Stephen C. Meyer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 43

this is Darwin's historical scientific method when you're trying to explain an event in the room up past you want to draw on your knowledge of cause-and-effect and if the effect is a lot of new digital information we know of a cause that can do that and it's a mind or an intelligence here we are on the Sunday special with special guest Steven Meyer he's the author of the book Darwin's doubt an intelligent design advocate we'll get to all of that in just a second but first let's talk about your impending death we're all gonna die at some point and that's why you should have life insurance life insurance can feel like assembling the world's worst jigsaw puzzle it is confusing it takes forever and when you're finally done it doesn't even look cool but if you have a mortgage or kids or anybody who depends on your income it's a puzzle you need to solve policy genius can help you do it policy genius is the easy way to get life insurance in just two minutes you can compare quotes from top 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out right now well Stephen thanks so much for joining the ben shapiro show absolutely let's start from the very beginning yeah because people are gonna ask so you talked a lot about evolution and science obviously your books Darwin's doubt and signature in the cell are both heavily scientific so what is your scientific background so folks know well I started in double majored in physics and geology and then I worked as a geophysicist for five years in industry and went from there to do the program in the philosophy of science specifically philosophy biology at Cambridge University where my PhD dissertation was on the origin of life problem which was it's a very interdisciplinary question how did life first arise from the presumably the nonliving chemicals so it's got a biochemistry molecular biology thermodynamics information theory it's a it's a question that has lots of different subjects involved so it's very interdisciplinary PhD okay so with all of that said if you go to your Wikipedia page the first thing that it says that you're the advocate of a pseudo pseudo scientific theory called intelligent design so let's start with a couple of questions on that first of all people suggest that you are a creationist what is the difference between intelligent design the argument for intelligent design and creationism right well creationism holds that it takes the Bible is the basis of the the theory so creationism is a as an interpretation or a deduction from religious authority whereas intelligent design is an inference from biological and physical cosmological evidence so the one starts from the data of the natural world the other starts from Scripture the other the other difference is that most creationists hold to a view that the earth is very young it was created maybe ten thousand years ago or something I've got ID itself is an age neutral theory but most of us hold that the standard ancient dates for the universe and for life so and planet Earth so I'm an Old Earth guy so so the the case that is generally made against intelligent design is the idea that it's not a scientific theory so is intelligent design the idea that there was somebody you don't actually say God but but something there was some intelligent force that moved the universe that that created life on earth that was responsible in your book for the Cambrian explosion how is this a scientific theory as opposed to just as maybe Richard Dawkins would say a God of the gaps argument well one of the things I did when I first said off to grad school my story is that I was encountered this information argument one of the most extraordinary discoveries of twentieth-century biology is that at the foundation of life is information in a digital form the DNA molecules stores information in a four-character digital code and the this discovery of Watson and Crick in the 50s has over time created an impasse in both chemical evolutionary theory which is which are the theories about the origin of the first life and there is a by law evolution as well which are theories about how you get new forms of life from pre-existing forms because to build anything in biology you've got to have code you've got to have information so I became fascinated with that question and the possibility that the the information that the foundation of life is actually an indicator of the activity of mind of an intelligence and but to determine whether or not that argument could be formulated scientifically I had to dig in a little deeper into how scientists go about reasoning about these origins questions about events in the remote past and oddly one of the people most helpful to me in that was Charles Darwin himself because in the 19th century he and his mentor Charles Lyell the great geologist developed a method for investigating historical scientific questions and they had a principle of reasoning they called the very cause of principle or the idea that if you want to explain an event the remote past you should posit an event a cause which is known to have the powers to produce the effect in question and as I began to think about that I realized that it was possible to formulate a case for intelligent design in a strictly scientific manner and using the method of Lyell and Darwin because this we think about the origin of information the one thing we know is that it always arises from an intelligent source whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal whenever you find information especially if it's in a digital or alphabetic form you trace it back to its source you'll always come to a mind not a material process so using the same scientific method of reasoning that Darwin used I came to a different non Darwinian conclusion which was that there is evidence of intelligent design not just what the Darwinian is called apparent design in the history of life so if our theory is unscientific the Darwinian theory would be as well but I think both are scientific I just argued for one and critique the other so the philosopher of science Karl Popper has suggested that science is basically that which can be falsified so what evidence would have to arise for the theory of intelligent design to be falsified you would have to find an undirected process that was kid that was capable of producing information beyond a threshold that we have defined mathematically there's a there's a amount of information that might arise by chance based on what are called the probabilistic Univ resources of the universe but if you get beyond that from an undirected process that would falsify our that only mine can produce that amount of information there's also other ways of conceiving of what makes something a good scientific theory rather than poppers idea it's been critiqued by philosophers of science typically a more more popular view among philosophers of science is that what scientists are really doing is they're making inferences to the best explanation and that's how I frame the argument in Darwin's doubt and in signature in the cell for intelligent design the best explanation would be one that pauses the cause which is known to produce the effect in question and in the best of cases where there's only one known such cause and that's the kind of argument I make for intelligent design that only intelligence only mind is capable of generating the amount of information needed for these big jumps in biological complexity in the history of life so in the history of science and the philosophy of science there's been this interesting battle between sort of religious folks who believe that religion should stay separate from science and folks who believe that religion and science are intertwined and that on the one side you have sort of the Thomas Aquinas that God and nature speak in the same language and on the other side you have the William of Occam argument that basically God can do whatever he wants and so what we don't want is a theory of science that can disprove God and the flip side of that is sort of Stephen Jay Gould 's non-overlapping magisteria argument that science handles this started religion handles this stuff and there's no crossover right so where does intelligent design lie in in that gap that's a really great question there's a bit there's Bakley there's basically three different approaches to the inter interface between science and religious belief one is the idea that two are in conflict and that was the kind of dominant view that came out of the late 19th century most historians of science now reject that is very simplistic another view is that the the Stephen Jay Gould view is that science and faith are in occupy non-overlapping realms of inquiry that galileo aphorism was science tells you how the planets go not how to how to go to heaven you know or how the heavens go not how to go to heaven but the theory of intelligent design I think shows that that's also simplistic there are many scientific questions and religious questions that are completely separate but there are some there are some there are some questions that both science and religion speak to and my view is that when they speak to the same in the same way that there is actually far more agreement than people realize in fact substantial agreement for example the origin the universe we now know had a beginning or the universe had a beginning and this is one of the first words of the biblical text that in there was a beginning so that's a point of agreement about the same the same issue did the was is the universe finite or infinite both science and religion are now telling us the same thing that that the universe had a beginning intelligent design is telling us that life and the universe were designed and that's something that you would also find affirmed in the theistic religious traditions so that's a point of agreement about a special question about in this case about origin the origins of life so I don't say that science and religion talk they have many areas of specialized inquiry they're different questions that each address but there are overlapping areas of interest and increasingly what we found is there's there is increasing agreement as we understand the science better and as we get better more sophisticated biblical interpretation sometimes as well one of the the biggest probably the biggest argument against intelligent design obviously is made by the new atheists and the new it's fascinating to watch the the crossover between neo-darwinian thinkers and new atheist they basically are the same they're the same group of people it seems to me that no surprise because in Dawkins said you know that Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist or atheist and also the Darwinian view the strictly Darwinian view is not just the idea of evolutionist change over time but the idea of an undirected unguided process that produced the appearance but not the the reality of design so they see nature essentially as being a self creating entity that can produce all the wonders of an intricacies of living organisms without any guiding hand whatsoever and so that that lends itself to a strictly materialistic or atheistic worldview well people have suggested that intelligent design advocates are anti evolution that they they don't believe in the theory of evolution so what does the theory of evolution say to start and then what in it is is in argument too far that's that's a great question this the term evolution is a term that has multiple meanings so if you want to avoid the fallacy of equivocation it's really good to define terms right from the beginning so meaning has changed over time obviously and that that can mean a couple different things itself it can refer to the small-scale variation that we see with things like the Galapagos finches where their beaks get a little bigger a little smaller in response to varying weather conditions it can also refer to the fact that life on the planet today is different than it was in the period of the Jurassic when you had the dinosaurs roaming the earth or in the Cambrian when you had trilobite s-- we've had change in the representation of life forms over time in the fossil record nobody doubts either of those meanings of evolution second big meaning of evolution is the idea that all forms of life are connected by common ancestry back to a single ancestral form a single one celled organism so Darwin represented that idea with his concept of the Tree of Life that's an idea of evolution that's consistent with the idea of intelligent design those many intelligent design proponents and others other scientists including evolutionary biologists are getting increasingly skeptical about it because there's so much evidence of discontinuity in the fossil record and discontinuity in the in the study of genomics but we have things like orphan genes which are big classes of genes that are unique to certain taxa and don't show any similarity to other genes anywhere else in the in the in the in the genomic databases so you have this sense of you know genetic information popping into existence in different classes of organisms discontinuity third meaning of evolution is the one though that's really that's this really contentious and that's the idea that that natural selection and random mutation are sufficient to produce all the new forms of life and the appearance of design that living forms manifests so it's an unguided process that produces the appearance but not the reality of design and that's that's the meaning of evolution that the theory of intelligent design is challenging there's some intelligent design proponents may be skeptical about common descent others are not but it's that third meaning that unites us and and and and it's what the theory of intelligent design is about we're challenging the idea that purely undirected processes can produce the complexity or the information necessary to build the complexity of living organisms so you make a couple of arguments in your two books Darwin's doubt as well as signature in the cell one is a DNA related argument one is a fossil record related argument but they go back as you say to that theory of evolution that suggests that natural selection and genetic mutation are enough alone to to lead to the way that life has developed over time wondering if you can start by spelling out where is the discontinuity with regard to the establishment of of life well the first big discontinuity is the origin of life itself which is what my first book signature in the cell addressed and many people don't realize that Darwin himself never addressed the question of the origin of the first life he speculated about it in a letter to a friend but he didn't this was not something he addressed in the Origin of Species he presupposed the existence of the first living cell and there's a major discontinuity between chemical processes that we observe and what we see in actual living organisms and and it's a complexity gap that's absolutely extraordinary but tiny miniature machines we have not only the DNA with a digital code in it but a complex information processing system and even the even the simplest living cells on earth so that's a big discontinuity there are then there is a series of discontinuities in the fossil record as we find greater and greater complexity arising over time one of the big ones that I talked about in Darwin's doubt was one that Darwin that bothered Darwin a great deal which was what we now call the Cambrian explosion which was the which is and the origin of the first major groups of animals in the fossil record there attested in the middle Cambrian in particular and many groups of animals exemplifying completely new body plans arise a very narrow window of geologic time very abruptly without discernible connection to ancestral precursors in the lower Precambrian strata and that's one of the big discontinuities in the history of life there are many others I've written an article with a german paleontologist gunther Beckley about 17 such major discontinuities the mammalian radiation the origin of flowering plants the first winged insects the dopplers dinosaurs most of the major groups of living forms on earth arise discontinuously so that's a big deal the even bigger question though that I addressed in the book is apart from that discontinuity which is a puzzle for Darwinism how would you build those organisms what process could account for the origin of all that new form especially now that we know you need information the information in DNA and from other sources to build complex new forms of life let's talk about information theory so for folks who don't whoever in your books don't know anything about information theory why does information theory suggest that there must be some sort of designer obviously people like Dawkins who suggest that that evolution is the universal acid that they say that these things can arise by themselves they would also make the suggestion that the information in DNA is not necessarily directed that it only seems directed to us cuz we're here to actually look at the direction in which it moves it could theoretically be random what does information theory have to say well it's actually helpful first to go back to the molecular biological revolution of the 1950s Watson and Crick discover in 1953 they elucidate rather the structure of the DNA molecule they discovers got this beautiful helix structure they got there there's these four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the helix called bases or nucleotides in 1957 1958 Crick who was interestingly a code breaker in World War two posits what's known as the sequence hypothesis which is just a breakthrough moment in the history of biology where he realizes that the nucleotide base is on the inside of the double helix are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or what we now think of as like the zeros and ones in a section of software code which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of those bases that is important to their function but rather it's their sequential arrangement in a in accord with an independent code which was later elucidated and we now call the genetic code so what we have is a true information bearing system that is that is expressing information as it happens for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive so in Seattle where I live we've got great information companies we got Microsoft which writes code we've got Boeing and other manufacturing companies that use code and there's a process called computer assisted design and manufacturing CAD CAM where an engineer might write some code code go down a wire be converted into another machine language that could be read by a manufacturing apparatus and that information will then direct the construction of a mechanical system if you're might put rivets exactly on the right place on the on the airplane wing so you've got in from and the same thing that's going on inside the cell that you've got information directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that are absolutely necessary for for survivability so the big question is where does that information come from and also what kind of information is it and that's where the information theory comes in in the late 40s there was a scientist named Claude Shannon who developed a mathematical theory of information but his theory only captured his theory of information had to do with the reduction of uncertainty which he showed was inversely related to improper to probability more improbable an arrangement of characters the more Shannon information that was carried but his notion of information didn't capture the the notion of meaning or communication function so you could have a series of characters that were basically gibberish but because they were a periodic and random you couldn't really tell whether they were meaningful or not but they had a big information measure so Shannon didn't capture the difference between functional or meaningful information and just an improbable arrangement of characters so it's actually not information theory but as information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information that we're familiar with in our own parlance but the dictionary talks about variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function and that's what we have in DNA and Francis Crick was very clear on that from the beginning he said it's not mere Shannon information it's information that's functional and that's the kind of information that in our experience always indicates the prior activity of an intelligence if it's just a random arrangement might be undirected processes but if it's if it's very specific and complex and its operating in in accord with a symbol convention then you've got information that is the product of mind and so this is this is where we get into the theories of probability because the question becomes could there have been such a strand of DNA that comes about by chance because the theory obviously as you mentioned of evolution suggests that its mutations now in the DNA that create all of the change and human life over time so let's get the origin of life problems and then and then and then we'll and then we'll but but when it comes to the information string in the DNA the contention is basically that given enough time you run the experiments enough times and eventually you will end up with an evolution that and combined with natural selection it preserves the mutations that are good and you will end up with a something that looks designed even though it is not designed that mutation over time being preserved by natural selection is enough why doesn't that work it's there's a mathematical problem and it's a profound one my colleague David Berlinski calls it the combinatorial problem or the problem of combinatorial inflation maybe simple analogy way to get into it we know from our experience with software code writing and and using it that the last thing you want in a section of functional software code is a random series of random changes to those zeros and ones if that happens you're going to degrade the information that's in that code long before you'll ever generate a new software program or operating system and Richard Dawkins and many many others biologists have acknowledged that what we have in DNA is akin to machine code or as Leroy hood puts a digital code it's that it's functioning in exactly the same way so what we've learned from software writing and using is highly relevant to understanding whether or not the mutation selection mechanism would actually generate could generate conceivably or realistically new information and there's a there's there's a reason that changing software at random invariably degrades the information before you get anything useful and new and that is because there's so many more ways to go wrong in any in any system of digital or typographic or alphabetic communication there are there are vastly more ways of arranging the characters in question that will generate gibberish then there are ways of arranging those same characters that will generate something functional so if you start randomly changing things you're overwhelmingly more likely to find a gibberish sequence than a functional one and as we've actually tried to quantify that how much more likely the the quantitative odds are prohibitive there's a scientists who work for 14 years at at Cambridge University and Douglas does PhD at Caltech went on to do a molecular long-term molecular biology research postdoc at Cambridge to try to quantify this question how rare or common are the functional sequences that would make a new protein or a new new gene capable of making a new protein how how rare are the functional ones in comparison to the non functional ones and for a relatively short protein about 150 amino acids long he determined that the ratio of functional to non-functional sequences was about 1 over 10 to the 77th power now to put that in context there are only 10 to the sixty-fifth atoms in the Milky Way galaxy so what that means is that a random search for a new functional sequence is going to be like looking for one marked atom among 10 trillion or sorry yeah at what 1 trillion galaxies of the size the Milky Way so and what it turns out that even 4 billion years of life's history is not enough time to to solve a search problem of that magnitude and I go into all the math of this in the book and and it's it's pretty straightforward there's only 10 to the 40th organisms in history the planet not enough replication events to search a space 10 to the 77 big so you're looking at even in the whole if you take the whole history of life on the planet into account you're only gonna be able to search a tiny tiny fraction of the total relative relevant sequences so you got a really big haystack really small number of needles and very little time to look for them the bottom line is it's overwhelmingly and more probable that such a search will fail than succeed in the known time of life on planet Earth which means that the mechanism is more likely the hypothesis that the mechanism produced new information is more likely to be false and true and so the result of this is as you say that it's more likely that it's that it's designed than that it was randomly done in terms of DNA and that's reflected in in the fossil record in the extent to the extent that there have - there's sort of these jumps in the fossil record there's what you talked about in Darwin's doubt is that it's not a continuous process of a mutation upon mutation building one on the other just randomly it becomes a big engineering problem because it's not just that there's gaps in the fossil record to ask well how would the evolutionary process produce all the new information necessary to build these completely new body plans new cell types new anatomical structures and we know it would take a lot of new information and so then you've got to look well is there enough time to do that do you have enough trials through this mechanism and the answer is just overwhelmingly no it's not plausible at all mathematically and on the flip side we do know however of a cause that is sufficient to produce new information this is why it's not a god of the gaps or an argument from ignorance is where we're drawing and this is Darwin's historical scientific method when you're trying to explain an event in the room up past you want to draw on your knowledge of cause-and-effect what kind of cause is out there that we've observed that is capable of producing the effect in question and if the effect is a lot of new digital information we know of a cause that can do that and it's a mind or an intelligence and it happens that's that's the only known cause that can produce lots of new information and it's certainly much more plausible than the Darwinian idea of a random search and we show why mathematically it's much more plausible now one of the theories about the the idea that that randomness is still in the system is Stephen Jay Gould idea of punctuated equilibrium then that essentially small groups of animals kind of went away from the big group they they did all their changes and then they reintegrated why doesn't that work the I did that the the jumps in the fossil record are results of small groups breaking away in a certain level of group selection yeah Gould model was a terrific advance as far as its accuracy in describing the fossil record because he described these big punctuation Zoar big jumps and then the long-term stasis that would occur lack of directional evolutionary change that's what we see in the fossil record very non Darwinian the problem was he didn't really have a mechanism that could accomplish the the that could produce the amount of change that we're seeing I discussed it as a whole chap I do a whole chapter on this in Darwin's doubt but the mechanism he proposed was called species selection a lot of other evolutionary biologists including Richard Dawkins were very critical of the mechanism and in a way rightly so because what it came down to in the end was that species selection itself depended on the natural selection random mutation mechanism and that mechanism requires lots of time to get the job done and it turns four billion years isn't enough but certainly the the abrupt jumps that Gould was talking about we're not allowing the mechanism enough time to work so you had this this kind of irony in evolutionary biology and then 80s and 90s in particular Gold's model pretty much was dismissed by the early 2000s but you had Gould model was viewed as a good one for describing the fossil record accurately but it didn't have a mechanism the Darwinian 's had a mechanism but it was inconsistent with the fossil record and also then as we've later critique the mechanism was also lacks the creative power to generate the information necessary to build big new you know major innovations in the history of life so from a design perspective what exactly is the theory of how one species would become another suddenly is that there's a bunch of dead DNA that is suddenly activated or is it that you know write something injects new information into the system how exactly would that work well mechanism the the question of species raises this whole question of envelopes of variability we see evidence of design at the the low sigh of the design are when you get the major innovations occurring in the history of life but the information that is present in a major group of organisms might be sufficient to allow a lot of variation within within an envelope so that's why there is evolution we think there is there's clearly evolution that takes place the question is how how much information was present and how how wide the envelopes of variability are that are generated by that information so there's a terrific evolutionary biologist and cell biology biologists at the University of Chicago also named Shapiro James Shapiro who's got a new theory of evolution he calls natural genetic engineering and he notices that and has documented that that many of the mutations that we actually see at work are not random at all they're they're an expression of what he calls pre-programmed adaptive capacity where there's a an external trigger or stress put on an organism and that triggers the production of certain proteins that for which the organism had the capability of building all along because it had the genetic information there and so a lot of the evolution we see is actually pre programmed adaptive capacity which is really an exciting biological phenomenon that the Darwinian --hz haven't really taken full account of but it does raise the question of the origin of that adaptive capacity where the pre-programming come from so intelligent design says the the inputs of information from outside the system from an intelligence are located in that pre-programmed adaptive capacity but it the theory also acknowledges that there is evolution possible going downstream as a result of that pre-existing information all right so let's talk about the origin of life problem the the question being how did organic life arise from non-organic material there are some experiments that were done in the early 20th century in which under certain conditions it looked as though maybe organic material could be created from non-organic material but there really as you pointed out has not been a great explanation of how non-organic material could create an information system like DNS so yeah the famous experiments still in a lot of the biology textbooks is the miller-urey experiment of 1950 to 1953 they sparked a a chamber that had gases known as reducing gases that then spontaneously produced a few of the 20 protein forming amino acids two or three problem is that amino acids do not a protein make and proteins by themselves do not make life so they were really quite a long ways away from demonstrating anything like a spontaneous chemical origin of life it's ironic that that experiment was performed in the same year as Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule and the subsequent elucidation the information bearing properties of the molecule because in what's called chemical evolutionary theory by the 1960s and certainly by the early 1980s the field reached a state of impasse precisely because the biologists and the and the biochemists realized that to build an actual living cell you've got to have information-rich molecules you can't just have the components you can't just have the letters you've got to have the sentences and and so there were a number of problems with the miller-urey experiment one was they presuppose conditions on the early Earth and in the early Earth's atmosphere that didn't actually match the conditions on the early earth we didn't have an early a reducing atmosphere we had a slightly oxidizing or neutral atmosphere here run those experiments you don't get amino acids forming spontaneously but the bigger problem was how he arranged the amino acids in in the very specific ways that are required to form a three-dimensional structure called a protein fold and that problem hasn't been solved apart from watching DNA do it inside living cells so to build proteins what we know is you need information stored in the DNA molecule and so as as the molecular biological Revolution unfolded in this in the 50s 60s 70s people the scientists working on the origin of life realized the problem was much harder than they realized because they didn't just need to account for certain kinds of building blocks of life they needed to account for the information that would organize the building blocks into DNA molecules into protein molecules and into the complex information processing systems they characterized even the simplest living cells so one of the theories that has been posited to sort of solve this problem is the so called RNA world thesis can you talk about yeah so one of the reasons that origin of like problem is so hard for evolutionary biologists is you can't invoke natural selection reasonably because natural selection only it that's depends on self-replication differential survival of lots of offspring okay but that only happens differential organisms only divide and reproduce on the basis of things that are happening at a molecular level that involve information-rich DNA and proteins so if you're trying to explain the origin of information-rich DNA and proteins you can't invoke prebiotic natural selection it's a contradiction in terms as one of the great evolutionary biologists of Jansky said so that made the origin of life problem even harder than the problems we've been talking about previously as far as explaining the origin of the information for new forms of life but one theory that attempted to get around that is called the RNA world and it was it was based on the observation that some RNA molecules can generate it can form perform two functions at once they can perform the function of information storage like DNA but they can also catalyze certain reactions like proteins proteins catalyze it much faster rates than would otherwise occur really crucial biochemical reactions that are crucial in metabolism so if RNA could do both the thought was then maybe life started with an RNA molecule that could copy itself that could get natural selection going at a molecular level before you had life problem is turned out again to be an information problem so we've done experiments on RNA it's turned out that we've people have they call them ribozyme engineering experiments and the that the name is apt because it is a lot of intelligent designs a lot of engineering but people have tried to engineer RNA molecules by arranging the sequence of bases RNA like DNA has these these bases that carry information and they've arranged the bases very specifically just tried to build RNA molecules that would copy themselves to get a self-replicating system going which would get natural selection going problem is number one we have been able to design some RNA molecules that will copy about 10% of themselves but only if the bases are very specifically arranged which means that to get a self-replicating system going you got to have information and where is the information coming from it's coming from the intelligent biochemist who's doing the ribozyme engineering so what's actually being simulated in these simulations is the need we argue for intelligent design the RNA world doesn't eliminate or it doesn't refute the the intelligent design argument based on information it actually demonstrates or illustrates the need for intelligent design and so I don't think it really solves the problem unless RNA world people are saying well that's where the intelligent designer input the information in the first place okay so it seems like that the biggest blow back that you've gotten obviously in terms of intelligent design is the term intelligent design because seems like most of the critiques that you've made of neo-darwinism are fairly well accepted is that accurate increasingly so in 2016 a number of us went attended a conference at the Royal Society of London in obviously London and it was a group of leading evolutionary biologists called the meeting to address new trends in evolutionary biology they called it was innocuous way of saying neo-darwinism is dead and we need a new theory first talk of the conference was by a leading Austrian evolutionary biologist named GERD Muller who enumerated five what he called explanatory deficits of neo-darwinism elsewhere he's written that neo-darwinism has no theory of the generative by which he means it explains the small scale variations very well like the Galapagos finches but it doesn't explain the origin of major innovations in the history of life and so many evolutionary biologists are now there's an aphorism it's afoot it's a mutation and selection explained the survival but not the arrival of the fitness the problem is the the main mechanism of evolutionary change doesn't seem to have significant creative power and that's the problem I think increasingly being recognized and as a result of that many people within evolutionary biology are looking for new mechanisms calling for the formulation of a new theory and that's kind of that's kind of striking it's an astounding admission when you think about how the theory is presented through the textbooks through with science popularizers the New Atheists the the public spokesman for science the National Center for Science Education or the the National Academy of Sciences when they talk about evolution it's a fact Richard Dawkins has said that if you if you find someone who questions it they're either stupid wicked or insane but the reality on the ground or rather in the peer-reviewed literature within evolutionary biology is very different there's a recognition that the fundamental problems haven't been solved and one of which is muler knowledge the problem of the origin of biological form when I saw that it was it's an it's in a table and in in a book that he's written with another evolutionary biologist is a list of unsolved problems one of which they list the origin of biological form I was stunned this 2003 MIT press that was the very problem that Darwin was supposed to have solved in 1859 and it's now an open question but with that said it seems like for a lot of folks like Dawkins it's not about the God of the gaps about the Darwinism of the gaps the idea that eventually we're gonna figure out that Darwinism still holds in these circumstances where it appears not to hold it is that accurate or does you have a theory for how to think well there's a yeah there's a very good explanation for that in the sociology and philosophy of science the assumption is we have to have a materialistic explanation we can't allow creative intelligence or agency or mind - we can't posit that as part of the explanation for how life got here and there's a rule that many scientists take as normative is called methodological naturalism and it says you're gonna be a scientist you have to explain everything by reference to purely undirected material processes and if you deviate from that in any way you're not being scientific that's why I got called a pseudo scientist on the the Wikipedia webpage was a little bit of an upgrade because previously they had me down as a theologian and I've no no training in theology but in any case this methodological rule is actually only as recent as the late 19th century in science the founders of modern science Newton Boyle Keppler they didn't adhere to this at all they saw design in science well in the in the natural world and they wrote about it in their science in their in their science treatise for example in the general Scullion to the print Kippy the Newton's great work on gravitation he's got a terrific argument for design based on the fine-tuning of the planetary orbits so design arguments were part of science from its foundation but they be they became their boat in in the late 19th century after the the Origin of Species and there's a very curious thing about this rule of methodological naturalism if you're if you're investigating an origin question or a causal origins question it's a rule that actually limits the intellectual freedom of the scientist there's a lot of a lot of areas of science where methodological naturalism is innocuous but if you're asking the question what caused life or the information necessary to produce life to arise and you recognize it could be an undirected material process or it might have been in mind but then you decide in advance that you're not going to consider any evidence of mind of course you're only going to get materialistic explanations but the explanations may not be adequate um and imagine you go into the the British Museum you look at the Rosetta Stone you see all those inscriptions in three different languages and you say well I'd like to say it was a scribe but since I adhere to methodological naturalism I've got to say it was wind and erosion or something like that the the rule actually limits scientists from following the evidence where it most naturally leads information based on our knowledge of cause and effect is a strong indicator of the activity of intelligence and yet we can't say that or consider that if we accept methodological naturalism and that's what's going on that's why the the dialectic kind of goes in circles work you get a new evolutionary model every few years and then they circle back to the one that was rejected you know 20 20 years ago and start the cycle over again because we're really looking in the wrong place we're barking up the wrong tree I mean it does raise the question if you're a methodological naturalist and all you believe is that undirected processes are responsible for everything why you believe in such a thing as objective truth for example because we're the reliability of the human mind as we were discussing before the interview right I mean if the idea is that the human mind is capable of grasping the world around it and there is such a thing as objective truth that we can grasp then that would suggest that our mind reflects the universe in some deep profound way as opposed to the sort of evolutionary biology belief which is that we are just adaptable balls of mates and so whatever we think about the universe maybe it's helpful in terms of our adaptation but it's not necessarily true very well but this was the the very thing that bothered Thomas Nagel the great philosopher of science from NYU Nagel got himself in a bit of trouble he wrote a favorable review of signature in the cell in The Times Literary Supplement and then there was a huge blowback including from a lot of other fellow atheist niggles an atheist but Nagel accepted that the the critical arguments in signature in the cell and began to get more critical of Darwinism as well not just chemical evolutionary theory but biological evolutionary theory and in 2012 he doubled down by publishing his own book with oxford press called mind and cosmos how the neo-darwinian materialist view of reality is almost certainly false was a subtitle and his problem was the one that you just articulated that clearly we live in a universe in which mind is a reality and if neo-darwinism can't account for that then it's missing something really big so it's it's an inadequate explanation for something we observe all the time which is the activity of Minds I see it in our conversation I know I have a mind by my own introspective experience this is a part of reality too and if the if evolution can't account for that and if we exclude mind as an explanatory principle we're gonna have an impoverished understanding of the world around us and so I think this is a very very important aspect of the debate as well is recognizing that mind is a reality well this actually is one of the fascinating sort of theories that the dawkins puts forth is essentially the mind is a spandrel that mind is is just something that we feel like we have but it actually does not exist in the first place which does raise the question as to why he does what he does for a living I mean if you're in the business of explanation why bother operating along the spandrels it's extremely self-defeating you're absolutely right but it's interesting that the Neo Darwinists say that design in life is an illusion we have apparent design but not real design its first line from the blind watchmaker page one biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having the design for purpose but in the at the end of the day Dawkins also has to say that mind itself purpose of intelligence is also an illusion that's an impoverished worldview we all know better than that well it does raise questions I mean far beyond that for civilization as well since we all have to live together in rat and and reason together I've had this exact argument with Sam Harris who friend who says he believes an objective truth and reason and I keep saying to him while we're wandering balls of meat with no purpose in the universe Oh what is this reason you're talking about or a bunch of firing neurons over which we have no control yeah two points on that I think you've addressed them both I think you're addressing with the point you just made in your new book but our whole legal system is based on notions of moral responsibility culpability before the law that presupposes our ability to choose as free agents that were not completely determined by undirected you know firings and our synapse you know it was not just nature or nurture there's there's there's human free will and moral responsibility our whole legal system is based on that idea and secondly there's the there's we have this epidemic of teen suicide in our country and I heard something you did on your show a little while ago and I had a very similar experience of kind of existential anxiety as a young person it was a fairly middle-class upbringing I had no great deprivation but I had this recurring question what's gonna matter in a hundred years what is what will any human achievement ever matter and this question of the purpose of human existence I think is gnawing at a lot of people in our culture especially young people because only agents only personal agents can confer meaning on something nothing can mean something to Iraq or to an atom and we find meaning in relationship to other persons and if at the end of the day we're just gonna have this heat death of the universe and there's no mind behind the universe no personal agency behind the universe there's no possibility of ultimate meaning and a lot of people sense that it's very deeply true and we're really not answering that question for a lot of young people I think one of the the philosophical implications of intelligent design which doesn't attempt to prove the existence of God but it does imply that personal agency is fundamental to the cosmos and it it opens up the possibility that there there could be a good answer to that question of meaning and purpose that I think snowing in a lot of people so let's talk about how intelligent design should be taught and so as we've mentioned a lot of scientists basically accept the the generalized critiques of neo-darwinism that you've expressed in your books is there a reason why we don't just say we don't know in other words why don't we try and just teach it this way here's the theory of neo-darwinism here all the flaws in the theory of neo-darwinism it would be very difficult for folks to try and kick that out of school since you're not mentioning god right and you're not mentioning any intelligent designer at all why not teacher that way then you're firmly within even the skeptics view of what science ought to be that happens to be our science education policy at the Discovery Institute we propose that students are allowed to teach to learn about the strengths and the weaknesses of different scientific theories including Darwinian evolution but there are many a lot of a lot of a lot of people have a stereotyped view of science which is really inaccurate it's the you know the men in white coats and the it's just about the facts and there's no role for interpretation or debate or argument but science advances there's a wonderful Italian philosopher of science named marchello pero who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence and what we've done is present a stereotyped view of science to students where we just tell them the answer and say that well here are the facts and and in the theory that explains it and it's all a fait accompli a much better way to learn science is to learn about the arguments that are ongoing now we have this complication in the United States with our church-state jurisprudence and we at discovery think that at this point at least it's sort of it's just borrowing trouble to try to buck that but what we certainly can do without any problem with the the constitutional a constitutional precedent is to allow students to learn the the strengths of Darwinian theory and also the scientific weaknesses as we find them increasingly in the peer-reviewed literature in biology and evolutionary biology I testified before the Texas State Board of Education several years ago for in favor of a proposal to do exactly what I'm describing and to teach the strengths and weaknesses I submitted into evidence about a hundred peer reviewed papers of leading people in evolutionary biology pointing out serious weaknesses in the theory especially around this problem of the lack of creative power of the mutation selection mechanism at that same hearing well prior to my opposite number at the National Center for science education at Darwin only science education Lobby said to the the the press the Dallas Morning News you can't apply the strengths and weakness's standard to evolutionary theory because the theory of evolution has no weaknesses well that's that's actually laughable when you get into the scientific literature and student ah just as a matter of scientific literacy to know about the problems with the theory that the scientists themselves are talking about so that's what we've been advocating so let's talk for a second about the intelligent designer so when you say intelligent design everybody goes to ok that's God but your theory doesn't actually suggest that it's necessarily God it just says there has to be some form of mind or intelligence that was responsible for this how do you connect the intelligent design theory to God or is it connected to got it all right thanks for asking it's a great question and the the first thing is to understand why from the biological evidence we make an inference to a mind of some kind when we're reasoning about the history of life we're using this Darwinian principle of the very cause of principle or using our knowledge of cause and effect what do we know from cause and effect well we know from cause and effect that it takes a mind with self conscious awareness to create or generate information in a digital form and so we can infer at leat that there was a mind that at least had the kind of capabilities of which we are familiar we because of our own introspective experience of having minds now when we're talking about the biological evidence the designing intelligence responsible might be an imminent intelligence within the cosmos or it could be a transcendent intelligence that has the attributes that Jews and Christians ascribe to the deity both our logical possibilities so I've always said when in my books on the evidence of design and biology that the theory of intelligent design isn't an argument for the for God's existence but it may have theistic implications it's theistic friendly now I happen to be writing another book is extending the design argument into the realm of cosmology and the foundations of physics where we find at the foundation of physical law these incredibly finely tuned parameters it's called the anthropic fine-tuning and the physicist since the 50s and 60s have been discovering dozens of these fine tuning parameters both in the way the universe was set up at the beginning and the configuration of mass energy and in the the the relative strengths of the different forces of physics and a number of other parameters like the expansion rate of the universe and the speed of light and things like this and it turns out we live in what they call a Goldilocks universe that the forces are not too strong not too weak the expansion rate not too fast not too slow the arrangement of the the mass energy just right at the beginning we live in a just right universe that has made life possible now that I argue and many physicists have argued is also evidence of design but that evidence of design is located at the very beginning of the universe and neither the beginning of the universe which we now know of as a result of our Big Bang Theory nor the fine-tuning can be accounted for by an agent within the cosmos clearly no space alien or imminent intelligence could be responsible for the laws of physics and the fine-tuning of all those laws that make it's very life possible nor could such an agent be responsible for the origin of the universe itself so I think when you bring that other evidence into the picture that you I think you can make a very strong theistic design argument and in my next book which is gonna be called the return of the god hypothesis i look at how a theism as opposed to other competing metaphysical hypotheses such as pantheism or materialism or deism best explains that ensemble of evidence from biology physics and cosmology so I do think you can make a theistic argument not a proof for God's existence but again an inference to the best explanation of this ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins now is there an easy way out for folks when it comes to the fine-tuning argument or to the information argument by simply saying that there is no such actual distinction between meaningful information and Chanin information there's no such distinction between fine-tuning and non fine-tuning except that we're here to see it in other words if the only thing that distinguishes an infirm rich segments of text from a non information rich segment of text is the fact that we speak English so if there's a bunch of letters and we can read them than we think that they're meaningful if there's a bunch of letters we can't read them we think that they're not meaningful so in other words are we reverse projecting mind onto a universe simply because we're here to well no because we do objectively recognize meaning and function there is a possibility of false false negative false negative judgments we might see a string of characters and not know the symbol convention and therefore conclude that that string is just random or complex but without being specified but when we make a qualitative judgment of specificity of arrangement when we see that the arrangement of characters is necessary to perform an independently observable function that's a kind of information that is real and is something that we know is only associated with a causal activity of intelligent agents so no biologist really when you get down to it wants to say well the sequence of characters in the DNA you know the a c's and g's in the in the DNA molecule the arrangement doesn't matter for building proteins because all we have to do is change the arrangement and see that the the protein unfolds and doesn't and doesn't catalyze a reaction there's a real objective way of recognizing function in biology just as there is in in in human language so I think the this qualitative in information in the information Sciences there's a distinction between specified or functional information on the one hand and mere complexity or randomness or Shannon information on the other and that's a real distinction and it under writes the whole case for intelligent design you're right okay so so the the countervailing case for a lot of this stuff is the theory of multiple universe I was so I was hoping you would ask about that I mean people essentially saying that that we are a bubble universe that is on a bunch of other bubbles you know there are an infinite number of universes so all of the probabilistic arguments that you make in favor of the chain of life in the creation of life none of this matters in the end because there are a bajillion universes right we just happen to be exactly and they call it the observer selection effect we think we're special because all the conditions that are necessary for our existence are so incredibly improbable but in fact some universe somewhere had to arise that produced organisms such as ourselves conscious aware a conscious and Intel agents indeed but there's a problem with this whole this whole approach many problems in fact and you might imagine in this new book that I'm doing I'm writing quite a lot about the multiverse and critique of it but let me give you the most important problem and that is the multiverse itself requires a prior fine-tuning the multiverse hypothesis presupposes a prior fine-tuning here's the problem if you have all these different universes out there AGGA billion of them if the universes aren't in some way connected then what happens in one universe has no material effect on events in another universe so the the fact that there may be a gabelli on other universes out there if they're disconnected doesn't change anything in our universe including the probabilities of our being here so to solve that problem and in recognition of that problem proponents of the multiverse have proposed a common cause for all the universes so that they can so they can portray the multiverse all these different universes as the results of something like a big cosmic lottery where there's some mechanism that's churning out universes where eventually one of them would have to have the right combination of factors to make life possible now the problem though is that in all the universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed there is prior fine-tuning there's something called inflationary cosmology and another and there's something called this string theoretic landscape so there's a string theory version of the multiverse and there's an inflationary cosmology version and in both cases there has to be exquisite fine-tuning for the universe generating mechanism to actually produce multiple universes so the universe the the problem of the origin of the fine-tuning has just been pushed back one generation one of my philosopher physics colleagues Robin Collins uses an illustration like this he says so imagine you have some chef presents a beautiful loaf of bread to you and you say oh chef I'd like to compliment your skill as a chef but I know you didn't actually design the recipe it was a bread making machine there was no design and this there was just a bread making machine that produced the bread but even if that were the case the bread making machine required prior design as did the recipe for the dough that was put in it so this is kind of analogous to what's going on with a multiverse it only it doesn't eliminate the problem of fine-tuning it just push it pushes it back one generation you know how'd the problem with regard to the Big Bang so a lot of folks have suggested that the Big Bang is not actually the beginning so there is no in the beginning there was prior universe that sucked in on itself and and then blew out again the basically time is eternal and there was no beginning to time necessarily well there really aren't good cosmological models that eliminate what's called the singularity at the beginning temporally the the standard Big Bang or the inflationary cosmology model both terminate in a definite beginning there been a number of developments in theoretical physics that have reinforced that the singularity theorem of Hawking Penrose and Ellis in 1968 and also the theorem independently in physics the the board with the lincoln theorem that established a beginning but what people have tried to do with theoretical physicists have tried to do to get around the theistic implications of there being a beginning is formulating a very abstract model of physics called quantum cosmology that's that's where the action is if you want to get around the theistic argument for the existence of god based on the beginning of the universe and i'm writing about this - it's really heady stuff but it's based on an analogy to quantum physics and some of your you know your your listeners and viewers are very smart so you they might know about the you know the the weirdness of quantum physics where particles act like waves and waves act like particles so there's this there's this thing called a wave function that describes all the different places that a particle might be and then how it might collapse and manifest one particular set of attributes upon an observation and by analogy some of the physicists have said well maybe the universe came out of a bigger wavefunction what they call a universal wavefunction where there was where there were all these different possible universes that were existing in what quantum physicists called superposition sort of existing simultaneously in an abstract mathematical space of possibilities not in not as physical reality and then somehow someway all those different possibilities collapsed and we got a universe like ours okay now this is a very bizarre thing for a number of reasons one they've got a mathematical equation generating a material universe which is a very not materialistic explanation of things it's almost as one of the proponents of this Alexander Vilenkin noted he said math is an idea that exists in mind so when we say that the universe came out of a big universal wavefunction equation are we really saying that that the universe came out of a pre-existing mind he raises that as a rhetorical question at the end of one of his books and then simply changes the subject to finish the book the other crazy thing is that to get that mathematical equation that might explain our universe you have to solve a prior mathematical equation and you can't do that without an input of information which comes from the theoretical physicist so like in those origin of life experiments they're actually modeling the need for a mind to generate information and you get this weird conclusion in the beginning was the word so it's it's very strange the attempt to get around the theistic implications at the Big Bang have just have generated other models which themselves have implications that are very theistic okay so in just one second I'm gonna ask you a final question and ask about your own religious background sure you come from religiously yeah if you want to hear Steven Myers answer you have to be a daily wire subscriber to subscribe go over to daily wire comm click Subscribe you can hear the end of our conversation there well book is Darwin's doubt the author of Steven Mayer Steven thanks so much for stopping by I really appreciate it yeah we covered a lot thank you [Music] the venture Pierrot shows Sunday special is produced by Jonathan hey executive producer Jeremy boring associate producer Mathis Glover edited by Donovan Fowler audio is mixed by Dylan Kate's hair and makeup is by Jess wah alvera title graphics by Cynthia and Guillot the Ben Shapiro shows Sunday special is a daily wire production copyright daily wire 20 19 [Music] you

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Keywords: Stephen C. Meyer, science, geophysics, origin of life, intelligent design, organic material, religion, Darwin, Big Bang, physics, academia, professor, discovery institute, life, Ben Shapiro, daily wire, the sunday special, podcast

Id: FDSpLBNQk5I

Length: 59min 38sec (3578 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2019