book the return of the god hypothesis and I go a little further than Birnam I don't say it's just more respectable I say that the god hypothesis best explains the ensemble of evidence we have about cosmological and biological evidence and therefore I would say that Richard Dawkins is entirely wrong the universe doesn't look as it should look if there was nothing at work but blind pitiless indifference and instead those early founders of modern science had it right after all thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 165,383

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Douglas, Axe, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet

Id: y02a28FrMKs

Length: 66min 9sec (3969 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020