Engaging with Faith and Reason in The Case For A Creator | Parable

[Music] [Applause] [Music] i've always been a logical and curious kind of person i mean that's just my personality i remember when i was little my parents gave me an electric train for christmas and then a couple hours later my dad finds me in the garage and i'm throwing the locomotive against the cement floor trying to break it open he said what are you doing and i said well i'm just trying to figure out how it works i mean my parents because of all the why questions i would ask finally went out and said here and they bought me an encyclopedia and said look the answers are in there go looking for them go find them yourself i mean that's just the way i was and so i guess it's natural that i would become a journalist because journalists are looking for facts they're looking for evidence they're looking for data they're looking for something that they can publish in the paper and have confidence it is true lee strobel earned a master of studies in law degree from yale law school and is the former legal editor of the chicago tribune he is the best-selling author of several books that explore the evidence for the christian faith i guess given my curiosity it's not surprising that when i was in high school science was my favorite topic because there the teachers actually encouraged me to like cut open frogs and find out how things work which i thought was great when i was a teenager i had this deep trust in science and i think part of it was prompted by the fact that i grew up in post-sputnik america where eisenhower encouraged all young people to delve into science so we could catch up with the russians so to me science sort of represented the empirical the hard facts the things that could be proven experimentally and that was sort of the way in which i looked at life i thought people who had faith people who believed in supernatural things like god i saw that as a sign of weakness because you know do you have any data to back that up in the autumn of 1966 strobel's interest in science led to a life-changing decision i can take you back to the exact spot where i was sitting it was in the third floor overlooking the asphalt parking lot i was in the second row the third chair from the front when my biology teacher recounted in great detail this experiment that had been conducted in the early 1950s at the university of chicago this experiment that impressed strobel so deeply was one of the most famous in the history of science in 1953 stanley miller a graduate chemistry student tried to demonstrate how life first emerged on earth miller attempted to reproduce the earth's early atmosphere he pumped hydrogen methane ammonia and a small amount of water vapor into a maze of glassware then sparked the gases with electrical discharges to simulate lightning after five days he discovered what he had hoped for a few simple amino acids the basic building blocks of living organisms had collected in the dark residue at the bottom of the glass many hailed miller's experiment as proof that essential components of life could have formed in the oceans of the earth billions of years ago the philosophical implications of miller's experiment were instantly obvious to me and for me it was a eureka moment because i heard this and i thought wait a minute if you can show scientifically that life can emerge without any outside assistance if life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances then god was out of a job from there the acceptance of darwinian evolution and full-blown atheism for that matter was pretty easy because if living organisms could emerge by themselves out of this primordial soup without the assistance of any kind of a god or or supernatural intervention then they certainly could develop naturally over the eons into more and more complex creatures just as charles darwin theorized in his book on the origin of species as strobel embraced darwinism and its atheistic implications he was surprised to discover that many christians believe their faith was compatible with darwinian evolution there's no way you can harmonize neo-darwinism with christianity i could never understand christians who would say well you know i believe in god and yet i believe in evolution as well you see darwin's ideas about the development of life led to his theory that modern science now generally defines as an undirected process completely devoid of any purpose or plan now how could god direct an undirected process how could god have purpose and a plan behind a system that has no plan and no purpose it just does not make sense didn't make sense to me in 1966 and it doesn't make sense to me now [Music] in 1972 lee strobel married leslie hurdler five years later leslie an agnostic became a christian and i thought this is divorce this is going to be the end of our marriage but all the negative things i expected to happen in her as a result of her newfound faith they didn't happen and instead i saw positive changes in her values and her character and the way she related to me and the children and i thought wait a minute she is attributing this to god and i don't believe god exists and so that was the main thing that prompted me to say maybe i need to really investigate this and get to the bottom of this and determine is there really any rational way i could ever believe that this kind of a god really exists and really causes this kind of transformation in a human being and so i decided to use my legal training and journalism training my scientific curiosity to systematically investigate is there any credibility to the christian faith because science had played such an instrumental role in his turn to atheism strobel embarked on an investigation of major discoveries in biology chemistry cosmology and physics his study spanned more than 20 years and included interviews with scientists and scholars as he sought to determine for himself what these discoveries implied about the reality of a creator throughout his inquiry one question remained constant does the evidence uncovered by contemporary science point us toward or away from the existence of god two-time nobel prize winner linus pauling once said that science should be the search for truth and that's what i wanted to do i didn't know where the evidence was ultimately going to take me but i really did want to know the truth about god and what i found shocked me and it stunned [Music] strobel search began with an examination of evidence that challenged materialistic theories of life's origin he discovered that this negative evidence contradicted the textbook explanations that had once convinced him the blind forces of evolution could account for the creation and diversity of life on earth a good example of negative evidence is the 1953 origin of life experiment by stanley miller the one that helped lead me into atheism in the first place as biologist jonathan wells explained to me miller's experiment has now been thoroughly discredited stanley miller put together a glass apparatus and in that apparatus he put a mixture of gases that people at the time thought reflected the atmosphere of the early earth and those gases were methane ammonia hydrogen and water vapor but then the professional opinion of what was there on the early earth changed in the 60s geochemists revised their hypothesis and decided that the hydrogen being very light would have escaped into outer space the earth's gravity isn't strong enough to hold it and probably the early earth's atmosphere then consisted of what we now see coming out of volcanoes today namely carbon dioxide nitrogen and water vapor well if the early earth's atmosphere consisted of those gases then stanley miller's experiment would not work in fact he himself tried it with those gases and he found that he couldn't produce any amino acids at all so the experiment falls apart once you use a more realistic mixture of gases in the apparatus miller's test has been repeated many times using the correct atmospheric components the results are always the same the amino acids that generated so much enthusiasm in 1953 do not appear even if miller's experiment were valid you're still light years away from making life it comes down to this no matter how many molecules you can produce with early earth conditions plausible conditions you're still nowhere near producing a living cell and here's how i know if i take a sterile test tube and i put in a little bit of fluid with just the right salts just the right balance of acidity and alkalinity just the right temperature the perfect solution for a living cell and i put in it one living cell this cell is alive it has everything it needs for life now i take a sterile needle and i poke that cell and all its stuff leaks out into this test tube you have this nice little test tube all the molecules you need for a living cell not just the pieces of the molecules but the molecules themselves and you cannot make a living cell out of them you can't put humpty dumpty back together again so what makes you think that a few amino acids dissolved in the ocean are going to give you a living cell it's totally unrealistic [Music] stanley miller's experiment was not the only unsuccessful attempt to explain how life originated beginning with russian chemist alexander oparin's work in the 1920s theorists have also proposed chants chemical attraction and biological seeding from outer space as possible answers each has failed to account for how non-living chemicals could have arranged themselves into the most basic components of the first living cell [Music] strobel's research ultimately led him to conclude that materialistic explanations for the origin of life were deeply flawed and his examination of negative evidence did not end with the question of first life he also learned of weaknesses in the most celebrated icon of darwinian evolution in darwin's book on the origin of species there's only one illustration it's called the tree of life darwin used it to explain how every species of animal and plant that ever existed on earth had evolved from the same common ancestor through small gradual steps over enormous periods of time even though darwin's tree of life is included in virtually every biology textbook published over the last half century contrary to what we've been told there is no conclusive evidence of the common origin of all life perhaps the most damaging blow to darwin's theory is the fossil record if all living organisms have descended from the same primitive life form then the rock strata of the earth should be filled with the fossilized remains of animals that were once part of a great evolutionary chain a chain of small biological modifications ultimately leading to a spectacular diversity of life yet after two centuries of research highlighted by excavations in southern china the multitude of transitional experiments or missing links that should exist are conspicuous only by their absence the most graphic example of this void in the fossil record is a geological era known as the cambrian explosion the branching tree pattern of darwin's theory is actually not seen anywhere in the fossil record unless we impose it with our own minds so the cambrian explosion is the most dramatic refutation of the tree of life the cambrian explosion of life was a dramatic episode in geological history usually dated at about 530 million years ago the exquisitely preserved cambrian fossils revealed that the body plans for virtually every major animal phyla appeared not gradually and slowly as darwin had speculated but instead with astonishing suddenness if we imagine the whole history of life on earth taking place in one 24-hour period the current standard estimates for the origin of life put it at about 3.8 billion years ago let's say 4 billion so if we start the clock then our 24 hour clock six hours nothing but these simple single celled organisms appear the same sort that we saw in the beginning 12 hours same thing 18 hours same thing three quarters of the day has passed and all we have are these simple single-celled organisms then at about the 21st hour in the space of about two minutes boom most of the major animal forms appear in the form that they currently have in the present and many of them persist to the present and we have them with us today less than two minutes out of a 24-hour period that's how sudden the camping explosion was in a geological instant the animal kingdom leaped from small relatively simple organisms to extraordinary creatures with spinal cords compound eyes and articulated limbs the record of this explosion of life looks nothing like darwin's slowly branching tree darwin's theory is that there's a tree of life where you have one organism diverging into many other organisms and big differences appearing at the top what we really see is from here up this does not exist in the fossil record if i were using a botanical illustration it would be a lawn with separate blades of grass sprouting independently of each other and those would be the phyla now within each phylum there is subsequent diversification but even there i don't see the branches connecting that would make them a tree of life as scientists it's not our job to force the evidence into a theory that just doesn't fit it and so i have absolutely no desire or reason to uphold darwin's theory at this point i think what we're seeing today is a series of scientific discoveries that are opening the eyes of more and more scientists that say wait a minute i can no longer believe that pure naturalistic processes can account for the origin and diversity of life there must be something else here the challenges to darwinian theory have led more than 600 scientists with phds from major universities throughout the world to sign a document titled a scientific descent from darwinism it reads in part we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life these are scientists with phds from stanford and berkeley and university of chicago and cambridge major universities who've looked hard and fast at the evidence and walked away saying i am not convinced maybe there's another explanation personally the negative evidence forced me to conclude that darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that i just had no good reason to make strobel's rejection of darwinism and materialistic science was also based on the large body of positive evidence for intelligent design evidence he first confronted in the science of cosmology which explores the origin of the universe [Music] how did the universe begin what is its source few questions have generated as much controversy through the centuries or inspired as many impassioned opinions i interviewed william lane craig a philosopher who has devoted much of his career to the study of cosmology and the question of origins from ancient greek materialism at the time of plato and aristotle up through 19th century idealism the prevailing view was that the universe is eternal that the universe never began to exist that the universe as a whole is as it were a static timeless entity [Music] this belief in an eternal unchanging universe for centuries a pillar of western cosmology was unexpectedly challenged in 1915 by albert einstein's general theory of relativity [Music] einstein's equations implied a startling possibility the cosmos was not static but instead existed in a continual state of either contraction or expansion einstein did not like the idea that the universe was dynamic at all in fact like almost all scientists at the time in the early 20th century he assumed the universe was static and eternal what's interesting and ironic is that he thought he had made some kind of mistake in his equations for the general theory of relativity but a few years after he developed the theory a belgian astronomer named lemathra developed a model based upon his equations which again predicted that the universe is in a continual state of expansion [Music] in 1929 theoretical predictions were confirmed with empirical data at the mount wilson observatory overlooking los angeles astronomer edwin hubble studied light from distant galaxies hubble determined that galaxies beyond our milky way were moving away from us at a speed proportional to their distance from the earth the more distant the galaxy the faster it is receding hubble's landmark discovery led most astronomers and physicists including albert einstein to a similar conclusion if the universe is continually expanding then at earlier points in its history it must have been smaller and denser [Music] i think a good way to visualize this is to imagine that the history of the universe has somehow been photographed and made into a movie that we could play in a projector as the projector runs forward we watch the universe as it continually expands but if the projector were to be stopped and were switched into reverse to make the movie run backward then instead of watching the galaxies move farther and farther apart from each other we'd see them draw closer and closer together as you trace this expansion back in time the universe grows denser and denser and denser until finally the entire known universe is contracted down to a state of infinite density which marked the beginning of the universe at this point which cosmologists call the singularity all matter and energy physical space and time themselves came into being this literally represents the origin of the universe from nothing so the startling implication of hubble's discovery was the temporal finitude of the universe that the universe had an absolute beginning at some point in the finite past [Music] during the second half of the 20th century other discoveries also pointed to a universe with a beginning [Music] these images of the cosmic microwave background radiation document what most scientists now believe is the remnant heat generated during the universe's early history background radiation is found throughout the cosmos and indicates its expansion from a sudden perhaps violent moment in time [Music] this evidence for a finite universe has reaffirmed the conclusion of an ancient philosophical deduction it is called the kalam cosmological argument the kalam argument is deceptively simple in its formulation it consists of basically three steps premise one is that whatever begins to exist has a cause something cannot come into being uncaused out of absolutely nothing premise two is that the universe began to exist and the remarkable development that has occurred is that for the first time we now have solid scientific evidence for the truth of that second premise that the universe began to exist and from those two premises it follows logically therefore the universe has a cause of its existence whatever begins to exist has a cause the universe began to exist therefore the universe has a cause of its existence and that points to a reality beyond the universe a transcendent reality beyond space and time and therefore non-physical and immaterial which created the universe out of nothing and brought it into being the implications of a finite universe coupled with other discoveries of modern cosmology have led many scientists to unmistakably theological conclusions [Music] there is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before and was suddenly galvanized into action it is simpler to postulate creation x nihilo divine will constituting nature from nothingness the chain of events leading to man commence suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time in a flash of energy and light we can't understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural supernatural creation of the universe in a flash of energy and light you know it sounds an awful lot like the first chapter of genesis to me today the vast majority of even the most skeptical astronomers and cosmologists believe that the universe had a beginning this belief isn't based on some theological doctrine it's based on scientific evidence and i think if we follow the evidence wherever it points it points clearly and powerfully and persuasively in the direction of a creator [Music] since the beginning of time all the matter in the universe has been governed by precisely balanced laws and constants during an interview with robin collins a philosopher with degrees in mathematics and physics strobel learned how these laws offer compelling evidence for a creator and conspire to make the universe habitable for life the laws of physics are balanced on a razor's edge for life to occur for example if you didn't have something like gravity that pulled matter together you would never get planets you wouldn't get stars you wouldn't get any complex organisms if you didn't have the strong nuclear force there would be nothing to hold protons and neutrons together in the nucleus and so you wouldn't have any atoms so no chemistry if you didn't have the electromagnetic force you would have no bonding between chemicals you'd have no light and the list goes on so you need all these sorts of fundamental principles have to be in place in order for life to occur wipe out one of those principles wipe out one of those laws no life strobel learned that life also hinges on the precise strengths and relative values of many different physical constants one example of this fine tuning is the force of gravity [Music] imagine a ruler divided up into one inch increments and then stretched across the entire universe a distance of some 14 billion light years for the purposes of illustration the ruler represents the possible range for gravity in other words the setting for the strength of gravity could have been anywhere along the ruler but it just happens to be situated in exactly the right place so that life is possible now if you were to change the force of gravity by moving the setting just one inch compared to the entire width of the universe the effect on life would be catastrophic no large scale life forms could exist anything that was more than the size of a pea would be completely crushed so you might be able to get life of a very very primitive sort such as bacteria but you could never get conscious observers the strength of gravity is just one of at least 30 separate parameters that must be finely tuned to produce a life-sustaining universe another example is the cosmological constant the cosmological constant describes the expansion speed of space in the universe if space expands too quickly then the universe will spread out so quickly that material objects can't form so you can't get stars and galaxies and planets and the types of things that we of course take for granted in our universe physicists have determined that the cosmological constant is fine-tuned to one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion such precision has been compared to traveling hundreds of miles into space then throwing a dart at the earth and hitting a bullseye measuring one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter an area less than the width of a single atom [Music] just consider those two parameters gravity and the cosmological constant their level of fine tuning is to a precision of one part in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion and it's like one atom in the entire known universe this fine tuning is also evident at the atomic level the strong nuclear force binds atoms together if the strength of this force were to decrease by one part and ten thousand billion billion billion billion the only element left in the universe would be hydrogen again chemical life would not be possible [Music] the fine-tuning of the laws and forces of physics is so precise that few theorists are comfortable invoking mere chance as an explanation unless our universe is not the only role of the dice if the universe looks like it's fine-tuned for complex life maybe there's a fine tuner maybe it was fine-tuned for life and this has certain unsavory theological implications and so it's not surprising that those committed to a fundamentally materialistic view of reality would try to find an escape hatch and the most popular escape hatch for this theological implication of fine tuning is this idea of multiple universes [Music] as its name suggests the theory of multiple universes proposes that our universe is not alone instead it is part of a vast ensemble of universes each with a different set of laws and constants if there's only one universe then the conclusion that the universe looks fine-tuned because it is fine-tuned is inescapable but if our universe is just one of a vast set then you seem to have more resources to play with chance gets a new lease on life i sometimes try to imagine what physicists have in mind that postulate this idea of multiple universes i mean what would the generator look like that creates them maybe it's like a giant monolith that has dozens of different dials each of which has to be set to the right physical constant if we think of these parameters as dials each of the dials is different so if you produce enough universes with enough different dial settings eventually just by chance you get one just right so you might have to produce a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion billion universes but eventually if you have a generator that just spitting out just an enormous number of them then it gets the right dial setting and then by just chance you get conditions right for life so it's a huge cosmic lottery that's the idea it's an interesting idea i mean there's really only one problem with it there's no independent evidence that it's true besides it really just pushes the question back a step because we could still ask who built the generator the suggestion of multiple universes strikes me as a desperate attempt to explain away the obvious which is that the universe is finely tuned by an intelligence to sustain complex life an intelligence it must be beyond the constraints of time and space strobel's journey through a universe finely tuned for life inevitably led him home to the blue jewel of our solar system the planet earth there he encountered another array of critically balanced conditions essential to human existence when i was an atheist i saw planet earth as being one of probably billions of planets just like it all over the universe i saw our sun as being an average undistinguished type of a sun i figured as i looked up at the stars at night that there must be millions and millions of advanced civilizations out there i just thought there was an ordinariness to our situation this line of reasoning was totally consistent with my atheistic worldview but what i learned later is it is not consistent with what science is revealing about the earth [Music] investigation caused him to consider the many conditions necessary for a life-sustaining planet in the process he was introduced to the science of astrobiology and astronomer guillermo gonzalez an astrobiologist and what motivates me is just to examine the conditions necessary for life and look elsewhere in the universe and see if those conditions are met anywhere else and the answer could be yes and the answer could be no and either answer is interesting for more than a decade guillermo gonzalez has researched the characteristics of a planet required to support complex life estimates vary but a current list of these factors would number at least 20 and include an oxygen-rich atmosphere liquid water and large continental land masses a home star of the right temperature and mass an orbital path that is neither too far nor too close to the home star a moon large enough to stabilize the tilt of the planet's axis and the movement of its tides a magnetic field strong enough to deflect the sun's radiation and a position in the relatively narrow habitable region of a spiral galaxy all these factors have to be met at one place and time in the galaxy if you're going to have a planet as habitable as the earth which you need for complex and even technological life theorists have attempted to calculate the odds of all the necessary factors for life appearing at the same time on the same planet [Music] a conservative estimate is one chance in ten to the negative fifteenth or one one thousandth of one one trillionth on those terms even when compared to the billions of suns and possible planets in our milky way galaxy the probability of even a single habitable world appears unlikely there are many probabilistic resources in the galaxy but on the other side of the coin are all these factors that you need you have to get just right in order to have just one habitable planet like the earth and that leads me to conclude that yes we're rare in the galaxy gonzalez's study of the earth's habitability led him and colleague jay richards to expand the scope of their research they began to examine how a life-sustaining planet like earth may also give its human inhabitants access to the mysteries of the universe i don't think there has ever been a time in the history of the human race in which at least some people haven't contemplated these questions we asked why can we see distant galaxies millions of light years away in the universe why can we postulate what's going on inside atoms or inside black holes why are we able to discover things about the universe to answer questions about its age for most scientific discoveries that we're able to make these sorts of things can't be explained in terms of the survival of the fittest of our distant ancestors not only our ability to do science but the openness of the natural world to science just completely outstrips the sort of reductionist and darwinian explanations that we're used to [Music] in response to this evidence richards and gonzalez have argued that our ability to make scientific discoveries is no fluke or accident instead it points to an underlying purpose behind the universe it is actually designed for discovery guillermo gonzalez and i spent several years pursuing a hypothesis that those rare things that life needs in a planetary environment those things that make a planet habitable also set up the best set of conditions overall for scientific discovery there are many examples of this correlation including our planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere both the critical requirement for our survival and a transparent window that allows us to explore the distant universe [Music] the earth's precise distance from the sun and the size of its moon and home star these factors not only control our planet's temperature axial tilt and the movement of its tides they also ensure perfect solar eclipses phenomena that have provided scientists with invaluable data about the composition of stars and the properties of light and our location in the milky way the earth is positioned between two spiral arms within a relatively small region where life is possible as a result we enjoy an excellent platform for clear unimpeded views of our galaxy and the rest of the cosmos [Music] i think god intentionally created a habitat for us that allows us to see him through the creation that he is left behind and this habitat is conducive for us to do scientific research it didn't have to be that way but it is why because i believe that by doing science we find god [Music] the final leg of strobel's investigation transported him from the deepest reaches of the cosmos to the microscopic universe of the living cell and the science of biochemistry there he encountered more challenges to darwinian evolution and new evidence of design [Music] throughout the second half of the 20th century spectacular technologies revolutionize scientific understanding of the cell the basic unit of life during an interview with biochemist michael beahy strobel learned how this new knowledge has shaken the foundations of darwin's theory in the 19th century when darwin was alive scientists thought that the basis of life the cell was some simple glob of protoplasm like a little piece of jell-o or something that was not hard to explain at all but with the hard work of science in the 20th century we've seen that the the cell is far from simple it's it's got very complicated molecular machines and things that are very resistant to darwinian explanation michael behe has devoted his career to the study of the design and operation of the cell he has also written extensively on the biochemical challenge to evolution most people have no idea of how small and complex cells are a typical cell from you or me called a eukaryotic cell is probably a tenth of the size of the head of a pin and yet in that single cell there are about three billion units of dna making out the chromosomes and those three billion units make the molecular machines of the cell literally machines that make the cell work with computer animation we can enter the cell [Music] here the staggering complexity of its molecular machinery is clearly seen [Music] it's like going into an automobile factory the factory has a large number of machines the parts have to fit together in very specific ways to do their jobs and things go wrong the cell is in big trouble and just one cell is enormously complex but humans you and i are made from trillions of cells and those trillions of cells have to fit together in the right way and do their own job darwinism was a lot more plausible when we were thinking about globs of protoplasm than it is when we're thinking about molecular machines each of these biochemical machines is a masterpiece of engineering and nanotechnology they are essential to functions as vital and diverse as vision photosynthesis and the production of energy in the cell [Music] michael behe has studied several of these machines including the flagellum a remarkable rotary motor i remember the first time i looked in a biochemistry textbook and i saw a drawing of something called the bacterial flagellum with all of its parts in all of its glory it had a propeller and the hook region and the the drive shaft and the motor and i looked at that and i said that's an outboard motor that's designed you know that's no chance assemblage of parts [Music] beehe's reaction was not surprising especially when the bacterial flagellar motor is animated and magnified more than 50 000 times to display the details of its construction and operation howard berg at harvard has labeled it the most efficient machine in the universe these machines some of them are running at 100 000 rpms and are hardwired into a signal transduction or sensory mechanism so that it's getting feedback from the environment it's got some tail proteins which act as the propeller when the flagellum rotates these push against the water and therefore push the bacterium forward and the motor uses a flow of acid from outside of the cell to the inside of the cell to power the turning the bacterial flagellum has two gears forward reverse water cooled proton motive force it has a stator it has a rotor it has a u-joint it has a drive shaft it has a propeller it's not convenient that we give them these names that's truly their function in all about 40 different protein parts are required to build a flagellar motor half of them are constructor proteins specialized mechanisms that assemble the flagellum's individual components since its discovery biologists have tried to understand how a machine of such superb design could have arisen gradually without foresight or plan through the biological pathway darwin envisioned [Music] i think what darwin was trying to show was that things that look designed aren't really designed but that we can find naturalistic processes to account for the complexity of life darwin theorized that every part of every living organism evolved through natural selection a blind process that acts upon random changes in the cell darwin believed that given enough time these random variations would transform the simplest cells into the great diversity of life that inhabits our planet [Music] in his study of evolution and molecular machines michael behe has raised a significant challenge to the creative power of darwin's mechanism of natural selection it is called irreducible complexity irreducible complexity was coined by mike beahy in describing these molecular machines basically what it says is that you have multi-component parts to any given organelle or system in a cell all of which are necessary for function that is if you remove one part you lose function of that system [Music] irreducible complexity can be illustrated by a familiar non-biological machine a mousetrap the trap is composed of five basic pieces a catch to hold the bait a strong spring a thin bent rod called the hammer a holding bar to secure the hammer in place and a platform upon which the entire system is mounted if any one of these parts is missing or defective the mechanism will not work all components of this irreducibly complex system must be present simultaneously for the machine to perform its function catching mice [Music] the concept of irreducible complexity also applies to biological machines including the bacterial flagellum told there are about 40 different protein parts which are necessary for this machine to work and if any of those parts are missing then either you get a flagellum that doesn't work because it's missing the hook or it's missing the drive shaft or whatever or it doesn't even get built within the cell you can't put something like that together gradually because they need a large number of parts interacting with each other at the same time before they work at all without the tools to observe the machinery of the cell and long before the idea of irreducible complexity charles darwin offered a way to test his own theory in origin of species he wrote if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down darwin acknowledged that if someone identified a biological system that could not have been constructed in incremental steps over long periods of time then his theory would be invalid and what michael behe and others have discovered is the existence of biological machinery that cannot be explained away by darwinian processes darwin's failed predictions have in fact falsified his own theory [Music] the existence of complex biological machines raises an obvious question if natural selection wasn't the agent of their construction then what was the centerpiece of my investigation was an interview with philosopher of science dr stephen meyer meyer who holds a phd from cambridge university brought me face to face with the most efficient information processing system in the universe the dna molecule and its language of life the discovery of the information bearing properties of dna and rna is a fundamental challenge to all materialistic theories of the origin of life neo-darwinism and its associated theories of chemical evolution and the like will not be able to survive the biology of the information age the biology of the 21st century meyer's conclusions are based upon his understanding of the dna molecule and the genetic instructions that are locked within the nucleus of living cells in 1953 when watson and crick elucidated the structure of the dna molecule they discovered that dna was a carrier of genetic information in the form of a four character digital code that is to say that dna functions like a software program only more complex than any anyone has ever created or devised for a biological system to run and operate it needs genetic information to build the proteins and protein machines that cause the cells to maintain their function this information is stored in a precise arrangement of four chemicals that scientists represent with the letters a c t and g sequences of these chemicals provide the instructions necessary to assemble complex protein molecules that in turn help form structures as diverse as eyes legs wings and hearts this code has been called the language of life and it is the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe [Music] geneticist michael denton has estimated that the amount of biological information necessary to build all of the proteins in all of the species of organisms that have ever existed on planet earth could be held in a single teaspoon and we'd still have room left over for all of the information contained in every book ever written the more i learned about dna the more i understood the significance of what stephen meyer called the most fundamental question facing biology today where did the information in dna come from how did it arise in the first place well lots of people have wanted to explain the origin of information by reference to the laws of physics and chemistry or by reference to the chemical properties of the constituent parts of the dna but that would be like saying that you could explain the information in this morning's new york times headline by reference to the physics and chemistry of ink bonding to paper there is a chemical explanation as to why the ink sticks to the paper but that does not explain the way the ink got arranged to convey a message that could be understood by speakers of the english language information requires a material medium but it transcends the material medium an explanation for the origin of the genetic instructions needed to build the first life is the holy grail of 21st century biology theories proposing that this information arose through natural selection acting upon non-living molecules or the self-organizing power of chemicals in a primordial soup have repeatedly failed [Music] even time and blind chance the often invoked saviors of implausible biological scenarios have fallen far short as accounts for the source of the instructions in dna mathematicians for example have calculated that a universe filled with monkeys typing relentlessly throughout the oldest estimated age of the cosmos would have no realistic chance of producing shakespeare's play hamlet let alone a transcript of the genetic information required to build even the simplest living sound [Music] based on our uniform and repeated experience which is the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past there is only one known cause for the origin of information and that cause is intelligence whether we're looking at a hieroglyphic inscription a section of text in a book or a computer software if you have information and you trace it back to its source and variable you come to an intelligence therefore when you find information inscribed along the backbone of the dna molecule in the cell the most rational inference based on our repeated experience is that an intelligence of some kind played a role in the origin of that information the implications of the scientific evidence coupled with meyer's logic are profound if we are finding information inside every cell and every living creature could that not be in a sense the signature of a creator thirty centuries before science unlocked the mysteries of genetic information or a telescope probe billions of light years into space the hebrew shepherd and poet david wrote eloquently of a creator who revealed his existence and power through all that he had made the heavens declare the glory of god the skies proclaim the work of his hands day after day they pour forth speech night after night they proclaim knowledge their voice goes out into all the earth their words to the end of the world [Music] god himself is invisible he is a spirit and yet one of the purposes he has for us is to find him so we can know him and he's left behind a series of clues and sometimes we just have to kind of take our blinders off and get beyond our presuppositions and say wait a minute i am going to pursue the evidence of science wherever it points and if it takes me to a very uncomfortable conclusion that there is a creator then if the evidence points in that direction that's the way i'm gonna go according to a lot of mainstream media the theory of intelligent design is a faith-based idea and in saying that they want to dismiss it as something that has no basis in science but the media has confused a fundamental issue they're confusing the evidence for the theory with the implications of the theory the theory of intelligent design may well have implications that are supportive of theistic belief but the theory is not based on theistic belief it's based on the discovery of digital code in cells miniature machines and cells the fine-tuning the laws of physics and chemistry and standard ways of scientific reasoning about the remote past in the history of life forty years ago a lecture in a high school biology class convinced an inquisitive 14 year old freshman that there was no god ironically years later it was an open-minded investigation of scientific evidence that led lee strobel to belief in a creator one of the most interesting things i've learned as i've gone on this journey of scientific discovery has been that you don't have to commit intellectual suicide to come to the conclusion that there is an intelligent designer because today science is pointing more directly and more powerfully toward a creator than any other time in the history of the world i was trained in journalism and law to respond to truth i had to take a step of faith in the same direction that that evidence is flowing which is logical and rational we do that every day of our life we make steps of faith based on the evidence that we perceive and so it was the most logical and rational step i've ever taken to put my faith in the creator that science tells me exists [Music] you

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 774,657

Keywords: Christian apologetics, Christian beliefs, Christian worldview, atheism debate, cosmic revelations, creationism debate, divine presence, divine revelation, divine revelations, existence of God, faith examination, historical mysteries, religion in society, religious exploration series, scientific proof of God, spiritual awakening, spiritual journey, tales of divine encounters., theism versus atheism, ultimate questions

Id: w31-opCnvOg

Length: 58min 0sec (3480 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022