Is Science Turning Back to God? - Stephen Meyer - Episode 43

welcome to upstream i'm shane morris oxford biologist richard dawkins famously wrote in his book river out of eden that the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil no good nothing but pitiless indifference he was speaking of biology in this instance but he would certainly say as many outspoken atheists and materialists have that nothing about our bodies our planet or our universe indicates or indeed ever could indicate the existence of a god with this line so-called new atheists have placed themselves at the crest of a scientific wave they say has conquered medieval superstition elevated humankind above our dark and ignorant past and rendered belief in god not so much impossible as just unnecessary but is this telling of the scientific story both historical and modern an accurate one where science and faith really at war from the beginning and are they at war now well atheist writers have their answer but my guest today has a very different one i'm pleased to welcome to the show dr stephen meyer dr meyer received his phd in the philosophy of science from the university of cambridge he's a former geophysicist and college professor who now directs the center for science and culture at the discovery institute he's the author of the new york times bestseller darwin's doubt the explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design and signature in the cell before that subtitle that is dna and the evidence for intelligent design his latest is called the return of the god hypothesis three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe and that's what we want to talk about today dr meyer welcome to upstream uh thanks for having me on shane and what a what what a provocative uh introduction i hope it provokes a good a good discussion it's only effective it does that let's start not with richard dawkins but with a uh 19th century french scholar named pierre simone laplace and there's this apocryphal remark you record in the book that he supposedly made to napoleon bonaparte after presenting him a copy of his work and napoleon supposedly asked well you know where's god in this and laplace said i had no need of that hypothesis or at least that's the way the story goes was he right has science rendered the god hypothesis moot how accurate is that attitude well the the story is as you mentioned apocryphal the first uh record of it came from a british historian william herschel much later and there was no record of that exact quotation but it did seem to capture the spirit of le plaza's work and his the tenor of his basic conversation with napoleon and i think whatever the truth was about that particular conversation the 19th century was in fact a time when scientists began to extricate themselves from the theistic moorings that of modern science that had been so crucial to the rise of modern science at the beginning of modern science during the period that historians called the scientific revolution from roughly uh 1500 to 1750 or stretching back into the late catholic middle ages uh um i think the roots of the scientific revolution go back to developments in philosophy at oxford and paris university in the in the 1300s so um this was a period of um uh it was a science arose in a decidedly christian milieu or context for very specifically judeo-christian reasons during this period of time christian scholars were rediscovering the hebrew bible they um used theological metaphors to describe their enterprise they were looking for laws of nature which they thought were a reflection of of a divine law giver they thought that nature was intelligible because it had been made by a rational creator who had also given us rationality in order to understand the design and the order that that the creator had built into nature they believed that nature was a book that revealed the mind of the creator every every bit british bit as much as the book of scripture so this was the the the theistic uh foundation of modern science but during the 19th century with laplace with uh some of the great geologists with and certainly charles darwin and his uh acolytes thomas henry huxley earns techel in germany a much more decidedly materialistic approach to the natural sciences arose where scientists no longer saw evidence of design as newton did as boyle did as kepler did but instead thought that nature had within it the self-organizing properties to to arrange itself into all the complex structures that we see in the world the solars from the solar system to new forms of life to even human life and even the origin of the very first life so by the end of the 19th century there was a kind of seamless materialistic narrative or story that could be told about where everything came from that did have uh no need of that uh design or god hypothesis as uh as a necessary explanatory framework for doing science the story you're telling here is very unfamiliar to many people who've been taught this alternative story that there's been a conflict between science and faith since the inception of modern science and the first part of your book is really dedicated to debunking that in a rigorous historical way not only do you tell the stories of you know the major players in the in the scientific revolution but you offer an explanation of the kind of theological underpinnings of science the assumptions that had to be made initially for modern you know science as we know it to emerge and explain what they explain the fact why science emerge in the west and in no other advanced civilization this is a huge question for historians of science so sometimes it's uh thought of as the why then why their question and what accounts for you know the the the greeks were uh very uh intellect an intellectual culture they were very philosophical some of them studied nature but the systematic methods of studying nature that rose during the period of the scientific revolution that involved things like isolating variables attributing causality describing lawful order with with with uh mathematics the whole concept of the laws of nature was something that was unique to this this uh innovative period of time and um historians have attributed much of the the source of of this innovation in the approach to studying nature as a result of underlying theological presuppositions first that nature was orderly but unlike the greeks also believed that nature was orderly but they believed that the order was a consequence of an inherent logic that was in a sense inviolable and self-evident to anyone who was also logical the the in the christian uh west there was a different idea as they were rediscovering the doctrine of creation in the hebrew bible and that was the idea of an impressed order that order was impressed on the created the creation by a mind by the mind of god and that that since god was entirely free he could have chosen many different kinds of order many different ways of ordering nature newton described an inverse square law for gravitation it might well have been an inverse cubed law or a linear relationship between the variables to find out what type of order was there one needed to go and look you couldn't just do armchair philosophizing as the greeks had done and uh one thing that historians of science point to that's uh that was um very obscure but it was a um a decree in 1277 by a pope who who uh who condemned what were called what was what is called necessary in theology the idea that god must have worked in a particular way the greeks thought that the best the most perfect form of motion was a circle so therefore the planets must be moving in circular orbits kepler discovered they were ellipses but he did that by looking and seeing so this idea of a contingent creation a creation that was contingent on the mind of god that required us to go look and see was one of the things that gave rise to a specifically empirical approach to science and a very systematic way of of uh evaluating the evidence and there's a lot more the theological presuppositions that are crucial to the rise of modern science are actually quite numerous and they do come straight out of that judeo-christian context one other example i've heard of such a presupposition is that we are created in the image of god and therefore have the ability innately to uh think god's thoughts after him as newton would have put it to actually it's a famous quote from kepler but you're exactly right be right the idea of intelligibility physicist no no no it's okay it's good really good i mean you're on top of this and um and but there was a conver a converse assumption as well and that is that the humans are made in the image of god and therefore we're capable of understanding the rationality the order the design that's put into nature because we've been endowed with rationality by our creator but especially in during the period of the reformation there was a reaffirmation of the fallenness of human beings and that are that our rebellion against god had had affected our but alvin planting it calls our no edit capabilities that are we're also capable of flights of fancy jumping to conclusions uh cherry picking the data and therefore we have to carefully test our ideas against what nature against nature itself we have to go and look and see again so the the these two theological propositions that nature was ordered by a mind other than our own and that our minds were capable of understanding that but also fallible led to a very empirical uh approach to science that emphasized uh testability and evaluation against the evidence you bring scientist after scientists in the early parts of the scientific revolution of its of its birth as a discipline and back then they call them natural philosophers to the you know witness stand as it were to testify about their motivation their theistic drive to understand god's world and and some of the things they say are just beautiful and poetic and yet by the time laplace comes along we've got this different paradigm that's beginning to take shape what happened there how did science go from a fundamentally pro-theism enterprise to one that's so radically anti-theism that it says god's unnecessary well it's a big story and and the shift takes place gradually i think it begins with with developments in in enlightenment philosophy during the 18th century and those developments start to affect science during the 19th century i mean there's still great theistic scientists during the the the 19th century james clark maxwell uh the great scottish physicist was a devout christian and when i was in cambridge as a phd student my department was right next door to the famous cavendish laboratory and on the on the the great door of the cavendish laboratory maxwell had inscribed the words of the psalm psalm 111 greater the works of the lord sought out by all who take pleasure therein and this was his understanding of the motivation for for doing natural science but in general there was a shift towards a much more materialistic framework for understanding science and a big part of that was a consequence of the theories of origins that scientists were developing during the 19th century that had no need of an intelligent designing agent or a god as an explanatory principle uh during the scientific revolution it was not only the case that the the early scientists uh brought to bear theistic presuppositions in the way they framed the scientific enterprise but they also believed they were seeing evidence of design as they did as they did their science uh newton made uh very very sophisticated and compelling design arguments both in the general scolium to the principia his theological epilogue to his great work about gravitation and secondly in um in the optics where he argued that the design of the eye the intricate design of the eye revealed uh the activity of a designing agent not only because of its own intricacy and design the complex integrated uh the integrated complexity of the eye but also in the way the eye anticipated the properties of light this is a very subtle design argument but very powerful so during the 19th century these types of arguments fell out of favor and by the time you get to darwin he is attempting to explain the origin of new forms of life and the appearance of design that they manifest he acknowledges the appearance of design but he says that appearance can be produced by an undirected unguided process not the artificial selection of a human breeder or the intelligence selection or design of god but rather the natural selection the nature winnowing uh variations uh according to their beneficial basis for survival so he he has a designer substitute mechanism called natural selection acting on random variation that allows him to explain the appearance of design with an actual without an actual designing intelligence and so by the end of the 19th century with darwin's ideas kind of culminating this trend you have a roughly seamless narrative from the origin of the solar system to the great geological features on planet earth to the origin of new forms of life and darwin's ideas even get extended to explain the origin of the first life by figures like heckle and huxley and so uh by the end of the 19th century it's true that the scientists feel they have no need of a design hypothesis and therefore no need of an intelligent designer and they're therefore no need of god as an explanation and that attitude and pre and presuppositional set of presuppositions about science has kind of informed much of 20th century science 20th century scientists have as a rule adopted a approach a strictly naturalistic approach to explanation and and yet and this is the story of the book we've had three huge discoveries about the origin of the universe about its finely tuned physical structure and about the origin of life and the nature of life at its foundational uh level in molecular biology that i think point in the opposite direction they point opposite to a materialistic world they challenge a materialistic worldview and have implications that are supportive of not just even intelligent design simplicitor but a designing intelligence with the attributes that jews and christians have always described to god this is what's so fascinating to me about your book because it tells the story of how science kind of went off the rails into this scientific materialism uh philosophy and you you make this very impressive argument that science is coming back in the theistic direction especially in the 20th century that these discoveries have pulled it back in that direction and that the rhetoric of the war between science and religion is now you know looking increasingly ridiculous i think the the most interesting aspect is the the implication of scientific hubris where you have this early on this idea that we shouldn't be like the greeks right we shouldn't play a name game with stuff we can't just say bread nourishes because of its nutritive property all you've done is you know you've just named the effect and made it its own cause you're just you're just reasoning circularly so that philosophy was kind of a dead end and scientists said no we got to pursue the material causes what is it that that causes it on a physical level but it seems like science went off the rails at the point where it says hang on we can push material causes all the way back to the origin of everything and material causes are now omnipotent and that was the attitude that took over but these three discoveries you think really challenge that idea that science can explain everything and that we even have to have this barrier between you know science and the implications of theology or philosophy a theistic explanation uh right yeah and part of there's a couple things to say about that first of all the this uh this idea that there was a warfare between science and christianity in particular theism or belief in god more generally is an artifact of late 19th century uh historiography as it's called the study of the history of science propaganda it was a kind of yeah there were a couple important books that were written that that portrayed this uh one was called the warfare of the the the history of the warfare between science and christianity that kind of told the story now that it just you that was a massively revisionist enterprise and it wasn't it wasn't consistent with what uh modern historians now know about the period of time in which uh the scientific revolution occurred there was no warfare it was exactly the opposite it was uh um as john lennox like to say i likes to say i have no i'm not embarrassed to be a christian and a scientist because christianity gave me my discipline you know that's his his uh line uh in any case that's one thing to say about it but secondly another thing to keep in mind is that there are different types of scientific endeavor some types of science is concerned with describing what nature does apparently on its own in a regular way and i accept as many many uh christians who work in the sciences except that the natural entities have causal powers of their own and underlying all that we believe you know many theists believe that god is sustaining and upholding the basic laws of nature but it's perfectly legitimate to try to describe in an orderly way to try to describe the orderly concourse of nature and to show what one part one part of nature may affect another and to describe that with mathematics or as a basis of some chemical chemical equation or whatever it is um and those types of scientific descriptions theories explanations can be properly completely materialistic because you're asking about how one part of matter is affecting another part of matter but there there's another part of of science which is concerned with origins which is the study of how things got here we could call that roughly historical science and there there is a different frame a different uh uh context of inquiry instead of asking what does nature ordinarily do on its own that you're asking the question where did nature come from in the first place right and their creative intelligence might actually play have played a significant role and therefore we need to be open to the possibility that perhaps the origin of life was produced solely by undirected material processes chemical reactions from simpler chemicals in a prebiotic soup but also perhaps creative intelligence played a role in for example generating the information in the molecules that's necessary for life to exist at all and so uh in these crucial origins questions which were the the origins theories in the 19th century were effectively what what excluded god as an explanatory principle in science uh i think now the the discoveries that we've made that are relevant to understanding the origin of life the origin of the fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of the universe itself uh have theistic implications or we could say to explain the data relevant to those events uh god is not only a possible explanatory hypothesis but actually the best uh explanation of the the evidence that we have collectively about those those big events in the history of life in the universe i want to get to the three discoveries that you talk about in the book in just a second but i'm so fascinated by this kind of ground rules game that's going on in science as we speak so dawkins says that our universe you know has precisely the properties we should expect if there's no purpose or designer yet he and other scientific materialists seem totally unwilling to even test the god hypothesis they rule it out of court from the beginning as an illegitimate pseudo-scientific thing and you're that's a super perceptive observation chain because there's a tension there right if you say that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if it bottom there's no purpose no design nothing but blind pityless indifference that's the quote from dawkins right what's implied there well blind pitiless indifference and no design no purpose is just a shorthand way of referring to materialism the the the world view of scientific materialism that says matter and energy are the the things from which everything else comes and mind has played no role in the in the uh the shaping of matter its design in the in the history of life in the universe so effectively what dawkins is saying is that the materialistic worldview can be evaluated empirically how by looking at the universe to see if the properties that it has match those that you would expect if scientific materialism were true right and i love that because he's he's basically making a strong claim and showing and arguing that you can test metaphysical hypotheses or world views but if that's true of of materialism the same thing ought to be true of theism and in fact the argument that i make in the book is that these three big discoveries the first is the universe had a beginning in time and space um the second is that the universe has been finally tuned from the very beginning or soon thereafter to allow for the possibility of life against all odds exquisite levels of fine tuning and that there is digital code or information functional information present in the large biomacromolecules that make life possible these are discoveries that you would never have expected on the basis of materialism brute matter does not produce digital code it fine-tuning suggests a fine tuner materialism denies a prior um any pre-existing mind prior to the origin of the universe so fine-tuning isn't what you'd expect at all and the materialists have long said that they think that the universe is eternal and self-existent and uh the famous quote from carl sagan and later neil degrasse tyson in the cosmos series about the universe is all there is all there ever was and all there ever will be the universe is the eternal self-existent thing rather than god in a materialistic uh worldview and yet we have evidence that the material universe has not always been here that it had a definite beginning and so these are just discoveries these three big discoveries are not expected on the materialistic world view that dawkins is promulgating and one way you know that is the elaborate what are called ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses that materialists have had to come up with in order to explain these big three discoveries we've had postulations of space alien designers by no less a person than francis crick and richard dawkins himself the physicists are talking about multiverses that are causally disconnected and unverifiable and undetectable from our own as a way of explaining the fine-tuning and in and in cosmology hawking came up with ideas about imaginary time and and quantum wave functions as the as the explanation for the origin of the universe which i show in the book in fact i show in the book that both the multiverse hypothesis and the quantum cosmological hypothesis if true have their own uh hidden theistic implications so um but the point is that the materials have had to resort to very convoluted uh explanations that involve multiple theoretical entities that are uh that cannot be uh verified or detected rather than the simple as opposed to a simple clear postulate that there was a transcendent intelligence that brought the universe into existence fine-tuned it and and and helped to create life it's kind of a jiu jitsu move you're doing where the the long time materialist trope has been to say well you can believe in god if you want but he's not necessary because we've explained it all in material terms but what you're doing is saying hey you guys have to come up with all these auxiliary theories you can believe in a multiverse if you want but it's much simpler occam's razor to say you know god is behind all this stuff let's let's zero in on the first um discovery here the universe had a beginning so i don't think that it strikes many of my listeners immediately as an obviously pro-theistic thing or something that has massive theistic implications why is that the case well there's a great uh princeton physicist who was looking for the cosmic background radiation which was one of the indicators of the the the big bang uh he didn't find it his name was uh robert dickey but two other guys in new jersey did penzias and wilson but dickey pointed out he said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past on the other hand if the universe begins to exist that suggests some the need for a cause beyond the universe it's an ancient cosmological argument that ran like this argument for god's existence whatever begins to exist must have a cause the universe began to exist not known until the 1920s 30s and into our our current century uh therefore uh the universe whatever begins to exist must have a cause the universe began to exist therefore the universe must have a cause and since all causes are separate from themselves the cause must be separate from the universe it must transcend the domains of matter space time and energy and as you look at the competing possible causal explanations that are provided by competing metaphysical systems materialism fails because materialism posits matter and energy is the cause of everything in fact it posits that matter and energy have been self-existent so that's an eternal that we now know that's not true or have good reason to doubt that and moreover to explain the origin of the universe in materialistic terms is uh inherently contradictory because it's matter and energy that come into existence at the beginning before which there is presumably no matter and energy to do the causing now there have been oscillating and cyclical models of the origin of the universe but there are problems with those that also imply that there must have been a beginning irrespective of whether we're in the middle of just one of many cycles the cycles eventually damp out and uh had we been around from for an infinitely long period of time uh we would have already reached a nullifying equilibrium the ball would have stopped bouncing and we wouldn't be in an expansion phase but we are uh and so therefore uh we we don't live in an infinitely old universe in any case the point is materialism doesn't provide a good explanation but theism does because theism posits the existence of a powerful mind uh in that exists independently of the universe and that's exactly the profile of the cause that we need something that's independent of matter space time and energy that's not bound by our time and space god fits that causal profile and therefore provides a better explanation of the origin of the universe than does materialism or for that matter pantheism the eastern philosophy that makes god and matter co-extensive because in pantheism there's no transcendence either the story you tell of the struggle to you know win acceptance for this theory that the universe actually had a beginning out of the jaws of this dominant theory of the steady state where the where matter and energy have always existed it's fascinating the resistance that you see physicists even some of the greatest physicists in history uh and astronomers putting up to this theory is uh is amazing of course the most famous is probably einstein himself who um you know came up with the cosmological constant which sort of jury rigged his his theory to make it look like the universe wasn't you know expanding and didn't need to have a beginning and he called it the greatest blunder of his career because yeah this is actually a fascinating story shane because you've got the observational astronomers that are getting the first indications of a beginning because they're what they're seeing is that the universe the the galaxies are expanding or they're they're they're receding they're moving away from us right and they the indication of that came from the light coming from the galaxies it was being stretched out uh the wavelengths were longer than would have been expected had the the objects in the night sky uh been at a constant distance from us it's like the doppler effect in uh that we know about from from physics class if the train is receding the pitch of the whistle goes hmm it becomes lower the wave wavelengths of the sound are stretched out same thing was happening with the light longer wavelengths correspond to the red end of the visible spectrum of light so the evidence was called the red shift evidence and as the astronomers surveyed the night sky they found that this uh the the the the light coming from distant galaxies was red shifted in all the quadrants of the night sky and so this suggested an expanding universe that was moving outward in in a roughly spherical manner like a balloon being blown blown up but if you back extrapolate from that and think about where what the universe would have been like a thousand years ago a million years ago a billion years ago however far back you go eventually the matter of the universe would have been condensed into a single point marking the beginning of the expansion and the beginning of arguably the beginning of the universe itself now einstein initially didn't know about this he formulated a theory in 1915 called general relativity which is theory of gravity and so on there was a parallel track you've got the observational astronomy and then the theoretical physics that's coming out of einstein's new ideas about gravity and according to einstein massive bodies actually curve the fabric of space and create sort of preferred lines of trajectory for any other body passing by a massive body now um that implied that if a dynamic universe because if gravity were the only uh force operating in the universe we would have already had a big crunch space would have been curved infinitely tightly and we don't clearly don't live in such a universe we live in a universe with empty space between massive bodies between galaxies so there must be he he argued an anti-gravity force that's pushing outward and he called that the cosmological constant so far so good but what he did in addition to that was assign a very precise value for the cosmological constant and in fact he fine-tuned it so that the outward pushing force of the cosmological constant exactly balanced the inward pulling force of gravity so he could portray the universe as a in a state of uh equi-poised uh stasis a static universe problem with that is later theoretical physicists showed that even on just the straight-up physics grounds that wasn't stable very slight perturbations and matter energy anywhere would cause either a re-collapse or an expansion but then secondly the observational evidence from astronomy which he didn't know about when he formulated the theory in his in his fine-tuning and he learned about this in 1927 in a famous taxi cab ride with the belgian priest physicist right uh george lumatra and lamatra told him about the what hubble and and his colleague hummus and out at caltech were discovering and later einstein went out and took a peek through the telescope there's some famous 1931 newsreel footage where einstein's looking through the telescope with with hubble in the background with his pipe and uh two weeks later he gives an interview to the new york times and says that that uh hubble and hummerson have established that the universe was not static the universe must have had a beginning and later he says that his his uh gerrymandering the value of the cosmological constant was as you say the greatest blunder of his scientific career so he had this and he acknowledged that initially that his resistance to the idea of an expanding universe outward from the beginning was that the ideas seemed to be based on christian theology it wasn't based on christian theology but it did oddly confirm the the basic biblical premise that the universe had a beginning the very first words of genesis after all here we are here we are in the 21st century after this time of uh of well-resisted discovery that has demonstrated uh very compellingly that the universe had a beginning it's not in a solid state the second discovery that you point to is this idea that the universe is fine-tuned we hear that that phrasing a lot particularly in apologetics what does that mean and why is it significant again well the fine-tuning of the universe refers to the precise values and strengths of many of the physical parameters and forces precise in relation to the requirements of life or requirements of a life-conducive universe uh physicists sometimes talk about our universe as a goldilocks universe right the for that cosmological constant the force that's generating the expansion of the universe is not too too strong not too weak it's it's very pres it falls within a precise uh strength or tolerance or limit that allows for a life uh friendly universe if we're going if it were if the expansion if the force were a bit stronger by one part in 10 to the 90th is an ex is an accepted value 10 to the 90th power we'd have what's called a heat death of the universe the universe would effectively blow apart and matter and energy would be so diffuse you couldn't get stable galaxies or rocky planets and things like that on the on the other hand if it were if the force weren't a little bit lesser if it weren't as strong you'd have a re-collapse the gravitational force would overcome the cosmological constant and you get a big crunch into a giant black hole neither of which conditions are are friendly to life and just to put that number in context there are 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe that's the best estimate we have so to get the fine-tuning right by chance would be like blindfolding someone sending them out in space and and having them look for one elementary particle but not just in our universe they'd have to actually search 10 billion other universes our size to be sure that they've made a thorough search in other words getting this right by chance is is absurd it's astronomically uh improbable um and the cosm the fine tuning of the cosmological constant is only one of of a couple dozen of these fine-tuning parameters many of which are independent from each other uh this the the strength of gravitational force the strength of electromagnetic force the ratios between those two forces the ratio between the strong nuclear force which holds atoms together and the ra and electromagnetic force is crucial for for example the ability for the universe to synthesize carbon which turns out to be unnecessary the abundant a highly abundant carbon is necessary for life in the universe and on and on it goes so there's many of these these fine-tuning parameters and when you have an ensemble of highly improbable parameters that exemplify a set of functional requirements we call that fine-tuning also in our experience a systems that have those two properties of an ensemble of improbable probabilities that exemplify a functional um a set of functional requirements or produce a functional outcome systems that have those properties are invariably intelligently designed french recipes are finely tuned internal combustion engines are finely tuned electronics are finely tuned uh the digital code is finely tuned and all of them have in common a fine tuner and so the uh or designer and so fred hoyle initially great uh a great uh scientific atheist later came to a kind of prototheistic view of things and was quoted as saying that the the data we have a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that uh that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible uh fine tuning suggests a fine tuner part of the power of the argument you're making here with respect to fine-tuning is that the the claim has so long been made that science can explain everything we we observe through material causes but when you get to the very back of material itself to the very back of the universe itself and the question of where time and space and matter and energy came from you can't posit material causes like you said a thing can't you know an effect can't explain itself and when we get to the back we find and have discovered that everything's majestically fine-tuned improv at levels of improbability that defy imagination that's i mean that's philosophically powerful not just scientifically powerful and i'm not really sure um you know how it's a science scientific evidence that underwrites a powerful philosophical argument yes for for god's existence and uh um and of course we talked a bit earlier about the multiverse but that has been the go-to alternative materialistic explanation right probably address that point yeah what's wrong with that uh it may be that there's a multiverse but if there is it doesn't explain the the fine tuning and here's here's the problem um even if uh for the multiverse to provide an explanation for anything that take well let me put it this way uh if there are a good billion other universes out there but they're causally distinct from our own right it it uh the the mere existence of alternative universes doesn't affect anything in our universe if they're causally disconnected if they're not interacting and therefore the existence of these other universes doesn't affect the probability of whatever it was that set the fine-tuning at the beginning so it's like a giant gambler's fallacy yeah exactly so even if you have other universes that by itself does not provide a probabilistic explanation for the origin of the universe what you need is something like a common cause of all the universes that it provides some way of calculating the probability of getting one of the universes as opposed to another and so what in recognition of that multiverse hypo multiverse proponents have proposed universe generating mechanisms and some of them are based on string theory others are based on something called inflationary cosmology uh and in fact you need both types of universe generating mechanisms because they each one explains one part of the fine-tuning but not the other and you need them both to explain the whole range of fine-tuning phenomena so it's massively convoluted in the occam's razor sense of postulating multiple explanatory entities not only do you have deposit a virtual infinity of multi of alternative universes you have to posit these two different universe generating mechanisms each of which imply the existence of other uh unobservable theoretical entities it's r it's really an elaborate hypothesis but even more telling even in theory these universe generating mechanisms require prior fine-tuning if they are to generate new universes so the fine-tuning of the universe that was the thing that many the the multiverse was was uh uh designed to explain is not actually ultimately explained it's just pushed out of view it's pushed back a generation to the fine-tuning of the universe generating mechanisms that produce the universes and and they hope one lucky one that has the right fine-tuning parameters in our you know somewhere namely ours it's it seems like we're doing metaphysics at this point though even for scientists to be talking this way because by definition right other universes that are causally independent from ours would be inaccessible to science well and i'd i've never been comfortable with the strict demarcation of between metaphysics and science because scientists are making claims about reality and metaphysics is this the this the philosophical discipline that studies what is really real right um now if you want to call the the multiverse of metaphysical hypothesis or call philosophical naturalism a metaphysical hypothesis or theism and metaphysical hypothesis that's okay with me i don't really care how we classify these things and in fact i'm quite happy to to to compare the explanatory power of competing worldviews or metaphysical hypotheses that's what i do in the book but many scientists have commented well gee this these these multiverse hypotheses are positive things that are far far removed from any possible observation um that however i mean a general point is worth making and in science that's often done we often posit things we can't see in order to explain the things we can see the question is uh how uh how simply can we explain what we see are we multiplying explanatory entities unnecessarily is there a simpler explanation that's being overlooked and secondly what what about the explanatory power of the of the explanation that's proposed if the explanation doesn't ultimately explain the thing it was designed to explain it it's lacking explanatory power and i think that's the problem with the multiverse and it's it's very convoluted it posits i i actually count about uh 10 different uh purely abstract theology theoretical postulates that have to be affirmed as part of the multiverse hypothesis all the extra dimensions of space that come along with string theory the infoton field and inflationary cosmology the infotainment shut off energies on and on it goes it's it's very very it's a very elaborate explanation as opposed to the single postulate of a transcendent intelligence um and indeed a postulate that comports with our ordinary our uniform and repeated experience our ordinary experience that finely tuned systems arise from intelligent agents uh and given that the multiverse doesn't ultimately explain the fine-tuning we really only have one known a causal explanation for fine-tuning and that is intelligence so even if the multiverse is true i think you still have a fine-tuning problem and therefore i think you still have evidence of a designing intelligence that is necessary to explain both the fine-tuning and and our life-conducive universe this really gets to the heart of it dr meyer you i don't want to give away the kind of secret of the book here um prematurely to to reviewers but the i the idea that's coming across to me is you're challenging the ground rules of science you're saying we don't necessarily have to have non-overlapping magisteria that that we can pursue in our investigations of material effects to causes that could you know best explain them even if those causes fall outside of the typical boundaries that we've we've set up for science how how do you as a philosopher of science see the the progress and validity of that and how would you how would you defend changing the definition of science well um i don't think we're actually changing the historic definition of science i mean science comes from the the uh the root ciencia which just means knowledge right so i think the object of someone who's interested in the natural world is to uh get to know it and uh by whatever means are are are possible um and so uh we might have and we're talking about these origins question it is a logically possible hypothesis that the universe or the the digital code in living systems or life itself was the product of a creative intelligence and it's even logically possible that we might be able to tell from the effects that we're looking at and so i think it's just important to follow the evidence where it leads to the best explanation and not limit our explanations to things that are strictly materialistic because we might be we we might be missing uh the obvious the obviously best explanation if you want to call a god hypothesis a metaphysical hypothesis um that's fair enough um but i think the theory of intelligent design where we don't get into the question of the identity of the designer is certainly it bears all the same features of an historical scientific theory as as a its materialistic competitors so i'm really not hung up about the definition i want to know what's true and i want to reason from the evidence to the best explanation assuming that our our best explanations are the ones that are most likely to be true well we've got a few minutes left here i want to hit the last big discovery and this is the one that you've obviously written about the most and it's in the area of biology one of the great historic arguments for god was looking at living things like william paley did and saying they're intricate they they exhibit artistry complexity and purpose that is best explained by a designer by an engineer who put them together and set them on their way and this has kind of been the classic design argument of course darwin is and has been seen for a long time now as the silver bullet that takes that apart or the universal acid as uh yeah daniel dennett said that so why is um give us the the briefs thirty thousand foot sketch on why darwin is not the silver bullet and why the arguments tend to be turning back in the theistic direction on biology and i think that's actually true i think things are turning back and fairly rapidly um darwin attempted to explain the appearance of design without an actual designing intelligence this was the the most philosophically significant implication of his work and uh the question is did and he explained some appearances of design or things that had been thought to be the consequence of design in the 19th century like minor modifications or adaptations to the environment but the question is did he explain all appearances of design one appearance of design he didn't explain is the appearance of design we find and even the simplest living cells because darwin didn't expect attempt to explain the origin of the first life he only attempted to explain how new forms of life arose from some pre-existing form the origin of which he he did not attempt to did not address um and and so in the 19th century it was it was i think possible to think that some undirected natural processes might have produced the whole of the by a lot of the biosphere but we knew very little about the complexity that makes life possible the integrated complexity and informational complexity and so during the 1950s there were a number of discoveries made now under the banner of the molecular biological revolution that revealed not only that life was incredibly complex at a molecular level but it it was an integrated and informational complexity that is reminiscent of our own high-tech information technology our own high-tech digital world here's the story 1953 watson and crick elucidate the structure of the dna molecule 50 in 57 58 crick advances something called the sequence hypothesis which suggests that the that the uh the the the chemical subunits along the interior of the twisting helix are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or digital characters in the section of machine code or software that is to say that the the uh these bases or nucleotide basis as they were called do not uh allow dna to perform a function in virtue of their physical properties but rather they allow the dna to perform a communication function in view of their specific arrangement and what dna dna contains therefore are a set of instructions for building proteins and protein machines and so what is discovered is literally a form of digital or alphabetic information digital code as leroy hood calls it right bill gates seattle here calls it says that dna contains a software program but much more complex than any we've ever created dawkins himself has acknowledged that the the dna contains machine code and so uh that is a a stop press moment in the history of biology that when we get to the secret of life it turns out that in addition to matter and energy there's a third fundamental element in nature and that is information and it's critical and the and we now know what the where the information is stored we know what it does but the discoveries of the of the molecular biological revolution raised a huge question which is where did the information come from and in my first book signature in the cell i evaluate the competing explanations and proposals that have been made to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life and i show for reasons that are actually widely accepted by origin of life researchers themselves that none of these proposals work there's a kind of phenomenon going on in original life research where everyone recognizes that everybody else's proposal doesn't work but they're sometimes reluctant to recogni to acknowledge it about their own but uh i show that theories neither theory is based on chance based on natural law or the combination of the two do an adequate job of explaining the origin of information and yet we know of a cause that produces functional digital information and that causes intelligence if we see a computer program we know that it was it was produced by programmer uh in fact whenever we see information whether it's in a computer program or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or in a radio signal when ever we find information and trace it back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process so i've argued in both darwin's doubt and subsequently and uh in signature in the cell and subsequently in darwin's doubt that the information necessary to build first the or to build the first life and then subsequent major innovations in the history of life both point to the activity of the designing intelligence in the history and origin of life on this planet there's a kind of parallel here between the uh design critique of materialistic explanations for the universe and the design critique of materialistic explanations for life where you're kind of getting behind the main theory and saying well look there's this huge question that you haven't answered so with material explanations for the universe where did the universe come from um material explanations for life where did information in the first cell come from there's this because you know darwin doesn't it doesn't address that he he assumes a living cell and then well in evolutionary biology one of the things i show in darwin's doubt is that uh there are new neo-darwinism does a very poor job of accounting for the information necessary to produce the firs to produce major innovations in the history of life because mutations degrade information they do not generate new information and anyone who's done programming knows that if you've got a computer program and you allow us corruption in your in your data or in your program you get a series of random changes to the theories and ones you're going to degrade that software program long before you'll produce a new functional program or operating system so neo-darwinism does a poor job of explaining the origin of information but the newer evolutionary models that are being proposed to address this problem of of the origin of major innovation in the history of life either do not address the informational requirements for producing fundamentally new forms of life or else they presuppose prior unexplained sources of information and i've seen this pattern repeat over and over again where you just push the problem out of you or back one generation and don't actually explain the origin of information just as the multiverse doesn't explain the origin of the fine tuning both fine-tuning and information in the functional sense the functional senses that we find with digital code do not have any known explanation or cause other than intelligence and so the attempt to to explain these either either people ignore the problem or they simply push it back without ultimately solving the picture that emerges here is it's kind of optimistic it's like the the kind of gerrymandering that you saw with einstein is happening right before you know before our eyes with these other materialistic claims and it looks almost as if um science is turning back in the direction of theism and there's a lot of resistance being put up to it but in the future perhaps we could live in an environment where um you know scientifically we're more open to theism as a valid explanation for all three things that's because that's beginning to happen but there's as you you correctly point out tremendous resistance to a theistic perspective and so when we say that when i argue that the the god hypothesis is returning i think that is the case among some scientists but i think it's returning because of the evidence the evidence is crying out for a god hypothesis and uh but one very gratifying thing for me was as i sent the book out for review and potential endorsement i got you know i got a surprising flood of endorsements from very high-powered scientists holding endowed chairs in various fields chemistry physics biology even nobel laureate in physics so there's a lot more sympathy to these ideas out there than people realize and i think we've had these very powerful voices in the culture the new atheists in particular uh bill nye the science guy neil degrasse tyson people who are effectively functioning as self-appointed spokespersons for scientists science telling us two things one that science and christianity have always been at war science and theism have been at war which is historically simply false and secondly that science properly understood today renders materialism or atheism the best overall explanatory framework for doing science and i think that too is is incorrect that the science the three discoveries we've been discussing show that uh you know that there isn't a good materialistic explanation for the origin of the universe let's just let's just be clear and stipulate that the fine tuning is not well explained by the multiverse the multiverse still has a fine-tuning problem and no one uh i mean even people working within origin of life research recognize and will will say publicly that we do not have anything like an adequate explanation for the origin of life from on the basis of of purely chemical evolutionary processes so right materialism has these huge explanatory gaps but they're not just gaps they're the evidence that has crea has created the problems for materialism is exactly the kind of evidence that we would in any other realm of experience attribute to the activity of a mind information fine-tuning etc well if there's a helm of the intelligent design movement you're pretty darn close to it and it makes me you know it makes me want to ask where do you see the intelligent design movement itself in light of this sort of shift that you be you're beginning to see happen in science because there's still a lot of stigma and resistance i mean i i posted um a while back a uh an excerpt from your wikipedia page where it's obvious the person who wrote it just wanted to absolutely discredit you you know it's a pseudo-scientific creationist i mean it right out of the gate um they don't even cite your your phd it's just stephen meyer is a writer a pseudo-scientific writer um where do you see the intelligent design movement and and is it gaining an acceptance uh i think we're gaining we're gaining uh there's a tremendous expansion in the interest in this idea and so i think yeah it's gaining acceptance and there have been some high level uh scientific conversions from a darwinian perspective to an id perspective in recent years so that's pretty exciting um but also as a research program it's moving in in a very fruitful and exciting direction in the first 20 years or so of work on intelligent design the main writers michael behe demski and and me were making arguments for intelligent design based on already known facts what we're now seeing is that we have we have scientists taking the id concept and using it to generate predictions and then using it as a guide to discovery and predictions that are testable in the laboratory and so an obvious example of this is the whole discussion of non-coding or so-called junk dna the neo-darwinist upon the discovery that 97 of the genome was not coding for proteins assumed that the other that that that portion of the genome had performed no function and therefore they labeled it junk and it's what they would have expected given the random trial and error nature of the darwinian mechanism but we instead many of our our prime movers in the id movement said well you know we accept that mutations are real processes therefore we'd expect some degradation of an original signal but we wouldn't expect the informational signal to be so dwarfed by the noise so we predict and expect that the non-coding regions of the of the dna will be importantly functional and when the encode project was was published uh several years ago showing that uh the vast majority of the non-coding regions were in fact functional that overall they're functioning something like an operating system in a computer which is controlling the timing and expression of the data files uh james shapiro who had written some of the early articles about the the showing the discovery are announcing discoveries of function in in junk dna openly acknowledge richard sternberg he said though though he and i have different evolutionary philosophies sternberg being a proponent of intelligent design he said much of the credit for the the uh the the insight that the the non-coding dna would have function uh goes to sternberg he was the first guy writing on this and exposing this so um intelligent design has begun to bear fruit as an ex not just an explanatory framework for facts we already have but as a guide to further research that's helping us make discoveries because after all if life is the the product of a designing intelligence it ought to look differently in some ways than if it was produced by an undirected unguided process that had to produce everything in a gradual darwinian manner and so there are discriminating predictions that the two models make and that allows us to do science from an id perspective that could lead to discoveries um more quickly or lead us to discover things that wouldn't have been discovered on a strictly darwinian approach to doing the science man that's exciting i hope i live to see some of this this revolution unfold in science and for the god hypothesis to uh gain acceptance again like it was at the at the beginning of the scientific revolution yeah well thank you shane it is i think it is an exciting time and um you know i mentioned a couple of these high-profile uh scientists who have recently embraced intelligent design one is a a high-powered german paleontologist uh gunter beckley who was the one of the lead curators at the uh state uh natural history museum in stuttgart germany phd in paleontology from two began multiple peer-reviewed publications he was by the way you mentioned wikipedia he was described as a very prominent and accomplished paleontology on a wikipedia page until he announced his support for intelligent design and then wikipedia he's no longer on wikipedia i wish they'd cancel my page because as you mentioned right you know before i was a for a long time wikipedia had me as an american theologian but i have no degrees in theology uh you know only only only physics geology and the philosophy of science but i you know i'd like to have time to get a degree in theology but i've never done it then they changed to describing me as a pseudo-scientist so maybe that's closer i don't know we'll see don't compute yes exactly but the point is there are there are there are a number of people like like a professor dr beckley who are are seeing the evidence for design and embracing it and uh that it's a worldwide network now of of uh highly accomplished scientists and one of the things we're doing at discovery institute is actually funding scientific research projects at mainstream secular research university with with uh with uh senior professors who are friendly to intelligent design and are using it as a guide to their research man we should have done like a part two with this this is super my guest today has been dr stephen meyer philosopher of science and author of three of the most important books you'll ever read on intelligent design and origins and it sounds like he's also a grandfather his latest and maybe his most ambitious is called the return of the god hypothesis three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe dr meyer thanks so much for joining me today on upstream i really enjoyed this conversation oh thank you you too shane you

Channel: Upstream with Shane Morris

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Published: Tue May 11 2021