Stephen Meyer—Return of God Hypothesis: 3 Scientific Discoveries Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe

okay my guest today is stephen c meyer the famous uh intelligent design theorist his book is return of the god hypothesis three scientific discoveries that revealed the mind behind the universe stephen received his phd from the university of cambridge in the philosophy of science he directs the center for science and culture at the discovery institute in seattle and authored the new york times bestseller darwin's doubt and signature in the cell and this is sort of the third volume of this trilogy in in building his arguments uh for there being an intelligent mind behind the cosmos i'm skeptical and so he and i go back and forth on at least a dozen different major issues in which i push back on all of them and he has of course rebuttals because there's nothing he hasn't heard from any of us um and uh to that extent uh it's a phenomenal conversation uh talk about everything physics and biology and consciousness morality why there's something rather than nothing and in information theory and the laws of physics and the mathematical universe and and on and on and on it's a phenomenal conversation on the biggest questions of all and the ultimate one is there something behind it all something like a god or an intelligent designer a mind well to find out the answer give this a listen thanks for listening all right stephen meyer here it is the return of the god hypothesis three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe well all right um you know you and i have done debates over the years many times and uh we're not going to do that today let's just have a conversation let's just talk about you know the big lot of fun the big questions and um the problem with debate and i'm pretending probably never going to do them again because you know you people are just trying to win and it's more tribal and it becomes more political in that sense and and i find that not so useful so let's just see what kind of headway we can make we can just leave off the table you're trying to convert me or i'm trying to convert you we're not even going to do that we're just going to talk about uh the big issues our our mutual friend brian keating told me you were you wished i were would would go secular oh both feel the same way we wish everyone had our world view but what i what i uh i've had some really nice debates with you and with uh michael roos and one thing that i have felt is that uh anyone who takes these big questions seriously uh is is a friend and there's this kind of kinship between people who are interested in these things and i read an article over the weekend by someone who said that the great thing about the new atheists and this was a a young christian writer was that they actually took it they actually took religion seriously enough to uh to make an argument about it you know yeah that's right well we should take religion seriously i mean we have that in common it's an important institution and so on well before we get into it just for my listeners that don't know much about you give us a little bit of a potted autobiography of of uh you know where you grew up in your education and where you work now and what yeah thank you yeah yeah i'm from the seattle area originally i went to a university as an undergrad at whitworth university in eastern washington a small liberal arts college affiliated with a presbyterian tradition i majored in geology and physics and uh took a minor in philosophy on the side after graduation i worked for four years in the oil industry i was doing seismic digital processing for a big oil company in texas and i got a rotary scholarship my last year to head off to england and did a first a master's in the history of science and then a phd in the philosophy of science at cambridge my phd dissertation and study was in the field of origin of life biology so it was a very interdisciplinary topic and after i got out i went came back to whitworth and taught there for a number of years in 96 four or six years into my tenure i helped start the center for science and culture at discovery institute in 2002 came full-time resigned my position at whitworth and came full-time to work with discovery uh since which time i've been engaging folks like michael shermer and uh michael roos and writing books and articles and uh had had a role in the in the formation of the intelligent design research program yeah i should say uh point out to my listeners and and you met you mentioned this in your book that um not all scientists take your hypothesis your not just yours but the other intelligent design theorists very seriously i think in part uh particularly with older scientists they're they're remembering uh young earth creationists of the 1950s and 60s people like dwayne gish and henry morris and and the gish gallup and all that stuff and and none of that panned out at all as is is even hardly useful to even look at this is not your father's creationism i should tell people that this is far more serious this you know these are not just published by uh christian publishers your book is harper collins i mean and and same thing with many of your colleagues these are mainstream trade or university presses that are publishing your works and uh you know i have a shelf full of books um by professional philosophers and scientists addressing your claim so um you know you're getting a hearing it's being taken seriously and and again this is not your father's creationism so it's worth discussing and as well you know i've had conversations on the kind of sociology of science and knowledge in general and you know there's kind of a split in the atheist skeptical community about um about belief in god and in religion and you know dan dennett's argument well i you know of course i'm an atheist but i believe in belief i believe that other people need to believe or want to believe and that may be true for some people but i i suspect not for for you um you're not claiming this is my truth and you have your truth or you know noma you know you have your world and we have our world you're you're making an argument that's empirical that's a scientific based argument that it's really true not not just mythically true or psychologically true right right true for me true for you true yeah um or freudian in the sense that man did not create god but god uh god did not create man but man created the concept of god i'm i'm arguing for more than the concept of god although the concept of god functions as as an explanatory hypothesis and i argue that because it does provide such uh uh compelling explanation of of key facts we have about biological physical and cosmological origins we have good reason to believe that the concept is also referring to a reality in the same way when we as in theoretical physics where we posit and unobservable in order to explain something we can observe when we find that that unobservable entity whether a quark or a force or a field provides the best explanation of the observables we hold that um that postulation as uh as a truth pointer it's pointing to something that's a reality so when we think about how science works since you you you're positing a scientific hypothesis to be tested in a way that that testing that falsification that pop area and falsification is part of it but not the only part of it uh there's also kind of a bayesian you know moving in the direction of positive evidence that we can accumulate in which our confidence grows or shrinks depending on on changing our priors as the new evidence comes in and so forth but there's also then a social aspect that i i like to think about is the kind of consensus science you know has science reached a consensus or not so like when i started college in 1971 the big bang theory had largely uh ousted the steady state theory there was a lot of consensus from most scientists in labs from you know cumulative independent lines of evidence to point to that and not the other one and so the big bang theory kind of won out and and and almost nobody i presume nobody could probably find somebody that embraces steady state theory today but nevertheless there's consensus on that now if you're oil held on to it to the bit to the bitter end but uh even gold and bondi uh relinquish that uh fairly quickly yeah his co his co go formulators of theory yeah so if the accumulated evidence you present in your book along these three major lines of of inquiry uh were true or that you know it's it's substantial evidence wouldn't most scientists who work in these areas read your book and go yes i think that's probably correct and i don't see that happening i mean your book just came out so maybe that's not fair for your book but but the arguments that you guys have been making since the 90s have been around so i just take brian keating's podcast he read your book uh he knows all the cosmology that you present in there he understands it and so when i had him on my podcast i asked him so did you convert are you uh are you a theist now and to be fair brian's not he's not an atheist like in the doc duncan's mode he's not militant about it at all you know he's not not something he's trying to do so you know here's what he said roughly speaking here without my playing it i'm using the youtube transcript you know as i read this as a cosmologist and i find uh oftentimes like with william lane craig in particular that it's sort of this it borders on the confirmation bias it borders on manipulation of evidence to support a conclusion and that conclusion always ignores the existence of alternative cosmologies of which there are many and in this article for the cover issue of skeptic so this article he did for us i want to flesh out the fact that it is by no means settle that there was a big bang now listen i said a big bang because it seems to me that if there were multiple big bangs that doesn't give more support for a creator then it might give less support for a creator anyway and he goes off on there and so for example in this article he talks about inflationary cosmology and the different versions of that and then this bouncing cyclical models that look something like that and uh you know he talks about these kind of multiple big bangs and he says i'll just read this portion then you can respond um so there's this one conformal cyclical cosmological model claims the universe endlessly cycles through consecutive eons of time in which as roger penrose described it the distant future of a particular eon becomes identified with the big bang of the subsequent eon in so-called bouncing models the cosmos rebounds after a contracting phase ushering in a new expansion according to stein heart and turok this cycle iterates on trillion-year time cycles time scales so at the very whether that turns out to be true or not who knows but but the point is that we don't know enough to know that your alternative explanation is the is the one we should take maybe we just don't know and there's these other alternatives yeah well i've got a lot to say about that it's a great question um first of all um there may be confirmation bias in the scientific community that would prevent a majority consensus congealing around something as as provocative as i'm proposing we do know that there is a default rule of method known as methodological naturalism that uh says that if you're going to be a scientist scientist you have to explain everything by reference to purely materialistic causes whether you're talking about uh even including things like the origin of the universe the origin of life it's fine-tuning or the origin and nature of human consciousness and so if that's taken as normative then no amount of evidence for creative intelligence could move a group of people who already hold that as normative that's one thing to say second thing to say is i don't i don't accept the premise of the question that these evidences and are not moving professionals who are working in the in the fields uh in which i'm talking uh i've i've got um you know i've got some fantastic book endorsements including nobel laureate in physics um and from leading scientists but also going back to the the the 1980s um you had books like uh god in the astronomers by robert jastrow you had a very dramatic uh public uh conversion of alan sandage who cited evidences from cosmology as a factor in his in his intellectual conversion from materialism to theism and so i don't think we can make an argument one way or another uh from the sociology of science alone uh there would be reason there could be confirmation bias within the within the field and there are plenty of people who have gone the opposite direction of that that you indicate uh as to brian he's an interesting guy um he is he describes himself as an agnostic who wrestles with god but he clearly is a theist he's a practicing uh conservadox jewish fellow and um and he's told me maybe i don't know what he's told you but he's told me that he he finds the argument from design and biology quite quite persuasive so um you know but not cosmetic so well interesting but let's talk about the cosmology because what i argue is that the evidence has theistic implications obviously there are new models being proposed all the time but the uh and i address the the cyclical and oscillating models in the um in cosmology head on um there's very powerful work critiquing those models going back to the work going back to ellen guth who showed that with each successive cycle in an oscillating universe you have an accumulation of entropy you have to because there's energy blowing the universe apart uh and so to get the next cycle has less energy available to do work you've got an entropy build up and therefore if you'd had an infinite number of cycles eventually you're going to damp out like a dancing bouncing ball and if the universe was infinitely old we would have reached that state of nullifying equilibrium a long time ago ergo the universe couldn't be infinitely old ergo even on a an oscillating universe model you have a beginning now the newer uh cyclical models have been proposed by steinhardt and uh penrose um uh are posit some mechanism of with each cycle of uh reducing entropy of going back to a highly ordered state but the mechanisms have no specificity and they're contrary to everything we know about physics in our universe and this is where you know just uh in our discussions i love the whole you know skeptic magazine and i know brian's got a piece expressing skepticism about the uh the multiverse but i there is a form of naturalism now which i call in the book exotic naturalism it's a form of supernatural materialism where things are positive beyond this universe in order to explain the key features we have about the key indicators we have of a beginning to this universe as well as the fine-tuning of the universe as well as the the deep mystery of the origin of life and i think there's a tremendous basis for skepticism about this these exotic forms of naturalism where we're talking about whether we're talking about multiverses in the in the sense uh that are invoked to explain the fine-tuning or whether we're talking about an infinite cycle of previous universes to which we have no empirical access by definition or whether we're talking about hawking's notion of imaginary time or um or you know even folks positing space alien designers to try to pause to explain the the evident evidence for design and the digital informational properties of living systems i mean no less a personage than francis crick posited panspermia with it with a design coming from some imminent intelligence within the cosmos because he recognized the extreme difficulty explaining the origin of life within this cosmos um kunin has posited the multiverse as an explanation for the origin of the first life so i think there's a you know you've you've made your bread and butter as a skeptic and and and rightly so many of the things you're skeptical about i'm skeptical about but i'm suggesting that that there is an appropriate skepticism about these extremely and increasingly convoluted uh materialistic models that are invoking things beyond this universe being on any possible observational confirmation as explanations for for the the key features that i'm addressing in the book so i'm not skeptical about modern cosmology i think the facts every indicator we have in cosmology points to a beginning of course we can create imaginative scenarios of multiple cycles before this one or other other verses out there multiverses the billions of them but i think it's reasonable to be skeptical about them and to weigh whether they really provide a better explanation than the single uh and more simple postulate in the occam's razor sense of a transcendent intelligence yeah i want to dig down into that mythological naturalism but i had one more example since you said brian said brian was encouraged by the biological arguments for intelligent design but that's not his field so i i found a review of your book on biologos i know you know those guys and uh here i'm i'm reminded of christopher hitchens line about if you hear the pope say he believes in god uh today you think well the pope's doing his job that's what he's supposed to do but if you hear the if you hear that the pope says he's having some doubts about god today you think whoa maybe i should pay attention here so you know i mean biologos the you know sort of theistic evolutionists or or creative evolution whatever they call themselves now you would expect them whatever they call themselves shifting the uh the terminology he would think he would you would just did a long podcast with their guy jim stumps oh you did okay interacting with all the different points on the ideological compass here well then then you can respond to this i'm sure you've seen this review by daryl fock i don't know him he's a biologist uh he says mayor's critique of the origin of life and evolutionary biology has significant inaccuracies for example discussing the hypothetical rna world and the origin of life meyer writes quote to date scientists have been able to design rna catalysts that will copy only about 10 percent of themselves close quote he then references the paper from 2001 however the field has progressed quite well in the past 20 years for example in 2014 robertson and joyce reported a similar system with a tweak which resulted in 100 percent effectiveness they summarized the results with these words quote each parental enzyme can give rise to thousands of copies per hour and each of these copies in turn can do the same all the while transmitting molecular information across uh generations and then he has a discussion about nz enzymatic enzymatic reactions uh and so on and then he says meyer goes on to describe a meeting at the new trends in evolutionary biology which he attended 2016. and this guy was there too um i was at the meeting also in one sense i think he's right the theme in the medium is that classic gene-based studies of how evolution works were given giving a far too narrow picture of how the process of evolution has taken place there's simply much more to the story than that which emerges when the focus is on genes a more holistic approach is required uh meyers summarized the opening talk this way and quoting you now in short neo-darwinism facebook michael would it be would it be okay to take these things separately yeah sure yeah yeah okay go ahead rna developmental biology issues um i i addressed the the choice paper in a response to my book that was uh published in the times literary supplement uh in uh and basically what they did was they they had two pre-made halves which they fused together okay and so this was not a significant increase in biological information and there was a huge amount of the the to the extent that they got any replicatory or biological relevance out of their rna world simulation there was an incredible input of or a significant input of information from the investigator you have to the investigator has to sequence the bases in the rna to get any any rem resemblance of function out of it so these these experiments are not simulating undirected evolutionary change and uh jim tour who knows a whole lot more about organic synthesis than daryl falk has been stripping the bark off of these guys in origin of life research pointing out that they're starting with purified reagents they're they're implementing an intelligently designed recipe where they combine specific chemicals at particular temperatures cool them at just the right time uh remove the in inter the the byproduct so that they don't we don't get interfering cross reactions this field really has made no progress apart from simulations that involve extensive investigator interference where the investigator is inputting information so i'll stand very firmly by my original critique of rna world and people who know a lot more about organic chemistry than darryl falk are are pointing out the very same problems that i am bulk by the way in his review of darwin's doubt acknowledged and this gets to your question about methodological methodological naturalism he said that i was absolutely correct that mutation and selection did not have the creative power to generate the new information needed for something like the cambrian explosion and the newer post neo-darwinian models which i also critiqued in that book were also inadequate to the task his reason for holding on to a general evolutionary framework was his affirmation of methodological naturalism so the biologist wasn't critiquing the biology in that case he was he was he had a he had a confirmation bias a pre-commitment to methodological naturalism now you may no you know now go on with this yeah and again the only reason i'm reading this is because he faced evolution this guy you know premises his review of your book saying i'm a born-again evangelical christian i accept jesus i do believe god operates in the world and miracles and so on right but we've been having a pretty good fight with those guys too because you know what they do is they simply baptize a standard evolutionary theory and say that in some way that it's very easy to reconcile with with theism maybe it is maybe it isn't but i that doesn't absolve them of the need to address the scientific problems with those theories and as you and i have talked before i think it's appropriate to be skeptical about neo-darwinism and many leading evolutionary biologists are it was striking to me at that meeting that um there that you know that people were very explicit about the lack of creative power associated with mutation selection mechanism and they were there to investigate other possible evolutionary mechanisms that could poss could possibly supplement that creative power susan mazur who's been part of the altenburg 16 group and who was one of the the voices calling for the meeting characterized the meeting as a whole afterwards for its lack of momentousness that it it did effectively a good job of explaining the problems but there weren't really powerful solutions on offer and fog's characterization of this is just a matter of gene-based evolution that my critique was only about gene-based evolution is really um a misrepresentation of what i argued i argue yes it's absolutely uh the the rarity of genes and proteins in combinatorial sequence space is uh is a huge problem for generating not minor modifications to existing genes or proteins but generating new protein folds that's one level of the critique i offered but at a higher level um i looked at the whole problem of the the of the immutability of gene regulatory networks which is the the locus of uh davidson's work at caltech for years i looked at the importance of in body plant formation of epigenetic and ontogenetic information these new discoveries about these hierarchies of informational control in life are posing problems for uh evolutionary developmental biology at every level it's not just a matter of generating new genes and proteins so i don't accept the his characterization of the narrowness of my critique interesting but the median itself was not proposing what your hypothesis is one of the alternatives no the table yeah but you know i happen to know about about 10 10 to 15 of people there were uh were id people i mean we were obviously interested in what was being discussed you know people like for example gunter beckley the the the german paleontologist who has announced his support for intelligent design uh coming from a deep background in evolutionary biology and paleontology i guess my my point in this thread is i i do wonder will we ever get to a consensus maybe it's 50 years from now 100 years from now or will we never reach consensus science because it has metaphysical even religious overtones and people just can't make that leap i mean are we forever gonna it's gonna be a different question than just say big bang versus steady state this is a different kind of animal yeah and that's kind of why i wrote the book and why i think conversations like that you the ones that you and i have had over the years are so important because uh we may not reach consensus but uh because i think you know you're arguing in your new book uh we still should be talking to each other there needs to be free speech in this country and and having these constructive dialogues where we're not stigmatizing each other and stereotyping each other and all that and uh these are the most interesting questions you know there was a conference at baylor 20 years ago called the nature of nature yeah was raising the quest yeah you were there i think that might have been the first time we met actually because i think we did our first debate or two later at that uh college in wisconsin but uh these are fantastically interesting questions and we don't need to be afraid of them you know some some people come down nature is a self-existing self-organizing system it does not require something external to itself to explain its properties that's the that's the naturalistic view of sean carroll and you and and you know some of the aggressive new atheists and i know you're not part of that uh group but uh fair enough you know that's that's a viewpoint that's an interesting viewpoint the other view is that nature has properties that are pointing to something beyond itself and requires something external to itself in order to explain what we see and i find and that's generally a theistic view but one of the point things that i was pointing out in the book is there is a kind of uh uh materialistic supernaturalism now i called it exotic naturalism where things pause where scientists are feeling the need to posit things beyond our universe in order to explain the properties of the universe even if they're not willing to consider creative intelligence as a possibility so we get multiverses and we get quantum wave functions and we get you know a cyclical uh you know um cyclical cycles of expansion and contraction before the big bang um but you know these questions of ultimate causal origins raise these deeper metaphysical questions and i think we can have constructive conversations about them we can evaluate them rationally one thing i appreciate about dawkins is he has a great talent for framing issues and he has this wonderful quote where he says that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there's no purpose no design nothing but blind pitiless indifference well of course blind pity difference is shorthand for strictly materialistic processes so he's saying materialism is an overarching system of thought can be tested by looking at the properties that the universe has i agree with that i think metaphysical hypotheses are testable more in a bayesian way than in the way we do in the lab where you put something under uh put you know do something under control laboratory conditions and try to get replicability um but but um so i i appreciate dawkins is willing to engage a big metaphysical question and say we can we can evaluate test it by observations we make of the properties of the universe i just happen to disagree with dawkins's ultimate conclusion and i think that there are key properties of the universe that are much more expected on theism than on than on naturalism and three that i mentioned and develop in the book are the universe as best we can tell from the empirical evidence had a beginning that the universe has been finely tuned for the possibility of life from the beginning and soon thereafter and that at the foundation of life we have an integrated informational complexity digital code complex information processing storage transmission system that that that boggles the mind and points in every way to a designing intelligence a master programmer for life so i think those are three things that you would not have expected on a straightforward naturalistic worldview you wouldn't have expected the beginning you wouldn't have expected fine-tuning and you wouldn't have expected digital code at the foundation of life and one way we know that's not what you would expect is is the the number of explanatory postulates pure pure theoretical postulates that have to be formulated to save the appearances from a naturalistic point of view the multiverse is a great example of that that naturalism has become more and more convoluted in the sense of epicycles of explanatory entities in order to explain the same things that that a single common sense appeal to intelligent design or creative intelligence would explain yeah i was surprised you didn't have a fourth um line of of inquiry that is the moral law within you know emmanuel kant's famous line about the two great mysteries of the world are the starry heavens above and the moral law within is that your next book or do you think there's not have enough space for that from yeah you know i think there's a great i used to teach that argument i have a i have a steve meyer version of it if you will but i think that that values valuing is something that only persons can do i'll give you my version of the moral argument i used to do this in intro to philosophy uh valuing is something that only persons can do that's a that's a and all ethical systems are based on underlying values for example the intrinsic value of human life um if all if if there isn't an objective value or a single person who's uh who's whose opinion about what is most important counts most then we will necessarily get multiple systems of valuing and therefore multiple systems of ethics and therefore we will devolve into relativism but none of us actually live as though all ethics are are uh are are purely relative that ethical propositions are only applicable to individual persons or groups we all in our behavior reveal that we accept an objective ethical system when it's our ox that's being gored or our mother who's being kicked in the shins or uh our child is being abused um therefore we're we act as though there is an objective ethical system theism insofar as it provides uh or it posits a single uh ethical opinion that matters more than any other because bias and posits a designer who made the ethical system to encourage human flourishing provides the best grounding for something that we all tacitly end up revealing that we that we believe in which is an objective moral uh moral propositions yeah that's interesting because i'm a moral objectivist and realist as well even though i'm an atheist and i think you can derive it although most how does that work yeah i'm interested how does that work for you michael i mean it's kind of a another long that was my podcast episode this last week sorry yeah with two two theistic philosophers i didn't even know they were theistic james hunter and uh uh nedelewski his their book was um sorry let me just get that straight from my oh you know he's the sociologist of religion at virginia right yes that's incorrect yes correct yeah that that's right let me uh give you the title of their book here sorry uh yeah this is this week's uh james hunter and paul nedelleski right so their book is science and the good the tragic quest for the foundations of morality to their credit as i told them halfway through our podcast when i found out they were theists i had no idea they were theists i mean i read their entire book because i was asked to review it because they critique me and steve pinker and sam harris and others uh and so to the credit they made all the arguments without uh he ever invoking religion or god or anything like that um so anyway so i gave them they were reasonable guys in spite of their uh disruption that's right that's right now that i know you're a theist okay now we're gonna take the gloves off no just kidding now we're gonna really well you know i agree that that takes persons in the sense that like all the primate research that franz deval does primate politics and they have these kind of pre-moral sentiments but but that's different than the kind of values you're talking about uh i think humans are special in that sense it probably takes uh some kind of abstract reasoning maybe even language uh to to scale up from these kind of pre-moral sentiments that primates have or maybe all mammals uh and uh and and then you go from there i did i was glad you quoted dawkins let me just read that again the universe we observe the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design no purpose no evil no good nothing but blind pitiless indifference well i'd listen to the reading of your book and and i i noticed it kept coming up over and over and over and i have a pdf so i just did a scan of the word pitiless indifference blind pitiless indifference 13 times you quoted this so i got it this is money quote my friend because he does such a beautiful job of framing the issue you know but is it or is it not the case that the that the properties of the universe are what we'd expect on naturalism or materialism or are the properties what we'd expect on theism and i think it's i think it suggests metaphysical hypothesis that last part that last part there's no good or evil it's just pitiless indifference i my sense is that's what really bothers you as it would anybody no what i'm interested in the metaphysical question itself um i mean i'm not one of these people that's a theist because um if there were no god that my fragile psyche couldn't take it i i you know i i cite lawrence krauss at the end he says the universe doesn't owe us comfort and so i i want to know what's true and what i'd appreciate about you know a number of the new atheists is they took religion seriously enough to say is it true or not i think there are a lot of people in the pews that actually don't really believe very much of it and um and i think the starting point is to determine well is there or is there not a god i mean that's a very important question or is is materialism true is it our matter and energy the eternal self-existent entities from which everything else came the ontological ground of all being as the philosophers would put it or the prime reality or is it a personal agent that's been something we've debated in western philosophy since the greeks and i thought let's let's let's you know let's let's get it on you know and and weigh the arguments on both sides and and his way of framing it also dovetails to this whole bayesian uh abductive approach to evaluating propositions which i i thought was really helpful where i decided to interrupt yeah that's okay when i depart from from dawkins and maybe ed wilson as well on this ed made the distinction between empiricists and transcendentalists transcend not the transcendentalists but something different that is is it just what we see materialist or can we transcend something uh to me it's transcendent to think that we are born with a nature that has a sense of right and wrong and guilt and shame that comes with the species it's not uh subjective just to me or my family my group my tribe my nation western culture whatever there are certain values that are really objectively wrong and you know so i start with lincoln if slavery's not wrong nothing's wrong and well how do you know it's wrong you know outside of you know lincoln and western culture or whatever well because you just asked the slave you know would you rather be free or would you rather be enslaved would you rather be you know satiated or would rather be hungry would you rather be in pain or would you rather be out of pain and so on you can just kind of go through these basics of life and you know people vote with their feet literally uh or their dollars or they vote with their behaviors what they want and so we can make you know general conclusions about what's objectively right and wrong from there and and to me i can i in my other work i try to scale up from doc and selfish gene model to you know this kind of reciprocal altruism kin selection reciprocal altruism and so on that you know as dawkins says in the selfish gene that the difference between uh let's say a rock and a lump of food a lump of food is an animal and and the rock won't kick back if i kick it but the animal will so and i know that the animal knows that it doesn't want to be in pain so i have to you know act in a different way than i would with a stone and if it's another human i know that he knows that i know i'm selfish and i know that he knows that i know that he knows that he's selfish and so on so we have to you know act in a moral way now one more step it's not enough to fake being a good person a moral person a caring person because we give off tells you know bob trevor has talked about self-deception you know cult leaders or whatever they they believe their own lies because they're better at able to pitch what they're selling but we have lie detection uh circuitry that looks for cues like this person's bullshitting me or exaggerating or lying and so there's this kind of arms race evolutionary arms race between line and line detection and so it's not enough to say i'm i'm a good person or i'm a moral person you actually have to act it and even there you could give off subconscious cues or tells that you're faking it so you actually have to believe it like i really actually care about you not just pretending in a machiavellian manipulative dark triad narcissistic way i actually do believe it and uh and feel it and that's to me that's genuine morality it's as good as anything that is on offer from these as i see it because you guys have the problem of of of the euthyphro problem you know if god handed us these moral values you know how to first of all how do we know what they are well we get them out of holy books well you know those holy books conflict with each other but in any case does god endorse moral values that are objectively right and wrong and if so why can't we just go straight to the source and why do we have to you know read it in a book or whatever can we discern it some way or is it only what he says is right and wrong you know the problem of course so uh anyway to me i think we can derive those and wait out a sidetrack because i just said why don't you have four of them maybe that's your next book um and that will well yeah and we should stipulate that i i don't really address the moral argument i do make an epistemological argument i think theism uniquely grounds belief in the reliability of the mind and i discussed that in the very last chapter of the book and i think theistic presuppositions about the intelligibility of nature and the reliability of the mind were crucial to the rise of modern science during the period we called the scientific revolution but on the on the moral argument just to uh um i mean that that's i i've never heard you unpack your take on it that before that's really interesting my take on it is that um the evolutionary account of uh that it's entirely possible to discern uh ethical uh principles what we should do but they all presuppose an underlying value that to the individual that's difficult to account for on an evolutionary and materialistic worldview and secondly that that uh if we give an evolutionary account of the origin of moral motions or or intuitions or principles i don't think that the evolutionary account withstands its own exposure as soon as i know that what i regard as moral in violent moral principles are just something that were programmed into me in order to enhance either my survival or the survival of the the group that i'm part of uh i don't really have a reason to continue to obey them if the moral principles cut against my survival uh my survival interests in the moment so um anyway it's a big discussion but i'm glad we should continue i think i'm ready to know you're a moral objectivist i think that explains why you and i have some very similar uh uh political views about free speech and libertarian uh you know the importance of of liberty and things like that so anyway well you can come back at it that that in itself would be a fundamental but you got to start somewhere so i start with this kind of fundamental autonomy and freedom that it's my body and my choices and so on but i know you have yours as well so for me to appeal to you using reason and rational arguments for why you should be nice to me i have to take you seriously and show you that i should be nice to you and this is kind of a foundation of of moral exchange yeah i think you can get to some specific agreed moral principles in that sort of interpersonal negotiation accounting for the difference between is and ought when odds are expression of underlying values and we want our ought statements to be universal suggest the need for a universal source of those the values that underline the odds so a universal person rather than your ver your opinion versus mine it is really interesting in that dawkins quote that we were bandying back and forth that he says there's no evil no good his his version of materialism does does lead to a form of relativism and i think you're you're somewhat unusual among uh people with a a a naturalistic world view in affirming moral objectivity uh there was a famine who did as well yeah yeah i am unusual that way although i'm not the only one pinker and sam harris as well uh but robert pannock uh makes makes the argument because i sent him all my stuff and said what do you think because i'm not a philosopher and i don't even play one on tv so and he said well you re you know this starting with the survival and flourishing of yourself and you know the human condition uh and the betterment of uh survival and flourishing for others and so forth that in itself as a foundation point has an ought built into it you you can he he convinced me that you cannot truly derive an ought from just is that that one of the premises probably has an odd built into it which was hume's original point so i take him i take him to be correct on that and so what okay so you know again just ask the slave would you rather be enslaved or free he's going to say i want to be free okay well how do we know well because he just said so all right so i mean that the person is expressing their their desire in that sense okay that's a slight but but but a second point on dawkins quote because here i think we're making an error that i call alvey's error that is assessing the purpose of something the wrong level of analysis alvey is alvi singer uh woody woody allen's character in annie hall where i recall in the movie has that flashback to childhood where he is no longer doing his homework and his mother takes him to the psychiatrist and alby why won't you do your homework he says because the universe is expanding and he says what he says well the universe is expanding and someday it's going to all blow up so it doesn't make any difference whether i do my homework or not and his mother upgrades him and says what's the universe got to do with it we live in brooklyn and brooklyn's not expanding and uh and i use this this is one of my yeah this is one of my scientific american columns because i was responding one to one of william lane craig's debates that i watched with him and shelly kagan about uh that well as he said here on a naturalistic worldview everything is ultimately destined to destruction in the heat death of the universe as the universe expands it grows colder and colder and heats up and you know then then nothing means anything so kagan responded to that oh because craig had brought up that you know godless not nazi torturers that got away with it so it didn't matter and so and kagan is jewish and he's like this strikes me as an outrageous thing to suggest it doesn't really matter surely it matters to the torture victims whether they're being tortured it doesn't require that this makes some cosmic difference to the eternal significance of the universe to for it to matter whether a human being is tortured it matters to them matters to their family and it matters to us and then craig committed a related fallacy when he argued that without god there are no objective moral values moral duties or moral accountability and if life ends at the grave then ultimately makes no difference whether you live as stalin or as a mother teresa so i call this craig's categorical error assessing the value of something by the wrong criteria category of criteria so for example we live in the here and now not the hereafter so our actions must be judged according to the criteria of this category whether or not the category of a god granted hereafter exists whether you behave like a russian dictator who murdered tens of millions of people or a russian or a roman catholic missionary who tended the poor matters very much to the victims of totalitarianism and poverty and then why does it matter well because this is in our nature we don't want to suffer well it matters to the individual person but the idea of morality as you point out is that it is universal and it must be transpersonal and one of the problems with tyrants is that uh there was no pro there was no principle that they they acknowledged that applied not only to themselves but to the the people they tortured so i know this is a d this is a deep question uh in moral philosophy but um i i think that the uh underlying all ethical propositions are beliefs about values and and i think if you want an objective system of morality that is that transcends individual our individual opinions about what is valuable um there must be a valuer who transcend who who has a claim on on his opinion counting more and uh i think if there is a creator who made us all with certain design parameters uh then if there's a moral law that is offered to advance human flourishing then i think the theistic account enables us to have that objective morality and have it and have it grounded but you know there's a there's a ton more to say about this we won't settle this one but it's uh dawkins is interesting this way because it's not it's it's not an argument i make in the book no i know i understand it's okay uh but one final point that dawkins himself is not a moral relativist you know as you know he has no qualms about criticizing islam and say female genital mutilation is being objectively wrong this is horrible and he rants about this so clearly even he with that famous quote that implies that female persons are valuable and that begs a question the grand says who is is it value are they valuable only to the female persons who are being mutilated or only to richard dawkins or are there objective principles above us all to which we can appeal that reflect a valuation that does is not derivative of our subjective opinions yeah well i say the lack of theism says yes there is and i and i can tell you where that comes from and i think that you know the the harvard law professor harold berman said underneath all ethical systems is a an unspoken question which he said the grand says who question and uh if the grant says who is always answered by well me or you i thou you know uh then we're going to get a lot of different moralities coming out of that and i think for those of us who accept moral objectivism um i i think um that's a problem and i think theism solves that problem i don't think i don't think an evolutionary account of morality does i think we end up realizing that um you know in in the same way i think the evolutionary account uh one once we understand that the the the moral principles or our sense of what's valuable has been programmed into us for survival only if my survival interests depart from the group i have no compelling reason to continue to go with the dominant morality of the group well the group will they will isolate you if you don't play nice right but then you then you're back to nature red tooth and claw and that's not really what we mean by morality so this is a good discussion mike do this more we should do one we should do just on this topic if on your take is correct then why do we need a military and police and why why do we have a judicial system people do need to be encouraged to bring out the better angels of their nature and and sequester their inner demons yeah for sure but um that's the human nature problem that theologians discusses related to our our uh instinctive rebellion against the creator okay methodological naturalism okay i i agree i agree with you that it is it is an assumption built into science okay so as opposed to what what would say supernatural methodological that's what it looks like science that would not limit explanatory hypo we're not say that we must limit explanatory hypotheses to postulations that affirm only materialistic entities in other words the kind of science that was practiced by newton boyle and kepler who got science going um the methodological naturalism is an artifact of late 19th century uh largely historical or evolutionary biology i mean it was it was implicit in the origin of species and um darwin made arguments that presupposed that science must not uh consider uh creative intelligence that's okay if he wants to do that but i think we need to be explicit about that and so when we're making here's an example that i sometimes use if you walk into the into the british museum and you look at the rosetta stone and someone says well how do you think those those etchings got there you know and uh you say well i think it was it must have been wind and erosion well we know something about the origin of information it always comes from minds we've got informational inscriptions in three different languages that have been translated back and forth people will laugh and rightly so because our our conviction if we applied methodological naturalism in that case we would be limiting the intellectual freedom of the scientist archaeologists to follow the evidence where it most naturally leads given our knowledge of cause and effect so um i think we need to be open to when we're talking about causal origins questions you made a good point a minute ago i was going to i was going to amplify that about your woody allen uh illustration the wrong level of analysis it's really important to keep the context of inquiry in mind in science there are a whole swath of questions where intelligent design the god hypothesis um an evolutionary explanation uh are not relevant because the science isn't dealing with causal origins questions or historical questions about how things got here most of science is concerned to describe how nature acts one part of nature affects another part of nature how nature acts in a regular way on an ongoing basis it's not asking a question of the form what caused something to come into existence it's asking the a question of the form what does nature ordinarily do and if i say well god did it or intelligent design was responsible or it evolved that way i'm not really answered the i've answered the wrong question but there is a class of scientific questions that are concerned with causal origins and if i ask well how did the find how did the universe acquire the fine-tuning that's necessary to life or where did the effectively digital form of information that resides in dna come from in the first place those are questions that might have adequate answers by reference to strictly materialistic causes or uh or forces but that they might also the right answer might be that creative intelligence had something to do with the fine-tuning after all fred hoyle long-time atheist um uh converted a proto form of theism on the basis of the fine-tuning that some of the fine-tuning parameters that he himself discovered and said a common sense interpretation of the evidence we have of fine-tuning suggested a super-intellect monkey with physics and chemistry so um so i just the argument here is that there is a there is a class of scientific questions that should be open to creative intelligence as a possible explanation if the evidence warrants and so the opposite of rigidly applying methodological naturalism in all categories of scientific endeavor is a more open philosophy of science that allows the context to dictate the allowable range of questions and then is open to all such possible explanations that are relevant to the question that's being asked and that by the way was a very productive form of of inquiry during the period of the scientific revolution and i would also argue it's becoming productive in our larger network of id scientists who are using design as a heuristic to generate specific predictions about what you ought to find in living systems and then going out and looking for those uh design patterns that you might find or that might be there if life was in fact designed i'll give you a few examples of that yeah okay so the the archaeologist who uncovers the rosetta stone um infers intelligent mind behind it but they know that there are intelligent minds they're called people and they lived in the past before us and we can dig around in greece and find oh well there's their tools and artifacts and there's some graves and they're their bones what would be the equivalent of that for say dna or the fine-tuning of the cosmos that's a really common objection to my argument michael and i just put that one deeply firmly to rest in uh signature in the cell in the first place let me give you an illustration that gets at the principle let's say you're an archaeologist and you're going into some you discover some caves under the ice pack in uh in antarctica and you go into the caves you've assumed that no one has ever lived in on the antarctic uh continent it's been way too cold for way too long but you go in and you discover on the walls of the cave uh some scratchings that look like inscriptions and at first you think oh it might have been you know leeching or erosion or something but then you find more of them and they've got little pictograms of animals and as you begin to study them carefully as the archaeologists did with the rosetta stone you begin to uh correlate the the pictograms and the inscriptions you realize this this is actually a form of linguistic communication now you have to assess you have to readjust your assumption that there was no life there was no intelligent life prior to um the discovery of this cave on antarctica because you found a distinctive hallmark of intelligent activity when there's one and only one known cause for a given effect you can reason red retrodictably from the effect back to the cause even if you didn't know that the cause was present prior to the time where you're investigating and so i think that that means that we need to be open to the possibility of intelligence even if we don't know there was an intelligence present prior to the origin of life on earth for example because there could be distinctive yeah because there could be distinctive indicators of intelligent activity um from a time or from a place or from a domain that is uh that we were not previously able to verify so that the mind would have would be something like our mind but but smarter bigger more powerful or whatever quite possibly we're finding for example and one of the predictions of an id model is that we would find sophisticated design patterns uh using the term of art from computer science in living cells a design pattern in computer science is a known method of storing or transmitting or processing information i've had we have a microsoft elite level architect programmers helped us write ten thousand lines of code to simulate the gene expression system in the dna he told me it's full of computer design patterns that we recognize only they're operating at an 8.0 9.0 10.0 efficiency beyond any they're far more elegant than than the design uh the similar design patterns that we've used um that suggests maybe they're the mind is superior go back to your example of the the cave in antarctica let's say that cave was was dated i don't know 10 million years ago well this would be quite defined uh and you know there are some people who think that you know humans existed you know advanced civilizations long before ours but this would be way way before but i i don't think anybody would posit a supernatural agency they would just say wow i guess our archaeologist wasn't the point of that illustration it was just the idea that you would posit an intelligence from a time and a place that preceded known human intelligence to that point in your in your knowledge the people that are searching for extraterrestrial intelligence do not know that et is out there but if they find the prime number sequence embedded in a radio signal or something even more sophisticated by way of information content they're going to infer that an intelligence existed in a dom in a in a place and at from a time before which uh we've previously from you know from a time and place that previously we didn't think there was any intelligence uh if we discover fine-tuning at the at the foundation of physical laws and in the initial conditions of the universe by the same logic it's completely uh reasonable to think that there might have been an intelligence acting before the beginning of the universe on the entire universe so i think we have to decide the nature i'm following i'm following it whether or not we have of intelligence by the nature of the effect that we find yeah i'm following the sequence but um again if if we discover some carvings in the rock or something like this we we know how intelligent minds have done this in the past they use stone tools or they use copper chisels or whatever um but so so my next question would then be where is this mind uh in the universe or outside of it and more importantly how would it create the signal that somehow is obviously different than just using stone tools or copper tools or whatever um how does the mind interact with the stuff so this gets to one one more point that you know the the mind body problem you know how does the thought interact with exactly the physical substance in another area i like to to tell my ghost hunting friends how does the ghost know to go right at the hallway and knock the painting off the wall it's supposedly this non-material stuff how does it interact with the stuff right right okay you see where i'm going well yeah i do uh the methods of design detections detection that intelligent design proponents use allow us to retrodict to the activity of mind without answering the question of how minds affect the material world around us people may say well that's a terrible cop-out you haven't answered the question going in the forward direction of time how does mind affect matter but we don't actually know that with our own minds and this is the mind-body problem and as gould used to point out concerning evolutionary biology he said we can often know that something happened without exactly knowing how how how the cause what what caused it so we can infer the activity of intelligence without knowing exactly how intelligence affects matter you and i are are constraining possibility speed as a space right now as we you know consider a nearly infinite arrange and combination i'm sorry i've got another someone else trying to call me i'll just turn them off here yeah sorry the perils of being in zoom in skype touch with the whole world right yeah uh oops so so anyway we we're where was i yeah so the idea is that um we're making a limited claim here we can infer the activity of mind we're not saying we've solved the mind body problem even either for the way the human mind affects the matter around it or for the way in which the designing mind responsible for the fine-tuning or the origin of life affected matter in the physical universe the mind of god if you will but but i am curious we don't know just we don't have a way of answering fair enough that that's a i don't know is always a good answer um but i am curious i mean what are your what's your sense or what's your hunch like if you think that that mind intervened periodically say in the precambrian or the cambrian or relation from rna to dna or bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting sequence or whatever example you want to use prokaryotes to eukaryotes one of my favorite uh i mean so does the intelligence so does the intelligence create a universe with laws of nature that grind along and create complex forms like ice crystals or you know something like that and you presume that he doesn't reach in uh to do that but periodically needs a little boost like well we have prokaryote cells i'm going to reach in there and glom them together into eukaryotic cells so that was an intervention there so two things you know you're claiming that it's not constant in other words it's not like god intervenes in a deistic way the whole running universe and all the laws that's god you don't mean in a deistic way or pantheistic way that way right now i have a i have a a theistic um and i i think probably a biblical theology of nature in addition to the arguments that i'm making from nature to god so that would be the difference between natural theology and theology of nature and there's an ancient uh theological distinction in the in both jewish and christian theology between what the christian medieval theologians called the potentia ordinata the ordinary power of god which we see manifested in the ongoing and regular concourse of nature which we dubbed in that period of time the laws of nature the laws being after all a juridical metaphor of theological origin to quote one historian of science our whole notion of law the law-like nature of nature is a theological concept that helped give rise to modern science but in addition to that uh from a a many theists have held there is another power of god which is sometimes called the potential absolute or the fiat power of the god the ability of god to act as an agent within the creation that he otherwise sustains and upholds to act discreetly and i i think that since we can detect the activity of intelligence and i made an argument that the kind of intelligence that we're dealing with is neither deistic nor uh nor nor alien but rather that when we look at the ensemble of evidences that i address in the book that we have evidence for uh the activity of god at the beginning of the universe and down the timeline as well insofar as we're dealing with that kind of intelligence i think it's perfectly reasonable to think that god may have acted more than one time in that discreet way even as he upholds the laws of nature on an ongoing basis discrete infusions of information into the biosphere uh suggest to me intelligence uh whereas i don't think for example mutation and selection does a good job of explaining how in how large infusions of information arose i think mutation does a great job of explaining how minor modifications might have risen or more generally how information is degraded but i don't think it's a good explanation for the origin of information take something like embryology so and and from one which is one other thing this is about sensibilities you know you said glommed onto and we use the word intervene and that's kind of a so if you're operating out of a naturalistic or materialistic framework or worldview the notion of god acting discreetly is often caricatured as an uh an intervention to fix something that was broken like you know it was a watch and then it broke and then but it might be more like a a great composer who's adding a new variation on a theme and we don't think of of human action in sequences somehow beneath our dignity so i i don't think that it would be god's dignity i don't think that or is it inherently disreputable to think of god no no no if you accept the existence of god in the first place and i think there's good reasons to do that you know i i don't need to go that direction because i was going to bring up embryology if you just look at the embryological development of a human fetus i mean the word miraculous is often used and for good reason it is just amazing that this cell knows to become a kidney cell this one's a heart cell that one's the toenail how does it do this i mean and as you know this is a you know big debate in embryological circles okay is it your sense that god designed the embryological system of development from dna at the beginning and it unfolds naturally or does does the intelligent designer need to intervene at each cellular division to push it okay that cell goes this way and that cell goes that way and this stem cell is going to become that the cell and so on because if if the former then why can't the whole universe just be wound up from the beginning and that's what god did he designed these laws to unfold in in adaptive complex ways and so on and and end up with the complexity we have yeah well let's say for the sake of argument i entirely accept that uh that all the information in a fertilized egg is is present to unfold without any uh subsequent intervention i know some scientists who are so blown away by what's going on in embryology and by the uh who have made informational calculations that wonder if there might be inputs along the way i don't hold that view but i'm not necessarily precluding it i mean it is an amazing project our friend paul nelson whom you know uses the marching band analogy you know that all the cells know where to lie you know where where to go and how to uh uh differentiate one from another and it's it's stunning it really is an amazing process and there must be an enor an amazing amount of information in that in that fertilized egg and it's not all in the dna that's a that's a crucial thing that i draw out in darwin's doubt you have these hierarchies of of information and uh the distribution of cell membranes and the cytoskeletal arrays in the the the sugar code the intercellular signal signaling i mean it's it's re it's it's a fascinating subject so is it your sense that let's say it's all there yeah let's say it's all there in the embryo and it's just unfolding you said why couldn't it defend that i have no i have no in-principle argument about why god couldn't have front end loaded everything but what i have is a very extensive empirical evident argument in chapter 15 of the book about why it looks extremely unlikely that that's what happened um if you look at the structure of the dna molecule and if we it's very hard to to synthesize nucleotide bases under under realistic conditions without investigator interference but let's give you a prebiotic soup with sugars phosphates and bases and let then let's say let's let the self-organize organizational chemical interactions between those molecules do their thing you do not get an information rich dna molecule you can look you can examine the dna structure the structural formula for a dna molecule and you'll notice that there are no chemical bonds along the axis that contains the information between the individual nucleotide bases and that the base is attached to the backbone with the exact same kind of bond in each case so there's no chemical biasing as to why one base attaches in one part of the molecule as to another so there's no underlying chemistry that explains the sequential arrangement of the basis which is the informational property of the molecule now if if so what's the argument the argument is that if the dna molecule in its if in if the highly relevant biologically subunits of information carrying molecules do not have inherent self-organizing tendencies that would explain the origin of the information that dna contains then surely we do not have in the elementary particles or in the plasma right after the big bang uh the information necessary to build a dna molecule if it's not in the if it's not in the biologically relevant subunits it's not in the it's not in the uh in the elementary particles or or the plasma and and to try to even conceive of a molecule that we don't even get atoms till 380 thousand years after the big bang so um the front end loaded idea of design i don't i just don't think works well then your sense would be that the mind then reaches in to stir the particles in some way to say bring those proteins together or create these hydrogen atoms yeah i think mind affected matter and i think we see the evidence of that without knowing how yeah yeah then then the question is could that all be part of just the laws of nature here let me channel scalia and rehnquist in the louisiana creationism trial that went all the way to the u.s supreme court this is from my chapter and why people believe weird things on this because it was an interesting case in which the aclu lawyers argued against the creationists that um that these people are just teaching they're sneaking religion in to their the classroom and renquest then says to the aclu lawyer jay topkis my next question is going to be whether you considered aristotelianism a religion and topka says of course not ranquez says well then you could believe in a first cause an unmoved mover that may be impersonal and has no obligation or of obedience or veneration from men and in fact doesn't care what's happening to mankind topka says right and run quest says and believe in creation tapkin says not when creation means creation by a divine creator rehnquist says and i ask you again it depends on what you mean by divine if all you mean is the first cause an impos an impersonal mover and taka says divine your honor has connotations beyond i respectfully submit and reinquest says but the statute doesn't say divine tapkin says no request all it says is creation you know so in other words brenquis is arguing well what would be wrong with teaching an aristotelian the laws of nature have teleology built into them and that's the creating force that's still a materialistic you know kind of naturalistic take on creation but still slightly different than what evolutionists are arguing and i think different from what you're arguing well let's set aside the whole you know church state jurisprudence issue that's a it's another whole canon worm so we'll go off on another tangent there michael but uh uh the laws of nature by definition describe regularities patterns that repeat sun up sun down all unsuspended bodies draw fall i drop the ball i let go of the ball it drops um and they are um by definition they describe what are in in the information what in the information sciences uh is described as redundancy a repetitive order the thing that we need to explain in the origin of life is not repetitive order but rather a periodic specificity also known as specified complexity uh the term that leslie orgel first applied to the dna in origin of life studies um in other words information information is not reducible to computational algorithm or to simple law-like descriptions that can be expressed as for example differential equations and uh the fine-tuning is subject to the same problem so i think that that the laws of nature do a good job of describing regularities self-organizational models of the origin of life do a good job of explaining what doesn't need to be explained what needs to be explained in life is not simple order in the sense of redundancy or repetition or regularity but rather a periodic specificity what we mean by specified or functional information and that in our experience is precisely what always arises from an intelligent source so i don't think i i don't think a uh positing laws alone will do in fact even in physics and this is a great point that michael balani made that that the laws of physics are he said are dumb without the gift of boundary constraints we have to laws describe certain regularities but to describe the universe in its specificity we need what are sometimes also called free parameters we have to specify initial conditions we have to specify the strength of the force constants and the in the fundamental physical laws and we need to say something about we need information about the boundaries of the system that we're describing what are called boundary constraints all of that kind of information always comes from measurement and observation so there's a kind of mythology in physics that laws explain everything rather they describe regularities and we don't even we can't even use them to generate specific predictions unless we also have information about initial and boundary conditions so um i don't think positing law alone will will explain the universe in all its glorious specificity and information-rich content here's what i wrote in why darwin matters by the way my only book with full frontal nudity on the cover i remember that book that was like 09 i think right uh 06 yeah the ultimate answer to the design inference is to provide a cogent theory of natural design that account for the complexity of the universe in life this we have through the sciences of complexity in which we recognize the properties of self-organization and emergence that arise out of complex adaptive systems self-organization means that the system requires only an input of energy into it in order to generate an action which comes from within the system itself emergent property is one that is more than the sum of its parts complex adaptive systems are those that grow and learn as they change and they are auto catalytic which means that they contain self-driving feedback loops so that would account for your bump in complexity or whatever without an outside source i used several examples language consciousness water the law the economy i mean no one designs an economy the only the only thing regulators can language and consciousness well let me just let's just see a prize on you right away i mean well use the use the economy as another legitimate let's use the economy as an example let's use the economy as an example no one designed it the only thing governments can do is regulate it and put restrictions on it and tax it and so on but just you and i trading and so on out of that emerges this incredible complex system without any outside input it's just you know individual persons doing exchanging isn't that something like making three choices intelligently guided though that this is not this is not an analogy that's apt for describing how um basic physical laws will generate information-rich molecules and i have i you know i really go into considerable depth in all three of the books i've written signature in the cell darwin's doubt and the new one on the problem associated with self-organizational models of the origin of life and and even self-organizational models of the origin of body plans they only get anywhere if there's large inputs of unexplained pre-existing information the kind of processes that are uh cited as examples of dissipative non-equilibrium self-organizational systems are things like tornadoes draining bathtubs where there's where energy is moving through a system but it produces a simple form of symmetric order it doesn't produce the aperiodic complexity that you find in in biological systems i used to have a illustration of this that i use with students two big coke bottles filled with liquid with blue dye in it and sparkles if i put energy through the system in a prigine or stewart kaufman like way i would get a non-equilibrium system i would get order arising as a result of that that energy input it'd be a nice beautiful spiral vortex fair enough but those little sparkles did not line up and say steve meyer did this um the the the higher level order was the result you still had lower lower level randomness and the there's just some very powerful critiques now of these self-organizational models uh brian miller a phd in complex systems physics from duke who's now our one of our research coordinators here at discovery wrote an excellent article at the uh at inference the the journal that david berlinski edits in response to jeremy england on this whole question these newer models of self-organization based on what are called dissipation theorems and they they really don't work in explaining the origin of life because they need information even dissipative systems to get anything that's remotely complex have to have an equivalent amount of informational input at the beginning and most processes that we know are producing order spontaneously with simple energy moving through the system are giving a simple form of redundant order not specified complexity so i just don't think that's a i don't think that's a very compelling alternative explanation the origin of life okay let's go back to how the mind could operate within the physical universe here i'm i'm going to quote sean carroll from one of my scientific american columns that if we follow this trend that i'm talking about what place is there for such paranormal forces as esp or supernatural agents like god do we know enough to know that they cannot exist or is it possible that there are unknown forces within our universe or intentional agents outside of it that we have yet to discover according to caltech physicist sean carroll in his book the big picture quote all of the things you've ever seen or experienced in your life objects plants animals people are all made of a small number of particles interacting with one another through a small number of forces close quote once you understand the fundamental forces of nature such as the thermodynamic arrow of time and the core theory of particle and forces you can scale up to planets and people and even assess the likelihood that god the soul the afterlife and hisp exists which carol concludes is very low but isn't that let's talk about scaling up yeah okay use that phrase yeah yeah that's the crucial thing and all these ideas about emergence um michael palani wrote two really profound articles in the late 1960s one called life transcending physics chemistry and another called life's irreducible complexity or life's irreducible structure be he was the irreducible complexity guy later um and one of the one of the points that apollonia makes is that at each level in what we would call a hierarchy where if you were an emergenciest you'd say that you had scaled up that the possibility space of the lower level has been significantly and often incredibly tightly constrained the basic law the fundamental four laws of forces allow for a vast ensemble of possible events uh and therefore they for example the law of gravity allows um apples to fall and astronauts to fly to the moon but the law is operative in both in both situations what accounts for the difference is not the law the law isn't the difference that makes a difference what makes a difference is the constraint on the arrangements of matter that allowed engineers to produce something like the saturn v rocket and yes they implemented knowledge of other laws laws of chemistry laws of propulsion but at every point in that ensemble of possibilities constraints have to be applied to get the specificity in this case of engineering that allows a completely different event to occur than when the one you normally expect which is that objects fall and so the underlying laws at every level are not what's responsible for scaling up what's always involved in scaling up is constraints on possibility space boundary constraints and that involves an input of information because whenever you're saying we're going to go we we want a not b 0 not 1 this constraint not that constraint we're imparting information so scaling up requires emergence requires information inputs and my argument is that again that information is the product of mind it comes from in our experience it's it's minds that constrain possibility space to achieve functional outcomes that is to say it's minds that generate information so i i always find this the emergentist um account of things really lacking in specificity it seems like a slogan without real that doesn't really address the underlying problem which is what constrains possibility space at each one of these hierarchical levels that allegedly emerged from the lower level yeah well so again how does the mind do this which forces is it using carol's point here uh said continue with quotes from him take the core theory of particles and forces which carol says is indisputably accurate within a very wide domain of applicability such that a thousand or a million years from now whatever amazing discovery science will have made our descendants are not going to be saying ha ha those silly 21st century scientists believing in neutrons and electromagnetism and thus carol concludes that the laws of physics rule out the possibility of true psychic powers why because the particles and forces of nature don't allow us to bend spoons levitate or read minds and we know that there aren't new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them not simply because we haven't found them yet but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers and then he goes on to talk about god in the same way leave out esp just right right here's the thing we have observations from our direct introspective experience about what minds can do we also know what our human minds can't do we have we have knowledge of their limitation so um i'm with you i've never been uh when you when you're skeptical about the spoonbenders i say go michael you know you get them um so but one of the things that minds do and we can cash this out in abstract conspec conceptually is that minds constrain degrees of mathematical freedom they constrain possibility space you and i are doing it as we're using language we have a nearly infinite array of possible sounds and symbols that we could babble back and forth at each other but on a on an ongoing moment by moment basis we are carefully choosing sounds and symbols words and syntax semantics in order to convey our meaning one to another and amazingly we're able to do it now so we know minds have that power and that and it's precisely that's power that's necessary to constrain the possibility space that gets you from physics to chemistry chemistry to biology and especially uh to actual living cells i mean uh and to the information that's needed to produce living cells so i we don't know how minds do that but we are on a on in a real-time uh experiment you and i right now using our minds to do that we know minds have that capability and we're looking at features in life that require that capability and i've unpacked that argument more in the books i think digital code hierarchically organized information a tightly integrated information storage transmission and processing systems are solely in our experience the pro the product of intelligence and when we find those at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cells this is not an irrational leap to conclude that a mind played a role in the origin of those systems as well yeah um you're i think you're familiar with my little thought experiment what i call tremor's last law any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from god and i would just expand that to say far future humans or uh or anything like that i mean just to take a look at this from just it says 2007. i mean this is another miracle right so well no no one in first no one believes that the iphone and rose without steve jobs right right but but so it doesn't say basically if if we discovered etis um as sega always said they're not going to be like just five years ahead of us or behind us they're going to be like five million years ahead of us we're not they're not going to be behind us if we encounter their technological signals or whatever so you know just look what we've accomplished in say the last century of science of not technology if you made that 100 000 years of history or a million years of history you know anything that that we can imagine a god could do they could surely do it's just engineering and technology and knowledge right uh and so could it be that the mind is and also michio kaku talks about this that whatever the aliens are going to be like they're probably not going to be physical beings anymore they're probably going to be just mines in computers or something like a cloud uh you know beaming around the universe on on on laser beams or something the universe yeah yeah which is an id hypothesis yeah yeah okay so that's right so could it be a super advanced intelligence not a personal god in the christian traditional sense but just some kind of higher intelligence like that yeah excellent but you do a great job of marketing your ideas too with the those are memorable i mean i'm not not i'm not as good as doctor i need to work on that what'd you call it shurmur's german's last law because i don't believe in naming laws after the last law i need a first law on the last one yeah newton had three lo he got three laws and he became bonded because i stole it from anyway i'm sorry i stole her from clark yeah well we stole her from newton did you okay yeah yes exactly exactly okay so um i actually addressed that hypothesis uh it's whether you call it scientific or metaphysical i don't know don't really i never really care about those classifications when we're dealing with these ultimate issues um but the panspermia hypothesis is effectively that it's the idea that a very advanced intelligence um that evolved by undirected strictly materialistic processes uh got so advanced that it could figure out how to create other forms of life and seed them here on planet earth and uh no less a personage than the great francis crick actually floated this idea in his book life itself which was a little book on the difficulty of the origin of life problem um dawkins perhaps uh now i think he regrets this but he floated the idea at the end of a of an interview with ben stein in the film expelled when he acknowledged yeah there might be a signature of intelligence in the cell but it would have had to have come from some other intelligent being somewhere out in the cosmos that also evolved by undirected material processes in the book i argue i i take that hypothesis on as a competing hypothesis to the theistic god hypothesis and i argue that it has two deficiencies with respect to the ensemble of evidence that i'm examining or about biological and cosmological origins one it doesn't really solve the problem of the origin of life because to get the evolutionary process going we know we now know that anything worthy of being called life requires a large input of information to again constrain the arrangements of matter to produce something that is self-replicating and has metabolism and an enclosure and so forth so to get anything worthy of being called life going you have to have an input of information and that has proved to be incredibly difficult from the standpoint of underlying chemistry including self-organizational processes so pushing the problem out into space someplace doesn't actually solve it problem number one but the deeper problem is that no being within the cosmos can account for the origin the fine-tuning from the very beginning of the universe upon which its own evolution would subsequently depend nor can such a uber intelligence within the cosmos account for the origin of the universe itself so when you look at the ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins not only the evidence of design in the information-bearing properties of dna rna etc but also the evidence of design that we have in the fine-tuning and in the and in the and the the evidence of a discrete beginning to the universe itself i think that theistic design provides a better overall explanation of that ensemble than a space alien however omniscient it might have evolved to be and that would be your same answer to the rebuttal this is the way i put it if the world is complex and looks intricately designed therefore and therefore the best inference is that there must be an intelligent designer by the same logic we should infer that an intelligent designer must itself have been designed by a superior intelligent designer and then a super duper superior intelligent designer designed that one these are these are logic chopping games that a lot of the i mean i really you know i don't know if you're quoting carol because i really i know that was that caroline i think dawkins made that argument too a bunch of people have yeah that's dawkins who designed the designer objection i addressed that in chapter 17 of the signature in the cell in signature in the cell in a really considerable detail short answer is every system of thought every every world view or metaphysical system posits something as the thing from which everything else comes dawkins clearly posits matter and energy and in the in the living context of a a self-replicating system of molecules you can ask dawkins you know what what you know who what what produced the replicator and what produced the the matter and energy his answer and that of consistent philosophical materialist has always been matter and energy space and time are eternal and self-existent they play the same role in our system of thought that god plays in a theistic system of thought so the real question is not what came before that philosophical primitive because every system of thought has that problem the question is what is a better candidate to be that philosophical primitive the prime reality from which everything else comes i think the indicators we have of the of the finitude of the universe that the universe had a beginning and that the properties of the universe that are pointing to mind suggests that mind is a better is a better ultimate explanatory principle than matter i don't think matter scales up to mind i do think mind shape matter so what an analogy be this would be like trying to explain the origins of baseball since you mentioned baseball in your book and i love that section because i was a big cincinnati reds fan the big red machine with johnny bench pete rose morgan that one those are the days yeah yeah but it would be like trying to explain the origins of baseball based on the rules that the game itself is played you can't do that this is a separate kind of explanatory uh mechanism right yeah exactly what what what what who set up the rules the the rules describe how the game is played but there was there was a person you know forgetting who who naismith was to basketball what someone was to baseball and i'm forgetting the it wasn't double days i guess the legend was double david but it turns out it's more complex with baseball but but that's would that not then apply to your using the concept of mind itself since mind is part of the physical universe however it arrives out of neurons firing um you're applying that to outside of the system well the the great philosopher of mine john searle uh gave a wonderful talk at that baylor conference that you and i attended where he showed that every single physicalist or even functionalist account of the origin of mind was able to cite well what he called them neurophysiological correlates necessary conditions of the function of the mind but in every case he showed that there was a gap between necessity and sufficiency in the causal sense that that our physiological physiological substrate what's going on chemically in our in our brains and the way synopsis synapses are firing those are those are absolutely necessary to proper function but there's a difference between that and what our minds do when we are reasoning and that that gap is non-physical my experience of red we're seeing you sometimes very clearly in skype and then sometimes a little bit blurry because the probably the bandwidth issue my experience of that my conscious awareness of you is is fundamentally a different thing than whatever the physiological substrate is that makes that possible and so and my reasoning based on that that imagery and the sounds and symbols that we're transmitting is something that is qualitatively different than than the uh the the uh the physiological processes that make my brain function possible so i i'm a mind body dualist i'm not a simplistic cartesian duelist i'm a in which god is the mind and all of it derives from that one single source no i i know i know people who are berkeley and idealists who trend that way but i think physical properties and this is my when i referred earlier to a biblical theology of nature i think the physical world physical entities have real causal powers that's why i think it's completely legitimate for in you know vast swathes of scientific inquiry are concerned with how does one part of nature affect each other nature has real causal powers but i also think that there is evidence in the structure of nature that mind played a role in its origin and so i i think i believe both things are real mind and body mind and matter my friend deepak chopra is a a mind monist in the sense that you use tillyx description eastern world yeah yeah yeah you use tilly's uh phrase the you know the ground of all being which deepak uses for consciousness he says conscious there's nothing beneath consciousness that is the ground of all being and what you call you stephen meyer call god i call consciousness there's no conflict we're talking about the same thing you're speaking as as deepak gopro or yourself yeah no yeah okay right yeah exactly no i mean these are the great philosophical questions there's you know there's basically and i laid this out in the book there's there's three basic uh you know classic world views there's the uh mind before matter roughly theism deism there's the matter before mind which is the materialism view and then there's the mind and matter are essentially one in the same the pantheistic or pan psychic view mainly that comes out of the east so uh you know as someone who teaches philosophy philosophy of science this is you know this is a great time i know it's a big one it's a great conversation all right let's let's see let's go to another huge one let's go to another huge one nothingness so in in my book giving the devil's dudes just an essay collection so i uh i wrote an expanded version of my short article in scientific american about nothing um so first of all i mean it's just such a weird concept so here i'm quoting uh robert kuhn he wrote a book with john leslie called the mystery of existence why is there anything at all so first it's impossible to conceptualize nothing no space time matter light darkness or even conscious beings to perceive the nothingness here's cune not just emptiness not just blankness and not just emptiness and blankness forever but not even the existence of emptiness and not even the meaning of blankness and no forever you know at this point i don't even know what i'm talking about i mean this is just you know this is like what am i stoned right you know and and so here i think so sometimes i feel like you might be able to get your synapses around it but you're not getting your mind around it yeah i'm not sure it's possible and so i think you know we maybe if we had bigger brains or something i don't know but we're hidden in epistemological well here's something that i i would love to commend to you at skeptic magazine as a you know a topic to address there's been this big push and we alluded to this earlier the idea that well you know in making a cosmological argument of the kind that i make mine is mine has a different form than the deductive argument of william and craig i use an inference to the best explanation sort of structure people will come back and say well but do we absolutely know that the universe had an absolute beginning we can't back extrapolate all the way because we've got general you know general relativity only takes us back within planck time and i say fair enough uh there are also arguments for an absolute beginning based on special relativity that are geometric that don't have energy conditions and don't depend on knowing what gravity was like in a quantum domain uh but uh so i think you can really justify the idea that there was a beginning there's a physical extremity past which you can't go but let's say you don't you don't go with me that far we have lots of indicators at the beginning at least uh the alternative approach to this is to say yeah we're gonna we're going to try to characterize the beginning of the universe using uh some sort of quantum gravitational ideas and so we'll come up with a quantum theory quantum gravity of quantum cosmology and the advocates of that and this connects to your your the quotation you just read people like lawrence krauss has popularized the work of alexander valencia or the hawking heart model have have essentially argued that we can explain the universe from nothing nothing except the laws of physics uh the laws of physics that apply to the quantum gravitational um era or epoch okay but in the book and this is i think one of the most significant original arguments in my new book uh i argue that if that model of cosmological origins is true it has its own tacit theistic implications uh if you have a definite beginning and you develop a cosmological argument from that you've got a god you have a very strong god hypothesis but if you don't like if you say let's not go with a definite beginning let's say maybe we don't get a definite beginning let's use quantum cosmological approaches we're going to explain and this is krause's claim on the cover of his book universe from nothing we've explained the origin from literally nothing physical but what ends up being the explanatory principle is what's called the universal wave function the mathematical descriptions of all the possible universes that could emerge out of the singularity so even in quantum cosmology number one there's still a singularity there's still a beginning it's presupposed in all the models whatever hawking said in his popular books about imaginary time eliminating the singularity it's still in his technical papers i've read them okay number two the explanance the thing doing the explaining of the origin of the universe is a mathematical abstraction it's a universal wave function which is the solution to a big hairy equation called the wheeler dewitt equation which is the analog to the classical schrodinger equation in ordinary quantum mechanics it's quite a trick to get a material universe of matter space time and energy out of a pure mathematical expression are we really explaining the universe from nothing well here's what the lincoln has said about this who whom krause is popularizing he's got fascinating rhetorical question he he raises at the end of many universes in one and he says before there was matter face time and energy what template were these laws physical laws of quantum gravity or whatever what template were they being written on because the laws of physics are things that we use to describe matter space time and energy they describe how matter interacts they don't tell us where the universe came from so if we have a realm of pure mathematics knowing that math is conceptual and always exist in a mind he says are we really saying that a mind predates the universe and so i've argued in the new book that quantum cosmology if true is the alternative to the straightforward extrapolation back to an absolute beginning if it is true it has its own theistic implications because it implies mind before matter and furthermore and this is the even deeper thing it turns out that to get that universal wave function which functions as the explanatory principle in quantum cosmology psi you know the famous expression from quantum mechanics applied to the early universe that psi is a purely mathematical reality but you only get a psi that includes our universe which is a condition of explanation on this model you only get such a psi function if you solve the wheeler dewitt equation but the wheeler-to-weight equation is a functional differential equation that has an infinite number of solutions unless very restrictive boundary constraints are applied to it but there's no physical system yet there's no physical universe to describe that you're describing so there's nothing in the physics can that can help you specify the boundary constraints so where do they come from they're chosen by the theoretical physicists with an end goal in mind namely getting a psi function out that includes a universe like ours that matches our physics so this is entirely teleologically it's a modeling that's entirely teleological and it requires an input of information from the theoretical physicist into the mathematical apparatus that models the origin of the universe and that that i can i contend is a form of intelligent design it's just like the simulation experiments that the original life researchers do where you've got massive investigator interference would that be different than max tag mark's idea of the mathematical universe the whole thing at bottom pure mathematics yeah yeah i mean i that's what i just described was chapter 18 in my book what you just asked about is chapter 19. perfect ted mark takes the multi yeah takes the multiverse one better and um and says that every mathematically possible structure is instantiated in some possible world okay and that would allow you to circumvent the argument i'm making now about the need for inputs of information because you just say that every possible solution to the wheeler dewey equation was one of those mathematical structures that existed in some possible world so that is the one way that that is the that is the atheist way out of the cosmological argument but it comes at a huge cost michael and that is that if you accept that every mathematical structure that is possible exists in some possible world you can have very idiosyncratic laws in which things are regular for a long period of time and then something completely irregular occurs polanya made the great observation that through any finite set of points you can draw an infinite number of curves so you can you could you essentially end up with a complete we could be living in a universe that has looked completely regular in its basic law-like structure till right now and then we will have could have an episodic random quantum fluctuation or just we might have laws that describe highly irregular curves and phenomena cause and effect relationships it completely destroys the possibility of reliable uh prediction or explanation uh you get boltzmann brain problems and so it these infinite universe cosmologies which are necessary to circumvent cosmological arguments are possible ways of viewing things but they come at the cost of the uh a complete destruction in any reasonable confidence in the reliability of the mind in other words you can get rid of the god argument but only at the cost of science you can have my argument is you can have you that science points to god but you can circumvent the arguments from science to god but only at the cost of destroying science you end up with the epistemological chaos and that's i look at the you know the boltzmann brain problem the and and the the complete inability on it on a tag markian view of things to make uh either to have reliable scientific explanation or prediction this is getting heavy sometimes i feel like marty mcfly and back to the future english stock all right hey and i've i maybe yeah i maybe we should do one last thing because we've been at an hour and 45 i might be wearing you out and i was going to give you one last thing one last challenge here this this comes from uh leslie and kuhn's book the mystery of existence and cunes taxonomy of nothings he lists what categories of things might be included in something that would be negated by nothing these include physical mental platonic spiritual and god physical all matter energy space and time and all the laws and principles that govern them known and unknown mental all kinds of consciousness and awareness platonic all forms of abstract objects numbers logic forms propositions possibilities again known and unknown spiritual and god anything that could possibly fit this non-physical category all forms of religious and spiritual belief if by nothing has meant no physical objects or matter of any kind for example there could still be energy from which matter may arise by natural forces guided by the laws of nature physicists for example talk about empty space as seething with virtual particles from which particle anti-particle pairs come into existence as a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum physics yeah or scalar fields yeah exactly yeah but if by nothing that's not really that's not really nothing in the philosophy that's right but here that's that's something to the point but if by nothing is meant also no physical mental platonic or non-physical entity of any kind then there can be no god or gods which means there cannot be anything outside of nothing out of which to create something so how does that square with your model you're making my head hurt too you know um well i just you know a kind of uh hue to some of the the uh considerations that i develop in the book here uh the quantum cosmologists at least in their popularizations will say that they've explained the universe from nothing but their nothing is even is either pre-existing space with an energy field uh that is unexplained or it's uh if you push it back further a quantum mechanical wave function a universal wave function that that describes what they call super space all the possible universes with various gravitational fields and then a mathematical apparatus that allows you to to justify the existence of such a a mathematical entity so in in quantum cosmology it's not um it's it's either pre-existing space with energy which is not nothing or it's pre-existing mathematical reality which is platonic and i would argue theistic because in our experience ideas don't exist disembodied they exist in minds minds think ideas so if we're d if we're if they're really saying that the universe came out of math then i think valencian is right in his uh well valencia never answered his own rhetorical question but he raised a very provocative question which is are we really then saying that the universe came out of a mind it seems to be implied in the idea that math precedes matter and hawking himself tumbled to this when he said what puts fire in the equations that gives us a universe to describe hawking was the classic uh god obsessed atheist and and and and i mean that as a compliment he was taking these things very seriously and didn't want the god hypothesis to be true but also was wrestling from the time he proved the singularity theorem to the end of his life in developing cosmological models that would he hope make the god hypothesis unnecessary i i think ultimately he failed but i have applauded the struggle he was quite immature i recommend you read uh leonard melodnow's book stephen hawking a memoir he talks about that and i think this is going to be uh one of these enduring conversations you know what did einstein really say about god what did hawking really mean about god so here's leonard's day because he knew he knew hawking pretty well that you know they wrote design yeah they wrote two books together so any anyway in the epilogue he opens with uh bantam publish the grand design here it is um in september 2010 uh on the morning of september 2nd i was walking my daughter olivia to school when my cell phone rang it was judith just hawking's assistant there uh and she was agitated leonard she shouted we need your help i have no idea what she was talking about haven't you seen the time she asked the new york times i said yes i'd read it no not the new york times the london times haven't you seen it judith who reads the london times here in la well google it and look at the headline it says quote hawking colon god did not create the universe it's creating a furor well the press is all over in and then leonard continues that's wrong we said god isn't necessary for creating the universe not that physics proves he didn't well the press is all over it and stephen can't handle all we need your help you know so he ended up fending off all these things no we're not saying that we're not saying we prove there's no god or anything like that just that it's not necessary well i did find a disparity in um hawking's between hawking's popular work in the brief history of time i was a wet behind the ears grad student and got to attend some of the lectures upon which that popular book was was based when i was in cambridge and uh so i've been interested in this quantum cosmological stuff for a long time but i have recently revisited it and uh you know he he claims that he does this mathematical transformation called a wick rotation on the space depiction of space time mathematically and in an intermediate step in that depiction you you what they call spatialized time and time as a variable drops out as you're in the domain of complex numbers and so the depiction of the universe looks like it has no definite beginning but he acknowledges that that depiction has no physical significance but in that famous statement the british press and others worldwide press jumped on you know um what need then for a creator you know if there's no beginning then what need then for a creator um actually you know this was a kind of uh and he almost characterized it this way in his more honest moments just saying that this was a kind of mathematical trick that's what he said it was a mathematical trick it had no physical meaning therefore you can't really draw a metaphysical implication from from a mathematical expression that has no physical meaning he acknowledged that when you transform back into the the domain of real numbers that the singularity reappears and it's presupposed in all his technical papers with hartle on on quantum cosmology so um so i can understand the way the you know the the the misunderstanding arose uh of course my argument is that it's not just that the god hypothesis is not necessary um i actually argued that quantum cosmology hawking's own research program here with hartle has tacit or blatant implications that suggest the necessity of a god hypothesis the explanatory necessity of a god hypothesis uh that that if if you're actually having to constrain possibility space to get your mathematical apparatus to produce a universal wave function that includes a universe like ours then you are actually modeling the need for an input of information in order to generate a universe like ours and so therefore even if you get matter and energy out of math alone you can't get the information needed to produce a universe like ours without mind so um i think i you know if quantum cosmology is true it has implications that are theistic and every bit as powerfully theistic as a straightforward column argument of the type that william craig makes could be he was just being also a little playful because leonard's got another story about the sentence in the grant i think was in the grand design where they said something like philosophy is dead or philosophers that you know haven't done anything in in ages or and leonard said stephen we can't say that that's not true and uh so then leonard says i brought in a bunch of philosophy of science books and started going through them and i wrote this like paragraph long sentence about the proper way to say it and stephen said your sentence has no punch we're going with mine it has no punch yeah well they wrote a popular book fair enough you know fair enough that's the uh that could be he's looking you know one thing about hawking did have a twinkle about him you know and you could his he had a wit that came through even through the voice into the synthesizer um so um but i i i think the what i did in in the new book is develop what philosophers call a robust argument showing that if you depe you can take several different things as the factual predicate and you'll end up in the same with the same conclusion so if you you assume that as best we can tell the universe had a beginning the best explanation of the beginning is something like a transcendent intelligence the theism or deism um if you say well we can't be absolutely sure there was a beginning we need a quantum cosmological model of the origin of the universe then i show you have theistic implications for other reasons although even in those models they still presuppose the singularity so um and the only reason not to accept that there was a beginning was that we might have this very small era of time inside plonk time an epic of quantum gravity uh and so if you run with quantum gravity you end up with all the difficulties i just described of a universal way a mathematic matter coming out of math and the need for information to make the math describe the universe like ours which is coming out of a mind in all the modeling all right stephen we're pushing up on two hours let me just close with this let me just close with this if i'm right we'll never know if you're right we will find out in the next life and i'll get to i'll get to apologize and hopefully we'll be in the same place no apologies won't be needed we'll just have we'll sit down continue the conversation we'll have an infinitely long conversation right we'll ask the mind why didn't you give us more evidence no just kidding all right stephen we will continue the conversation when the next book comes out probably on consciousness and morality like that thank you for this and congrats on your new book which i understand has just come out or no no no well this one my essay collections which is a year now a paperback comes out pretty soon and then the next big book is on conspiracy conspiracies and conspiracy theories is another uh topic that has kind of risen to the top of the uh news cycle yeah so yeah indeed i understand all right congratulations again all right in fact i forgot to endorse this at the beginning the way i say it is uh if you want to read one single book that best summarizes intelligent design theory this is it you capture all the the major arguments and and all the latest stuff that's been worked out in the last few decades so good job we'll see you next time you you too friend yeah we'll hopefully connect in person before too long as things open up

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 135,575

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, God Hypothesis, intelligent design, cosmology, physics, origins of morality, irreducible complexity, information theory, materialism, methodological supernaturalism, immaterialism

Id: On-4lOWuWQQ

Length: 118min 1sec (7081 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021