Stephen C. Meyer - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buddha at the gas bump my name is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people we've done over 600 of them now and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones please go to batgap.com b-a-t-g-a and look under the past interviews menu this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to support it please there's a paypal button on every page of the website and there's also a page of alternatives to paypal my guest today is steven c meyer and i'm very excited about this interview um i'll tell you why in a minute but let me read his bio first stephen uh received his phd in the philosophy of science from the university of cambridge in the uk a former geophysicist and college professor he now directs discovery institute's center for science and culture meyer is the author of the new york times bestseller darwin's doubt i have a picture of the book cover here um darwin's doubt the explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design and signature in the cell um sorry for you go to between my software in this paper signature cell a london times literary supplement book of the year in 2004 meyer ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the smithsonian institution published his peer-reviewed scientific article advancing intelligent design meyer has been featured on national television and radio programs including the jim lehrer newshour cbs sunday morning let's see fox news live nightline good morning america abc news nbc nightly news paula zane on cnn and the tavis smiley show on pbs he has also been featured in two new york times front page stories and has garnered attention in other top national media so you've probably picked up two things from that one is that stephen meyer has done a lot of media interviews and two that he's somewhat controversial and the reason he's controversial is that intelligent design is kind of a live wire in intellectual circles and um it happens to be the way i view the world we might see slight differences in the way stephen and i understand it and he's much more of an expert at explaining it scientifically than i could ever be but if you've been watching this show for years you've heard me make references to the fact that you know intelligence must be guiding or orchestrating the universe from the macroscopic to the microscopic and that the universe would come to a screeching halt if it weren't doing so and it's funny despite the fact that that's been my attitude for decades um when i whenever i heard the term intelligent design i somehow felt like maybe that's something that people who think the earth is flat are using to try to get to try to get religion into the schools or something but uh as soon as i got exposed to steven's work and read his uh latest book which i haven't mentioned yet it's um return of the god hypothesis let me read the subtitle as well three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe i read the entire book or listened to it over the past couple of weeks i was just really delighted to hear the sophistication and depth and scientific rigor with which he explained all this and of course he has his critics and maybe as we have our conversation here um he will mention some of the what the critics say to various points he makes and and um you know and anybody listening to this if you have a question even if it's critical send it in and he'll answer it believe me he can handle it um and finally um you know you might be listening to this a year later or something we'll have a facebook group page as we always do for each interview and discuss your issues or concerns there and i'll keep track of them and maybe we'll be able to have a second interview with stephen later on and bring up some of those points so here we go um i think maybe stephen just give us a little bit of your background to begin with and then i'll i'll have plenty of questions and i know there's a lot you're going to want to bring out yeah right i was raised in the northwest here i'm in seattle now and uh i went to college in washington state at a liberal arts college called whitworth uh then called whitworth college it's since upgraded itself to whitworth university is that a christian school i work second it is uh yeah it's it's definitely christian school it's a presbyterian founded and uh fairly fairly diverse in the student body it attracts um then i went to uh worked for as a geophysicist an exploration geophysicist for four years and uh went to england uh to do my uh first master's work and then ended up staying on to do the phd in the philosophy of science i was very interested in the question of the origin of life and ended up doing my thesis on origin of life biology the last year i was working in the oil industry i attended a conference uh it was a just absolutely fascinating conference on the uh it was called it was uh it convened materialist atheists agnostics on one side of the panels and theists of various stripes on the other to discuss the origin of the universe the origin of life and the origin and nature of human consciousness and it was basically the the ancient debate going all the way back to the greeks is it mind first or is it matter first does matter produce mind or does mind shape and create matter and uh i was really struck by this discussion these discussions the first was about the origin of the universe the great cosmologist alan sandage spoke and announced that first of all he shocked everyone at the conference by sitting down on the theistic side of the panel rather than with the materialists he was a long time outspoken agnostic materialist and he had had a religious conversion and in his talk he explained that the scientific evidence from his own field of cosmology had contributed to that conversion to the awareness of a some kind of it would be described the big bang as a creation event and that described the need for an external creator of the universe of some kind and in the discussion about the origin of life there was a similar uh uh scientific conversion uh reported where one of the leading origin of life researchers announced that he had come to accept the idea of it wasn't called intelligent design then it was his id he called it an intelligent cause of some kind must be responsible for the digital information that's stored in the dna molecule and this was the the key evidence that was bringing origin of life research to an impasse which was uh the chemistry simple chemical reactions between non-living chemicals don't produce code and yet to get life going you need the code you need the genetic code you need the information that's stored in dna and rna and those sort of molecules this scientist name is dean kenyon a very prominent origin of life researcher so i was you know 27 years old at the time practicing scientists at the bachelor's level of education and i was just blown away by these discussions and thought i want to get into the middle of this this is really interesting i'd done physics and geology as an undergraduate and but i took as much philosophy as i could on the side and so i was always interested in those those big subjects big topics in science that were at the intersection between science and philosophy and so i ended up a year later going off to grad school i found this great program at cambridge that was the history and the philosophy of science and then they allowed you to specialize in a scientific topic of your of your greatest interest and mine was precisely this question of how did life first arise not not the darwinian question of the origin of new forms of life from pre-existing forms but the origin of the very first life from simple non-living chemicals how do we get from non-life to life uh and when i was i was working in the in uh seismic digital processing in geophysics that was an early form of information technology and i think i was just seized with the uh uh the the concept of the the the the realization that the big mystery associated to the with the question the origin of life was the origin of the information you would need to construct a cell where does that information come from and so that's that's what caught my cut my fancy and off i went to grad school so that's kind of my story yeah that's a good story in a nutshell i have a quote here from carl sagan someplace but you can probably actually quote it from memory but just um yeah here we go i mean sagan says a single cell contains the equivalent information content of over 10 million volumes and that's the end of the quote but they're supposed to be something like 40 to 100 trillion cells in the human body and probably billions of them in your finger alone so there's this incredible complexity in that area we'll talk about other areas and to me the thought that something like that could come into being through some sort of chance or randomness or accident or something just seems someone completely improbable and it really begs the question like well why do these things exist how could it function um you know how can you say it's random or accidental it's not little billiard balls creating something well and and not just uh i mean there are a number of different types of purely naturalistic that is to say mindless processes we could invoke we could invoke what scientists call stochastic processes random interactions of molecules but we could also try to invoke law-like processes uh you know the laws of nature or what are sometimes called self-organizational processes and they they there are real you know there are laws of nature there are processes that cause order to arise in a net purely natural way you can think of dropping a pebble in a pond and thinking that nice concentric rings of of waves moving outward from the place you dropped the pebble you could think of a vortex and as you drain the bathtub or something but the kind of order you have in life is not simple symmetric order it's highly complex and yet specified order if you think of a key you look at the the the notches on a key they're highly irregular but they're highly specified to open the lock or if you think of language you think of the arrangement of the letters in a in a sequence of you know i always use the example of a a line of poetry tied in time wait for no man those letters don't rigidly repeat like a mantra 80 80 80 80. no they they they're highly irregular and unpredictable and yet they're very specified the sequential arrangement is specified in order to perform a communication function and so when we find those two things together what we call specification or specificity and complexity that's that's a type of information that always arises from a mind and that's what we have inside living cells we don't just have repetitive order we don't have random processes right things that are highly complex in the sense of being random but we have an irregularity or complexity that's also highly specified and that is an indicator of intelligence and that's what we find in the dna and the rna and the and as well as in computer code and human language those are the three things in the universe that have this property this special property of specified complexity language computer code and the information in dna and rna yeah i have this friend in australia that got in touch through this show and i've been going back and forth with him a little bit on this topic and he said various things but one is here so the only place i could see an argument for intelligent design is in the physical constants of the universe we don't know where those came from once you grant that miracle everything else is understandable by the laws of physics and evolution by natural selection and i'll just show a little cartoon here a couple of scientists are sitting in front of a blackboard and there's always formulas on both sides and right in the middle it says then a miracle happens and the other one of the scientists says i think you should be more just going to give it a little more detail i think it should be a little bit more explicit here in step two so i mean i don't even agree with him that you know once we have the laws of nature everything is understandable i think those need to have a mind you know maintaining their function uh but you know it's a big leap even to to suggest that you know they came into being in the first place through any kind of random yeah go ahead a really interesting comment from your uh your aussie friend um and one of one of the three big uh discoveries that i address in the book is precisely the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics the fundamental parameters of physics and the initial conditions the arrangement of matter and energy at the universe all physicists tell us that these parameters are fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances that allow for life to exist in the universe even for basic chemistry to get going these parameters have to be exquisitely finely tuned how many of them are a couple hundred of them aren't there well i the the estimates vary but there's there's at least a dozen really really tightly finely tuned parameters that may be as many as three dozen at the fundamental physical level so there's a little bit of a debate about that and give us name a few of them yeah absolutely uh one of them is the what's called the cosmological constant it's the it it's the parameter that that uh governs the strength of the force that is causing the universe to expand and so we've we know about the big bang theory we talked about that's another one of the big discoveries the universe had a beginning uh the physical universe of matter of space time and had and energy had a beginning but one way we know about that is that we've discovered that the universe is expanding outward in a spherically symmetric way from that beginning point and physicists uh tell us that that that uh force of it that's causing the expansion which einstein called the cosmological constant uh is extremely finely tuned if it were a little bit stronger if the push outward against gravity we're a little stronger we'd get what would be what what's called the heat death of the universe where matter and energy would dissipate so widely that we couldn't uh that you couldn't sustain life the universe would be too cold you wouldn't get stable galaxies and things like that on the other hand if that force were a little bit weaker then we the gravity would overcome the force of expansion and we get a big crunch and the universe would be a giant blo a very compact black hole and the fine-tuning associated with that one parameter it has been estimated at about 1 part and 10 to the 90th power some scientists think it's even more some physicists think it's even more finely tuned than that but to get an a a sense of the degree of precision and improbability associated with that one parameter consider that there are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe so this would be to get this right by chance would be something like a blind equivalent problem would be like a blindfolded man floating out in free space somewhere in the universe looking for one elementary particle but not just in our universe but in 10 billion universes our size that's the size of the search that would have to be made but randomly so and this is just one of the parameters there's also the fundamental forces of physics the gravitational force uh electromagnetism the strong and weak nuclear forces also not too strong not too weak the masses of the elementary particles not too heavy not too not too light and right on down the line multiple parameters and the arrangement of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe is also exquisitely finely tuned it's in fact the most finely tuned of all the parameters it's called the initial entropy it's a hyper exponential fine tuning one part and ten to the ten to the 123 is a is the estimate that uh sir roger penrose has given so the physicists have been very impressed with what they sometimes call the goldilocks universe it's all these parameters just right and so your aussie friend's exactly right that's a very powerful and compelling evidence for for intelligent design but i part company with him on the question of life because just getting the fine-tuning right is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of a universe where you have life you also have to have an exquisitely finely tuned planetary system and then you've got to have information in a digital form stored in macromolecules to build cells and the laws of physics are describe or highly orderly patterns we think of the sun rising every morning sun up some down or every time i drop a ball it falls what we we use the laws of physics to describe repetitive patterns but information especially the kind of digital or alphabetic information that we use in computer code or written languages or in the genetic text is not highly regular it's not just the same thing like t-h-e-t-h-e-t-h-e repeating over and over again it's again that highly irregular complex but also specified sequences and so the laws of nature don't explain that sort of thing because they by definition describe highly orderly repetitive patterns in information sciences we call that redundancy and the genetic text is not it has a little bit of a built-in redundancy but it's it's mainly specified complexity and that's something that is just by definition not explainable by the laws of nature in our experience it only arises from a mind so materialists as i understand it get around the extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe by insisting that it could still be random but there could be sort of almost an infinite number of other universes in which things didn't work out and we somehow lucked out and exist in the uni in the one universe out of zillions in which things did work out is that did i state that properly that's very well explained yeah that's that's sometimes called the multiverse right kind of makes your head they're grasping at straws many physicists take this very seriously and some uh will acknowledge that part of the motivation for that is that uh as leonard susskind great stanford physicist said well he says you know i admit that multiverse is counterintuitive but if we don't hold to it we'll be at a loss to respond to the he calls them the id critics the intelligent design proponents so there there is a little bit of an awareness that if you don't go with the multiverse then the fine-tuning points to a fine tuner but and many physicists will say well look it's either one god or many universes they're both equally metaphysical hypotheses we can't really decide the question and i know you've you've had a look at my book and so you know that i actually disagree with that um i think both are metaphysical hypotheses the god hypothesis uh the the hypothesis of a mind that transcends the universe is a metaphysical hypothesis but so is the multiverse but i think there are reasons to prefer the theistic design hypothesis over the multiverse and here's why um just having a number just positing a gabillion other universes out there that are causally disconnected from our own means that whatever happens in this universe is unaffected by those other universes including whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning at the beginning of the universe so the just having other universes doesn't explain the improbability of life in this universe or the improbability associated with the fine-tuning parameters that allow for there to be life in the universe and in virtue of that many multiverse hypothesis our proponents have proposed what they call universe generating mechanisms where they can whereby they can say that there's some underlying mechanisms that producing spitting out these universes like the you know the the different spins of a dial on a roulette wheel or a a gambling machine so that they can portray our universe as sort of the lucky winner of a giant lottery a giant cosmic lottery but here's where the rub comes in there have been two different universe generating mechanisms proposed one based on strength theory and one based on what's called inflationary cosmology and even in theory these universe generating mechanisms require prior exquisite that is highly improbable fine-tuning in order to produce new universes so even if you posit the multiverse you still have prior unexplained fine-tuning in your system you've not explained the ultimate origin of the fine tuning you've just pushed it back out of view and since in our experience finely tuned systems whether we're talking about uh uh a french recipe an exquisite french recipe or an eternal combustion engine or an electronic set of electronic components fine-tuning is associated with intelligent agency so even the since the multiverse doesn't ultimately explain the fine-tuning the best explanation remains i think a fine-tuner that is to say intelligent design yeah i think so too why do you think materialists well you you know a lot about the history of science and religion and perhaps we can even discuss a little bit how science evolves and i mean one thing you know you can't blame people for giving religion a bit of a hard time because of the crazy things that used to promulgate about astronomy and various other topics and the severe treatment uh it gave to those who disagreed with those things i mean people were burned at the stake for suggesting that the stars might be other sons like our own and they might have planets around them and stuff so you can understand why you know science wanted to divorce itself from religion perhaps at the outset although many early scientists as well as current ones are very religious people but why do you think that there's such a strong reaction a strong resistance to acknowledging that you may be right that that there may be intelligence at the foundation of everything and orchestrating everything yeah it's always hard to say and it's probably different with every person but i think it's fair to acknowledge that pretty much all of us have a motivation to want there to be some transcendent purposive creator behind things because we're aware of the human condition and we know that you know we only live for a finite amount of time and then we die and you know our hope of an afterlife depends upon there being a uh a transcendent creator who could who could reconstitute us if you will um on the other hand uh we haven't we have a motivation not to believe in a creator because none of us really like the idea of being morally accountable to a supreme being or something like that so you know there's this push pull inside each of us and so for that reason i've really tried to stay away from making the argument based on any kind of assessment of motivations of people who disagree uh but i would say that you know there is an interesting historical background to this as you alluded to uh some of it's been mistold i mean there was a in the 19th century there was this form of what's called historiography this way of telling the history of science that portrayed science and religion as always uh you know at each other's throat there was this kind of warfare model that developed if you go back to the period of the scientific revolution when the first really systematic methods of studying nature were being developed they were being developed by devoutly religious people um and the the big names are you know people like kepler and newton uh even galileo was very much despite his troubles with the catholic church he was still very much a uh a a believer in god and and and uh but you got newton galileo boyle christian huygens even going back further into the late middle ages a lot of the philosophers who were developing the scientific method like robert gross test for example was a particular intellectual hero of mine these were devoutly religious people who believed in god and believed that by studying nature they were revealing the handiwork of a great of a great mind or creator behind the universe uh we kind of lost that perspective in the late 19th century there were there was an intellectual shift it was presaged by developments in philosophy in the 18th century in the period that we call the enlightenment especially the secular enlightenment philosophers who are more continental um but then in the in the in the 19th century you had this theory these theory a series of of theories and ideas about origins the origin of the solar system the origin of the geological features on planet earth darwin's theory of the origin of species other people who extended his ideas to try to explain the origin of the first life and so by the end of the 19th century you had this kind of seamless materialistic account of where everything had come from and the the so-called god hypothesis or the design hypothesis seemed increasingly unnecessary and i think that kind of became the default way of thinking in the 20th century among many scientists i thought if we're going to be a really good scientist we need to get rid of any reference to creative intelligence as an explanation and just explain things by reference to the laws of nature or other physical processes and and so i think that kind of became a you know a a default way of thinking it became kind of a habitual among scientists and now here at the you know end of the 20th century the beginning of the 21st we're discovering things that i think really point to mind and intelligence and uh so i'll stop there for now but there's a lot more to say oh yeah sure uh incidentally just for the record i actually have bastard bachelor's and master's degrees in something called the science of creative intelligence um no kidding okay that's which is which is very intelligent design-ish and it's in its nature yeah yeah um and um what was i going to say yeah so the return of the god hypothesis so that implies that it had been around but had gone up faded and it's starting to return and let's let's pick out let's pick apart some of the terms in that title i mean first of all god let's uh everybody different people have different concepts of what god is but let's why don't you try to define it the way you understand it yeah right well one of the things i do in the book is look at different uh concepts if we look at the go back to that ancient debate all the way back to the greeks is it mind first and then matter and matter get shaped by mind or is it matter first and mind emerges from matter and so there's kind of two great philosophical systems and philosophers refer to one as materialism and the other is idealism and within the idealist framework there's a number of different perspectives about the nature of the mind that would be the ultimate entity responsible for things one is the classical theistic view that the god that the the mind is is the mind of god and by god we mean a transcendent intelligence a an intelligence that is separate that that resides separate from the universe but also acts within the universe in time uh another closely related idea is the idea of deism which is the idea that god is transcendent and separate from the universe but god uh only acts at the beginning and not after the universe he sets the universe in motion or it success the universe emotion and then lets things run on its own and then there are other views like the um uh well pananthism which is a view that says yes there is a god but god and and the universe is dependent upon god but pananthism says that the god is also exis is dependent on the universe for its existence so there's a kind of mutual dependency between god and the universe and then there's another idea called pan psychism which is the idea that there is a universal mind or consciousness and there's a little bit of that consciousness in all of matter um but the the the universal conscious mind is not in any way separate from the universe itself it's co co-extensive with the physical universe the universe is in the mind and the mind is in the universe and then there's that a fifth idea which is not really either materialistic or idealistic it's the idea of pantheism which says there is a god but god is not a conscious agent it's god it's kind of a mystical oneness or unity that binds all matter together it's kind of an impersonal force that binds matter together and there's a little bit of god in that sense in all matter and matter is is god as well so it's also the idea of god and matter being co-extensive but not a god not as a minder so you've got pantheism panentheism uh pansysm deism and classical theism you've got five you sort of five choices in the non-materialistic side of the philosophical ledger so i've got a a a new good friend that i've made at rice university uh wrote the the book uh the flip it's a critique of materialism jeffrey correct um yeah i've interviewed jeffrey yeah he's terrific yeah and you know he's he's he's a decided decidedly not a materialist and he's sort of thinking through well i'm not i'm not a materialist but i'm not sure which of those i don't think he's a pantheist either but you know is he a theist or a a pan-enthusiast i think he's kind of oscillating between theism where are you on that you know what's your preference i'm a class i'm a classical theist and that's part of was the um you know the argument of the book is that when we look at these three big discoveries about biological and cosmological origins materialism actually does a lousy job of explaining all three of them so you know that it doesn't explain the origin of the material universe because prior to the origin of matter space time and energy you can't invoke matter as a cause so i mean our new cosmology our ev the evidence from physics and astronomy and astrophysics is i think strongly pointing to the idea that the physical universe of matter space time and energy had a beginning and i think that requires um an external cause beyond the universe to bring bring the existing universe into existence you can't invoke matter to explain the origin of the universe when it's matter and energy that are precisely the things that are coming into existence at the beginning um on the other hand but then you know deism would do a pretty good job of explaining the origin of the universe because there is a transcendent intelligence separate from the universe that could act to bring the material universe into existence i've got troubles with pan-enthism on that score because panentheism says that god is dependent upon the existence of the universe just as the universe is dependent on the existence of god and in that philosophical framework then there's nothing separate from the universe that could act to cause it to begin uh in other words before the universe begins to exist the pan-enthusiastic creator or god would not exist because the pantheistic and the fantastic guys depends on the existence of the universe for its own existence so it can't exist separately to cause it to come into existence and uh pan psychism and uh pantheism have a similar problem so i've come down as far as the question the orders of the universe i think it's either deism or theism but then when you also see that there's evidence of design that arises long after the beginning of the universe and for example the digital code present in the dna molecule or those complex information storage transmission and processing systems we're finding in cells then i think you've got evidence for a designing mind that acts at the beginning but also long after the beginning and so i think when you kind of sort of uh i'm playing a game of philosophical survivor you know putting all the different ideas on the table and saying okay here's the key facts that need to be explained which best explains the whole ensemble and some of the some of the philosophical systems i think do a good job of explaining some of the key facts others different key facts but i think theism does the best job of explaining the whole range so thus the return of the god hypothesis where by god i'm electing for a theistic conception so as a theist um god is transcendent right and gives rise to the universe but somehow still he doesn't just go on vacation after that he's some he's still involved and i i shouldn't say he i mean i get actually flack from people for saying he um they let's say they uh they are still involved in uh orchestrating it at least periodically when it needs orchestration or perhaps moment to moment um what do you say about about that right right well the classical theistic conception is that god has multiple powers of agency that are expressed in his or its interaction with the physical universe okay um that god acts as a creator in the beginning god uh acts to sustain what we call the laws of nature in fact the whole idea of the laws of nature was as one historian of science put it a juridical metaphor of theological origin the nature has law-like order because there is a law giver and sustainer there's a a someone who's sustaining the orderly concept of nature and this was a very strong element in in for example sir isaac newton's thought uh so that's another one of the cons another mode of divine agency if you will and then a third power of god is the power to act as an agent within the creation that god otherwise sustains and upholds so you you can have instances of divine action after the beginning on an ongoing basis but also at discrete moments in time such as for example in the origin of life or the origin of human conscious awareness or whatever so um so that that whereas the deistic concept of god affirms one power of divine action or divine agency and that's the power to create in the beginning uh but not after the beginning and then there they're kind of there's also sometimes there's hybrid models where god creates at the beginning he sustains the laws of nature but doesn't do anything specific at discrete moments of time uh in many what are called theistic evolutionists hold of that kind of a concept let me tell you what i think and so there's a kind of a philosophical menu here menu options yeah menu of options you can you can either try to consider them let me tell you what i think and you can tell me what ism you think i am it might take me a minute to explain this but um i i resonate with the notion that god is omnipresent and there are biblical references for that and both old and new testament here's a here's a 19th century hasidic master menachem nahum who said the creator's glory fills the whole earth there is no place devoid of him but his glory takes the form of garb god is garbed in all things end of quote this aspect of divinity is called shekinah indwelling since it dwells in everything so my my sense is that there are no holes in god there's no place no thing where if you looked closely enough or deeply enough you wouldn't find god you could go out to the middle of intergalactic space and and their god would be if you knew how to look uh and in a sense god is hiding in plain sight because all these laws of nature are evidence of that infinite intelligence even in the middle of intergalactic space there would be gamma rays and photons and what not going through and those are adhering to laws of nature which i think everything would come to a screeching halt if that intelligence were not all pervading and indwelling in all these phenomena you don't have that exact same concept concept that in in him all things are held together you know there's a yeah um there's there's even a verse on this from the bhagavad-gita speaking as god it says what if i did not continue unwaryingly in activity if i did not engage in action these worlds would perish so but that doesn't mean that god is not transcendent god is transcendent but god is also imminent so there in other words let's put it this way intelligence has its sort of quiescent or resting phase like an ocean that isn't whipped up by the wind and it also has its active phase like an ocean that is whipped up by the wind and um and since creation is multi-dimensional in many ways of understanding it even in you know physics we have obvious levels we have molecular and atomic and subatomic and and then perhaps just some level which is not physical at all unified field or vacuum state or something um you know we have this wholeness which is we could say everything is contained within everything is contained within god and god is at the same time in everything and if if you speak that way you could end up saying well there really is nothing but god and that which appears to be something other than god is just sort of god and garb as this hasidic master said saints and sages in every religion who claim to have attained what we might call god consciousness an experiential apprehension or lit or oneness with god i mean jesus said i and my father are one and many great saints and sages have said similar things so what i'm suggesting here and i'll try to wrap it up is that the human nervous system is an instrument which well here's another one quote god's this is from a sufi saint ibn arabi god sleeps in the rock dreams in the plant stirs in the animal and awakens in man so god is in all those things pervades all those things but in terms of a living experience the rock is you know it contains god but it it as a rock is not conscious or conscious of god but human beings are conscious and they're conscious that they're conscious and ultimately they can consciousness or or divinity can wake up within a human being such that one knows oneself as that and that's what all the the great mystics throughout history have attested to so what am i yeah what kind of is it well a lot of it sounds very very classically theistic god being imminent uh present in all things uh your the way you described it it first reminded me of the the psalm from the hebrew bible you know if i go to the depths you were there if i go out into you know the reaches of space you're there and then you in describing god is also transcendent in some ways separate from the creation uh that's all that the big word transcendent really means um that's very classically theistic um it sounds like you conceive of god as as a a conscious mind therefore personal not an impersonal force as uh pantheon maybe both maybe maybe god has an impersonal level and like brahman and then a personal level which they would call ishwara or um sago no brahman brahman with qualities if you use that eastern terminology and i think that we also since we are permeated with god we were like the wave on the ocean which yeah i'm a wave but then we're also the ocean oh i'm not a wave i'm i contain all waves i'm i'm oceanic yeah and there are both theistic and pan-theistic versions of eastern religions for example there's a theistic version of hinduism as well as a pantheon there are numerous flavors there they've been debating each other for thousands of years yeah yeah exactly but the metaphor you used of quiescent and an active phase it can be applied in in a sense it can map to some scientific reality that if we think of the laws of nature as an expression of god's effort to maintain an order in the universe or they're an expression of god's con one of my cambridge supervisors summarized newton's view of the laws of nature he said that they were that newton believed that what we call the laws of nature are an expression of constant spirit action and that's sort of the quiescent phase god is constantly active in that but we don't really detect god's action in that because we're so used to the orderly concourse of nature sun up sun down i drop the ball it falls the the electricity produces the light etc but then there's also an active phase where god does things discreetly that become detectable to us his actions become detectable to us against the backdrop of that orderly concourse of nature and so in in medieval theology this distinction was captured with two latin terms one was the potency ordinata the ordinary power of god which we describe as the laws of nature and then was and then they called the other was called the potency absolutely the fiat or absolute power of god in which god acts as an agent within the creation that god is otherwise sustaining and upholding and so you see these two powers of god at work and um in our modern time with the under the influence of materialism even many theists have wanted to disavow the potentia absolutely and say that god never acts in a discreet way god can only act through the laws of nature but one of the key arguments of my books in particular signature in the cell and i reprise this a bit in return of the god hypothesis is that information is by definition not the kind of thing that can be reduced to this sort of regularity regular order that that the laws of nature describe so the laws of nature do a great job of describing even matt with mathematical precision regularity in nature but complexity irregularity that is specified to perform a function that's another way of thinking of the concept of information is not reducible to those laws it's because it's a different kind of beast it's not repetitive information that the way you and i are speaking with each other we're using some of the same words but never in the same arrangement and because we want to convey very specific thoughts and ideas so the transmission of information is not reducible to the underlying laws of physics and chemistry it's a it's an entirely different something and something that we really only associate with mine if i understand what you just said let's say i might say well i can't pick up my pen my my hand my arm can pick up my pen but no you know i my arm and hand are they're my organs of action they're not part of it you know they're under your control you as an agent something different than the laws of physics right so i mean i would say that uh anything we see gravity or photosynthesis or anything else that's going on um you know those are just sort of god's organs of action doing their thing and they're really not separate from god just as my arm is not separate from me or from my mind they're just a kind of a more manifest or expressed aspect of that transcendent intelligence so they're they're you know the transcendent intelligence is the ocean and then the gravity or photosynthesis or whatever are just waves on that ocean but it's really all one entire ocean we if we we can distinguish between waves and the rest of the ocean or we cannot and just accept the whole thing as one giant wholeness you mentioned plato um plato described the universe as a single living creature that encompasses all living creatures within it and if we think of it that way then the laws of nature are like specific currents of intelligence flowing within the ocean of intelligence performing various functions yeah i mean many of those metaphors are very helpful um the uh the thing that fascinated the early founders of modern science in particular kepler and newton was that these these regular patterns that we observe in nature can be described with mathematics to a very uh precise in a very precise way and so they seem to in in so far as mathematics is conceptual and mental we hold we don't see mathematical equations floating around we don't point to them they exist in our minds and we might write down an expression of these mathematical relationships but they're that they they are mental in character and conceptual and so both kepler who was a christian neoplatonist and newton believed that what they were revealing as they described these regularities with mathematical precision was something of the mind of god and uh so that that's a you know and so and i would say the way you're you you sound very classically theistic with a little bit of an eastern flavor to it you know so that's it might be the way i just i'll come to that and you know there's very there's very fine uh subtle distinctions that you know we can chop the baloney really finely and um you know are the laws of nature an expression of god or are they are they a result of god's action in a material realm which is in some way separate from him but in which he also inhabits the more eastern take would say well they're an expression of god that the god is is expressing himself in nature and he's connected to nature perhaps more intimately the western take would be a bit more god created nature separate from himself but then he inhabits it and acts within it so there's a maybe slight difference but i think the idea that there is a transcendent mind who is also active in the creation is basically theistic and then there's different ways we could you know kind of uh fine-tune that understanding and we might fall on different sides of philosophical distinctions but uh it's really striking to me that we live in a time after maybe a hundred and fifty years or more of dominance of the materialistic worldview the worldview of scientific materialism that you have figures like jeffrey cripel who are saying ah don't think that works i think the there's something well even our um very interesting scientific atheist uh thomas nagle um who put his neck on the line to write a very favorable review and assessment of my book for uh you mentioned at the beginning the times literary supplement in london and uh he uh was then attacked by fellow atheist philosophers he's a philosopher of science at nyu now i think emeritus but a great eminence in in the uh american academy what is it like to be a bat exactly exactly you know he's he's a deep thinker and nagel uh was it was viciously attacked for saying nice things about my book advancing the theory of intelligent design though he made it clear he wasn't a theist he wasn't really willing to go all the way to intelligent design but he thought my critique of origin of life research of chemical evolutionary theory was was very substantive and he appreciated it i think it's sad that he was viciously attacked i mean you know these ideas that i'm discussing i'm not invested in them in the sense that i'm going to viciously attack somebody who disagrees with them i'm just doing my best to understand this conversation yeah i mean we're we're having it right here i mean this is yeah we're not going to go to war over these things yeah yeah no this is what makes wakes makes it great to be a human being you know we're thinking about the human condition and how we got here and what the ultimate reality is and anyway just one part of the story i wanted to tell was that um i ended up having lunch uh with with nagel in new york and i i was coming to new york and i emailed him in advance and i thought i told him i perfectly understand if you've had enough of having interacted with us it's brought you only grief but he said no i'd love to get together we had this great conversation and he was either he either had just written or was in the process of writing his book mind and cosmos why the neo-darwinian materialist understanding of reality is almost certainly false was this long subtitle so here's a an atheist philosopher who has become completely disaffected with materialism in the darwinian form of that because there he says there are two things in in the universe there's mine there's matter but there's also mind there's a physical cosmos but there's also minds and if we can't give an account of what mind is or we or if our account of reality excludes the recognition of the reality of conscious awareness and mind then we're missing something really big and that's i think that's one of jeffrey kripal's big big big points as well yeah you know a lot of things don't become obvious to the general public until they have almost become the norm and i think that um there's a shift taking place in a paradigm shift taking place from materialism to something along the lines of intelligent design and i think it's it's quite well underway and i think that it's extremely important and i could give you reasons why i think it's extremely important i mean one of the most important things we could possibly consider but let's hear why you think it's important well nothing can mean anything to an atom or a molecule or a rock or a planet or even a solar system or a galaxy meaning is conferred things mean things to persons meaning is conferred by persons and is found i would argue in relationship between persons best found in relationship between persons and if we live in a universe where there is no purposeful intelligence and therefore personhood behind the universe and if we live in a universe where ultimately there will be a heat death and nothing will be left but very cold uh elementary particles um then there is no there is no possibility of there having been a purpose to our creation or a purpose to our our our ultimate end and i think many people in our culture sense that the scientific materialist worldview has given rise to a form of nihilism where we think um yeah you know live eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die but tomorrow but but ultimately when we die we rot and that's it and there there is no hope of an ultimate significance to anything we achieve we have a short time on earth we can yes we can create some temporary sense of of purpose and meaning to our existence but we have to face facts and recognize as the atheistic existentialists uh sartre and camus nietzsche did that that ultimately if this the materialist worldview is true what we're left with is anguish forelorness and despair there is no hope of ultimate significance and i think instead if there is a purposeful creator behind the universe and if our existence depends on the activity of that creator then it's perfectly possible that this life may not be the whole of life and that things that we do in this life may have ultimate significance beyond the short time we're here on earth and so i i think i mean these are they seem big heavy metaphysical considerations things maybe we only think about it four o'clock in the morning but i think they affect our daily lives in a really significant way we have an epidemic of teen suicide in in the country and i had an experience as a 14 year old of a deep uh form of anxiety which i only later learned was a kind of metaphysical anxiety i was asking questions of myself or rather i wasn't really asking them they were spontaneously popping into my head you know what is anything that i do going to matter in 100 years what does any of this matter and i i found it very difficult to answer within the kind of secular framework in which i was surrounded and for me finding god was also finding a sense of significance and purpose in my life that transcended the the daily routine routines of life and uh finding the possibility of of of uh relationship between persons that is is quite possibly lasting so i think i think a lot of young people and and i i had a sense of despair about my inability to answer these questions and as i've i've encountered young i was a college professor for 12 years and somehow kids that had that turn of mind would find me you know and so i would tell them okay we'll we'll discuss those questions but first go register for the philosophy major and then we'll we'll have longer more chances to talk about it but i think a lot of young people are wondering is it just about going out and making money if so what am i doing that for you know affluence by itself is not completely satisfying i i wonder if there's a deeper meaning to my existence so i think the materialism really robs us of any sense of that and leads to nihilism whereas uh alternate the alternative view that of a purposeful creator i think opens up the last line of my book was it was uh i was quoting the great uh jewish psychologist victor frankel with his title man's search for meaning and uh you know that i said if if if the evidence of intelligent design of a transcendent intelligence behind the universe is true it means that our search for meaning need not end in vain yeah here's what i think i think the the universe is one big evolution machine and its whole thrust its whole trajectory is to evolve more and more complex structures which can more and more fully reflect the divinity that is inherent within creation then at its foundation and um you know that quote i said earlier the rock the plant the animal the human being there's there's an evolution in terms of becoming better and better reflectors of that divine intelligence or whatever we want to call it and um i happen to believe in reincarnation i know that as a christian you probably don't although there are some evidences for it in christianity suppose some say it was edited out at the council of nicaea but um in terms of our just rotting when we die i i think that nobody dies and that the soul whatever that may be exactly um continues to sort of you know each life is like a class you might take in school or a grade you might take in grammar school and then you go on to the next one the next one and you accumulate sort of wisdom and you know spiritual evolution as you go along so i think the reason that you know materialism is so destructive is that it compl if the if anything i'm saying is true is that it it completely shatters any notion like that you know you were just by any any hope of of life yeah of anything right we're just biological robots in a meaningless universe right and when you die you're dead um yeah whereas the these other ways of looking at it and the one i express is obviously not the only one but they they offer a much bigger picture and they they imbue life with a lot more meaning and significance than it otherwise have and you you mentioned suicide opioid epidemic is another example exactly i agree i agree let me get let me give you two cuts on what we were talking about you know with the the life after death issue um i think many people anyone who's ever stood at the bedside of a dying person realizes has has a very strange experience at the moment of death because the body is still there but something has left and i think all of us have an ins an intuitive sense that uh our personhood sometimes called the soul by you know theologians or philosophers but our self is more than our bodies and so that gives i think throughout human history there's been an intuition that therefore there's something about ourself which doesn't die just because our bodies die and i think that's been a persistent human intuition about about the nature of their own of our own natures of our own our own our own self that's just just an observation that's whatever it's worth i don't base anything on my argument in the book isn't based on that intuition but i it's something that i've i've noticed and many i think many medical people have that who who attend many dying people have the very strong sense of that you know the mass of the body is still the same at the moment of death as it was the moment before but something has left but another and just another cut on this is kind of interesting i got to hear a talk several years ago at a sort of small scientific conference by a great scientist named james tour he's a nano technologist and organic chemist at rice university same university as jeffrey uh kripal and dr tour has written a number of articles very critical of these um chemical evolutionary theories of the origin of life and the simulation experiments that that the origin of life researchers do to try to simulate how life would have arisen spontaneously from non-living chemicals and what what uh tour points out is number one the the chemists are always uh manipulating with their own intelligence the molecules to move the molecules in a life-friendly direction they never have built an actual living cell but they can get build biomolecules that are at least kind of relevant play intelligent designer in other words they play they're but they're simulating intelligent design exactly but second thing he points out is that life depends on information this is the big big insight of the 20th century biology francis crick 1953 with watson discovers the structure of the dna molecule 57 and 58 he proposes what's called the sequence hypothesis which tells us that along the spine of the dna this chemical subunits are actually functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digi digital characters and machine code this is these are a set of instructions this suggests the mind but if life and this is now to tour's point he says if life depends upon intelligence and we have perfected ways of storing information or if life depends on information and we have perfected ways of storing information and all kinds of different media you know i can i can transmit it over a wire i can put it through a fax machine i can speak something into a receiver at one end and it comes out a receiver on the other or we now even can store information literally on the cloud the computer cloud so if information can be stored and then uh and then expressed in some other some other place on a in another medium what would keep them if there's a and if that information is pointing to a mind as our creator what would keep that creator from storing the information for reconstituting us you mean as we are or in some other body yes maybe in an enhanced or better form right jews and christians believe in a a spiritual body at the resurrection i once had a spiritual teacher who at one point said he was talking about immortality and he said you know if we want to be immortal there must be some better bodies than these in which to do it well this is you know you find this in the in the in the biblical text you know the teaching st paul talked about this a spiritual and incorruptible body that would be glorified by not being subject to the kind of decay that we experience in this life but i thought that was a really interesting talk from professor tour about information that informa if information is the key to constructing a body and if in if information can be stored in many different media and indeed in other minds then if there is a mind of god who created the information for building us in the first place when we die it's entirely possible that he could be storing that information to reconstitute us in the same or even an in an improved form and at this conference was another computer scientist where was a computer scientist david gallaranter from yale universities the chairman of the computer science department there glariter uh actually is the inventor or he did he did some of the key work conceptually on on developing the cloud concept in computer computer science he's an orthodox jew and he and in tour were just jabbering away afterwards you know about the the religious potential religious significance of developments in computer science and our understanding of what information is now can be stored in different minds or on different media some people some neuroscientists think that our memories and and all aren't necessarily even stored in the physical brain um but that the brain is kind of like the way our computer is where it can pull things off the cloud and store things back to the cloud you know um so who knows you know that might be well that's an interesting concept too rick it's called mind body dualism and i'm increasingly persuaded of that and for reasons that have come out of neuroscience that the that uh increasingly there's evidence that the brain is an organ of thought that is being used by the mind and uh and so that that that com computer uh analogy kind of works for software and hardware and software sort of like the mind the hardware's like the brain only you know the mind uses software as well so there's a higher level but um it's uh one of the greatest brain physiologists of the 20th century sir john echols was uh his position he called mind body dualism he was a mind body duelist interactionist he wasn't a an old-fashioned cartesian dualist but i had a chance to interview him when i was a very young scientist and fascinating discussion and he cited a number of experiments that seemed to suggest that what what's going on in the brain is being controlled by the mind and not the reverse um i mean the brain affects the mind but but the the the mind is also controlling the brain so that's a there's a no one of our research scientists and fellows uh michael egner is a neuroscientist a neurosurgeon at the state university of new york and he writes on our website mind matters about some of the this evidence i even have a video out that we did uh in our science uprising series about the evidence for the mind controlling the brain so that's another challenge to materialism yeah a couple of points on that i've interviewed a lot of people who have had near-death experiences and they might be under heavy anesthesia during an operation and they're they're able to sort of watch the operation from the ceiling or something and say afterwards what the surgeons had been talking about and there was one lady who saw a red sneaker on the roof of the hospital with somebody went up there later and found it and you know or they'll they'll go somewhere down the hall or even farther away and see things happening and report them later so so that would suggest that the mind or whatever it is is independent of the body even if the body is not at all functioning and then another thing is in a couple weeks i'm going to interview a guy named jim tucker dr jim tucker at the university of virginia and he is the successor to another fellow named dr ian stevenson and they've specialized in interviewing young kids who remember past lives and the kid will you know some kid will start talking about some ship and some plane they went down in and then the names of his friends and all and then his parents will do research and find that there was such an aircraft carrier there was such a plane this guy crashed he was with these other guys with those names when he was on that carrier you know all kinds of couple of thousand accounts like that so it's just interesting because it just sort of it's a way of evidentially suggesting that obviously there is more to us than our physical body and there's something which survives its its demise yes i understand it and i don't know a lot about this many of the near-death experiences um involve subjective experiences that can't really be evaluated one way or another but there's a small portion of them that do do admit um critical scrutiny and and involve people seeing things that they could not have possibly seen in a horizontal position on an operating theater and which were accurate to things that were going on the room while the operation was taking place or and uh this professor medical professor that i was mentioning michael egner had a colleague who had done some very systematic study of some of those things so um i i don't know a lot about them but i i don't discount them offhand you know i think there would be something there yeah and they're becoming more common because our ability to resuscitate people um is so vastly improved there's a dutch cardiologist named pim van von lammel who ended up really writing books and all about near-death experiences because he started encountering so many of them in people he had resuscitated who were in cardiac arrest um but anyway it's just part of the puzzle part of the puzzle yeah yeah was it what's the shakespeare quote more things there is another implication i think oh irene's going to hand me you know i'm talking too much um no we're doing okay another implication i think of materialism and the reason that um a shift to intelligent design or something along those lines will be transformative is not only the sort of the individual nihilism and drug addiction and suicide and all that but i think that everything we see in the world is an expression of the collective mindset of humanity and we see the sixth great mass extinction we see environmental destruction we see pollution we see huge economic and social inequities and so on and i think that if we really not just by believing it but with some deep intuitive experience knew that god is present in all things and orchestrating the universe we wouldn't treat the the world the way we do because we would actually be treating god that way that would be our experience and we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to do that well it's interesting i just read an article today about some leading intellectuals who are um have grown disaffected with secularism and materialism atheism agnosticism and who are themselves still agnostic they're not believers in god but they're talking about this idea and this is more pertains to how we treat each other but that in the west we've had this very deep concept of the intrinsic value of the individual that each person being made in the image of god has a value that transcends his or her material worth you know it's not just him you can chop us up and the chemistry of the body isn't worth a whole lot but the person is infinitely of infinite value and uh several intellectuals were mentioned douglas murray a british writer um uh tom holland this interesting british historian who uh and both doug murray and tom holland are kind of calling themselves christian atheists you know they're they're atheists by belief they're agnostic they can't really believe but they they see the benefit of what you know in the west judeo-christian religion brought to us with that deep sense that each person has had intrinsic dignity and they don't see anything that can really replace that um you know and that we can try to invent it if we're atheists or say well we're valuable because of some other reason but nothing has really replaced that sense of intrinsic dignity in the sense of human rights that flow from that and so i i do think that's another reason that belief in god what i call the return of the god hypothesis could be very significant to us because um absent that sense of of um moral accountability to a creator and also the sense that as our founders put it we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and that concept of rights in western political philosophy came out of the notion of an intrinsic dignity that was conferred on us by virtue of our creation not something that governments could give or take away not something that corporations could give or take away it's not a matter of our economic value in dollars and cents we have that dignity intrinsically in our personhood and with the increasing secular secularization of our culture that's something that even secular intellectuals are starting to mourn and wish we could somehow bring back well you know your book is entitled the return of the god hypothesis it's not entitled the return of the god belief and as as i understand it a hypothesis is something that you can actually investigate you don't just have to sort of believe it and hope for the best you can investigate it in various ways right exactly and i don't claim to prove the existence of god with absolute certainty that's something you can really only do in mathematics in science we propose theories or explanations and then evaluate them based on their explanatory power we propose hypotheses and assess their explanatory power and it turns out that the god hypothesis which i'm quite happy to call a metaphysical rather than a scientific hypothesis nevertheless has great explanatory power with respect to these great discoveries that have been made about biological physical and cosmological origins the universe as best we can tell had a beginning it's been finely tuned and its basic parameters from the beginning and there have been big infusions of information into the biosphere since the beginning and indeed we find information and information technology in even the very simplest living cells on earth suggesting as i've argued in my books a master programmer for life so these are three huge discoveries that i think have uh implications that point to a transcendent intelligence to what i call the god a god hypothesis i'm not by the way saying that god left and has now come back uh i think i think god has always been there but our in our our thinking is coming back around to recognizing the evidence for the reality of god yeah if god had left we'd be in trouble absolutely um the question came in from elizabeth in colorado which i think pertains to this she said is your belief in god based on logical reasoning or have you also experienced god directly and intimately the way that mystics such as thomas merton and hildegard of bingen have there's three parts to a question but let me give you that one first oh yeah uh well i would say both although i with the caveat that um i don't consider myself a great or unusual saint or anything like that um right well in the sense that you know uh christianity teaches that anyone who comes to believe in god and christ as savior is is uh has access to what jews and christians call the holy spirit that god dwells within us in a personal way that um and i do uh i i would affirm that i've experienced that and and have an awareness of god's presence in my life and sometimes on occasion a kind of guidance that i would characterize as very direct communication um sometimes just by reading uh the the hebrew bible or the new testament sometimes also in experiences of prayer getting a very definite sense of of leading or guidance about a key decision or an awareness of something that i need to be an insight you know so i i do have subjective experiences of god that are are important to me and part of my experience as a human being i also have um a firm and i've written some books arguing that there's uh objective that is evidence that's not dependent on my personal experience that that is available to all objective evidence of the reality of of of god in nature and i also think i was a long time philosophy and philosophy of science professor i think they're very good philosophical reasons to consider the god hypothesis one big thing i address at the very end of the the new book return of the god hypothesis is the whole question of knowledge and the reliability of the human mind has been a big problem for philosophers since the enlightenment trying to justify the reliability of the human mind but if we uh have reasons to think that god exists it's not very hard to justify the reliability of the mind because we can think that the human mind was created by a superior mind who made our mind in some way in the image of of that creator and therefore the the the design the rationality the lawful order we perceive in nature that has come from that rational creator is something that we can understand because that same rationality was built into us so the reliability of the mind is in certified by the reality and benevolence of the creator who made our minds to know the world whereas on a on a purely secular agnostic atheistic materialistic uh world view it's been very difficult to justify the reliability of the human mind especially i put it more specifically on a darwinian account of reality it's hard to justify the the mind darwinism teaches that whatever we think or our belief system and our cognitive equipment would have been maxim would have evolved to maximize survival but there are many sort of scenarios where where we could believe the wrong thing but stumble onto something that confers survival advantage on us and just to give one example which richard dawkins himself points out uh religious belief has been shown in many studies to promote mental and physical well-being and dawkins acknowledges this and says yeah it was selected for evolution selected for religious belief because it confers a survival advantage on human beings but he also thinks that religious beliefs are completely false so that means that an evolutionary account of the origin of the human mind um involves uh the origin of beliefs and cognitive tendencies that are also false and so on an evolutionary account there's no guarantee that things that will confer survival will also be truth tropic that will lead us to true beliefs including about abstract things especially about abstract things like our ideas about where life came from or the origin of the universe these have no direct survival advantage one way or another and so we could be an assist a situation where evolution has programmed us to think completely false things and we would rather think that our minds are reliable instruments that good reasoning leads to to to truthful beliefs and theism gives a reason to believe that our minds are reliable and therefore provides a ground for believing in our ability to know the world which is the basis of all science by the way so science is theism is really a friend to science whereas i think materialism undermines our confidence and our ability to know the world which is what science is all about i think that there are degrees of reliability and you know that the mind can be extremely confused and unreliable but it can be absolutely absolutely it can be refined to be more reliable well and this was actually another really the the the founders of modern science had kind of two key ideas about the mind that they held together one was that the mind is basically reliable because it had been made in the image of god who had made our minds to know the order and the design and the rationality that god had put into the world but they also being mostly of a judeo-christian mindset believed in this idea of uh a original sin or a problem with the human um will that we could be willful we could jump to conclusions we could be biased we could be prejudiced and so there was also a problem with our thinking that had to be uh taken into account and that was one of the reasons for what we call the scientific method i think there are several scientific methods but the idea that you had to test your ideas against nature it wasn't good enough just to think of what you thought was the most pleasing idea about how nature works you have to go out in the va you have to test it against actual observations to see if that's actually how nature works and this was a problem that the greek philosophers had they were interested in nature as well as abstract ideas but they had a belief that nature had an intrinsic order that was self-evident to us that could be perceived by pure reason without observation and so they did very little careful empirical investigation of nature whereas the judeo-christian framework said yes the nature is intelligible to us we can understand it but we better look at it carefully so we don't jump to conclusions or deceive ourselves or uh act on prejudice so it combined the rational and the empirical in a way that's been incredibly fruitful for science going forward william blake's famous quote if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is infinite for man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern so so yeah and then of course there's the you know in the bible seeing through a glass darkly and then eventually clearly yeah yeah so it's a matter of kind of refining the senses and the perceptual faculties to the point where you can see things as they are which is infinite yeah the uh the uh historian of science uh steve fuller who's at warwick university in the uk an american guy that i know quite well but a quite a fantastic historian philosopher of science uh pointed out to me in correspondence as i was writing the book that this this uh doctrine of original sin which seems so you know kind of prejudicial or uh unflattering to human beings a lot of people don't like it he said but it actually had a powerful positive effect on science because it said we can't trust the first thought that comes into our mind we might be deceiving ourselves we got to check our theories and our our hypotheses against the way the world really works and there's a great quote from robert boyle uh the great chemist who said his famous book was called the skeptical chemist but he said it's not the job of the natural philosopher to see what god must have done or to say what god must have done but rather it's to go and look and to see what he actually did do we have to ground our scientific ideas on actual observation of nature not just uh philosophizing in an armchair way yeah there's a saying somewhere in the vedic tradition it's written by pragya which means that level of intellect which all which knows only truth and the understanding is that we can sort of bring the mind to such a level of refinement that anything you put your attention on or want to know you know it truthfully without any without any distortion and that that's yeah go ahead that's interesting because that says that the goal of human science is to know the world as it really is and they're now there's now a profound relativism that's crept into literary theory and philosophy and the study of it the subdiscipline of philosophy known as epistemology but even in science as well it's a a a philosophy of science known as the sociology of knowledge which says there really isn't an objective truth out there that that truth is created by by by the the groups of people working together you know and so whoever gets the grant makes the theory and and whoever has more money and more grant money gets to predominate in the contest between theories but it's all relative we don't really know an objective reality and i i think the the a pervasive human intuition across different cultures has been that no there is an objective reality there and truth with the capital t uh is found when our ideas about reality match as it real reality is it really yeah that's that's a that's a common and pervasive human intuition that i think it's being lost because of what's called this this post-modernist trend in epistemology that that says every and it's not just morals are relative it's not just political ideas are relative but even our scientific ideas are relative to persons or groups there's no objective truth that can be true that can be even in principle uh ascertained yeah i mean you know i think the world is round and you think it's flat and uh you know who's to say who's right you know it's just you can't you can't trust nasa of course they're all you have your science and i have mine you know yeah right that's creating so much confusion in the world these days but i i think it's actually one of the things that the god hypothesis has done historically and i think can help to restore that sense of there being an objective truth is that it's it's given us reason to trust in the basic reliability of the human mind our tendencies towards uh flights of fancy and prejudicial reasoning notwithstanding and so it is at least in principle possible to know things as they really are which is a presupposition of all of science and the early founders of modern science being god believers had a confidence that they could know and and discover that that as one historian science put it that nature had a secret to reveal and the careful study would reveal it and if we lose that confidence if we lose the confidence in our basic ability to know the world then we really won't have science anymore science after all in the ancient greek sense of sciencia just means knowledge this is why i find the whole science religion or science spirituality interface fascinating i i think that you know science has lacks the tools to explore certain realities that spirituality can explore so spirituality can help science in that respect but also spirituality can be very woo and loopy and imprecise and imaginative and you know fanciful and i think if if a scientific attitude is brought to the spiritual endeavor it can kind of keep you on track yeah it's important to have evidence for what you believe yeah yeah and that's of course the the the approach i've taken in the new book uh there's been this long divide it's a kind of almost a cultural trope that science is the facts and religion is all about faith maybe it might be about values but it's about subjective or abstract things that can't be in any way tested or evaluated the argument of my new book is that the facts of science support faith or belief in god and that the two can be brought together and and that is actually the classical understanding of the relationship between science and faith going back to the period of the scientific revolution and we now have evidence that says it's time to return to that yeah and another question that elizabeth asked is um oops is is logical reasoning or direct experience the more um convincing proof for the existence of god i would say say both should be brought to bear but what would you say about that i think i think it's a both hand not an either or i don't think if if you're speaking with a friend who's a materialist and wants to know is there any reason to believe in god it's not usually that persuasive to someone else to talk about your own personal and subjective experience can be some people are if they trust you and they trust your integrity may say oh that's interesting there may be more things under heaven and earth that have occurred to me in my philosophy but i think generally as a way of of introducing people to the reality of god it's more helpful to point to objective evidences that don't depend on one's own personal experience and i used to tell my students the heart cannot exalt in what the mind rejects many students that i used to teach had had individual experiences of god subjective experiences but then would get talked out of their faith by atheistic professors because the professors would say well look the evidence of science is against that you can't believe that and so i think it's important to have that grounding in evidence and reason and i used to teach a course when i was a college professor called reasons for faith with that idea that reason can be an aid to faith but that doesn't mean that it exhausts the grounds for faith that one's own personal experience can be very important and uh and and shouldn't be discounted out of hand especially if you have good objective reasons for believing there may be a realm beyond the material yeah and as i said earlier i i personally feel that god is a reality that can be experienced and with you know greater and greater degrees of clarity and eventually crystal clarity and since we have that if that's true since we have that capability we won't be satisfied until we have that experience so i think it's great to pre to engage in intellectual understanding of the whole thing your book does that brilliantly i loved listening to the whole book but if that's all i had to go on i would be frustrated because you know i also want the personal experience i i think that's right and what we're talking about if we're talking about a personal god we're talking about the possibility of having communication between persons between ourselves and god which is a another way of talking about having a relationship so um that and i think the i think the the two comments you've just made bring to mind the uh sin augustine uh he had this concept of a god-shaped vacuum that people are restless and felt until we find our our home as he put it in the in god using the archaic english construction of the capital th and then the other thing talking about epistemol epistemology or our ability to know the world augustine also had this idea uh in latin it was very had various constructions but one was cradle kratos telegom believe in order to know if you believe first in god then that grounds our belief in the reliability of the mind and it makes pos it makes it possible to know the world around us and in a secular age which is rejected belief in god the impli the consequences of that start to perkle in to percolate into our our philosophy our philosophy of knowledge and the philosophers have been famously uh distressed about this whole question of epistemology how do how can we justify the possibility of human knowledge and there's been more and more different flavors of skepticism about our ability to know that have arisen since the enlightenment and the the the idea that we could reason without any any framework any theistic framework so so augustine i think was sort of prescient and on in both regards uh we're we're looking for a relationship with god and we need to believe in god to be confident that our minds are real reliable instruments that allow us to know the world believe in order to know i mean a scientist has to have enough faith that if he pursues a particular line of experimentation it might produce a result to actually start pursuing it and if he thinks it's hopeless and there's no chance i'm going to discover anything then he won't even start won't you you want yeah he or she won't do that and your comment reminds me of the great uh hungarian physical chemist and philosopher of science michael palani in his book personal knowledge i don't know if you're familiar with that rick but you might enjoy that it's a it it expresses some of those same kind of ideas but there's an element of faith in the practice of science yeah and uh we we presuppose certain things about uh the structures and reliability of the mind we presuppose that our efforts will result in some insight because there's an underlying order in nature none of these things can be proven they have to be presupposed in order to do science at all at all yeah that's true of so many things in life i mean you you sort of wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless you felt like the the floor was there you know or you know varying other things we do you you know we just sort of assume that every time we get on an airplane we trust that the laws of nature will continue to to function in the way they have in the past that that airfoil trick will work again you know so and so i think what we're kicking around here is just the notion that the pursuit of god or knowing god can be a scientific enterprise and uh could the the laws of science that a scientist adheres to in doing his work you know a seeker of god could apply that those same methods in a way i mean obviously there might be some different techniques and practices involved but with the same rigor of empire you know forming a hypothesis and then seeing verifying it and maybe forming another one and verifying that step by step right and i use a specific method of reasoning to make my case for the existence of god in the book it's called inference to the best explanation and it's used by scientists but it's also used by philosophers as well and so there's a rigorous form of reasoning that underwrites the argument that i'm using and i i go into that in some detail so people kind of pull the curtain back and see uh how i'm getting to the conclusion that i'm i'm getting to um there's also in philosophy a definition of knowledge which is the idea of knowledge is justified true belief and the question arises can you have knowledge of god the same way you can have knowledge of the world and i and now an increasing number of other philosophers of science would argue yes you can you can have justified true beliefs about the reality of the deity and what i attempt to do in the book is to show uh is to provide first some evidence and then a chain of reasoning that shows why the inference to the reality of god is a justified relief and therefore that we can have knowledge of god in the same way that we do have knowledge of the world yeah but i wouldn't use the word belief there i think that we can have experience of god that is actually more concrete than our current experience of the world and i think people have had it it's rare but i think we might be entering an age in which it's becoming more common i think that might well be true to philosophers the belief doesn't have the stigma that it has the word doesn't have the stigma that it has to scientists science scientists think of belief as a kind of uh nebulous uh purely subjective that's the way i was interpreting it yeah yeah no exactly to a philosopher a belief simply means uh a proposition that one holds and and accepts is true so um can you have can you know things about god can you believe things about god that are justified and um and that are true and uh just as we think we have knowledge of the world can we have knowledge of god in that sense and and i and other philosophers of science would say yeah you can that's uh god isn't in a separate category uh obviously we can't see god but we we believe we give intellectual assent and affirm the existence of many things in physics for example that we can't see quarks and electrons and elementary particles and fundamental forces and laws of nature you know we see the effects of those things yeah but we don't see them direct much of the things our knowledge of the dna molecule is inferred from things we can see we don't see the the double helix strand directly but we infer its structure and much of science has that uh that character of uh affirming things that we know indirectly but from other evidence science is indirectly inferential oftentimes and our knowledge of god can be indirectly inferential we learn about god from other evidence of his reality or it can be more direct i i know there's an apple in the refrigerator i believe that i i saw it earlier i could go and actually eat it and then it would really confirm my belief meister eckhart said the i through which i see god is the eye through which god sees me and i think he was referring to a level of attainment or realization in which you know he's eating the apple so to speak that that god the whole relationship to god moves beyond any kind of belief or or conjecture or abstraction to you know the most concrete a direct personal encounter like jesus must have had and saying i and my father are one yeah i i agree with that i think that one does not preclude the other and they're not mutually exclusive you can have both subjective uh and very direct personal knowledge of god and you can have objective knowledge based on evidence and inference and reasoning yeah and speaking of jesus check there's no apples in the fridge oh irene said there's no apples no there's one in the drawer [Laughter] all right we'll see about that speaking of jesus i have no problem believing that he walked on water or did the other things he was said to have done and there are other instances in other traditions of people doing similar things and some people call those miracles i think it's actually an example of a being a person who had such a profound experiential immersion in the ground of being in which all the laws of nature reside that he acquired the ability to utilize those laws of nature in ways which most people can't um that's an interesting way of putting it let me give you my uh take on on miracles there's an a a long-standing argument against their possibility that was formulated by the philosopher david hume and the argument was pretty straightforward it went like this miracles uh violate the laws of nature the laws of nature cannot be violated therefore miracles are impossible yeah but uh hume's argument has a number of problems one is that he also thought the laws of nature because he did not believe in god were nothing more than habits of our mind there wasn't a universal mind behind nature ensuring that nature would continue to act in the regular way in the orderly way that it has acted to this point out into the future so uh the way philosophers talk about that is to say that according to hume the laws of nature had no ontological status there weren't things out there they're not entities that prevent things from happening or ensure that some things do happen they're just habits of our mind they're ways that we describe things that have happened to this point and we have no no reason to believe that that the patterns that we've seen in nature will continue into the future well if the laws of nature aren't things that either prevent or cause things to happen as hume argued in other parts of his work then they can't stop what we call miracles from happening either in fact his account of the laws of nature saying that how do we know that what has always happened will continue to happen in the future uh maybe they won't left the door wide open to unusual events that were contrary to what we'd always observed in the past um in addition i don't think the laws of nature violate or i don't think miracles violate the laws of nature the laws of nature tell us what ordinarily happens uh given certain conditions if i uh for example i'm playing a game of pool and i go to hit one ball with a precise trajectory and i can calculate that then i can make a prediction about where the other ball will end up but if right as i make my shot someone shakes the table all bets are off the ball will end up in a very different place than predicted by my knowledge of the laws of nature but not because the laws of nature in this case the law of momentum exchange was violated but because there was an interfering condition an interfering action of an agent involving other laws of nature well initiating new lines of cause and effect and maybe involving other laws of nature but the ultimate disruption came from the action of an agent the choice of a free agent but if a free agent can change the outcome of a physical system without violating the law of nature the momentum exchange wasn't changed rather the initial condition of the system was altered in a way that made the law that made the prediction uh false but if an agent can change the the outcome of the system without violating the laws of nature in an unexpected way so could god almighty who established the laws god isn't violating the laws of nature when he acts within the natural realm that he otherwise sustains and upholds any more than we're violating the law of momentum exchange when we shake the table there was i remember when i was a physics student we did an experiment called milliken's oil drop where you put an electrostatic charge on a drop of oil in an electric field and you can cause the oil drop to levitate now if you were looking at that not knowing about the electrostatic forces in play you could say whoa it's miraculous the oil drop is levitating violating the law of gravity no the law of gravity isn't violated there was a countervening force applied as a result of the design of the experiment by the the physics students well a physics student can cause something unexpected to occur without violating the law of gravity then god could cause something unexpected to occur without violating the laws of nature i don't think the laws of nature are violated by miracles i think there are unexpected acts of an agent or another really simple way to put it is that miracles are acts of god if there's no if god doesn't exist then miracles are impossible because there's no god to act but if there isn't a god to act then then there can be acts of god it's as simple as that yeah and and such acts don't violate the laws of nature they represent the actions of an agent within a matrix of of natural regularities that god is otherwise upholding there have been all sorts of stories like connecticut yankee and king arthur's court and various science fiction stories in which people are transplanted from either the future to the past or in past to the future and you know if if someone from the 17th century to come here now and walk around and see everything we're doing they would be their minds would be blown because they just don't understand the laws of nature that all the technologies that we now use such as jet planes and computers and everything else utilize uh those laws of nature weren't known then um or weren't known how to be applied um so it's really a matter of what's right and that's very insight it's a matter of the work i mean yeah what we're doing with technology is harnessing the laws of nature to produce unexpected outcomes so i have if i um ordinarily if i drop an apple it will fall and one way of expressing newton's law of gravity is to say that all unsuspended bodies will fall unless there's a counterfeiting force applied and what we do with rocket ships is we configure matter in very specific ways we put some fuel in we ignite the fuel and we produce a machine that can it's taking advantage of the law of gravity it's not violating the law of gravity but it's producing an unexpected event because of our ingenuity and our action within the matrix of natural law and again if we can do that then certainly the deity could do that as well and i would suggest that theoretically there could be a society maybe there is on some planet where um it's kind of the norm for people to be able to do the kinds of things that jesus did or jesus himself said all these great things i do you shall do even greater things um or saint joseph cupertino he used to levitate all the time or saint teresa of avila and others it's just that such people are outliers now and have been for a long time but theoretically either on this planet or some other they could be the norm and you know it's like yeah i guess i made the point yeah well and i've only elevate or levitated oil drops physics there's a couple of thoughts kicking around in my head throughout this interview that i wanted to have you address um and there's a few questions that have come in that i want to get to one is um you know you have you wrote a whole book called darwin's doubt all about darwin and i was wondering whether you know how with einstein's theories um newton wasn't invalidated he just kind of became a special case that applied to a more restricted realm of of our our experience yeah and we still use newtonian physics to get to the moon or whatever mars to build a bridge or an airplane uh so and like that is darwin still uh valid within his own realm but perhaps just relegated to a smaller um domain by until very good very good way to describe it and to explain what we think is proponents of intelligent design the mutation selection mechanism is a real process things do change over time but the mutation selection process seems to have limited creative power and many even evolutionary biologists are now recognizing this i attended a conference at the royal society uh of the royal society in london in 2016. it was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who are calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize that the mutation selection mechanism does a great job of explaining small scale variations peppered moths changing their coloration patterns from dark to light to dark again or uh the galapagos finches in response to differing weather patterns getting slightly different shapes or lengths of beaks and beak sizes that sort of thing what's sometimes called microevolution that the mutation selection mechanism does a great job of explaining those sorts of phenomena but it doesn't do a good job of explaining the origin of birds or insects or animals or mammals in the first place the major innovations in the history of life the more major uh what are called morphological innovations uh the abrupt appearance of new forms in the fossil record animal or plant forms these are not well explained by the mutation selection mechanism in part because mutations degrade pre-existing genetic information and to build new forms of life you need new information so um that and that's where we think intelligent design comes in the major innovations in the history of life and especially the origin of life in the first place require big jumps in the or big require a lot of new genetic and other forms of information and that's something information is in our experience always the product of mind whether we're talking about a computer program or a paragraph in a book or we think the information necessary to build new forms of proteins and new new anatomical structures in the history of life okay an unrelated question that i've been wanting so darwin's good for the the microevolutionary uh phenomena we observe but uh the darwinian mechanism seems to lack creative power for the big changes and so yes it's it is valid within a a realm of experience but the darwin the doubt that i spoke of in uh darwin's doubt was precisely about one of those big events in the history of life the origin the abrupt origin and sudden appearance of the first ma and animals in the in a period of um geologic geologic history called the cambrian explosion so and darwin was already in 1859 wondering hmm have i really explained this you know this uh this doesn't quite fit with my theory what what what are we going to do to account for the abrupt appearance of all these new forms of animal life okay another earlier you referred to mathematics and i've heard people um speak about the uncanny correlation or what's the word kind of connection between the way nature functions and and mathematics for instance why should e equal m c squared you know or various other things that nature conforms to beautifully in various other mathematical formula that nature conforms to beautifully and some people sometimes refer to mathematics as the language of nature um for that reason and it's something that human beings have learned to speak so i don't know wondering if you have any thoughts on that yeah it's a it's a fantastically deep um insight about the uh as eugene vigner great nobel laureate physics used to put it the um the uncanny applicability of mathematics to physics why is it that mathematics which is a mental which is conceptual and mental something that we either discover or invent in our minds but it's in our minds why is our uh why does do mathematical concepts and relationships that we can discern or invent why do they apply so beautifully to the way the world functions and many scientists have seen in that uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world an argument for a prior intelligence for a a great mind that is the source of that mathematical reality and that argument is strengthened if you happen to believe as i think many mathematicians do that mathematical objects or mathematical concepts are not purely sugges subjective they're not just things that are you know the concept of three is real whether or not i am aware of three of anything it doesn't depend on my mind there are mathematical ideas and concepts that are true or false independent of my knowing them and so if they don't if these mathematical concepts are mental realities but they don't exist solely in my mind if they have an objective truth that's independent of my affirmation or rejection of them then there must be a transcendent mind in which the mathematical concepts that's a form of of mathematical platonism uh my colleague david berlinski has written a number of really important books about the history of mathematics has uh unpacked that argument and uh his book advent of the algorithm another one he wrote one two three the history of mathematics uh there there's it's it's not uncommon to find among mathematicians a tendency towards this uh this philosophical position known as mathematical platonism and it often comes with a theistic twist and certainly many physicists have been deeply impressed at the almost shocking way that mathematics applies to the physical world and many times mathematicians will come up with mathematical concepts and ideas that only much later are discovered to be important for describing the physical world and that's kind of uncanny too it's something that we dreamed up in our mental realm turns out to correspond or apply or correspond to the way the universe was designed that's fascinating it's almost like a kind of a cognition or something of a law of nature within the physicist or within the mathematician himself which then it's a resonance yeah yeah well many physicists have had the sense that there's a kind of resonance with a transcendent mind that they are discovering when they they see this applicability of mathematics to the physical world you get that sense um with some of the great scientists like einstein and others who were so deeply intuitive that they just kind of cognized a thing and just knew it in their heart of hearts to be true and then later on somebody proved it you know but yeah yeah there's a great quote from einstein that i wanted to use uh in the book but i just had to cut some things because it was getting too long but where he likens the universe to a great library where the books have all been clearly arranged in some very specific order but the scientists like the child walking into the library doesn't immediately perceive the order and it's only upon deep study that that order is revealed and this is in einstein you know it's a a modern uh ref re reformulation of the ancient two books metaphor that god speaks through the book of scripture but he also speaks through the book of nature and einstein of course in addition to thinking of nature as a book thought of nature as a a lawful and orderly mathematical realm and he believed that that orderly mathematics that was that the orderly processes that were so precisely described then could be described so mathematic with such mathematical precision sorry uh revealed a great mind behind the universe which is one of the reasons i chose that phrase in the subtitle i might as well show my einstein quote here that i have queued up contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive and try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature there you go absolutely yeah okay um running short on time but let me get to a few more questions that came in um yeah there's a few here um this is uh another one from elizabeth in colorado she asks um you seem to structure your work largely around contrasting materialist and theist points of view have you considered as a third option the view of non-dual spiritual traditions such as advaita vedanta if so what are your thoughts feelings about the non-dual approach non-dualistic in the sense of matter versus mind advice means not two and it's a it's a theory in uh or oh yeah in other words everything is ultimately one that's one yeah yeah well i in fact in fact i do address that because uh what i call the philosophical um system known as pantheism is also a monistic system it says that uh that the uh presentation of distinctions that we encounter in our sensory experience or effectively the illusions the the the the maximum all dualisms where distinctions are illusions the the the physical world of maya is illusory because there's an underlying reality that's more real than the distinction that i perceive between you and me or me in the wall or me and the tree outside through the window and so pantheism is that system which affirms that underlying uh unity of all things to a to an ultimate degree such that the perception that we have of distinctions between things is ultimately maya or illusion and so yes i definitely look at pantheism as one of the the four great systems of thought there are permutations and variations on these but there's there's uh classical theism deism pantheism and materialism i write long footnotes about other permutations like panentheism or panpsychism but uh yeah i look at pantheism i am not i'm not a pantheist i argue for theism um uh but obviously it's one of the great systems of thought that you need to engage my my project was to look at these big discoveries about biological and cosmological origins and to evaluate evaluate which of the great systems of thought best explain those discoveries pantheism in so far as it denies the reality the fundamental reality of mind but rather that there's an underlying force that binds everything together that's mystical but yet not a conscious reality if you're a pantheist in the east if you're if you're a theistic hindu you pray but if you're a pantheist it can do you don't because there's no mind to whom you are communicating or with whom you can communicate so insofar as we have evidence that on the basis of our uniform and repeated experience always arises from minds in life or in the universe like the digital code in the dna or the fine-tuning of the universe i think those evidences require as a best explanation the uh uh the the action of a of a of a of a prior intelligent mind or or agent i think insofar as pantheism denies the existence of such agency uh i would say it provides a less good explanation uh than does classical theism or deism similarly the pantheistic god is coextensive with matter in the same way that pan-enthusiasm makes god a matter of co-extensive but pantheism does that as well and if you go back in time you back extrapolate and you have evidence that the physical universe of matter space time and energy came into existence before which it did not exist then on a pantheistic account you would have to say that the pantheistic god does not exist until the universe comes into existence and therefore the pantheistic god can't doesn't exist separately from the universe and therefore is not in a position to cause the universe to come into existence and therefore does not provide a causally adequate explanation for the origin of the universe so i in evaluating pantheism i argue that it lacks explanatory power it doesn't provide as causally adequate an explanation for the origin of the universe its fine tuning and the informational properties of life as does for example classical theism advice is actually more radical than that they they say that the universe didn't come into existence and that the perception that it did is a mistake and the classic example used is that of a a rope which is perceived to be a snake and you react because you think it's a snake right and so on and so forth um and the you know the question might be well how do you get rid of the snake that you get rid of it by recognizing that it never existed it's all it's always been a ropes and and if you work solely within that philosophical system that's entirely sort of your right to do so you know what i was doing my project was looking at the scientific evidence that we have and then saying okay if we take these as facts what is the the best explanation of those those presumed facts and if we have evidence and i think we do have very strong evidence i describe it in several chapters in the book four five and six in particular from both theoretical physics and observational astronomy that the universe had a beginning then any system of thought that denies that the universe had a beginning and instead affirms that the universe is eternal and self-existent as does classical materialism and some forms of eastern philosophy then i would say that the scientific evidence presents a challenge to those those those uh philosophical systems at least in so far as they could provide good explanations for those pieces of evidence now i understand an eastern philosopher could say well all the evidence that we're deriving from the empirical world is maya it's illusion because it implies a distinction between different entities within the physical world and the ultimate reality and the only true reality is that the the monistic the reality affirmed by mohanism of of of an un um unbroken unity of all things and so if you make that move then you would be operating uh you would have a coherent system but you'd be and you'd be operating within uh a strictly monistic philosophical system but you would also have cut yourself off from scientific evidence informing your worldview and uh and so that's the you know it's a choice you can make as a philosopher to say well i'm going to regard evidence of my senses as essentially illusory if you do that then i really have no i have no grounds for arguing with you because i'm arguing about how can we understand the scientific evidence best what best explains it if we take the scientific evidence as as a starting point in the discussion i think monism or pantheism doesn't do as good a job of explaining that evidence as does theism yeah it's a big topic we could go on that one alone for two hours um all right so let me ask one last question here this is my maybe a good wrap-up question this is from pamela hickey in granite falls i'm not sure where that is but she asks um in keeping with the idea of bringing god back into the world of science i'm curious to know what you think would be a good content to school curricula for young children and teens thank you oh thank you for that question um it's a very it's a question that's fraught with mindfields because we have at least a perception that our constitutional system requires a strict separation of church and state uh that phrase doesn't actually appear in the constitution but never mind we do we do as a pluralistic culture not want to indoctrinate students in the public school into one worldview or another or one expression of religious faith person as a another but one thing that's happened as a result of that is we have a kind of default materialism that is now the accepted religion uh religion of the state and that we can use to indoctrinate students so uh now i think that that presents a whole range of challenges and that's a big topic but as for the evidence for intelligent design we have at this point not been arguing for uh inclusion of the case for intelligent design in the public school science curriculum in the k-12 years we think that there it it probably ought to be perfectly constitutional for a science science teacher to explain the evidence for darwinian evolution and then alongside that explain the contrary idea of intelligent design the problem is if you do that just as a practical matter if you do that in the public schools it will elicit all sorts of lawsuits and controversy and it just opens up a big a big hornet's nest and we have as primary advocates of the theory of intelligent design really wanted to really want we really want at this point to focus our efforts on developing the scientific case for intelligent design at the highest levels of science and even using the concept of intelligent design to advance scientific knowledge what we do advocate though for public schools is teaching the controversy about darwinian evolution as you find it in the peer-reviewed scientific literature darwinism classical darwinism as opposed to just the concept of evolution evolution just means change over time in its broadest sense but darwinian evolution argues or affirms that there's an undirected unguided process namely natural selection uh acting on random variation that can produce the appearance of design without being designed or guided in any way in other words darwinism denies actual design in nature and that's a controversial idea and it ought to be students ought to be allowed to hear counter arguments to that if they're going to be taught darwinian evolution they ought to know some of the scientific arguments that are being made in peer-reviewed scientific journals questioning the creative power of that darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection so we've produced a book for a supplementary biology textbook called explore evolution the arguments for and against neo-darwinism that allows students to learn the competing arguments and competing interpretations of the scientific evidence without at this point introducing the alternative theory of intelligent design which creates uh the potential for public school controversy and legal battle all that stuff can of worms so so that's the policy we've been we've been um advocating at least for now are are you the kind of preeminent proponent of intelligent design these days uh i would say that a network of scientists who are associated with discovery institute either formally or informally are probably the primary proponents one of the great things about intelligent design as a research program is that it's it's there's an exploding interest in it worldwide and uh so discovery institute played a key role in getting uh in sponsoring research that was seminal that got this way of looking at life and the universe off the ground but i would point to important figures who published well before me for example william demsky in his book the design inference published with cambridge university press which was a very technical explication of the probabilistic and other forms of reasoning we use to detect the activity of intelligent agents we do it all the time as it turns out if you look at a stop sign you know there was a mind behind that well what is it about the stop sign that makes you realize that that was not produced by wind and erosion when you look at mount rushmore you know that a mind was involved in carving those faces what is it about the structure of those faces that allows you to detect design demski came up with a brilliant theory about how we detect design michael bihi's work on the intricate nano machinery inside cells and the circuitry that we find in cells and organisms that he developed in his 1996 book darwin's black box very very important contribution seminal contribution to the intelligent design research program a scientist douglas axe whose book undeniable which is all about how we can detect design even using our basic pre-scientific intuitions uh is a very important uh figure in this movement jonathan wells so there we one of the great things about the id movement as it's sometimes called is that it's uh it involves a lot of teamwork between scientists in different fields in physics biology cosmology and also philosophers and philosophers of science so no i wouldn't say i'm the preeminent spokesman uh or advocate but uh i've become prominent in advocating for it as how many of my colleagues now are most of these colleagues christian because i don't see intelligent design as a christian thing per se i just see it as a you know a way of trying to understand the world and we've been citing sources from other traditions in today's conversation and we can probably find all sorts of sources from every ancient spiritual tradition from confucianism to taoism to hinduism buddhism etc that would support the argument yeah i'm looking at a a book on my shelf that i very much admire by gerald schroeder an israeli physicist called the science of god who is an advocate of intelligent design and astrophysics and cosmology a theist but a jewish theist not a christian theist there are many christians who are in the forefront of the intelligent design movement there are some agnostics michael denton um who was actually wrote one of the first and most important books called evolution ethereum crisis where he at the end of the book made a very powerful design argument at the time he would he described himself as an agnostic i think he has more theistic leanings now but he is not uh i don't think he's a religious theist i don't think he subscribes to jewish or christian or islamic theism there are a number of islamic uh proponents of intelligent design and there's even a philosopher named i think his first name is bradley montan i've corresponded with him but it's been a while who describes himself as an atheist agnostic who is sympathetic to intelligent design and then there's a few people who hold to intelligent design who advocate what's called directed panspermia oh yeah yeah life was alien intelligence was the source that always of course has the weird problem of if you think that life is seated here by an intelligent agency well and and how did it's always thought that the alien would have evolved by purely natural processes on some other planet but that just puts the whole question of the origin of life out into space without explaining where the origin of the information necessary to build the first life that got the evolutionary process going there how did that happen so um but anyway yes there's a variety of intelligent design hypotheses one of the reasons that i wrote return of the god hypothesis was to articulate one of those which was the theistic intelligent design hypothesis incidentally i have a good friend named dana sawyer who wrote a book on houston smith and uh right he said that houston smith was very much a believer in intelligent design but my friend didn't put that in the book he felt it like too too much of a touchy subject or something he was a great philosopher and sociologist of religion and he corresponded with philip johnson who was the law professor at berkeley who wrote darwin on trial and was the one of the early leaders in the intelligent design movement and research community so yeah yeah houston a a a very uh [Music] weighty figure in the american academy yeah anyway i it's fun i feel like we've just scratched the surface and i've i often say this but i i really enjoyed preparing for this interview i must have listened to your between your book and some of your other talks and interviews maybe 25 hours of of stuff over the last couple of weeks and as i was listening almost every other point i was thinking well that could be a topic for discussion oh that could be a topic for discussion and obviously we can only do a little bit of a sampling of the smorgasbord but i've really enjoyed this particular sampling and as i said in the beginning i will set i'll set up a thread on the bat gap facebook page as i always do for each interview and people can go ahead and discuss it and if you want to post questions that we might discuss in a future interview with stephen please do that and i'll keep an eye on it maybe tag me when you post the questions so that it'll come to my attention and if we do another one one of these days stephen i'll have a chance to read another of your books because i would i wish i had had time to read all three of them well it sounds like you've done more than your homework on this and it certainly showed in the depth of your question so this has been a really a really in-depth interview i mean we did just scratch the surface but compared to what we can typically do in a in a an audio or video interview we really got to cover quite a lot and some things that i hadn't really had a chance to talk about in other interviews with talking about some of the different and competing um ideas about uh the mind behind the universe well if we do another one in a year or two i'll carefully review this one and and you can also think about you know what might we you want to talk about that we didn't get to and we'll take another shot at it that's great well thank you very much for having me on and thanks to the people in your audience for submitting the thoughtful questions yeah there was maybe one or two questions i didn't get to but actually we had sort of covered them so i didn't bring them up so i thought okay we did that one already yeah okay well thank you so much stephen and again and thank you those people who've been watching um and i will be posting a page on that gap about this interview here right now i'm showing on the screen stephen's website which is just stephenmeyer.com is it well it's stephen c meyer an easier one to remember it would be return of the god hypothesis dot com not the return just return of the god hypothesis dot com good and uh i'll have links to all that stuff on stephen's bat gap page and links to his books and everything so you can follow up and his books exist on audible um in addition to print format and kindle format and personally i can get through audible books much easier than i can through printed ones just because i can listen to them while i'm walking in the woods and all and all but in any case i hope you all have enjoyed this conversation i hope it wasn't too sciency for people but i i just love this stuff and so you know maybe our enthusiasm kind of kept people on the edge of their seats carry the day we hope we hope so yeah okay all right thanks steven thank you i really appreciate being on with you yeah thanks to those who've been listening or watching see you next time you

Channel: BuddhaAtTheGasPump

Views: 16,426

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Id: E_UnEpIXSHI

Length: 135min 30sec (8130 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021